Detail of watercolor painting. Copyright Lauretta Jones.

This week, I want to introduce you to another native evergreen, one that is just as graceful and often grows side by side with white pines: Tsuga canadensis, the Eastern Hemlock. Although hemlocks are also very tall, their details offer a beautiful contrast with white pine. Where white pine has long soft needles in bundles of five, hemlock has short, flat needles that stick out on either side of its twigs, creating a feathery impression. Hemlock cones are much smaller than those of the white pine, measuring ½ -1 inch and sport gently rounded scales. White pines may drip with fragrant and sticky resin, but not hemlock.

Turning a hemlock needle over, you will find two white lines. These are chains of pores or stomata, with which the leaves “breathe”. Hemlocks are under attack by the non-native wooly adelgid that can kill a tree after several years. Adelgids resemble tiny bits of cotton and can be controlled with horticultural oil spray. Unfortunately, this is not feasible in forested areas and researchers are investigating other types of control.

The first hemlock I ever heard of was the poison variety that the classical Greek philosopher Socrates was condemned to drink. But these two hemlocks are not related at all. Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) is a member of the carrot family. This illustrates one challenge of using common plant names: they change from place to place and different plants may bear similar names. Hence the importance of the scientific naming system, in which each organism is given a unique name that also indicates its relationship to other organisms.

Photo copyright Keith Kanoti, Maine Forest Service, USA

Pinus stobus – the scientific name of our native White Pine has a pleasing lilt. In pre-colonial days this majestic tree grew across large portions of Eastern North America, reigning as the tallest tree in the forest. It was reputed to have reached heights of 230 feet, but we’ll probably never be able to verify that. Why? Because only 1% of those original pines remain standing, the rest felled for timber. The tallest white pines today measure between 160 and 189 feet.

White pines were known as “mast pines” because of their value to the sailing ship industry. Agents of the British king marked the best of our pines for use as masts by the Royal Navy. Colonists were forbidden to cut down the trees. In New Hampshire, colonists’ discontent resulted in the Pine Tree Riot; mill owners caught with the King’s trees assaulted and ran his sheriff out of the village.

It can be difficult to tell one type of evergreen from another. The secret is to look at the leaves – the needles. The white pine is a good place to start: like all pines, its needles grow in little bundles. White pine has 5 needles per bundle, 2-5 inches long and rather soft. If an evergreen twig has individual needles it is not a pine. Pull off a single needle and feel it. Spruce needles have four sides, which you can feel if you roll it between your fingers. Fir needles are flat.

White pine cones are 2-5 inches long and slender. Beneath each scale sits a little seed with a filmy wing that catches the air to carry it away from the parent tree.

Just as we have invasive species that are native to other lands, our natives can become a nuisance outside of their ranges. White pines have naturalized in Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Our pines got there just as many alien species have arrived on our shores: brought deliberately by well-meaning gardeners and landscapers.

Eight weekend AFP Volunteer Days have been scheduled between through June 2012.  The dates are listed below and also appear on the Somers Land Trust event calendar.

• February 25 (Saturday)
• March 10 (Saturday)
• March 18 (Sunday)
• April 1 (Sunday)
• April 21 (Saturday)
• May 6 (Sunday)
• June 3 (Sunday)
• June 16 (Saturday)

The best way to stay informed about Land Trust news is to become a Friend of Angle Fly Preserve.  After you sign up you will be subscribed to our periodic email newsletter which includes reminders about scheduled events and other information about the Somers Land Trust and Angle Fly Preserve.  Becoming a Friend is easy and free.  Sign up today!

Photo copyright Lauretta Jones

Blink and you may have missed it, but for a few short days our woods were full of snow. Snow reveals many things that are otherwise hidden, offering hikers fresh experiences along the snowy trails. Animals leave traces of their presence with tracks and depressions in the snow where they bedded down and their dark scat contrasts with the white snow.

Plants also show different patterns in the snow. The Tussock Sedges (Carex stricta) poking through the melting snow in this photograph create a Doctor Seuss-like landscape. Tussock sedge grows two to three feet tall atop hummocky clumps in wet or water-filled soil. Sedges offer an array of services to other species: cover for breeding amphibians and insects, nest and perching sites for birds, seeds to nourish birds and small mammals.

It can be tricky to identify the many sedges that grow in Angle Fly and to distinguish them from the superficially similar grasses or rushes. The first step: make certain you are indeed looking at a sedge. Feel the stem and a leaf between your fingers while remembering the rhyme, “Sedges have edges, and rushes are round; grasses have nodes from their tips to the ground.” Sedge stems feel triangular while those of rushes and grasses are round. Grasses also have little bumps or nodes along the stem where the leaves attach.

Other well-known sedges include the water chestnut that lends crunchiness to Chinese food, and papyrus from which ancient Egyptians made paper. But you won’t find either of those at Angle Fly Preserve.

The Always-Something-to-Learn Department: In my column about moss two weeks ago, I described mushrooms as “…non-green, non-food-producing…” A knowledgeable reader emailed to say that although fungi do not create food by photosynthesis as do chlorophyl-containing plants, in 2007 microscopic fungi were discovered at Chernobyl that were shown to make their own food from radioactivity!

Photo copyright Lauretta Jones

Whenever I find myself beaten down by the long, gray days of winter I walk through the woods looking for the first signs of spring. What I seek are the purple tips of Eastern Skunk Cabbage blossoms (Symplocarpus foetidus) melting their way through the frozen ground. This unusual ability is known as “thermogenesis,” literally heat generation. Skunk cabbage is on average 36ºF warmer than the air around it, day or night. To stay this warm the plant consumes as much oxygen as a small mammal! Usually skunk cabbage emerges in late February or March, but in this oddly warm winter they have been persuaded to awaken earlier.

The approach to the Angle Fly Brook footbridge (along the Yellow Trail) is surrounded by large swathes of wetland filled with this native plant. Skunk cabbage thrives in wet areas and can often be spotted growing in streams, entwined among icy ribbons of flowing snow melt.

The tough, green-blotched brownish-purple hood of the skunk cabbage blossom is called a spathe. Within are hidden the flowers themselves, tiny and yellow, arising from the spadix – an egg-shaped structure. Skunk cabbages are pollinated by bees, flies and other insects attracted by its foul, pungent smell. Pollinators may also find the spathe offering a warm refuge from the cold winter air.

Another odd characteristic of skunk cabbage is that its stem actually grows deeper into the earth each year of its life, pulled down by “contractile” or shrinking roots.

By May, the blossom has withered and large cabbage-like leaves unfurl to dominate the damp understory. Skunk cabbage leaves can be one or two feet wide and several feet long. By late summer, the leaves have decayed totally away as if the plant had never been there at all.

Photo Copyright Lauretta Jones

Moss is one of the most beautiful of green plants. Although mosses seem very different from garden flowers, they are all chlorophyl-containing organisms and make their own food. Perhaps because moss is tiny and mingles with mushrooms, we may think they are related. But the non-green, non-food-producing mushrooms are only distant cousins of moss. Moss is as different from mushrooms – which are the above-ground fruiting parts of fungi – as it is from mammals!

Moss is also different from lichens, which I wrote about in November. A lichen is not a single organism at all, but rather a cooperative venture between a fungus and an alga. When they combine, they form something that looks and acts very different from either organism on its own. (Perhaps you know some couples like that?)

Although mosses are green plants, they are different from trees and flowers in some important ways. They do not have a water circulatory system and hence you will most readily find them in damp environments. And although they are more prolific during wet weather, some species can survive being dried out, seemingly springing to life again when rehydrated.

Mosses do not produce flowers, which also means no seeds or cones. But in this photograph of moss at Angle Fly Preserve, note the little red-brown cups sitting atop hair-thin stalks. These cups hold the spores that – like ferns – mosses release into the air to reproduce.

Historically, mosses had many utilitarian uses, including as diapers and as dressings for wounds. But today we have much better alternatives, and should allow the slow-growing mosses to sit in peace, delighting our eyes and bare toes.

(Somers, NY) – The Somers Land Trust (SLT) will hold its 2012 annual meeting at the Somers Town House (Elephant Hotel) on Sunday January 22. The meeting will begin at 2PM. All members are invited to participate. In addition, prospective members and the general public are encouraged to attend to learn more about the SLT and the work it is doing to protect open space throughout the Town of Somers and its neighboring communities. Interested attendees will have the opportunity to become SLT members while at the meeting.

The annual meeting will include a brief formal meeting to elect SLT board members and update the membership on SLT activities. This includes information about Angle Fly Preserve, including the continued development of hiking trails, the installation of new composting toilets, scout projects, and hunting.

The meeting will also include a presentation by guest speaker Candace Schafer, Executive Director of the Westchester Land Trust. The SLT is honored to host Ms. Schafer who will speak about the future of land trusts, including the challenges that organizations such as ours face and ways to build for the future.

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About the Somers Land Trust
The Somers Land Trust (SLT) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to preserving open space in the town of Somers. Together with the Westchester Land Trust, the SLT holds a number of conservations easements throughout Somers. In addition, we promote environmentally sensitive planning and helped devise the town survey soliciting public input for the Somers Master Plan. Perhaps the most visible achievement of the SLT is the Angle Fly Preserve. The SLT helped bring the 2000 open space funding referendum to voters whose approval enabled the purchase of Angle Fly Preserve. The SLT also assisted with the purchase of this 654 acre property in 2006 and founded the Friends of Angle Fly Preserve, a group of volunteers dedicated to protecting the natural beauty of the land for public enjoyment. For more information about the Somers Land Trust please visit www.somerslandtrust.org.

Photo copyright Lauretta Jones

When the lovely distraction of summer’s green or autumn’s fire-colored leaves is gone, a walk through the woods brings overlooked sights to our attention. This year, high up in many trees, you may spot long gashes where the gold-colored inner bark and cambium layers have been exposed, contrasting richly with the duller gray-browns of the weathered outer bark. Most of these are the scars of our unwelcome October blizzard, when healthy branches were violently ripped from trees, stripping the still-supple bark in long patches. The color contrast is so noticeable that these wounds are often called “shiners.”

But that is not the only wound trees endure. The ruddy-colored scratches on the trunk of the Angle Fly tree in this photo were caused by a white tailed deer. This “deer rub” is a sign that a buck (a male deer) has scraped its antlers roughly against the tree.

To understand why, it helps to know a bit about deer antlers. Antlers are bone and are regrown anew every year (unlike horns which are made of keratin like our fingernails, and add on a bit each year). In the spring, a buck’s newly growing antlers are covered with velvet – a soft fuzzy covering rich with nourishing blood vessels. Once the antlers mature in late summer or fall, mating season has begun and bucks rub the velvet off on the trees while also leaving a scent that challenges other males and attracts does.

Unfortunately, this type of damage can seriously weaken a tree. Since the living part of the trunk, the cambium, is a thin-walled layer just beneath the bark, if it is sliced through all around the trunk the tree will have no way to bring water up to the leaves nor nutrients down to the roots and it will die. Oh, deer!

Photo copyright Mike Lubchenko

Spring is the season of impatient expectation while summer brings all we’d been longing for. Although Autumn may stir up bittersweet nostalgia, it also holds a queue of festivities that soften our journey to year’s end. The sweet distraction of shopping and cooking, traveling and eating, decorating and wrapping, family and friends comes to a crescendo at midnight on New Years’ Eve. Then we face a long, slow slog until spring… It’s enough to make one burrow under the feather duvet and dream the time away.

Some of our mammalian cousins do just that. The stout and sturdy Woodchuck, or Groundhog (Marmota monax) retires from the grassy edges of Somers parkways, meadows and backyards into his or her underground den, seals the sleeping chamber with dirt, and lays down for a long winter’s nap. Woodchucks are true hibernators, which means that their body temperature lowers, their breathing, heartbeat and metabolism slow, and they burn stores of body fat for energy. In early spring they emerge from their dens and we enjoy pretending they can forecast the end of winter.

Since every living thing constantly burns energy, evolution has come up with many efficient strategies for matching animals’ needs to food availability. The primary purpose of hibernation is to get the Woodchuck safely through a season of food scarcity. Other animals migrate from place to place, following the food supply. Some of the birds you see at your feeder in the winter have come down from the North where they reside in the warmer months. Even during spring and summer, some birds burn so much energy each day that at night they enter a slowed state similar to hibernation called torpor.

Modern humans, with our warm houses, refrigerators and pantries full of food have developed other strategies to deal with the winter cold: some of us run off to Florida, while others don snowshoes and skis and enjoy what the season has to offer.

Photo copyright Lauretta Jones

We are fortunate in Somers to live surrounded by the natural world while also enjoying the benefits of human-made artifacts and conveniences. The slivers of woods woven between our homes cannot hold the richness of larger tracts of open space; nonetheless they provide important opportunities to rid ourselves of stress and “nature deficit disorder.” And so the subject of this week’s column was spotted right outside my door, although I have every confidence it is also happening throughout Angle Fly Preserve as well.

Following a hollow knock-knocking sound to its source, I spied a male Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) – our smallest and most common woodpecker – diligently crafting a hole in the side of a dead ash tree. Over the course of several days, he (males have a red patch at the back of their heads) hammered out a cavity in the tree. The Downy then climbed into the tree, repeatedly picked up shattered wood fibers in his beak and flung them to the ground with a sharp snap of his head. The entire endeavor was made all the more memorable by the simultaneous (and much louder) din on the roof of our house as repairs were finally being made to damage suffered during last summer’s hurricane.

Undeterred by the nearby commotion, this little bird was getting ready for the winter by excavating a roost. The opening points southward, away from prevailing winds and ready to take advantage of the warming sun. On cold nights, the Downy may conserve energy by lowering his body temperature while huddling in the roost. If we are lucky, once winter is over, this little woodpecker will move a mate into the cavity and start a family.