urbpan: (dandelion)
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Without a daily blog project I've been letting photos build up a long time: these are from a walk we went on in the Stony Brook Reservation on July 8th. This is one of the only mushrooms I've seen all summer.

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Not far away, feeding on the sugars shared between tree and fungus, are a group of ghost flowers, or monotrope.

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These parasites need no chlorophyll, so dot the forest with ghostly white instead of green.

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A distant relative in the same family, striped Pipsissewa is found from Canada to Panama, but is endangered across some of its range.

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The plant is sometimes called striped wintergreen, or more confusingly, spotted wintergreen. Some government agencies have taken to calling it "striped Prince's Pine" in the misguided idea that this is somehow less confusing.
urbpan: (dandelion)
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This black rat snake was showing off its extraordinary climbing ability.

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urbpan: (dandelion)
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This is Monotropa uniflora, a parasitic plant, still identifiable as a wintry corpse.

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urbpan: (dandelion)
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Summer is awesome because even if you are working hard at your job at the zoo (I promise) you can find new and interesting living things everywhere you look! Here's yet another Amanita mushroom!

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I went out to dinner with some of the folks that were at the Nocturnal Bug BioBlitz, at a bar I'd never been to, in my new home town. Afterward we were standing outside saying goodbye and one of the gang pointed across the street and said, that's public land over there. She had studied the maps of the town and knew that this unused parcel was not private, and that it might end up being a town woods or park. I said I would go there any time and check it out. Which I did, the next day.

Long story short, it has potential. Mostly it is impassibly choked with poison ivy, but one margin was easy to get at, and had clear evidence of human use. A small wetland was there, with a swampy pond and a dry stream bed. The far side of it abutted some houses, and was being used as a combination dirt bike track and dump.

I found a little group of Indian pipes, white flowers that are parasitic on mycorrhizzae and have no chlorophyll.
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urbpan: (vernal pool)

Photo by [livejournal.com profile] urbpan. Location: at the base of a red oak, in the Riverway, atop the earthen mound that separates the trolley tracks from the pedestrian path, Brookline.

Urban species #197: Indian pipe Monotropa uniflora

At first, you may not even be sure of what it is: Is it a flower? A mushroom? Most often encountered in the woods, and very rare in the city, the Indian pipe is indeed a wildflower. But the Indian pipe's ghostly pallor sets it apart from almost all other plants. It once was classified in the heath family, but has been reclassified, along with its closest relatives, into their own group. Monotropaceae are a family of plants that have eschewed photosynthesis-based metabolism. Instead their roots intermingle in the mycorrhizal (what's that again?) relationships of trees and soil fungi, and feed on the products of that symbiosis. Because this kind of relationship takes time to develop, requiring stable soil with the proper elements in place, monotropes are not common in the city.

Fortunately for wildflower enthusiasts and other nature lovers in Boston, many old oak and beech trees line the Emerald Necklace. When Frederick Law Olmsted's firm designed the Riverway and other parks in Boston in the late 1800's thousands of trees were planted, and some still survive today. For some reason, probably soil and weather related, this year there is an impressive bloom of hundreds of Indian pipe flowers. Indian pipe has a variety of evocative common names, including ghost flower, corpse plant, fairy smoke and Dutchman's pipe. Close relatives include "pinesap", "pine drops", and "sugarstick." Indian pipe is the only monotrope I have found in Boston, to date.


A veritable forest of Indian pipe emerges from the bark mulch around a 150 year old European beech, on the Boston side of the Riverway.

Some more, these by cottonmanifesto )
urbpan: (dandelion)
It's been too long since I've posted an urban nature post. Sorry about that. Partly it's because we have so many pictures taken (during our 2 weeks with automobile) that we haven't resized them all for blog use. Here's the first part of a photo-heavy post about Franklin Park in Boston. We took so many pictures that it's only right that I divide this into at least two posts.

Franklin Park is yet another part of the Emerald Necklace, Olmsted's brilliant landscape design that winds its way through Boston. Franklin Park, a sprawling greenspace containing a golf course and a zoo, is the southern end of the Necklace spreading from Jamaica Plain down to Mattapan.


We parked (alas, automobile is the easiest way to get there) along a maintenance/service road next to a pond.



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