A Flower for November

 

 I woke to another dull, dark, gray November morning today. Well, they're all dark, because I wake up so blinkin' early, but then I wait, knowing better than to even look out the window hoping for stars here in the mid-Ohio valley in November.

I got suited up to take a hike and somewhere in between thinking about persimmons and cottage cheese for breakfast and filling the feeders with raw trembling hands, I lost heart. I looked at the weather forecast and decided to write a blogpost instead, and hope that the sun might show its Garboey face sometime later on this afternoon. Hope's fading, it's noon, but you never know.

November forces me to wait for better weather. And when I don't feel like waiting, it makes me go anyway, and appreciate what I'm given. I decided to write up my last hike on November 14, down my beloved Dean's Fork. It's the best example of a November hike you could come up with. It had lessons on flexibility, going with the flow, and watching for miracles.

First lesson of November hikes: Go anyway. You might be surprised. The light was awful, but this witch hazel in full bloom glowed through the darkness. As frustrating as it was to try to get a photo that conveyed its beauty, I tried, and failed.

 

OK. So we'll go for the close-up. Its lobed leaves still clung the the twigs. Its gentle, fresh mimeo-ink scent tickled my nostalgia centers, sending me back to test day in elementary school, when we all huffed the still-wet sheets of purple-blue ink that our teachers had just run off on the enormous crank-powered machine in the lounge. 

 

 

 

  This contemplation of witch hazel gave me to wonder why on earth a plant would flower at a time of year when its petals can be frozen solid, as these were. What pollinators could it be trying to attract? Clearly, with its strong, sweet, strange scent, it's after something.

It was Vermont naturalist/writer Bernd Heinrich, who as usual is walking well ahead of me down the wooded trail, who wondered the same thing. Heinrich figured out that the pollinators of witch hazel are doing their work under cover of night. They're owlet or winter moths, of the family Noctuidae, who are able to generate heat by shivering, and doing so, they get the job done. And being Bernd, he wrote it up for a scientific journal, for those of us who wonder later to find and cite.
Heinrich, Bernd. 1987a. “Thermoregulation by Winter-Flying Endothermic Moths.” Journal of Experimental Biology 127 (1): 313–32. 
My thanks to Venerable Trees blog for answering a question that popped into my head on the hike. Blogging isn't dead. It's just screaming, deep under all the Facebook water. Thanks to those of you who can still hear bloggers.

From there, I went on to visit a sycamore I've been admiring for many years. The tree, to me, is an eloquent standing metaphor.

The left side was clearly once a huge hollow tree, most of which rotted out and died. But a living sheath of bark remained. For years, the trunk it sent up put out leaves and appeared to be prospering.

 

It's the trunk to the right in this shot. It died last year, and has dropped its twigs. But never fear. The trunk to the left, which takes off from the right-hand base of the hollow part, is going for broke, even as the hollow old sheath breaks and rots.

 

 This keyhole window in the original trunk reminds me of the terrified little character in The Scream by Edvard Munch. 

And the old hollow trunk isn't dead yet. It's sending sprouts out from the base of the "dead" trunk. Which clearly isn't dead just yet. I know, it gets confusing. There are so many little deaths and rebirths in this one tree.

 

 

I love the whole thing, the whole complex mess of it--hollow sheath of old tree; dead trunk; live trunk; shoots off the "dead" half. So I keep watching. That tree just won't throw up the white flag. It keeps going, keeps living the best life it can.

To me it speaks of re-invention and rebirth after trial and tribulation. If that sycamore can keep sending up fresh shoots, what's stopping me?

Well, there's quite a bit that can stop me. I forded two rather deep crossings after all the recent rain, laughing at myself the whole time,  and shivering as water splashed through the fine filigree of my shoes, but I finally met my Dean's Fork Waterloo here at Bobcat Crossing.

No way across it without going in over my shoe tops. Even if you do it really fast you get to enjoy wet freezing feet all the way back. This happens to me every year when I try to "run" with "running shoes" down this muddy, stream-crossed road. Dang it, Zick, give up. Just put on your waterproof hiking boots and walk fast.  You'll see just as much, and you can bring the big camera, too. Duh! Kick it into winter mode already.

Forced to turn around before reaching the Ironweed Festival Grounds, I was delighted by perhaps two minutes of weak lemony November sun. Please click on this to see the creek traveling along the right side. It's one of my favorite vistas.

The trot back home was beautiful, with the light coming up at last. It wasn't going to be a sunny day, but it was brighter, and that was enough. 

I was nearing my car when I saw what I thought (please forgive me) was an expanded tampon in the leaves. Chuckling as I write. I did. I thought it was a tampon, and I didn't want to touch it, but logic and curiosity conquered my initial 21st century response to this novelty. 

Internal Science Chimp conversation: It's a tampon. No it's not. Yes it is. It's just expanded. No, you idiot, it's snow-white. Well, it got rained on. Who drops a tampon on Dean's Fork in November? And if it's a tampon, why is it attached to a plant stalk? Touch it. Ugh. No. Oh! It's brittle! It's made of ICE! Wait. So what's going on here?

With the two little Science Chimps sitting on my shoulder, one adventuresome and one not, I went from Eeew to What the Heck is That Thing? in about 2.5 seconds.

And I realized that it was a flower. A frost flower. The little green leaves are part of a recently deceased aster top. The stem has been broken and shattered, but the plant's roots keep pushing out water to a top that's no longer there.

And that water comes out the broken stem and hits the freezing air, and makes a flower for November.

The more I looked at it the more delighted I became. Would there be other frost flowers waiting for me?

Yes. But only if I looked for them.

That's November for you. She's not the nicest teacher, and she can sometimes be dull, old and gray, but if you listen to her, she'll give you the best secrets.

Speaking of flowers of November, Liam is home, and still asleep, as far as I know, in his own bed. Having my boy back for a nice WVU Thanksgiving break is divine, even though I'm already chewing on him for strewing his things around and having altogether too much hair on top. It's all I can do not to go jump on him and wake him up so I can feed him Eggos and sausage.

And Phoebe is living her best life, maybe ever, on La Gomera. She cracks me up daily, and only WhatsApp and Facetime stand between all of us and death from terminal Phoeblessness. Catch up with her at her sparkly blog,  Canary Current
 

It is, my darling. On you, it is.

Bug Crazy

I've always loved bugs. Everyone claims they were a lonely, nerdy child who spent hours alone. But not many people can claim they spent hours as a child nudging an assortment of small insects down the sloping sides of ant lion pits to see what would happen; digging them up to find the crazy little ice-tong faced critter that could only crawl backward in circles; playing with tiger beetle larvae deep in their burrows, figuring out how to get them to clamp onto a grass stem so she could pull them out to have a look. Nope, most people don't say that in their memoirs. 

This is an unadulterated look at the right side of my "drawing board." I put that in quotes because I'm spending all my time there writing lately. That's OK. I write in big spurts and chunks, and then I draw the same way. It feels sooo good to be writing again, unblocked. Getting up in the morning looking forward to writing. It's a thing.

The Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and my pal! Seabrooke Leckie is what you'll find me reading a lot lately. What a treat it is to page through and find the moths I've photographed without knowing what they were. 

The Beautiful Wood Nymph is technically a bird dropping mimic, but it's oh so much more when you have a close look. Yep, it's supposed to look like feces to fool predatory birds (who'd wanna eat that?), but gaaah what a beautiful dropping. That bronzy edge to the chestnut border; the olive spots of corruption, and the furry forelegs which are designed to look like squiggly softserve drips...ahhhhh.

When something like this blunders through the dog door and into the kitchen, I get all ate up.

I AM THE NIGHT! RELEASE ME IMMEDIATELY!

All right. Out the door you go.

So on August 1 when I saw a spectacularly colorful beetle clinging by one good leg to the bird-proof netting on the outside of my studio window, it was the most natural thing in the world to haul a kitchen chair out to the hummingbird garden so I could climb up and get it down. 

 I knew it was a metallic wood borer, but didn't know which one. It was a beautiful one.  Holy smokes  what a living jewel.

The Kaufman field guides are the ones I grab first. Small, compact, illustrated with immaculate photos (many retouched for accuracy), these guides are the bomb. My sentimental favorite is the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America. I love it because it's given me so many thrills. Ounce for ounce, the insect guide is the one that thrills the most. That's just because there is so darn much to know about bugs, and no naturalist can know everything. I started to write "amateur naturalist" then stopped. Ehh. I think I safely qualify as a pro at this point. 

 I turned the unfortunate beetle over in my hand, noting that it had somehow lost all but one of its feet. Perhaps through aging? An accident? It was hanging in there. I was so grateful to see it, to hold it in my hand.

I looked it up, posted photos on Instagram and Facebook, and was quickly and cheerfully corrected by a career entomologist named Ted MacRae. It wasn't Cypriacis fasciata, but Buprestes rufipes. Thus we discovered that there'd been a caption switch in the Kaufman guide. These things happen. They've happened to me. Imagine putting together a book like this with hundreds upon hundreds of photos to match to their names. This small error does not diminish my love for Eric Eaton's book in the slightest. It is incredible and I'm grateful to have it. You should have it too. 

The underside was particularly ridiculous. 

Buprestes rufipes is a wood borer, with a grublike larva that chews through already dead maple, oak and elm trees. Do not hate it. It doesn't kill your favorite trees. Just hope that you get to see one some- day, too. It is a spectacular insect.

Another thrilling ID from the Eaton/Kaufman guide: the Mydas fly! I knew I'd never seen anything like this gigantic fly. At first I thought it was a tarantula hawk, and that's what the Mydas fly wants you to think it is. But the head and antennae were all fly. The abdomen had a blunt end, no stinger. Good ruse!

The closer I got the more fly-like it became. The sweet thing was placidly sponging up nectar from the milkweed blossoms with a tongue that was standard-issue housefly--tipped with a spiny sponge. 

Will ya look at the honeybees on this milkweed?? This photo begins to capture the riot of activity in my favorite Monarch Meadow. 

It also begins to capture my joy at its conservation. This is the single best stand of common milkweed I've ever seen. Acres of it. And it was getting mown twice a summer, once just before bloom peak, and once again just before the cut plants struggled back with another attempt at blossoms. I will never forget the day I came back from the bus stop to find it being mowed. Late instar monarch caterpillars were being thrown through the air. We got out of the car and flagged my neighbor down.

All I did, back when the kids were still riding a big yellow school bus and Liam was about half as tall as Phoebe, was to speak with my neighbor, show him the displaced caterpillars, and suggest that he not do that second mow. That we leave the milkweed for the butterflies and bees. 

We took all the caterpillars, some 70 of them, home to our meadow to grow up. Sweet SuperLiam just happened to be wearing his cape when he was pressed into service to pick monarchs and transfer them to uncut plants in our yard.

please forgive your mother Liam, for posting this photo. You were and are the sweetest boy.

The meadow has never been mowed in late summer again.

This is the result.

The magic here is that the milkweed, having been mown in June, is bursting into bloom at precisely the time that bees, butterflies, and monarchs especially need it most. Ovipositing female monarchs are presumably ecstatic to find young, tender shoots to lay their eggs on, and a big drink of sticky nectar to boot. 

This, by the little black scent glands on his hindwings, is a male, but you get the picture.

There will be more posts from Monarch Meadow. I cannot stay away. Perfection is a real draw for me.