Leaders for today’s Ramble: Eugenia Thompson and Tom Shelton
Authors of today’s Ramble report: Linda and Don. Comments, edits, and suggestions for the report can be sent to Linda at Lchafin ( at ) uga.edu.
Insect, fungi, and gall identifications: Don Hunter, Bill Sheehan
The photos that appear in this report, unless otherwise credited, were taken by Don Hunter. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on your screen. Not all of Don’s photos made it into this report, so be sure to check out his album on Facebook at this link.
Number of Ramblers today: 33
Today’s emphasis: Birding with Tom and Eugenia, searching for late arriving migrants, mostly in the forest edges along the right-of-way.
Announcements and other interesting things to note:
Heather is recovering well at home after surgery last week. You can wish her well at crickie (at) gmail.com
Eugenia recommended a book by biologist Joan Strassmann, Slow Birding, as an antidote to the kind of birding that focuses on list-keeping. Linda recommended a similar book by Simon Barnes, How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher.
For fans of A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean’s classic novel: Rebecca McCarthy, local journalist and author, has written a biography, Norman MacLean: A Life of Letters and Rivers. Rebecca will discuss her book this Wednesday, May 22, at 7:00 p.m at the Athens Public Library on Baxter Street. More info about this event is here.
Bob announced that there are three upcoming events featuring his new book of poetry, Between Birdsong and Boulder: Poems on the Life of Gaia. The first will be Saturday, May 25, at the Alps Road Presbyterian Church, 380 Alps Rd, Athens, from 10:00 a.m. to noon. It will be an interactive presentation, with readings and questions, as well as a book signing. The other presentation will be at Avid Books, Tuesday, June 11, and will consist of several readings, followed by a panel discussion; more info about this event is here. A third event will be held at the Botanical Garden on Sunday, August 18, 2-3:00 p.m. and will include poems and visuals describing Earth through geologic time.
Interesting article on “plant intelligence”!
Show and Tell:
Gary brought a branch from a fruiting Cottonwood tree covered with masses of fluff-tipped seeds releasing from fruit capsules. The seeds are tiny and pale green. Cottonwoods are a common floodplain tree in the Georgia Piedmont. They are distinguished by their dark, deeply furrowed bark and by triangular leaves with flattened petioles. The source of the common name is obvious when the trees go to seed. A single Cottonwood tree produces thousands of dark, oval seedpods, each of which contains thousands of tiny seeds that are equipped with a tuft of long, cottony hairs. A single Cottonwood tree can produce over 25 million seeds. This species is dioecious: only female trees produce seedpods. The seeds require bare mineral soil for germination, provided naturally by the scoured soils and sediment accumulations that follow our winter and early spring floods. Here’s a short and interesting article about this amazingly prolific tree.
Today’s Reading: Bob recited “Praise,” a poem from Between Birdsong and Boulder: Poems on the Life of Gaia.
Praise
The days of creation move through time
filling out the soon-to-be
with songs and creatures yet undreamed.
So praise to the cells that capture the sun –
the algae that aerate the oceans,
the grasses that anchor the plains.
Praise to the microbes that render the soil
and fungi entwined with the roots of trees.
Praise insects that pollinate weeds.
Praise to the chorus that wakes the dawn
to the bustling hum of a summer day
and the hush that ushers the night.
And praise to the ongoing song of Gaia –
the eons ring as her trillion-voice choir
sings praise to the maker who moves through it all.
Today’s Route: We left the Children’s Garden arbor and headed down the entrance road to the right-of-way, taking the paved ADA walkway to the Middle Oconee River then returned the same way.
BIRD OBSERVATIONS:
Spotting birds was much harder today than in last month’s birding ramble with Bay; the tree canopy is fully leafed out and birds were mostly in hiding. We pulled out our phones and opened the Merlin app to do a little birding by ear as well as by binoculars. Here are the species we heard or identified by sight:
Acadian Flycatcher Empidonax virescens
Black Vulture Coragyps atratus
Blue Grosbeak Passerina caerulea
Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher Polioptila caerulea
Brown-headed Cowbird Molothrus ater
Carolina Wren Thryothorus ludovicianus
Chipping Sparrow Spizella passerina
Common Yellowthroat Geothlypis trichas
Downy Woodpecker Picoides pubescens
Eastern Towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus
Eastern Wood-Pewee Contopus virens
Great Blue Heron Ardea herodias
Great Crested Flycatcher Myiarchus crinitus
Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus
Indigo Bunting Passerina cyanea
Louisiana Waterthrush Parkesia motacilla
Mallard Duck Anas platyrhynchos
Northern Cardinal Cardinalis cardinalis
Pine Warbler Setophaga pinus
Red-bellied Woodpecker Melanerpes carolinus
Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis
Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus
Summer Tanager Piranga rubra
Tufted Titmouse Baeolophus bicolor
Turkey Vulture Cathartes aura
Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina
NON-BIRD OBSERVATIONS:
Coming down the mulched trail through the Upper Shade Garden on his way to the Ramble, Don spotted a shiny Click Beetle on a Hop Hornbeam leaf.
He also spotted a large Magnolia Green Jumping Spider beneath a Hop Hornbeam leaf.
The path to the Children’s Garden arbor is lined with Southern Magnolias in all stages of flowering. In these primitive Magnolia species, the petals and sepals are nearly identical and collectively are called tepals.
A Southern Magnolia flower well past its peak; its tepals have faded to tan and the stamens are nowhere to be seen. The pistil is developing into a cone-like aggregate fruit composed of many small fruits, each with a red seed. The hook-like structures on the cone are the remains of the styles and stigmas that conveyed the sperm cells to the ovules.
A nearby Serviceberry tree, loaded with small, red fruits, attracted the attention of several squirrels and chipmunks.
Tumbling Flower Beetle on a Hop Hornbeam leaf: they have flattened and enlarged hind legs allowing them to kick, bounce, and tumble. Adults live on pollen and transfer pollen among the flowers they visit.
Silky Dogwood’s four-petaled flowers are small but clustered into a showy, flat-topped cyme. They are visited by a variety of bees, flies, wasps, and butterflies. The anthers are purple, something I never noticed before seeing Don’s photo. The fruits are round, dark blue drupes (a fleshy fruit with a single seed). Both leaves and twigs are covered with silky hairs. Silky Dogwood is a common wetland shrub that also thrives when planted in moist gardens such as the Dunson Garden.
Anglepod Milkvine is a climbing, herbaceous vine in the same family as Milkweed – its leaves and stems also ooze a milky latex when damaged. There are scattered anecdotal reports of Monarchs using milkvines as a larval host but there are no published data. Its natural habitats include moist deciduous forests and bottomlands; in Dunson, it grows on the deer fence along the road.
Carolina Horse-nettle is in the Tomato family and, like other members of this family such as tobacco, potato, and bell pepper, it has showy, tubular anthers. Bees grasp the anthers and vibrate their flight muscles, shaking pollen from a hole in the tip. In the process, pollen from a previously visited flower is deposited on the stigma – the green ball at the tip of the style seen here protruding between the yellow anthers. Native bumblebees and solitary bees can buzz-pollinate but honeybees cannot.
Purple Milkweed is one of the rarest plant species in Georgia, with only eight documented occurrences in the state, all occurring in only two northwestern counties. In the wild, they prefer moist to wet savannas and flatwoods but are thriving in the Dunson Garden. In the photo on the left, Large Milkweed Bugs are exploring flower buds; on the right, a Western Honey Bee is searching for nectar in the flower.
Clasping Venus’s Looking Glass flowers are tubular: the short tube flares out into five pointed lobes that are vividly marked with nectar guides.
Clasping Venus’s Looking Glass leaves wrap around its erect, unbranched stem. The odd name derives from the shiny seed surfaces of a related European species.
As we walked toward the river, we noticed several Silvery Checkerspot Butterflies fluttering across the White Clover flower heads, taking nectar from the flowers. As usual, ramblers debated how to tell this species (below, left) from Pearl Crescent (right). The difference between the two species is pretty obscure. The edge of the lower pair of wings of Silvery Checkerspot is bordered with a series of white dash marks. Above the white dashes there is a dark gray or black band topped with a series of black spots, some of which have a round, white dot in the center. If the butterfly you’re looking at is a Silvery Checkerspot at least one of those lower wing black dots will have a white dot in the center of the black dot. If not, it is a Pearl Crescent (below right).
The pale gray, warty or lumpy, bark of Southern Hackberry (Sugarberry) trees is unmistakable. Often found in floodplains, Hackberry is always an indicator of high nutrient soils – I’ve seen them growing on coastal middens rich in oyster shells; on limestone outcrops in northwest Georgia; and in floodplains like the one at the Bot Garden that receive sediments derived from mafic bedrock.
Photo by Bill Sheehan
Roger ventured into the floodplain forest and returned with this twig from a Hackberry tree. Hackberry trees almost always have round galls attached to the leaf stalks near the tips of twigs. These are created by the Hackberry Petiole Gall Psyllid, a tiny, fly-like insect.
Photo by Bill Sheehan
Bill took some of the Hackberry galls home to his lab and took these great photos.
Annual Ryegrass, a European native, was planted during the ADA trail construction and has persisted in the right-of-way. Although both are grasses, Annual Ryegrass is in a different genus from the grass that produces the grain Rye, Secale cereale. Each Annual Ryegrass floret has three yellow stamens and two tiny, brush-like stigmas. The stem is distinctively zigzagged. Look for this grass at any recent construction site; Georgia law requires post-construction seeding with a fast growing grass such as Annual Ryegrass to slow erosion.
Other weedy species in the right-of-way include Japanese Mazus, with its dainty purple and yellow flowers (below, left), and Virginia Pepperweed (right).
Across the river, a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks tending a nest they’d built on a power pole captured Ramblers’ attention.
SUMMARY OF NON-BIRD OBSERVED SPECIES
Click beetle Limonius basilaris
Magnolia Green Jumping Spider Lyssomanes viridis
Hop Hornbeam Ostrya virginiana
Southern Magnolia Magnolia grandiflora
Serviceberry Amelanchier arborea
Eastern Gray Squirrel Sciurus carolinensis
Chipmunk Tamias striatus
Tumbling Flower Beetle Mordella sp.
Silky Dogwood Cornus amomum
Anglepod Milkvine Gonolobus suberosus
Purple Milkweed Asclepias purpurascens
Large Milkweed Bug Oncopeltus fasciatus
Western Honey Bee Apis mellifera
Eastern Carpenter Bee Xylocopa virginica
Clasping Venus’s Looking Glass Triodanis perfoliata
Carolina Horsenettle Solanum carolinense
Silvery Checkerspot butterfly Chlosyne nycteis
White Clover Trifolium repens
Southern Hackberry Celtis laevigata
Hackberry Hackberry Petiole Gall Psyllid Pachypsylla venusta
Annual Ryegrass Lolium multiflorum
Japanese Mazus Mazus pumilus
Virginia Pepperweed Lepidium virginicum