Look at this bizarre little fungus, like black sausages standing on end. In spring, they’re covered with a white powder (the spores). Part of the latin name, polymorpha, means it can take many forms, but it’s often in this club shape. Belongs to the same class of fungus as morels and truffles, but these are inedible. Common to eastern North America.
Dead Man’s Fingers (Xylaria polymorpha)
This 4th of July morning was gray with the clouds of an impending storm. We went to check out a heron nest I saw a couple of weeks ago. And it was so great to look over there and see all these great tall birds perched in their aerie! At first they were bunched together so it was hard to see how many there were. 
But then they wandered around a bit, revealing four.
I hope they come through this storm okay (remnants of Hurricane Arthur). Glad there is enough habitat here to support them. Imagine building that nest (with your mouth) — how do you get the first sticks to stay? Clever birds!
Great Blue Herons will eat just about anything they can catch, including fish, insects, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and even birds. They can hunt during the day and night, because of good night vision. We’ve noticed new beaver dams in our favorite hiking areas, and this is a boon for herons because hunting is good in the swamps created by the dams.
From allaboutbirds.org:
Male Great Blue Herons collect much of the nest material, gathering sticks from the ground and nearby shrubs and trees, and from unguarded and abandoned nests, and presenting them to the female. She weaves a platform and a saucer-shaped nest cup, lining it with pine needles, moss, reeds, dry grass, mangrove leaves, or small twigs. Nest building can take from 3 days up to 2 weeks; the finished nest can range from a simple platform measuring 20 inches across to more elaborate structures used over multiple years, reaching 4 feet across and nearly 3.5 feet deep. Ground-nesting herons use vegetation such as salt grass to form the nest.
Great Blue Herons nest mainly in trees, but will also nest on the ground, on bushes, in mangroves, and on structures such as duck blinds, channel markers, or artificial nest platforms. Males arrive at the colony and settle on nest sites; from there, they court passing females. Colonies can consist of 500 or more individual nests, with multiple nests per tree built 100 or more feet off the ground.
— A clutch will have 2-6 eggs, which are about 2.5 to 3 inches long. They incubate for about a month, and the young stay in the nest 4 to 7 weeks. These ones must be about ready to strike out on their own. Pairs choose new breeding partners each year.
A hardy groundcover — tolerates poor soil, dry conditions, deer, rabbits, pollution… Has a milky, poisonous sap that repels herbivores. Forms a dense fluffy blanket about a foot tall. Tiny flowers that start lime-green and yellow, and age to red. Has narrow-leaved foliage reminiscent of cypress trees, hence the name cypress spurge. (The common name “spurge” comes from the Middle English/Old French word “epurge”, meaning “to purge”, because these plants were used as purgatives. (Poinsettias are spurges!) Native to Europe, introduced to North America in the 1860s as an ornamental, and is now a harmful invasive that has really colonized Charles River Peninsula.
Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias)
A “spring ephemeral.” Has only basal leaves which wrap around the flower stalk as it begins to bloom. Then the leaves open fully as the flower withers. The flowers bloom only one or two days each, with a fragrant scent. The foliage contains a red juice (which was used by native people to make dye). It’s toxic and usually avoided by herbivores. Native to eastern North America. (This sample is in my yard, an import from the Whitesides garden in Charleston, Illinois.) Poppy family
Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)
Another sign of spring in Needham is that you’ll be driving along and do a doubletake because suddenly, there’s an empty lot and a backhoe where there used to be an older house and a bunch of trees. Or depending on your timing, maybe they’re sawing all the trees down, or a big machine is biting the roof off of a little house.
One by one, the little houses are replaced by big ones. Sometimes the razed houses are ugly little houses and occasionally they’re charming, large, or architecturally significant. Sometimes it’s just a big estate of mostly woods carved into a subdivision. When we moved here I assumed all the woods was the happy result of zoning and conservation, but I was wrong.
This morning we took a paddle on the Charles River. This bit borders Cutler Park and is about 20 miles upstream from Boston Harbor. I was trying to take a picture of an egret farther away when I realized we were really close to this well-camouflaged heron hiding in the pickerel weed!
The closest I’ve ever been to one — thrilling surprise! So tall — I feel like it was head-level with me in the canoe. Later we saw another one which had caught a fish…
It flew off and I was not ready with right camera settings… so here’s a terrible blur of a great sight:
Great Blue Herons are about 4 feet tall. They eat mainly fish, but also crabs, insects, frogs, small rodents, snakes, dragonflies… Their favorite breeding areas are beaver swamps, and their favorite nesting areas are in the branches of dead trees down in the water. They mostly migrate, and come back to use the same rookery every year.
Bonus picture of the whole scene. An usually wide place in the river. Felt lucky to have a canoe, a beautiful day, this amazing place, and a friend to go with! and a camera!
This is a common weed that offends all over my yard. I never wondered what it was called… until I noticed it blooming! So I had to identify it and it has a rather fancy name: Three-seeded Mercury. I can’t find an explanation of the name. It’s an annual, it can have a two-foot deep taproot, flowers in the axils, it has clear sap, can be a mild allergen, mourning doves like the seeds, deer like the leaves. The latin name Acalypha comes from the Greek word for nettle — Linnaeus thought the leaves resembled nettles. Native. Spurge family.
Three-seeded Mercury, Copperleaf, Diamond Threeseed Mercury (Acalypha rhomboidea)
Sometimes there’s a non-wildflower item that demands notice! In our woods, there were several of these big ruffly fungi all growing around an old tree stump (my hand added for scale). I took these July 21; now they’ve pretty much withered, darkened and disappeared. I’m finding fungus identification difficult — there are many that look similar to me, and there can apparently be lots of variation within a species. That said, I think this is a Giant Polypore — can get to be 30 inches in diameter.
Giant Polypore, Black-staining Polypore (Meripilus giganteus)
My original plan for the blog was to photograph all the local wildflowers as they came into bloom and post them right away so that I would have a good record of the flowers with information about them and their blooming times. I was thinking I would do this multiple years and keep track of trends in the blooming time. That year we had a freakishly warm winter which really had me wondering how the plants would be affected. It was a big job; some days I’d barely walk out the door and I would see 10 new kind of things blooming. Plus I didn’t know what anything was and it took me a while to get efficient at identifying the flowers.
This spring I started out with the same plan, but I have been out of town so many weeks that I fell hopelessly far behind. So my new plan is to continue to photograph new discoveries and write about them, and when the growing season is over, I’ll create a good index to make this a more useful tool for Massachusetts wildflower identification. And post interesting flower photos when I have them. That’s the new plan.
Common Milkweed, Butterfly flower, Silkweed (Asclepias syriaca)
One of North America’s most poisonous plants, and it’s growing right on the corner by our house. You don’t even have to ingest it; it’s poisonous to taste. Many recorded deaths of people, and apparently it kills a lot of grazing livestock. Can grow to 8 feet tall. Parsley family. Native.
Water Hemlock, Cowbane, Poison Parsnip (Cicuta maculata)
