A
Northwoods Almanac for 10/18 – 10/31/13
Just
in Time for Halloween: Dead Man’s Fingers and Wolf’s Milk Slime
Well,
Mary’s mushrooming passion is getting pretty macabre. In honor of Halloween,
I’ve attached photos that Mary took of two very odd species. The first is “dead
man’s fingers,” a non-gilled mushroom that grows out of the soil from
below-ground rotting wood, and looks very much like decomposing fingers of a
human hand – very cool in other words! The mushrooms emerge whitish but turn
blackish in the fall. They’re saprophytes, meaning they live off dead, decaying
organic matter.
The
second species is “wolf’s milk slime,” a slime mold that is pinkish and exudes
a goo that looks like PeptoBismol, though as it ages, turns dark and fills with
gray spores. Slime molds aren’t fungi – they’re amoeba-like organisms that
reproduce by spores, sort of ooze their way around, and contribute to
decomposition by consuming bacteria and other microscopic foods as they go. John Tyler Bonner, a Princeton professor and world expert on slime
molds, says that they are "no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin
slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those
of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that is, simple
brains." Well, I’m not sure what they might think about in those brains,
but I do know this: They are very, very odd, but also very cool!
Wild
Cranberries
Carne
Andrews and Keith Reinemen stopped by our home last weekend and gave us a pint
of wild cranberries that they had picked in a bog. Keith had called me the
previous week to say he had picked seven pounds of cranberries in five hours,
and was in breakfast heaven when he combined pure maple syrup with the tartness
of the cranberries over homemade pancakes.
My
mouth watered then, and it’s doing it now again.
Compared
to commercially farmed cranberries (large cranberry or Vaccinium macrocarpon), most wild cranberries that I see are the
small cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus),
and are typically tinier – about the size of wild blueberries. The small
cranberry has teensy, pointed leaves, and a wiry, prostrate stem. They’re hard
to spot unless you get down on your knees and poke around in the sphagnum moss.
Cranberry
spreads over the bog mat by sending out long stems that root at the joints and
begin another clonal plant. The
leaves, like those on most bog plants, are evergreen, an adaptation that saves
the energy of spring leaf formation, energy that's hard to come by in the
hostile habitat of a bog.
The
berries taste sour, making the eyes squint a bit with each bite, but they make
fine sauces and jams
(cranberries contain their own pectin). They
also keep well, and early settlers
picked their share.
Huron
H. Smith wrote the Ethnobotany of the
Menomini [sic] in 1923, the Ethnobotany
of the Ojibwe in 1932, and the Ethnobotany
of the Potawatomi in 1933, and said the following about the use of bog
cranberry by each tribe:
“This
is a Menomini food that is sweetened with maple sugar and eaten the same way as
the blueberry.”
For
the Ojibwe, “A tea for a person who is slightly ill with nausea . . . This is
an important wild food . . . cranberry pie.”
“The
Forest Potawatomi do not use the cranberry as a medicine, except insofar as
they claim that all of their native foods are also at the same time medicines
and will maintain health. . .”
(Huron
Smith conducted ethnobotanical fieldwork among the Ojibwe during three trips,
which lasted six weeks in duration. The first trip was made in June 1923 to the
Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Vilas County. He visited the same region again
later in the fall. During the spring of 1924, one trip was made to the Leech
Lake Reservation, in Minnesota, where the Pillager Band of Ojibwa lives on Bear
Island and the surrounding mainland. This was followed by trips to the Red Cliff
Reservation in Bayfield County, Bad River Reservation, Iron County, Lac Court
Oreilles, Clark County and scattered bands in various sections of northern Wisconsin.)
Highbush
Cranberries
The
highbush cranberry belongs to the honeysuckle family, so is actually unrelated
to the familiar bog cranberry. The brilliant red clusters of autumn berries are
supposedly treats for bear, fox, squirrel, grouse,
cardinals, cedar waxwings, thrashers, and many others, but in the marsh below our house the fruits often last until late
winter when little else can
be found to eat. Folks rarely eat these raw like bog cranberries, but they do
make a fine jelly or jam.
Big
Pine on the Winegar Moraine
The ice
sheet of the Wisconsin Glaciation advanced southward from Canada about 26,000
years ago, moving into northern Wisconsin in two major ice lobes, the Superior
and the Chippewa Lobes (a third major lobe, the Green Bay Lobe, covered eastern
Wisconsin). The maximum extent of the lobes at the time, about 18,000 years
ago, were located south of the UP in Wisconsin, and are marked by terminal
moraines. The ice then retreated in response to a moderation in climate, but advanced
again about 12,00 to 13,000 years ago. This time the ice margin didn’t reach as
far south because the climate was getting milder, stopping near the
UP/Wisconsin border where it deposited the western section of the Winegar
Moraine (the moraine is named after William S.
Winegar who bought the Vilas County Lumber Company mill in 1910 in present day Presque Isle).
The moraine left
behind an array of rocks, a tumbly topography, and sandy loam, a richer mix
than the nearly pure sand and flatter lands in southern Vilas and northern
Oneida counties. I enjoy leading hikes along the moraine because it supports
big hemlocks, sugar maples, and yellow birch, and an occasional large pine.
Over the weekend,
we were fortunate to be invited onto some private property on the moraine where
one very large old grandmother tree still stood. Callie and I measured it at 47
inches diameter breast height, which is about as big as any I’ve seen still
standing in northern Wisconsin. At nearly 4 feet in diameter, this tree would
have been a bit larger than the average white pine that was cut during
settlement, but not as remarkable as the giants that were up to seven feet in
diameter.
Sightings
– Blackbirds, Chipmunks, Tamaracks, Woodbine
Flocks of rusty and Brewer’s blackbirds
have been visiting our feeders, sharing the sunflowers with a couple of chipmunks
who continuously fill their cheeks beyond what looks possible and then cache the
seeds in their winter dens.
Many sites in our area finally
experienced their first hard frost on 10/14, a crazily late date for frost in
the North Country. Perhaps now the mosquitoes will finally die off!
Tamaracks are now peaking in their
gorgeous smoky gold attire. Likewise, the woody vine known as woodbine has
peaked in its brilliant scarlet.
Monarch
Migration
The
monarch migration is proceeding very slowly, perhaps as a reflection of our
warm autumn and lack of frost until this week. With the winds finally shifting
to the North this week, they began moving much more quickly to their Mexico wintering
grounds.
October
Winds
Autumn winds carry an array of sensory messages. Here’s an excerpt from
John Muir’s essay “A Wind-storm in the Forests”:
“There is always something deeply exciting, not
only in the sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence
over every mind, but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the
movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers. By no other trees are
they rendered so extensively and impressively visible . . . The waving of a
forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the
pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving
goldenrods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century
lives.
[Muir
climbed 100’ into a Douglas fir and rode out a windstorm] “The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the
passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round,
tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I
clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed . . . The
sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with this wild exuberance of light
and motion. The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like
waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a
shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur . . . Winds are
advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read
them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone.”
Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: call me at
715-476-2828, drop me an e-mail at manitowish@centurytel.net,
or snail-mail me at 4245N Hwy. 47, Mercer, WI 54547.
No comments:
Post a Comment