More Goodies from the Woods

 No wonder I was so tired yesterday afternoon. I forgot that Gary and I held up this clump of trees so everyone could walk under it.

We saw several kinds of ferns, but I'm always a sucker for the Northern Maidenhair, Adiantum pedatum. These whorls are just perfect.

This is nothing special, but it's one of my favorite sedges, just because it's kind of showy. Carex intumescens.

Probably because the wind brought them down, we saw a lot of oak apple galls.

This one must be very new. The structure inside wasn't filled in like I usually see. For example this one

Here's another little oddity. This bracken fern should have 3 branches. But something has damaged the growth meristem. The frond that should have grown there is all bunched up. It looks kind of like "witches broom," but that usually only is found on woody plants. Like galls, this can be caused by more than one thing. Insect damage, a pathogen, a chemical. When you see something similar on goldenrod, it was probably caused by a midge or a fly making the plant create a chamber where its egg can grow. But I've never seen one on a fern before.

In other news, I edited big time. Minnesota is taking a lot of work. I had the data collected, but put it aside because I hadn't settled on a format that worked in all situations. But once I get Minnesota whipped into shape, everything east of there is pretty clean.

I also worked in my gardens for over an hour, total. I edit until I have to wiggle, then go outside for a while.

See Gary Hits 100

Acorn Plum Gall

I did not find this, but a friend did, and he asked me what it was. A little searching determined that it is the Acorn Plum Gall caused by the Acorn Plum Gall Wasp, Amphibolips quercusjuglans

Each ball is about 3/4 - 1 inch in diameter. I suspect it gets the name from the purpleish color. You can see the collection of various-aged galls that Fred made.

The clincher for the ID as a gall was when he cut them open. That round center with the radiating rays is characteristic.

I checked where in the world this particular gall is found, and sure enough, it's been noted here, so I think that clinches it.

The little wasp that lays an egg in the plant tissue which causes the tree to produce the gall is tiny and never bothers humans. Interestingly, this gall is only found on oaks in the red oak family- the ones with sharp points on the leaf tips.

Photo credits to Fred Hayward.

In other news. I have the workshop program pretty well done, and started on another editing job. That one will go with me.

See Oak Apple Gall See Succulent Oak Gall

Little Things

  Cathy and I went for a 5.5 mile hike today on the North Country Trail. It was hot and humid, but there was a pretty strong breeze that helped when it wasn't blowing dirt in our eyes.

This was a fun find. It's either Pig Ears fungus, or Fireplace Cup. It's dark for the pig ears, but the Fireplace Cup usually grows in burned soil, which this was not.

There was quite a lot of it. This is a sampling.

And the wind had brought down a lot of Oak Apple galls. All the ones we saw were smaller than usual.

I cut one open so Cathy could see inside. The structure is really easy to see when they are this small.

Were you wondering about the little things on my deck? Yup... proud papa mostly perches on a bracket, and mom stays busy.

In other news: I did some editing and odds and ends before hiking. But the 3 hours of sleep I got last night has about run out now.

North Country Trail miles for 2021 is at 317. Cathy is at 42.5

North Country Trail, Manistee County, MI, Hamilton Rd north 2.75 miles and back. Total 5.5 miles

See Oak Apple Gall See Mrs. Phoebe Gets Cozy

Fife Lake Loop- Day 3

 
Just 6.6 miles of the loop remained to be hiked. This is the section I'd seen before when it was North Country Trail, but that was in the early winter, so it looked quite different. I did recognize a few spots. On flat terrain, with not too many outstanding points of interest, we moved right along.

Also, it had rained in the early morning hours. We were dry in the tent, but the grass was wet along the trail, and plopping down to rest just made us wetter.



A little dog knows how to stay dry at rest stops. Just climb on top of a handy pack.



Soon we started paying attention to smaller sights, such as wool sower galls on oak leaves. I'd seen them before, but this one is really large- almost two inches across.



One nice wet meadow had blue flag in bloom.


Let's talk about water. We had found that open water where we camped 0.7 miles south of M 186. There was another wetland with open water about a mile south of that. It was smaller without good access, but you could probably get water there if you were desperate. Can't promise it stays wet all year, though. We had stashed a gallon of water where the trail crosses M 113. It turned out we had plenty still from the morning fill-up where we had camped, so all we had to do was top off our bottles. It seemed a little weird to pour out the rest and crush the milk jug to carry out, but that way we didn't have to go back with the car to get it later. Six miles south of M 186, the trail follows Walton Outlet Creek where you could easily get water again. The day wasn't as hot as Sunday. We started hiking at 69 degrees, and it only barely broke into the 80s before we finished around 3 pm. I think we would have had enough water even without the milk jug stash, but it's always good to be prepared.

Here's Walton Outlet Creek. There is another semi-developed campsite along here which would be a very pretty one to stay at.



We were on a roll. Our feet were soaked, and we could hear a restaurant calling. We stopped twice for snacks and pressed on. We knew we were getting really close to the car when we passed the southern turnoff to rejoin the North Country Trail. (this is looking back)



A look downstream reveals the trestle for the Tuscola & Saginaw Bay Railroad (now Great Lakes Central), which is a live track.



This brings me to mention a piece of this trail that really should have an interpretive sign. That said, I didn't even think to take a picture when we were walking it. The straight E-W section that's about a mile long, follows the berm of the old Manistee and Northeastern Railroad (Manistee to Traverse City and an associated spider web of spurs). I've mentioned that line before, and another piece of the old bed is part of the NCT near Hodenpyl Dam. This was primarily a logging line, but as the timber began to disappear it carried cherries from Traverse City, salt from Manistee, and potatoes. It was merged into C&O in 1955, and the line was abandoned completely by 1997.

Once again, we were walking along the Manistee River. I just liked this stump.



Onward to the car where we had to take a few congratulatory selfies, and then to the North Side Restaurant in Manton for a late lunch. Highly recommended for hikers. The linoleum is peeling and the table tops are delaminating, but we got good, real food and lots of it for very little money.



We had thought our hike was 21 miles, because the text on the map says that. But the very same map (if you add the mileages) only totals 20.1 miles, as does the official NCT web site maps. Well, we probably walked an extra mile to that water pump and looking for not-so-good cache trees. Haha.

Would I go with Sue again? You bet. Time to start plotting another adventure.

If you care, this same piece of trail is part of "The Princess and the P's" chapter in North Country Cache.

Fife Lake Loop Trail, and about a mile of North Country Trail just west of the Old US 131 State Forest Campground near Manton, MI

	See Fife Lake Loop- Day 2 See 85.7 and Still Walking for more of the Manistee and Northeastern rail bed
if you like this blog, click the +1   or

Oak Apple Gall

 
Here is an interesting item often found in the woods this time of year, Later in the summer you can still find them, but they will be brown and dried out.

This one is about an inch and a half across- and average size. They aren't often attached to tiny oak leaves, although this one made a nice presentation.

It also highlights the common name, oak apple gall. It sure does look like a little green apple with oak leaves!



This is a common gall, and you are likely to find them in the woods most any year. Plant galls are usually caused by the piercing of the outer layers of leaf or stem by an insect. This is usually to lay eggs.

More than one kind of insect may be the cause. The gall is the plant's response to chemicals injected at the site. All are in the family Cynipidae, commonly called gall wasps or gallflies.

When you cut open a gall, you can tell it's not anything like the inside structures of a normal plant or living animal. There is a kind of organization, but no organs or circulatory system, etc.

	See Succulent Oak Gall, Revisited
if you like this blog, click the +1   or

Fasciated Evening Primrose

 
I know we are overdue for the January goal report, but there are much more fun things to discuss. I'll do that on a slow day.

The other day, as Sylvia and I were walking we saw a whole line of odd-looking plants.



They were along the edge of a farm field. I went over to take a closer look



Pretty bizarre, eh?



Stay tuned. The seed pods are easy to identify as the common evening primrose, Oenothera biennis.


But something pretty weird is going on with the stems and tips.



This is known as fasciation, and it occurs when there are mutations in the growth tips of a plant. Some plants are more susceptible than others. I was not aware that evening primrose is one that is commonly affected.

The condition can be caused by a permanent genetic change- this is how the cockscomb celosia came to be. It reproduces with the condition in each generation. Usually, the current generation is the only one affected. Insect or mite damage, radiation, or chemical exposure can cause the condition.

I'm thinking that because of the location at the edge of a field this might have been as a result of pesticide use.

You can see pictures of the same plant, still with leaves, fasciated by radiation exposure at Fukushima Diary

See some other plants with the condition at Wayne's World

	see Evening Primrose in bloom
if you like this blog, click the +1   or

Succulent Oak Gall, Revisited

 
Two years ago, you might remember that there were thousands, probably millions, of these little balls on the ground under oak trees. After some research, I learned that they are succulent oak galls, caused by being punctured by a cynipid wasp. The leaf grows a ball of unusual cells around the irritation, where the wasp has laid an egg. Thus the egg has a nice safe home in which to develop.

Two years ago, almost all the galls had fallen to the ground. Yesterday, I found some still attached to a white oak leaf. And this picture shows the color variety better too.

	See Succulent Oak Gall See More on the Succulent Oak Gall
if you like this blog, click the +1   or

More on the Succulent Oak Gall

 
Although I was really certain of the identification of the Succulent Oak Gall, I still hadn't seen one actually on a tree. For some reason, these galls apparently all fall to the ground at some point in the cycle. Since I don't think I've ever seen these before this year, I have no personal knowledge bank on the topic.

The one reference I found that had photos showed the little balls attached to the undersides of white oak leaves. In the first picture I showed a couple of weeks ago, there is a little ball on a leaf, but is it attached? Or did it simply fall and land on a fallen leaf?



Since then, I've been hunting in the leaves above every patch of the galls I've found, but it appeared they had all fallen!

Finally, in Nordhouse last week, I did see a couple of balls that were still attached. But they were high in the tree, and the wind was blowing so that the leaves were in constant motion. The result is a picture that is good enough to prove how they are seen on the tree, but not in very good focus.



So there you have it. These seem to all be on white oak. Maybe some day I'll get a picture of the little wasp that causes it.

I'm going to bed. I think I've finally made it to tired enough to get to sleep early.

if you like this blog, click the +1

Succulent Oak Gall

 
This was a mystery a week in the solving. I think I mentioned last Saturday that a few of us took a walk between workshops and dinner. While we were walking, we came across thousands of these small "fruits" in the trail.



The picture looks mostly brownish, but the balls ranged from light pink to pale yellow to grayish brown. They are about a half inch in diameter. One of the other walkers also knew plants pretty well, and we were just stumped. What were they?

I looked up hawthorn and hackberry, but couldn't find a good match, although both of those can be about that size. I cut one open, but it didn't seem to have much structure inside.

So... tonight, my buddy Ester is here. (There will be a nice adventure story tomorrow), and she's another plant weenie. She thought it looked like some kind of gall.

We cut one of them open now that they are quite dry, and look what we got! A very definite structure, but not that of a fruit.



OK, very odd. Any galls I've found were attached firmly to leaves or branches. But some internet searching revealed that this is probably a succulent oak gall, caused by a cynipid wasp. There are dozens of species, and each targets a particular oak creating unique galls.

A gall is caused when an insect "stings" a plant with its ovipositor, and lays an egg. This irritates the plant which grows non-typical cells to surround the egg, which creates the gall. I have some pictures of other interesting galls. Maybe I should feature some of them in the future.

Since the interior structure (of the one I cut open) doesn't have a tunnel to the outside, the larvae didn't develop and burrow out of the gall.

But at least we solved the mystery.

if you like this blog, click the +1

Fun with the Treeweenie

Any expedition with my friend Irene is bound to include studying trees. That's her self-declared nickname, the "Treeweenie." She actually is less interested in looking at leaves than she is at tree shapes, bark and buds. So a hike when the trees are bare is just her cup of tea.


On our road walk back to the truck we passed the beautiful tree that you see above. Both of us were sure that we should recognize its unusual shape. Note how the branches curl up at each end? (see picture to the left) We knew that was a definitive feature! Then there were the buds. They were large, over 1/2 inch long each, a rich reddish brown, and.... sticky, yes, really sticky!

We walked just a few more yards and encountered a tree covered with these odd growths. Here was mystery number two. We were pretty sure that it was some sort of gall caused by an insect, but this was not one that I had seen before. The tree it was growing on was an oak, in fact a pin oak (which has a distinctive shape of its own). There were so many galls that I took my penknife and cut one branch off to take home to study.

Here is another example. Most of the galls were all on one tree.

The minute we returned to Irene's she pulled out the tree books, and we quickly identified the tree with the sticky buds and turned up branches. Boy did we feel foolish. We should have recognized it for sure. It is a horsechestnut. They have large palmate leaves with 7 leaflets and a beautiful showy flower in the spring. At any other time of the year we would have known what it was!

Not so many years ago identifying the gall would have been tricky. Now, thanks to the internet it was a snap. This is a horned oak gall, created by a stingless wasp, the Callirhytis cornigera (horned oak gall wasp... duh). They can disfigure trees and cause branches to die back. In some areas of the country they are a bigger problem than others. One adult wasp emerges from each horn when they mature!

Finally, here is just a fun picture of the underside of a downed tree. I just liked the star shape of what is left of the roots.



See Letchworth and Gibsonville