|
Gretta Moulton Forest Restoration
By
Don Recklies, Naturalist
Watch Slideshow of Photos
Forest Restoration
Workshop #179, May 21, 2011
For Protectors’ 179th Forest Restoration
Workshop 7 of us returned to the Greta Moulton Tract, a site just off the
Green Trail where the Yellow Trail crosses Manor Road on its way past Moses
Mountain. Protectors has been visiting
that site at least once a year since I have been a member, and I’m told that
this was one of the original locations for our workshops back when Tony Emmerlich, Tim Wenskus, and
others in the Department of Parks started reclaiming disturbed areas with the
help of a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Grant grant
in the 1990s. Chuck recalls Tulip
saplings being planted along that trail years ago that are now sturdy young
trees, trees that would have had small chance of surviving without periodic
pruning of vines that might strangle them while they were still saplings.
We separated into small groups according to our
tools and temperament and went after either the twining woody vines or Multiflora Rose.
My choice was the Multiflora Rose; the soil
there is rich and wet, and the rose can grow thick and rank forming clumps
with stems over an inch thick. These
can grow into impenetrable thickets that without constant attention would
soon overwhelm the trail. Over the years
we had spent periodic sessions pulling the rose by hand and digging it out
with a pick-mattock. We had some
success, but gaining on it was slow.
Then about 4 years ago the Department of Parks attacked that area with
herbicide, and in the following spring there was
little left but dead stems and withered, brown leaves. Much of the rootstock, however, was not
killed, and by the end of the year rose suckers were springing up from buried
roots and many apparently dead clumps had sprouted new buds.
We kept the site on our schedule and found that
the re-sprouting rose was much easier to uproot than it was previously. I suppose that the lack of nutrient during
the growing season must have killed many rootlets and weakened the hold of
its roots on the earth. Over the next
few sessions we found that the same thing had occurred with other clumps of
rose that we had previously cut because they were too large to uproot. Now large swathes adjacent to both sides of
the trail are visibly free of multiflora rose; however,
further from the trail, and especially alongside the stream, there is much
left to uproot.
We continued clearing vines away for the
balance of our work session, and were lucky to enjoy weather that was just
about perfect - a major relief from the wet weather we had all the previous
week. Temperatures were just low
enough (high 60's) to make wearing trousers and long sleeves comfortable, and
the sun shown in a clear blue sky - and we could enjoy working in the
shade! By noon, the mosquitoes were just
starting to be drawn out by the warm weather so, for
the most part we avoided them. We also
seemed to avoid the ticks as well, and only one of us to my knowledge
discovered a tick crawling up his leg.
Ticks have recently been a problem in that area,
especially around the heaps of Japanese Honeysuckle that mound some of the
more open areas. On a Restoration a
few years ago Chuck picked five off his clothing in just an hour. Dom noted that formerly they had not been
so troublesome, but now that so many ticks have been infected with the agent
of Lyme disease and the huge invasion of deer has helped spread them across
the island, they are something to worry about. Now whenever one strays off the beaten
path, it’s a good idea to strip down and make a tick examination before the
day is over. It’s an annoyance, but
that’s just the way it is. As far as
Lyme disease, recent research indicates that the disease originated in Europe
long ago, before the ice ages, and has been present in the US for a long time;
why it should have flared up around Lyme, Connecticut in the 70s and quickly
become the major problem it is today remains to be discovered.
There are several kinds of ticks, but the tick
of most concern is what is now called the black-legged tick, formerly the
deer tick. The old name was a bit of a
misnomer, because the tick is not very particular about what mammal it uses
for a blood meal; deer are just large and convenient as far as adult ticks
are concerned. However, considering
that the deer-mouse is one of the nymphal ticks primary hosts and one that most frequently infects
the tick with Lyme disease, perhaps the older name wasn’t so far wrong after
all.
Like insects and crustaceans the tick has a exoskeleton that must be periodically shed for the tick
to grow, and in so doing the tick goes through a life cycle of four
stages. Eggs are laid in the fall and
hatch into a tiny larval tick; just an almost invisible dot, but still
needing a blood meal to grow. These
six-legged larvae usually attach to some small mammal such as the deer mouse
for their first meal, and usually don’t pose any danger to us big
creatures. In any case, the experts
say that ticks freshly hatched don’t carry disease agents, and don’t become a
danger until after they have fed on an already infected mammal. Most deer mice are infected - some say more
than 70% - so after that first meal the young ticks become a hazard. The next stage, the nymphal
stage - by which time they have acquired a forth pair of legs, is the stage that
most often transmits disease to us.
The nymph stage is bit larger than the larval
stage, but still pretty small, about a tenth of an inch long and easy to
overlook. These ticks, like the sesame
seed sized adults they will eventually become, climb to the tips of low-lying
plants where they can latch on to passing animals. One researcher has suggested that they
might be found on fallen timber since that is frequently used as a kind of
super-highway by mice, etc., and that this is where resting or lunching
hikers may pick up ticks. I can’t
verify that is true, however, but it certainly seems possible. If the ticks catch onto clothing, they will
climb up until they reach skin, often lodging at points of pressure such as
the belt line or where sleeves press against the flesh. Anchored on the skin they appear like a
tiny, flip-floppy scab or bit of flesh.
If the tick nymph is
unable to get enough blood during its first season, it can
overwinter until the next year. (If
you’re squeamish, you might want to skip the next three paragraphs...)
The tick needs a good part of a day to embed
its beak into the skin and begin imbibing blood, so if found early enough it
can usually be carefully removed. I
favor using a strong, sharp-pointed tweezer,
gripping the tick’s ‘beak’ just below the head and pulling strongly but
slowly until the tick pops loose. You
don’t want to grip higher on head or body for fear of pulling the tick apart
leaving the head embedded, or squeezing the contents of the tick’s body into
your skin. Most sources say to avoid
using chemicals or heat to cause the tick to release for fear that it will
regurgitate the contents of its stomach into your skin while releasing. Having a doctor or clinic do the removal
might be a good idea, although expensive, but delaying for an appointment
might prove to be a problem.
Lyme disease has gotten the most publicity, but
that is just one of the blood-born diseases ticks
can carry. If you’re curious, do a
Google search and look at sites such as
http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/idepc/dtopics/tickborne/diseases.html;
our local NYC Natural Resources Group has produced an informative booklet,
although now a bit dated, which you can find as a PDF at: http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_about/parks_divisions/nrg/nrg_stats.html. Regarding different ticks and different
diseases, I should mention two years ago finding a female Lone Star Tick,
which has not yet been identified as a vector for Lyme disease, but harbors several
others, climbing up my arm when I was walking the LaTourette bike path. I assumed from its name that this was a
western tick brought in by a visiting dog, but then found out that it is in
general a southern tick, and has been moving up the east coast from the
south.
Because a tick uses its mouthparts not only to
suck up blood but also to anchor itself in the skin, the business end of its
head is very interesting. I say
mouthparts because the mouth of a tick, like those of insects and spiders and
other jointed legged invertebrates is not just a simple hole in the head that
leads to its stomach. It is made up of
a number of specialized “appendages” that surround the opening to the gut and
work together as if they were the blades of a Swiss army knife. If you hold a tick under a high power hand
lens or use a low-power microscope you can see that its mouth parts form a
stout tube (if you care, it’s called a hypostome)
that is surrounded with sturdy, nasty-looking, backward pointing barbs. It’s these barbs, anchored in the skin,
that make a tick so hard to remove.
When a tick decides it has found a good place to attach, it secretes
some anesthetizing saliva and begins to slice at the skin with two of the
blades of its “Swiss army knife”. When
the hole is deep enough, it pushes the barded central part in and then
continues with the cutting parts to make the hole deeper, pausing every now
and then to shove the barbed part further in, and secreting protein compounds
that harden and help anchor the barbs in place. When I first looked at the mouth of a tick
and saw the barbs I immediately thought “how on earth does it get that thing
back out!” While writing, I discovered
that while absorbing blood through that barbed tube (hypostome),
the tick is constantly secreting saliva to keep the blood fluid and maintain
anesthesia, and that when done it secretes a lot more saliva to lubricate the
hypostome and allow the tick to pull it out (maybe
that saliva dissolves the cement too).
It seems that by the end of the meal, if the tick is infected, its saliva
is full of bacteria and the tick leaves its host with a substantial dose.
The various mouthparts of all these
invertebrates are intriguing mechanisms, so odd that they appear to us, when
we get a look, like something out of a sci-fi horror movie. Not many of us, though, have the equipment
or inclination to take a look at the actual apparatus, and that’s where the
internet comes in handy. If you want a
good look at the business end of a tick, although artificially colored to
make things more clear, take a look at
http://www5.pbrc.hawaii.edu/microangela/deertick.htm or
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/111990/enlarge (there are lots more
if you Google); http://salinella.bio.uottawa.ca/BIO3323/InteractiveWeb/DigitalZoology/Mout_Lab.html
has lots of fascinating, labeled photos, and
http://www.backyardnature.net/insmouth.htm is one of many other sites of
photos and drawings of the mouthparts of small creatures. One of the neat photos on the Digital
Zoology site is that of a nectar feeding butterfly showing the long, coiled
feeding tube that can extend deep into a flower to reach the nectaries inside.
Like the mouthparts of other insects, this tube is deceptively simple;
it is not just a simple straw; not only is it flexible and capable of being
coiled out of the way under the butterfly’s head, it is constructed as two
half-tubes which have to be carefully combed together by the still soft adult
butterfly when it emerges from the pupal stage
where it had transformed itself a caterpillar. Apparently the halves of this siphon are
joined by tiny hooks which allow it to be split apart for cleaning, but I
haven’t seen an illustration that clearly shows these - no doubt a more
attentive web search would find a photo...
Well, enough about body piercing and sucking
mouthparts!
Following our work session we first made a loop
around Loosestrife Swamp and then a longer loop past Pouch Camp to Hourglass
Pond and back. The flush of early
spring wildflowers is now over; the trees have leafed out and conspire against
any plant that cannot co-exist in the deeper shade. That earliest of the spring flowers, the
Skunk Cabbage, sports tall, glossy green leaves that will continue to expand
over the next month, but the increasing shade is already working against
them, and their leaves will soon lose their gloss. By mid-summer they will start to become
tattered and ready to collapse. Trout
lily blossoms and those of the Spring Beauty are nowhere in evidence,
although Canada Mayflower flourishes as myriad sprigs of white blossoms
promising a surfeit of red berries come the fall. Among the shrubs, a few Pinxters still
held their blooms, although on most of these the petals had become separated
and hung like wilted collars around the ends of the pistils.
Early summer flowers were showing and we found
True Solomon’s Seal with its waxy, greenish bells hanging in
a rows of paired flowers along their stems, and an occasional Virginia
Waterleaf. Strangely, none of the
Virginia Waterleaf leaves showed the typical “waterspotting,”
and I wondered if the wet weather the week before had anything to do with the
even coloration of the leaves. Bits of
summer yellow showed along the trail, usually the five-petaled
blossom of a Cinque-foil or an Indian Strawberry (not a true strawberry, it
is usually described as inedible or tasteless; I see that some foraging
accounts say it tastes a bit like watermelon, so when I next see it I might
give it a try). I had expected to see
a lot of 4-petaled, yellow cress, but we passed only one scraggly specimen
not worth mentioning in a small clearing on the way to Orbach
Lake.
We paused beside Orbach
Lake and again at Pump-house and Hourglass Ponds to look at the lush emergent
vegetation. At all three locations
there were lots of Arrow Arum, unfurling the leaves whose shape gives the
plant its common name, but none were yet in bloom. However, the tight balls of unopened
Spatterdock blossoms seemed to be everywhere, just waiting for a little more
sunlight or warm weather to open into rounded, yellow, 6-sepaled cups. (Sepals and petals both are actually
modified plant leaves; the petals immediately surround the sex organs of the
plant, the female pistil in the center and the male stamens, and the sepals form
the next outer layer. Usually sepals,
if present, are greenish and somewhat leaf-like, although in some cases, like
the Spatterdock, they are the showy part of the blossom.) At the edge of Pumphouse
pond one of these blossoms had found enough light to open and for us to see
the thick pistil centered in the middle of the blossom like a squat
pedestal. Sarah-David knows these as
Bullhead Lily, and others know them as Yellow Pond Lily. The common names seems
to abound, and my old field guides sometimes list them as separate species,
Spatterdock being a southern variety.
Recently, however, the folks doing genetic studies seem to have
decided that all of these, once considered separate species, are but one, Nuphar lutea.
We noted a few mushrooms, including the
intricately patterned Dryad’s Saddle (Polyporus squamosus), a bracket mushroom whose scaly surface has
the appearance of being laid over with an armrest cover from the 1890's, but
stopped to remark only on the Tree Ear (Auricula auricularia), which was growing as a cluster of floppy, brown,
rubbery flaps on a dead stick by the trail.
Tree Ear is a common jelly fungus which consumes dead wood - it
doesn’t attack the living stuff - and is often found attached to small dead
branches have dropped to the ground and occasionally on dead branches still
attached to the tree. True to it’s common name, after a wet
period it expands from a brownish-black crust to an amber, quivering
mass. Although it appears to be a
sticky jelly, if you’re brave enough to touch it you will find that it’s
quite rubbery, not sticky at all. I’m
rather amused about the redundancy of its current Latin name - how would that
be translated? Ear’s ear? - and read
that among other Latin names it used to be called Tremella
auricularia, trembling ear, and for descriptive purposes
that older cognomen was a pretty good name.
The taxonomists discovered, however, that the Tree Ear didn’t belong
in the same group as the other trembling jelly fungi, and so changed its
name. In older texts you find it
called Judas’ Ear or Jew’s Ear, and there is a lot of supposition about the
folk-lore that created this name.
Those names, however, are now recognized as politically incorrect and
usually only appear in lists of “other names” that the fungus has been
called. Wickipedia
has an extensiveaccount of this nomenclature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auricularia_auricula-judae.
Well,
this last week has been a busy work week for me and gotten in the way of
writing up this account - which believe me is the far more pleasurable
activity - but it’s done for now. Next
month will see us at Clove Lakes park.
DfR 05-23-2011
|
