Great Blue Heron

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!

GreatBlueHeronThe 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…

HeronwithFishIt flew off and I was not ready with right camera settings… so here’s a terrible blur of a great sight:

HeroninFlightGreat 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!

CharlesRiverPaddle

Destroying Angel

Destroying Angel

I’m new to identifying mushrooms, but apparently this is a poisonous mushroom that causes death by liver failure from eating just one. Identifying features: has a smooth white cap (sometimes with a tan tint in the center, like this one), gills, and a drapy skirt-like ring near the cap. The first stage of poisoning is called the incubation stage: 6-12 hours with no symptoms while it takes over without you noticing. Don’t eat white mushrooms!

Eastern North American Destroying Angel, Deadly Amanita, White Death Cap, Angel of Death (Amanita bisporigera)

Wild Asparagus

Wild AsparagusThere is a bit of meadow where these stalks have emerged. They seem few and far between so I wouldn’t feel right harvesting them. But they look good! (Later when they fruit, they’ll have small red berries that are poisonous to humans.) There is an asparagus recipe in the oldest surviving cookbook, which is a Greek book from the third century AD. Native to Europe, Africa and Asia. Introduced to North America around 1850.

Wild Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis)

Cedar-Apple Rust

Orange fungusI’m including this parasitic fungus (which looks like a beached sea creature) because its life cycle is entwined with the wild crab apple trees. This fungus grows on eastern red cedars… but only if there is an apple tree nearby. To live, it requires two hosts: it has to alternate between an apple tree and a cedar. The fungal spores blow from the galls on the cedar onto the leaves of apple trees. They infect the apple tree and eventually the fungal spores from the apple tree blow back to the cedar and create new infections. Yuck.

Cedar-Apple Rust (Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae)

Project Budburst

ForsythiaColumbine budFrom AF Lorie, I heard about a citizen science enterprise called Project Budburst, which is loads of people picking a few plants to monitor, and inputting the data on their website to be compiled and charted. I picked forsythia and red columbine in my own yard (pictured), and the assignment is to note when they leaf, flower, etc., to help understand the effects of climate change. Phenology: the study of the timing of seasonal biological events like migration, mating, flowering, budburst.

Siberian Squill

Scilla sibericaAt Centennial, I noticed a single beautiful little blue flower among the brown leaves. I wasn’t going to count it because it’s Scilla siberica, a spring bulb flower. But as I kept looking, I saw this big drift of color at the edge of the woods where this flower had been naturalized, and the single one I saw was clearly an escapee from this group. So let’s not count it as a wildflower, but the field of blue was so gorgeously springy as to require a post. Native to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey. But not Siberia.

Siberian Squill (Scilla siberica)

Amaryllis while we wait

AmaryllisWhile we dream of spring, here is a giant tropical ignoring the snow outside the window. I notice on my calendar that in 2012, the spring peepers started singing on March 12, now almost two weeks past. That was an eerily warm winter. This blizzardy year, they’re still asleep under the ice.

Amaryllis (Hippeastrum x hybridum)