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Protectors of Pine Oak Woods · Current
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Forest Restoration at High Rock, White Trail Forest Restoration #181 07-16-11 It was a lonely morning on Protectors’ 181st Forest Restoration on the White Trail by High Rock Park. Chuck had to attend an on-the-water event and Elaine had an afternoon appointment with just time enough to drop off a bag of bananas and cherries for refreshments, so there was only Dom, myself and Judy, who had as usual come to give me a ride to the shed at High Rock and then to the restoration site. Summer vacations and the threat of 90 degree temperatures probably had much to do with the slender turn-out, but, like rain, we can’t do much to control that. Never-the-less, Dom and I set off down the White Trail to pull Garlic-mustard and Multi-flora Rose. The shade did much to moderate the temperature, and we weren’t awash in sweat until the session was almost over. Last month would have been a better choice for going after Garlic-mustard; at that time Garlic-mustard would have been in flower with few mature seeds to drop, but we were committed at Clove Lakes for that month. I had hoped that we would be pulling plants with candelabras of still green seed “pods,” but now at least a third of the plants were mature with seeds ready to drop from their siliques. (Now there’s a word that I’d always mis-pronounced; I had been pronouncing it as “silk” like the fabric, but I find it should be pronounced something like “suh-leek”) A silique is a type of pod peculiar to all the mustards. It has two sides, or valves, separated in the middle by a thin membrane on either side of which the seeds grow. When the pod is mature, the valves split open from the bottom and the small, black, oval seeds fall out; the thin, narrow, center membrane remains on the plant displaying tiny transparent windows where the seeds had been attached. Mustard siliques can be quite decorative, and you’re probably familiar with another decorative silique that is used in dry flower decorations: the silvery coin-like pods of the money plant (Lunaria annua). Actually, botanists give those more rounded pods a yet different name, a silicle, but silique is enough to remember! The Money Plant is an alien member of the mustard family, an escapee that we occasionally find growing in low, wet areas on Staten Island. Since they bear seedpods, we can infer that the mustards are distantly related to our garden peas, but pea pods don’t grow upright, have only a single row of seeds, and don’t have that distinctive center membrane. We spent the entire session pulling mainly Garlic-mustard and Multi-flora Rose, although we did find a quantity of Japanese Barberry to pull growing closer to the stream. Much of the barberry was too entrenched for the tools we had brought along, so we pulled out what we could and cut the rest close to the ground. What Barberry re-sprouts from the cut stems will be weaker and easier to uproot next year. We left the uprooted Multi-flora rose and Barberry in piles, but because the Garlic-mustard was seeding, we felt obliged to bag those remains and take them away. Unfortunately I had left our trash bags behind at High Rock; luckily there were two bags tucked away in my pack, but this was still too little for the pile of uprooted plants. We managed by squeezing the seeding ends into bundles and clipping off and discarding the stems. It was a bit more work this way, but not nearly as onerous as it might seem, and Dom was able to haul away bagged seed stalks along with a small collection of bottles we had uncovered. Following the work session we undertook a walk, but choose to keep it short considering the rising temperature, pausing at the Meisner Pond dam and making a short loop along part of the White and Red trails in LaTourette. Below the dam in the shade close to the stream Ebony Jewelwing damselflies searched each other out and vied for territory, while a few skippers and other butterflies visited Thin-leaved Sunflowers on the banks above. Blue Dasher and Eastern Pondhawk dragonflies occasionally perched on the leaves of a nearby Spicebush and the twigs of a beetle-decimated Arrowwood. In the pond Arrowhead was producing lance-shaped seed pods that will soon bend over to open in muck of the bank; on the edge Button-ball and a Mallow bloomed with St. Johnswort and Rough Avens higher up the bank. The cloudless sky and hot sun prodded us to move away from the pavement by the dam and seek a shaded place to sit along the trail. While we sat Sarah-David picked up a 3' long dead stick which bore a 1-1/4" long, dark brown caterpillar covered with wiry hairs and terminated with long brown tufts either end. This I identified as the larva of one of the Tussock Moths, named after the tufts of hair the larvae bear and which often attract attention in late summer and fall because of their distinctive appearance. We looked at it more closely, noting its stout prolegs towards the back and the six smaller, clawed, jointed legs at the front. Caterpillars are, after all, the larvae of insects, and like all insects have 3 pairs of jointed legs. The prolegs are not true jointed legs; they are fleshy, clawed outgrowths of the abdomen that bear tiny claws, and will disappear when the caterpillar metamorphoses into a moth; the true legs will be retained, although changed in shape. We wondered whether the caterpillar was alive, since it didn’t move at all, and I cautioned not to prod it, at least with bare fingers, since these caterpillars are often covered with urtricating hairs, hairs that can detach and pierce the skin and which often are charged with irritating substances. Even though this caterpillar might have been dead, perhaps parasitized by a fungus or carrying within its body the eggs or larvae of some other insect, touching the hairs might still be an unpleasant experience. We have a few different Tussocks Moths in our area, the unwanted alien Gypsy Moth among them - although the Gypsy Moth caterpillar doesn’t have those prominent tufts. Most Tussock Moths adults are non-descript brown or grey moths, and often the only ones we see are winged males, the females frequently being wingless. The female Gypsy Moth (Lymantria dispar), however, does have wings, and this no doubt contributes to its ability to occasionally break out in large numbers. Unlike the adults, the caterpillars of these dull moths are colorful, and bear various arrangements of tufts or plumes of hairs. Paging through Caterpillars of the North-East, however, didn’t reveal a match for our larva, but a more thorough search turned up the larva of the Yellow-haired Dagger Moth (Acronicta impleta), not a Tussock Moth at all. The Yellow-haired Dagger Moth caterpillar has tufts of hairs, but not, as far as I could find, urtricating hairs. The Yellow-haired Dagger Moth caterpillar mimics unpalatable Tussock Moth caterpillars and thereby derives some protection from predators.
Urtricating hairs (I am going to keep using the term in hopes that by repetition I can break myself from trying to spell it with an “l” in place of the initial “r”) are not uncommon in nature. Arachnophiles (spider afficionados), for instance, are aware that many tarantulas have them, and some tarantulas can use them actively for defense, briskly rubbing their bodies with their legs to cast off an irritating shower of hairs. A mouthful of these should go a long way to deter predators. In the plant kingdom we are familiar with the stinging hairs of several of our common nettles, the Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica) and the Wood Nettle (Laportea canadensis), which function as tiny glassine hypodermic needles bearing fragile tips filled with formic acid. Botanists call these hair-like outgrowths trichomes. Brushing bare skin against the trichomes of this plant results in an intense burning sensation, but the effect is temporary, unlike the inflammation caused by some insect urtricating hairs. Urticating and the genus name of the nettle, Urtica, are both derived from the Latin word for nettle and the word burn; Roman soldiers on campaign in the marshes must have been ruefully familiar with these plants. Herbalists used the nettle in a variety of ways, usually as a tea or an infusion, and some actually believe that its burning properties provide relief from arthritis. I wonder if anyone ever tried using caterpillars in the same way? If they did, they probably soon found that it wasn’t a very good idea! The hot afternoon made us torpid, and we moved slowly about the loop. We looked about for what mushrooms might have popped up in the area but found only a few hard polypores, some dry Russulas and a clump of Mica-cap. The Mica-caps are so named because when young they glisten as if covered with flecks of mica. They belong to a group of mushrooms whose gills turn to a black, gooey ooze as their spores mature. The Mica-cap is supposed to be edible, and I suppose wouldn’t begin to deliquesce before carried home, but I’ve never been able to stomach the idea of eating something that was on its way to becoming ink. These hot, dry days don’t bode well for mushroom hunters, and the forecast for the next week promises more of the same. Relatively few insects were about, and we were little bothered by mosquitoes until later in the afternoon. A hairy-bodied, stout, black Tachinid Fly caught our attention because of its size. Normally we would wave away such a big, dark fly, fearing the bite of a deer or horse fly, but Tachinid Flies are nectar feeders, and their larvae are parastic on other insects. In any case, this fly was content to be scrutinized while sitting still on a leaf. We continued on the White Trail back to Meisner Road and kept an eye out for a flash of red in the muddy flats where the scarlet Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis) grows, but saw no color. Disappointed, we ventured into the mud to take a closer look and found a dozen or so with buds beginning to form. We were just too early for these striking red, perennial lobelias. John Eastman includes an account of the Cardinal Flower in Swamp and Bog, the second book in of his ecological trilogy, where he compares it with the Great Blue Lobelia that grows in similar locations. The Blue Lobelia flower has a lower lip that acts as a landing platform for its insect pollinators, usually bees, whereas the red Cardinal Flower’s lower lip is thin and flimsy; its red blossoms are calibrated to attract hummingbirds and insects that can hover while draining nectar from the flower nectaries (although I have seen large butterflies such as Spicebush Swallowtails cling to the blossom while probing it with their long curled proboscises). Eastman suggests that the size of populations of hummingbirds - in our case the Ruby-throated Hummingbird - and Cardinal Flowers are directly related: that the success or failure of one reflects the success or failure of the other. I wonder, now that so many hummingbird feeders exist, whether these tiny birds still do much searching in the swamps for Cardinal Flower nectaries, or on the contrary whether the proliferation of feeders has enabled a greater population of hummingbirds and so benefits the flowers. Many of our mucky wetlands have disappeared, and so have good semi-shaded habitats in which Cardinal Flowers can thrive; they are not frequently encountered here and we were glad to see this colony (which may have been re-introduced by the DEP when the nearby Bluebelt was installed) still exists. DfR 07-23-11 |
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