These sexy Ghost Plants don’t photosynthesize. There is never anything even remotely green about them. As we learned today at the Biophilium some plants have evolved into heterotrophs meaning they get their food from someone else, like we do, rather than magicing it up out of thin air and sunlight like most autotrophic plants do.
Ghost Pipes, Monotropa uniflora
This one in particular grows in an intimate relationship with the mycelium of a Russula mushroom. The fungus isn’t fruiting today so I couldn’t see them, but I’m sure they’re down their in the soil mycorrhyzaling with the Ghost Plant and the Jack Pines. The Pine tree is huge and has green photosynthesizing needles way up in the canopy that turn sunlight into carbohydrates and brings them down into the soil. The word mycorrhyzae (fungi+root) refers to the physical connection between the plant and the mushroom who support each other by sharing sugars and minerals and water back and forth. Its a super survival strategy because some parties are much better at collecting one and not the others so they have far better chance of survival if they share their resources. 80% of plants depend completely on mycorrhyzal partnerships. It’s what people mean when they say the ‘wood wide web’. The Pinesap flower, unable to make its own carbs takes them from the fungus who takes them from the tree.
Fall Pine Sap, Monotropa hypopitys
The flowers look to me like they would be pollinated by a bee, but I read that although the fall Pinesap, who can be very red all over are pollinated by bees, summer Pinesap are yellow like this and are mostly self pollinated, which doesn’t sound like a great strategy to me, but who knows. Do you who how self pollination works?
June’s full moon is the Strawberry Moon because that’s the one that wakes up the Wild Strawberries who are smaller, slyer and sweeter than Market Strawberries.
Wild Strawberries
I have an inconsistent relationship with Fairy Rings, those very green, nitrogen rich patches of lawn where Mushrooms grow in circles around vortexes, places where it’s dangerously easy to slip through to other realities. I know that the superstitions like wearing your hat backwards to protect you from inter-fairy-ring-soul-transmission are just rumors started by the fairies hoping to trick us into entering the faery realm so I usually manage to keep a safe distance.
The thing is, some years I take extra care to stay on the safe side of the rings, and some years I can’t help but head right inside as if pulled by a magnetic attraction that blocks my cautious thinking. When you go through a fairy ring its hard to know what’s changed. Humans are very adaptable. We accept our situations, and often don’t notice transcendental change.
Today the Wild Strawberries were growing inside a fairy ring and I tried to photograph them but they kept disappearing. They were delicious.
There’s been lots of talk this month at the Biophilium about control, planning, and intention vs wandering, trusting and going with the flow in the wild and in the studio. It’s hinged on questions of self identity, integrity and confidence. As an exhausted adventurer recovering from Spring migration, I’m struggling to hold on to control of my decisions, like the one to stay out of fairy rings, but the flow is taking me to nice spontaneous experiences like the sweetness of special Strawberries, so I’m deciding to trust myself to make the most of what ever shenanigans I find myself in.
Fairy Ring Mushroom Gills
This is the Fairy Ring Mushroom that grows in my lawn; the one that cuddles with the Wild Strawberries. It’s been there for years and fruits for months every summer. They are good to eat because they TASTE LIKE MAPLE SYRUP!! They are relatively easy to learn to identify, partly because their stems are so robust that it’s difficult to break them with your hands.
You can find Fairy Rings growing in lawns even when they are not fruiting by noticing how the grass grows. Most plants can’t access the nitrogen that makes up most of the atmosphere, and need another organism to ‘fix’ it, so they can use it to grow. The Fungi grow in roundish patches in the lawn expanding every year. The new growth around the outside edge is where the Fungus is digesting dead plant matter under ground and releasing loads of nitrogen into the soil. The grass around the outer edge picks up this nitrogen and grows faster, bushier and more healthily than the rest of the lawn. Lawn care cult leaders call this a ‘symptom of Fairy Ring disease’, but it’s a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
Grow trees not grass.
While planning a birding route on Gmaps I found these massive Fungi growing in an island sports field. (Compare with the size of the Baseball diamond). What I like so much about this is that we can’t see the Fungi, but we can see what they are doing to the grass, and so we know exactly where, how big and what shapes they are.
Fairy Rings as seen from space
The Fungi are growing in the soil around the grass roots. Each individual mycelial mass is expanding radially as it grows over the years. The outer ring of the mycelium is supplying more nitrogen to the grass and making it greener.
You can see where individual Fungi bumped into each other and fused together and became one individual. I mean. It looks to me like that’s what’s happening. If they were simply overlapping, or interlapping, weaving themselves through each other, sharing space but staying separate unique entities, wouldn’t we see the luscious green rings as ven diagrams as I do with fruiting fairy rings of different species that overlap and share territory?
I could be wrong. Maybe something different is happening where they connect. Maybe they are not making love. (Mushrooms have sex by fusing together, swapping DNA and staying connected forever) Maybe they are doing battle. Fighting for territory and resources, and where the battle is happening they are too stressed to do what ever grass enriching magic is happening along the rest of their boundaries.
On second thought, when one Fungal entity bumps into another they together would digest the nutrients in the fresh dead grass at the boundary between them and then have no new fresh food to turn to nitrogen. This would trigger fruiting, so I’d have to go back in the fall to see if mushrooms grow in a ven diagram showing distinct overlapping individuals or if they fruit only around the outside border as a new unified being.
It rained for days. My tent kept the water out but my campsite was swamped. My kitchen was quicksand and (the best part) the ground under my tent was a soft squishy mud puddle.
Prothonotary Warbler
I did a Photoshoot in the rain with a sexy Prothonotory Warbler who had been posing in the forest swamp. Thousands of photos. I usually take a couple hundred photos a day and post any useful identification shots on iNaturalist and then post 5 or so nice images on IG. It’s been 14 years that I process my photos at the end of each day otherwise they would just pile up and never be looked at. Until this day.
From the swamp I walked down a forest path and came upon a little clearing. The same clearing where I’d watched some Sandhill Cranes fly over the day before.
Little Red Bat
Then, finally, the sun came out, and so did the insects and then so did everyone who eats insects and so on all the way up the food chain. Which meant that all sorts of nocturnal animals who hadn’t eaten all week came out to play like a hungry looking Coyote, a starving Great Grey Owl and this Little Red Bat.
I plopped down on my knees to steady myself and chased her with my camera lens taking thousands of high speed shots. It was a great workout (my lens weighs 6 lbs) and she was moving fast. She made hairpin turns after flies that I couldn’t see. After this it was much easier for me to shoot the Ruby Crowned Kinglet, who flits around and never stands still. The sun shone through the little bat’s wings showing off why she is called the Little Red Bat. She flew around in front of me, catching insects out of the air for 45 minutes before I had to walk away because it was too exciting.
So now there is a time capsule on my hard drive. Thousands of unprocessed photos of a little yellow bird admiring his reflection in the rainy swamp and an aerobatic bat feasting in the sun.
Whatever you are reading put it down and read this.
Nature’s Best Hope is a book of DIY conservation. It explains why and how we should plant trees on our lawns and which trees to choose for maximum benefit to wildlife. It explains the mechanics of ecology in ways that are crystal clear, easy to understand and very motivating.
The book presents a history of our relationship to wildness and nature and talks about how and why the aesthetic of our landscaping of private land is the way it is. Tallamy suggests that the current aesthetic of suburban front yards is a status symbol that says “I have the money and time to manicure and weed my lawn” and is a symbol of community solidarity and a message that we care about our property and look after it. The problem is that the aesthetic is outdated and actually does an enormous amount of damage to the land and to wildlife we are trying to signal that we care about. He suggests ways to update that culture so our aesthetic supports our values.
His ideas of how to make forests instead of lawns would save, money, time, and fuel and provide productive biomass, habitat and take carbon from the atmosphere… Really his ideas would solve a lot of our problems. If you own land you must read this book. It will guide you to make a deeper more loving relationship to your land and your neighborhood. If you are feeling nervous about climate change, or loss of biodiversity, read this book. It will give you hope and ideas about how you can be a positive influence in the world.
Dee dee dee dee dee dee deeeeeeeeeeeee! Presenting His Supreme Friendliness, Surveyor of the Feeder and Ultimate Birb: the Chickadee!
Black Capped Chickadee
Sit down and get comfy while I tell you about the best little bird. Chickadees are cryptically sexually dimorphic; These muffins all look the same to humans, but to a lady Chickadee, who can see colors into the invisible-to-humans end of the spectrum, the handsomest Chickadees have ultra violet mustaches!
Chickadees have a lot to say. Their language is complex. ‘Chickadee’ is only one of their calls. It’s one of their alarm calls! They say other things when they are alone (like ‘cheese burger’ and ‘squigledeedoo’) but when they see a human they say ‘Chickadee dee dee dee dee!’ And so we call them that because they call us that. We call each other that.
Chickadees have lots of alarm calls that signal different kinds of danger, where it’s coming from and how dangerous it is. For example they say one thing for a Snake and something different for a Hawk – the number of dees indicates the degree of danger.
Chickadees are non-migratory birds. They stay in the same home range their whole lives and get to know the place really well and you can find them all over North America. While a migratory bird who winters in the tropics and summers in the arctic is passing over my house, they are unfamiliar with the local predators, but they are familiar with Chickadees. Chickadees always know the local dangers. Migratory birds will often follow Chickadees to food and water sources and eavesdrop on their conversations especially their Chickadee alarm calls which can act as a call to mob. When Chickadees want to harass an intruder like a Crow, Owl, Hawk or me, they do a mobbing call that brings in lots of other Chickadees and lots of other species too.
If you’ve ever been out with a birder trying to see as many species as possible you might have heard them pishing. It’s a birding trick that calls lots of birds in. it sounds like this: “Psh psh psh psh psh psh!” To a migratory bird its sounds like the dee dee dee dee of the Chickadee call. If you do it in the spring, all the species around will hear you pishing and might think it’s a Chickadee doing an alarm so they send in a scout to see what the mater is. One scout from each species will arrive to take a look and you can stand still and check off a whole bunch of birds you might never have seen before.
The Biophilium 