they don’t look barren to me

The New Jersey pine barrens are no such thing. There’s all sorts of great stuff going on in there.

First, a general view. The trees are mostly pitch pine (Pinus rigida) and black-jack oak (Quercus marilandica).

The pines are well adapted to fire: the cones only open after a fire.


Plus they have this neat trick of being able to launch branches any old place, just straight out the side of the tree.


Incipient amber.


Apparently, the oaks are starting to succeed the pitch pine because of wildfire suppression.

OH! We found several of these. This is an oak, leaf, obviously, and it’s got this puffy sphere attached to it, about 2.5” in diameter.


Here’s one that had broken open.  I’m assuming it’s a marble gall, the baby-house of a type of parasitic wasp.


That’s the exit hole. Wikipedia informs me that oak galls contain tannic acids, and that “traces of iron-gall ink  have been found on the Dead Sea scrolls”. Wow.
One more tree, and then we’re going to ground level.

Holly. Festive holly. This stuff grows in trees at least 20 or so feet tall.

Lichen, right on the sandy ground.







I wasn’t kidding when I said the ground was sandy.


Ahhhhhh…..


A type of lichen in the Cladonia family, usually called “cup lichen”. I like Kevin’s name better, though: “golf tee lichen”.
This next one completely stumps me. It looks like a cross between a mushroom and an herbaceous plant. WTF?!

As I took picture after picture of this stuff, a family with a brown lab walked by. You can see him in the photo below.

See his golden eye? Just about now is when he barreled into me to say hello.



Not bad for an hour or two.

on the restorative properties of chocolate, vs a macro lens

I’ve got the bends: I’m decompressing from the week of jury duty, and the main symptom, as of right now, is irrational anger. It’s not the content of the trial itself, as heinous as that was (more on that in a minute). It’s the effects of several-days running of being trapped in windowless rooms, with no opportunity to ramble and explore. As I joked with my fellow jurors at the time, as we cooled our heels in our deliberation room while the attorneys and judge squabbled, for the n^th time, about how to proceed through the quagmire of evidentiary rules, sometimes you just have to go into airport mode. You’re not in control of things, so sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy a good book. This sufficed for me to get through the week as it was happening, but the pent-up frustration built up under the surface. Hence, today’s crankiness.
I just got inside from about a half hour in the woods. I would have stayed longer, but the camera battery died.

Whew. OK, much better, already.

This is an ash seedling that’s dive-bombed into a moss-covered stump.


The turkey-footed casing of a yellow birch seed. The seed itself is to the left.


I’m pretty sure this is club moss – Lycopodium – and these are the reproductive bits. Those specialized leaves contain spores.


A decaying maple leaf. Reminds me of coming in for a landing at Any Airport, USA that’s surrounded by subdivisions and tract housing.


Moss’s fruiting whatsis.


A snuggling convocation of same.


This kind of moss looks like baby ferns. Two points if you spot the yellow birch seeds.


Gasp. A striped maple. This is where my camera battery gave up – I need to go back so I can show you the incredible colors of the twigs on this guy.
So do you want to hear about jury duty? Brace yourself: it took chocolate chip cookies, as well as a double shot of brownie sundae, to clean my soul when it was all over. The soul is best cleaned with exposure to nature, but chocolate’s restorative powers are not to be underestimated.
The defendant was charged with three counts of sexually abusing his daughter, starting when she was in elementary school, and continuing until she was about to enter high school. We heard three days of testimony, followed by a morning of closing arguments and instructions from the judge. Finally it was ours to deliberate on. A particular detail in the evidence came up on the second day that sealed the deal for me, but I listened carefully, with an open mind, for the rest of the trial. 
When it came time for our first straw poll, there were four or five of us who felt no hesitation in saying we felt the defendant was guilty. The remaining seven or eight were unsure, and wanted to replay some of the testimony. We trouped back into the courtroom and listened to the audio recording of certain parts of the trial. When we gathered again, I found myself explaining what I made of this testimony. I hesitate to describe it in too much detail here, but essentially, I argued that the worst possible case scenario was that the witness in question (not the complainant) was a flat-out liar. I showed how it didn’t matter, given other testimony from other people we had established were credible. We could toss this witness right out the window, and it wouldn’t make a difference. We took another straw poll, and only two people were now unsure.
I wondered if I should have followed my ninth-grade ambition to be a lawyer – an ambition that lasted maybe a week.
Another hour or so passed while we mulled things over. Our foreman had us vote officially, and there we were: unanimity. Guilty on all three counts.
It was only the next day, when I read about it in the local paper, which, unsurprisingly, had major, simple facts of the case wrong, that I learned that the defendant could be sentenced to up to life plus 25 years. They don’t tell you that ahead of time.
The whole experience was, on the one hand, a logistical and financial hassle (the pay is well under minimum wage). But on the other hand, it was a privilege to get to do this. I mean, what’s the alternative? Just one judge? No thanks. Vigilante justice? Perhaps more viscerally satisfying, but I’ll take “presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” any day. 
In Vermont, you have to serve either three draws, or three trials, whichever comes first. This trial was actually my second: the first was the week before, and the defendant settled the morning of the trial. My next draw is in late February, with associated trials all during March. Until then, I’ll enjoy not having to ask an armed deputy permission to go outside.

a net of diamonds

So, does the spider say “dammit!” or does the spider say, “excellent, look at all this drinking water?”


Some kind of mold or fungus is troubling some of the evening primrose seed pods. I don’t remember seeing this last year. Of course, last year, I didn’t know this was primrose. In fact, if you look at this here post from about this time last year, I have learned a ton since then. I was taking pictures of the same species, but didn’t know what they were. Yee haw!
Anyway, back to the primrose…

The ones at the top of the stalk – this stalk, incidentally, is maybe four feet tall – are the newest, and largely still green.


Down the stalk a bit, they’re starting to ripen. Which, once again, looks a lot like “decaying”, “dying”, “getting all oogy and brown”. There’s a life lesson in here somewhere.


Until at last you come to the opened-up pods with seeds inside.
A search for life and color leads us to the world of lichens and mosses…



We live on an awesome planet.
I startled what I think is a spring peeper. Normally they have “X”’s on their backs, and I’ve sort of convinced myself that this one has the “X”, but it’s faint, which apparently can happen. All the other froggies around here are way more marked up, so I’m going with peeper for the time being.

Look at those tiny little fingers! As I told Kevin, who was chopping wood into kindling nearby, I think I’m in love.


Tasty shrooms.


This caterpillar does not seem bothered by all the spikies on the yellow foxtail. It’s eating all the seeds anyway. I took several pictures before figuring out which end’s the head, and which end’s the bum. Answer: head’s on the bottom. As for the plant: this time last year then I was calling yellow foxtail “that tall grassy thingy”. Maybe by this time next year I’ll know what kind of caterpillar that is. Or maybe it’s not a caterpillar. Maybe it’s a larva. Whatever that means. I think it means, similar stage in the lifecycle, but not going to end up a butterfly or moth.
Boatloads of mushrooms in the woods – I know nothing about mushrooms, so these will all be unidentified for now…

I took waaaayyyy more pictures of different mushroom than I’m posting, mostly because the light was crappy and they all wound up blurry, dark, etc. etc.


Is this snail not gorgeous? Look at the almost phosphorescent bits – is that in the shell? Are these body parts we’re looking at? Snails have – get this – lungs! Well, only one lung per. Also? Livers. Who knew?
It was a damp and occasionally drizzly day today. Not the greatest weather for putting laundry out on the deck to dry (oops!). And not so great for our friends, the windblown seeds.

cattail

thimbleweed (tall anemone)

OK, that was my afternoon. Happy rest-of-the-weekend, world!

spot the bugs

Day lily leaves, showing how the weather’s been lately. Hey, does anyone else remember print ads for Bausch and Lomb contact lenses from the ‘80’s?
Ode to a Dandelion, Part Deux:

And yesterday’s patch of coltsfoot…

…today, almost every one of these is a dirty gray puffball. I missed it! Rats! I guess it happens pretty quickly.
Other flowers open more slowly, so we can enjoy ‘em at our leisure. To wit: the lilacs.

The apple trees in our yard are starting to open up.  When I visited my friend Craig over the weekend – here’s another shameless plug for Half Crown Hill Orchard – he and his wife explained how apples generate a cluster bomb of five buds at a go, with the “king” blossom in the center. They might not have used the phrase “cluster bomb” – that sounds like something I might have made up. I’d never noticed that before, so imagine my delight when I saw this:



Still no luck identifying Random Lawn Weed:

Thin, skinny, alternating leaves; behaves kind of like a vine. Anybody have a clue?

And now for something truly exciting. I think I may have found some wild ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) today. Or possibly red baneberry (Actaea rubra). It’s exciting – well, it’s exciting to me, either way – but it’s theoretically additionally exciting if it’s ginseng, as mean people have been known to poach ginseng for sale on the herbal market.

Ignore the sensitive fern at lower left. (It won’t mind, despite its name. That’s actually its name – “sensitive fern”). What you want to see here is – one long stalk, that splits into three, with compound (more-than-one-leaf-per-stem) leaves on each of the three stems. And you also want to notice the separate stalk, coming up seemingly from at-or-below-ground-level, that similarly splits three ways, with a cluster of flowers at the tip of each one.

Here’s the flower stalk action.

Cute, eh?

I tried and failed to get a look at the emerging flower.
[Editor's Note: this is probably actually wild sarsaparilla - Aralia nudicaulis)

Oh, we’re not NEARLY done yet. Let’s have a look at fern naughty bits spores.

The solomon’s seal flowers are finally finally finally starting to pop.


Here’s some more on the decline and fall of the magnolia blossoms (sob!)


Just in time for the azalea nearby to start blooming:

And now for the macabre. Have you been watching for bugs so far, in this post? Because there have been three so far. This next one is hard to miss. We’re on a fern.

She’s embalming her victim in a cocoon. Don’t believe me?

*slurp.*

Moving right along!

We have a great boulder on the edge of the lawn. It’s a whole planet unto itself.

I keep spotting new jack-in-the-pulpits. I’m just as thrilled as I was the first time I ever saw one. I mean, who INVENTS this stuff?



Miterwort (Mitella dyphilla). These are hard to photograph – they’re TINY (maybe at most a quarter inch wide?) and, the mosquitos are out in this spot of the woods. I make a lot of sacrifices for this blog…I sure hope y’all appreciate it.
As for the bugs…here they are (minus the dining spider)…