Spring Camp Out

Last weekend I went on our annual spring camp out with my Pathfinder Club. I was afraid I was going to have an adventure since I did not have as much time to plan as I usually take. But there were no adventures, so all was well.

We camped on my friend Ken Haggett’s farm. We have camped there many times in the past, but this time we moved to a new area since we discovered last year that our old camp site is prone to flooding. I wrote about that last year so I don’t need to rehash it. The new area is quite a bit drier.

I had several goals for this trip. Every year we make plaster casts of animal tracks. Sometimes we find tracks out in the wild, but in a pinch, we will take our old casts, impress them in some sand, and cast those. We do this to meet one of the class requirements for the Companion class, but don’t have time every year to earn the full Animal Tracking honor. I like to make the time every 3-4 years, and this was one of those years.

The Haggett Farm has a lot of wild turkeys, and sure enough, we had no trouble finding their tracks.

Turkey track

I have been wanting to cast a turkey track for a long time. I have even stopped the car a couple of times when I’ve seen turkey’s cross the road in front of me, got out, and looked for tracks. But that never came to anything. But now we have cast this turkey track in plaster, and have added it to our collection. We also made casts of deer, frog, squirrel, and coyote tracks over the weekend, but we already had examples of those.

On the way back from casting these, I took a photo of some Bluets (Houstonia caerulea).

Bluet (Houstonia caerulea)

I hadn’t seen them yet this season, but now I can check that box.

Another I hadn’t seen yet this year was goldthread (Coptis trifolia).

Goldthread (Coptis trifolia)

I only took one shot of it and got lucky. It’s hard to concentrate on photography when you’ve got 12 kids in tow.

At one point during the trip, I aimed my camera at two of the girls. They decided to pose for me by kicking their feet up and trying to put them on one another’s chairs. That led to a slight imbalance which led to an all-out tumble.

Whoops!

Those are the same two girls who were wading in the ocean last year on Pathfinder Fun Day when they began splashing one another. It ended much the same way then as it did this weekend (only there was less water this year).

Fun Day 2011

I managed to catch these flies in the act on our kitchen window screen.

Flies on the tent wall

They were oblivious to my lens which I got to within less than an inch of them.

On Saturday evening, Ken came down to visit with us. We had a nice fire going, and I asked Ken to tell us a story. He reluctantly agreed.

Ken getting ready to tell us a tale

The first time we camped on his farm, Ken came down and told a story that was just hilarious. We have camped on his place several times since then, and until this weekend, he had not been able to make it down for a story. I was so glad he did this time.

He makes these stories up as he goes along, and it’s mostly about how he hung out with Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, John Colter, and Jason Grimes, the one-armed mountain man as they explored the Yellowstone area. These are all real people, and Ken knows his material (he teaches history at a nearby high school). As the story progresses, it gets more and more ridiculous, ultimately building up to a point where he scares the kids. They love it. Last time he told a story, it involved the legendary two-legged fur-bearing trout. This year it was the giant warm-blooded black fly (and I know exactly where that inspiration came from – the tiny, cold-blooded variety were thick).

After the story the kids played a game in the woods in the dark, so they were clearly not seriously scared. I let them stay up for a while and then sent the pre-teens to bed. When I was about to drop myself I sent the teens to bed and turned in myself. Then we had a gentle rain that lasted through the night. By morning it was pretty much done and the temperature had dropped into the 50’s. That was enough to tamp down the black flies, so it was very welcome to everyone.

After breakfast we worked on the Camping Skills honors as well as Wilderness Living. We finished Camping Skills and made a sizable dent in Wilderness Living (we’ll finish that one up in Maine in two weeks). We also practiced building a ladder from poles and ropes. That’s the other competition we’ll have at the Camporee in Maine (along with the cardboard boats).

After lunch on Sunday we started to break camp. Since we were on Ken’s farm and not at a public campground, we decided to leave the tents up to give them a chance to dry out. Otherwise the kids would have taken them down, and I would have had to pitch them again at my house when I got home. Then strike them again after they were dry. Sometimes the drying part takes 10 days, and it looks like this might be another one of those times. The forecast is calling for rain every day for the next week. Sigh. I might go back to the farm and move the little tents into the kitchen tent. I think I could get six of them in there. Then they’d have a shot at drying out before we take them to Maine.

 

What May Brings

I took a walk to the grocery store during lunch, and was surprised to see several new blooms. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised – these things are fairly predictable! Here’s some of what I saw:

Greater celandine (Chelidonium majus)

Cherry (Prunus spp)

I’m not sure what kind of cherry tree this is. In fact, it might even be some sort of crabapple. I really ought to learn this.

Spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana)

This spiderwort grows in a little garden by our main entrance. There was also a bit of salsify about open up, but the photos of that were not really postable.

When I got home I put on my rain gear and headed into my wood lot. Penny came along in case there were any sticks out there. I think it was raining lightly, but with rain pants and a good rain coat, it was hard to tell. Actually, I was also wearing my replacement Tilley! It came in Saturday when I was in Maine. That was a lot quicker than I was expecting, and of course, I am delighted. Here’s what I found around my yard and in the woods:

Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense)

The other name for this is “false lily-of-the-valley.” But when I found it had a more honorable name, I adopted that instead. It’s a beauty in its own right, and I don’t think “real” lily-of-the-valley holds anything on this one.

Pink Lady Slipper (Cypripedium acaule)

I had to venture off my path for this shot. Pretty much all the lady slippers along the path have been mowed down. I think it was probably Penny carrying a five-foot stick in her mouth as she chased down a basketball and brought it to me. Whodathunk she could wipe out so many beautiful flowers so quickly?

Starflower (Trientalis borealis)

The starflowers are in full-force now. They don’t seem to hold up to rain too well though, as it makes them all nod a bit. These two were facing up more than the rest, so I chose them to represent their species today.

Striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum)

All the blooms on this tree were at least seven feet off the ground. The tree has several branches on its west side that are four feet high, but none of them had any flowers. I had to hold the camera up over my head for this shot. Hard to hold it still that way, so none of the shots were very impressive. I tried to frame the shape of the leaf in the photo.

Korean spice viburnum (Viburnum carlesii)

This is a rare thing on my property – a cultivated plant.

Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)

I posted some photos of these at an earlier stage of development last week. Carl Strang of Nature Inquiries correctly identified them as aspen aments (catkins). If I’d have waited another week I might have been able to figure it out on my own, but it sure is nice to have Internet friends speed things up for me. I arranged these three aments in order of development. It’s easy to see why the poplars (including aspens) are also called cottonwoods.

Azure Bluet (Houstonia caerulea)

I found three tiny batches of bluets. These things grow in profusion around here in a lot of places, but they just barely hang on in my yard. These grow right under Carl’s aspen (which is what I will call that particular tree now).

 

Coptis trifolia

Yesterday I mentioned that I had taken several shots of some Goldthread (Coptis trifolia), and I thought that maybe some of them had come out pretty OK. Well, I think maybe this one did!

Coptis trifolia

I liked this one so much I uploaded it to the Commons and added it to the WIkipedia article on the plant.

You can see a hi-res version there if that sort of thing interests you.

I’ve been calling this Coptis groenlandica, which is the name Peterson listed for it in my Wildflowers field guide, and that was how I first identified it. However, the more widely accepted name is C. trifolia, and that’s what the USDA, Lady Bird Johnson WIldflower Center, and WIkipedia all call it. I still have it listed as C. groenlandica in my photo database and at Wikiversity though. Maybe I’ll switch over completely some day, but… I’m in no rush.

I had to leave work early today so I could take Penny to the vet. On the way there, I stopped and took a couple of pictures of some bluets:

Azure bluets (Houstonia caerulea)

I stopped though because I thought I spotted some blooms where I knew some wood anemones (Anemone quinquefoilia) grew last year. Unfortunately, I didn’t see them, and Penny was starting to get agitated in the car with David. So I quickly took the bluet portraits and went on.

On the way back though, I thought I saw the anemones again. So I stopped again, and found that I was right:

Wood anemone (Anemone quinquefoilia)

When I got home, I went outside and worked more on Beth's play-house cabin. I think that counts as aerobic activity, so I'm going to just call it that. I did find that the cabin already had at least one resident, though it is not human:

Huge ant

I saw this ant yesterday on the same log, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see it again today. It’s about an inch and a quarter long. I haven’t yet tried to determine the species, but I’ll try to get to that later tonight.

 

Bloom Explosion

Today I noticed several plants in bloom that I hadn’t seen yet this season. Some of them are kinda early too, so I was really not expecting to see them in bloom yet. The first one was Azure Bluet (Houstonia caerulea). I didn’t get a picture of this because I just barely caught it out of the corner of my eye while Jonathan and I were driving home. It was in a spot where I didn’t know it to grow too. I wasn’t 100% sure that’s what it was, but another mile or so up the road is a place where it has grown pretty thickly the past two years. I figured if that field looked the same, then that must be it. As we came upon it, there it was. I didn’t get a picture though. Moving car plus tiny flowers equals bad photography. Last year it didn’t bloom until April 27, so it’s 12 days early (as compared to then).

When I got home, I went walking around the property. I was astounded to find the blueberries in bloom:

Blueberry blossoms

I’ve not seen these bloom in April before. Last year I logged them as blooming on May 4. I noticed that the ones growing in the woods were nowhere near ready to bloom yet, as opposed to the ones growing around the base of the oaks at the edge of the yard.

I turned around and almost stepped on this specimen:

Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris)

This is a carnivorous plant. It has hairs on its leaves and exudes a sticky goo that tends to render bugs (et al) immobile. This is another one that bloomed on May 4 last year. I had notice that these had sprouted an were making leaves, but wasn’t expecting them to bloom just yet.

I walked on and saw this:

Pussytoes (Antennaria parlinii )

This is a crappy photo too, and that’s too bad, because Wikipedia’s image repository doesn’t have a picture of this plant. I may try to get a decent one soon to rectify that, but it might snow here tonight, and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so I’m not likely to get a good shot of it until the weather clears up a bit.

I made my way into the woods then and took lotsa photos of trailing arbutus, but most of those have fading blossoms now (and I have already posted good pics of those in the past couple of weeks). But I was not expecting to see this:

Dwarf Ginseng (Panax trifolius)

This is the plant I wrote about yesterday. I found a couple of them with open blossoms. This one did bloom in April last year (on the 28th) so I wasn’t expecting to see any flowers two weeks early. But here they are!

Not far from the ginseng I started looking for some Goldthread. I had spotted its leaves here the other day (and indeed, I saw several before the snow was melted). Then I found one which had sent up a stem and had an unopened flower bud on it. I took some photos, and then not five feet away, I found one that had opened:

Goldthread (Coptis groenlandica)

The earliest I found one of these in bloom last year was on April 30, so here we are with another one open two weeks early.

The last new bloom I spotted today was this one, and again, it wasn’t expected:

Wild oats (Uvularia sessilifolia)

The earliest log I had for this one was May 5, so we’re looking at one that’s three weeks earlier. This photo didn’t turn out very well either because the wind was whipping it around in low-light conditions (necessitating a slow shutter speed).

I had also taken shots of birch, cherry, sugar maple, box elder (which is a type of maple) and crab apple in Concord today at lunchtime. Those have been in bloom for about a week I guess. But I have posted enough photos for one day!