Last Chance to Pull Stiltgrass

Late August and early September mark the last opportunity to pull Japanese stiltgrass before it goes to seed. An annual grass that was introduced from Asia, and which wildlife show no interest in eating, stiltgrass has taken over large swaths of the forest understory in Princeton, as well as many yards.  We called it bamboo grass when we first noticed it in the 1990s, back when I was living in the piedmont of North Carolina. It was also called packing grass, because it had in the past been used to pack porcelain coming from Asia. That's probably how it got a foothold in the U.S. 

The stiltgrass name fits when it extends it seedheads this time of year, appearing to climb up and over other vegetation, as if on stilts. Height tends to be around 2-4 feet, though it can even spread into lawns and somehow survive and reproduce as a miniature version a few inches high.

In late summer in the forest, it looks like this, ready to flower, bear abundant seed, then die. This is actually one of the smaller patches. In some invaded areas, stiltgrass extends through the forest as far as the eye can see.

In late summer, stiltgrass can form monocultures along wooded roadsides, thriving on the extra runoff from the pavement. 

Many people assume that since stiltgrass is so widespread, nothing can be done other than to wait a few hundred or thousand years for something to evolve to prey upon it and bring its numbers into balance with all the other kinds of plants currently drowning beneath this inedible green wave of supergrowth.

But there are many areas of Princeton where stiltgrass is just beginning to invade. Many yards still don't have it, or have small enough amounts to pull. Being an annual with weak roots, it is very easy to pull, and satisfying progress can be made if you have a small patch or many hands.

My strategy is to pick my spots, preferably pull it by late August, before it begins to flower, and just leave it on the ground to dry out. But even in September it can be pulled before the seeds begin to fall off. If it is already blooming and forming seeds, then either bag the pullings for the trash or, if you don't want to add to the landfill, pile it in one spot where any seedlings next year will be concentrated and easily dealt with.

We have made considerable progress in diminishing its presence at the Botanical Art Garden in Herrontown Woods, simply through persistent pulling to markedly reduce the production of seed. 

A friend at the NC Botanical Garden has found that large patches of stiltgrass can be treated effectively, before seed production, with a very dilute (0.5 %) solution of herbicide. Annual plants don't invest much in roots, and stiltgrass's weak root structure makes it more susceptible to systemic herbicide than perennial plants that may be interspersed. 

Here's what it looks like when it's going to seed. Stiltgrass seedheads look a bit like crabgrass, which is also an introduced annual that gets a late start in the spring and then seeds in late summer. What makes stiltgrass an aggressive invader of woodlands is its capacity to thrive both in sun and shade. 

On a recent walk along the Princeton ridge in Herrontown Woods, I found stiltgrass fairly early in its invasion, just beginning to form sizable patches.  Interspersed was a native grass with similar appearance--Virginia cutgrass--and it's interesting to note that the native grass, while common, does not form the large, exclusionary patches that the introduced species does. 

It's a challenge to tell the two apart. Most homeowner's yards won't have the native Virginia cutgrass, but it's interesting to compare. Here is Japanese stiltgrass, which also goes by the latin name Microstegium vimineum.

Here is Virginia cutgrass (Leersia virginica), with its longer, narrower leaves and more spread-out seedhead. 

Stiltgrass leaves often have a stripe down the middle.

Virginia cutgrass does not.

Once you start taking a closer look at the grasses along the ridge, you may notice the subtle differences between one species and another. Here's a native grass that I haven't learned the name of as yet. You can see that it has dense clusters of short leaves, in contrast to the others.

A look-alike homeowners are more likely to see is a nonnative smartweed called "lady's thumb," which has a cluster of pink flowers at the end. This photo shows lady's thumb at the bottom and stiltgrass growing up and to the left. Both are easy to pull.

Previous post on this subject: Stiltgrass's Annual Trillion Seed Initiative.

More Bear Sightings in Princeton

Princeton has no resident black bears, but they do occasionally wander through in the summer. There were some sightings beginning Aug. 11 near the old Butler tract, then August 13 in the Herrontown Woods area of northeastern Princeton, then other sightings through August 18 down along the Stony Brook.

The wisdom of a comic description I've posted in the past detailing how Princetonians should behave when encountering a black bear is confirmed in a recent article by the Town Topics. 

Black bears, particularly young males, are motivated to seek out new territory in the summer. One online source describes how young bears stay with their mothers for about 18 months, then are shooed away when the mother receives the persistent interest of an adult male, commencing another cycle of reproduction. 

Each bear must establish a home range. Female bears often share their ranges with their female offspring, but the young males must find new territory. That search sometimes includes Princeton. To get a sense of what the young male bears are looking for, Princeton is roughly 18 square miles, which is on the small side for a male bear's home range. Though we have a lot of open space, the habitat isn't enough to sustain a bear. Thus the brief visits in summer.

There is considerable solitude in the 20 plus years of a bear's life. The females have the recurring company of their offspring for 18 months at a stretch, but adult males spend their time alone except for a periodic few days' courtship with a female.

Black Bear Seen in Princeton

 This notice from the University:

Date:  Monday, June 20

Incident:  Black Bear Sighting

At approximately 2 pm. on Monday, June 20, a black bear sighting was reported on the Lake Campus (300 Washington Road).

Black bears by nature tend to be wary of people.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has tips on black bears available at https://nj.gov/dep/fgw/bears/index.html

A compendium of previous black bear sightings can be found by typing "bear" into the search box for this blog. They include an explanation of why black bears come wandering our way this time of year, which has to do with young males seeking new territory.

Many people wonder how to behave when a bear is encountered. Below are the fruits of my research, conducted ten years ago and adapted for a Princeton audience. These words are as relevant now as they were then. Please note that grizzly bears, which are not found around here, require a completely different response.

Black bears are near-sighted, so make noise to avoid surprising them. If the bear stands up on its hind legs, don’t worry. It’s just trying to see you better. Make sure the bear has an escape route. For instance, if it is following you out of the public library, hold the door open and give it plenty of room. If you encounter the bear in the woods, or on Nassau Street, you can back away slowly, but don't turn your back to the bear. In a calm, assertive voice, put the bear on notice that you are a Princetonian fully armed with opinions, and will not hesitate to express them.

Avoid eye contact. If it doesn't run away right off, bang the pot you happen to be carrying with you, or download a "kitchenware noise" app on your cellphone. Bears hate to cook, which explains their interest in garbage. Otherwise, clap your hands, raise your arms over your head, wave a jacket, all of which should make you look large and impressive.

On rare occasions, the bear will do a bluff charge, at speeds up to 35 mph. If a cafe is close by, this is a good time to duck in for a double latte. If that option is not available, then you'll need to dig deep. Fleeing will only make you appear weak. Perhaps the stirring words of a high school football coach will come to mind. In any case, stand your ground, wave your arms and shout. Pretend you're in front of town council, venting your outrage over moving the Dinky. The bear should veer away from you at the last moment, providing a bigger thrill than any 3D movie at the mall.

If the bear actually attacks, which is extremely rare, it's time to drop all remaining pretense of civility. Fight back. Don't worry about the bear's lack of access to dental care. Without asking permission, bop it on the nose. Bears' noses are 100 times more sensitive than ours. Use this sensitivity to your advantage, all the while reveling in what a great story this will make to tell the grandkids.

Note: In case you surf the internet for more info, don't be confused by accounts of how to behave when encountering a grizzly bear out west, where the protocol is completely different and not nearly so gallant.

Native Chestnuts in Princeton--the Next Generation

Many of us have lived our whole lives without seeing a mature native American chestnut tree. An excellent NY Times Magazine article described it as a true gift of nature, the perfect tree, growing straight and tall, with rot-resistant wood, and bearing nuts that were easily gathered and eaten, sustaining wildlife and people alike. My first encounter with the American chestnut was the sight of their fallen trunks in a Massachusetts forest, 70 years after the fungus that causes chestnut blight was discovered in NY city in 1904. The massive trunks I saw, lying on a slope in the shade of young white pine, were among the billions that the accidentally imported fungus would ultimately kill in the U.S. Since the roots survive the fungus, there was still a living community of underground chestnut trees beneath our feet in that Massachusetts forest. One of the roots had sent up a sprout about twenty feet tall--promising, one would like to think, but its slim trunk was already ringed by the fungus, its fate sealed before it could bear nuts. 

One of the projects I'm involved in is reintroducing native chestnuts to Princeton. The initiative began in 2009 with an email from Bill Sachs, a Princetonian with considerable expertise when it comes to nut-bearing trees. Bill reported that Sandra Anagnostakis, "one of (if not the) world’s leading experts on the pathology of American chestnut," had agreed to supply us with disease-resistant, hybrid American chestnut trees. Sandra's efforts to breed resistant native chestnuts at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station over many decades was apparently unconnected to the American Chestnut Foundation. The trees were 15/16th native, and Bill with occasional help from me and others proceeded to plant them at the Princeton Battlefield, Harrison Street Park, the Textile Research Institute, Mountain Lakes and Herrontown Woods. 

Some fared better than others. Many, despite having been bred for resistance, nonetheless struggled with the blight that had laid the mighty tree low a century ago. This fall, however, paralleling our work to bring back native butternuts, one of the chestnut trees has borne fertile seeds.  

Bill made repeat visits to the tree to collect the nuts as they ripened. The deer likely got many, but he managed to gather quite a few, some of which he encouraged me to cold stratify. Stratification has always been an intimidating concept for me, suggesting sophisticated manipulation to get a seed to germinate, but in this case it turned out to be not much more than stuffing some seeds in a bag of moist peat moss and leaving it in the back of the refrigerator for awhile. 

The tree, hosted by TRI near Carnegie Lake in eastern Princeton, bore generously despite significant pruning by the periodical cicadas early in the growing season. 

This past summer a friend had sent me a photo of another chestnut tree that, being smaller, was much more affected by the cicadas' egg-laying activities. They cut into stems to lay their eggs, which ends up killing the foot or two of stem beyond where the eggs are deposited. 

We'll see how these various trees do over time, and if a second generation of these mostly native chestnuts comes into being. The NY Times article was mostly about efforts to develop a blight-resistant American chestnut through genetic modification. That thirty year project, with a geneticist named William Powell as the main protagonist, has been successful. They managed to find a gene in wheat that confers resistance when inserted into the chestnut's genome. 

Adding one gene would seem a much more precise and less intrusive means of correcting a century old wrong than adding many genes, most of which are irrelevant to improving resistance, from asian chestnuts. But don't expect these ever so slightly and efficiently modified native chestnuts to be available any time soon. There are strict regulatory hurdles that must be overcome. 

For me, the situation demonstrates two powerful forces in the human world. One is the fear of the slippery slope. Would an elegant genetic fix for the American chestnut open the doors to a wave of less admirable genetic modifications of our world? The other powerful force is our focus on regulating intentional change, while allowing unintentional change to run rampant. While the government spends years deliberating over one gene being added to the native chestnut tree, global trade is introducing an ongoing wave of new organisms to the country, any one of which could be the next emerald ash borer or spotted lanternfly. 

In the meantime, we'll be thankful for the mostly native chestnuts we have, and see what we can grow.

Below is more info I've taken from some of Bill Sachs' emails. Click on Read More. 

Butternut Redux--A New Generation Bears its First Crop

This has been a breakthrough year for those of us working to bring back the native butternut--a species laid low by an introduced canker disease.. 

Twelve years after I helped Bill Sachs collect one of the last known harvests of native butternuts in Princeton, the new generation has finally born a crop of its own. Butternuts, also called white walnuts, or Juglans cinerea, bear nuts similar in look to black walnuts, but are oval rather than round. 

Bill continued to harvest and plant butternuts from the TRI property for a couple more years, but that pair of trees was then lost, with one blown down and the other cut down, ironically as part of an environmental remediation of contaminated soil. Most of the other known specimens, solitary so unable to bear, at Herrontown Woods and Mountain Lakes, have since been lost as well, lending all the more importance to this new generation of trees, grown by Bill and planted around town. 

We planted multiple trees, for cross pollination purposes, at Mountain Lakes, Herrontown Woods, Harrison Street Park, and at the TRI property where the seeds had originally come from. 

The saplings needed to be caged, to protect them from the deer. I made the mistake of removing a cage when a tree was tall enough that the deer could no longer reach the leaves. Bucks proceeded to rub the bark off the trunk, reducing a promising tree to root sprouts. A post from a couple years ago tells of some of the persistence required to nurse a new generation towards maturity. Along with deer, the young butternuts have been in danger of being smothered by fast-growing Japanese honeysuckle and grape vines, and trees like sweetgums and mulberries that rise quickly to fill the sunny openings the young butternuts need to grow.  Gardening, even wild gardening with native species, teaches the necessity of followup. 

This year, the butternuts had to deal not only with the 17 year cicadas' heavy pruning, but also the expanding presence of spotted lanternflies. 

Adding to the young trees' burden were some galls, which Bill said were most likely caused by walnut leaf gall mites

But despite all of that, the long awaited flowering of this new generation was spotted in July, and a few nuts collected in fall that appear to be viable, offering hope of yet another generation to come.

This fall's harvest is mostly being planted to grow more trees. Bill plants the butternut seed "in tall pots to be kept outdoors for the winter. This has worked well in the past."

Here are some additional tidbits gleaned from correspondence with Bill. The "float test" is used to determine whether a nut is viable. If it floats in water, it lacks a viable seed inside.

Dehusking walnuts and butternuts:

"I don’t really know if it’s absolutely necessary to dehusk walnuts or butternuts before a float test, though I think it is prudent. If you have a lot of nuts the best way to dehusk them is to use an old cement mixer with rocks and water… since I don’t have an old cement mixer, I use a piece of ½ inch plywood about 18 in by 6 in. I put a butternut or walnut in the driveway or street, put the plywood on top and use my foot with pressure to roll the nut under the plywood. (Use gloves to handle the nuts if you don’t want to stain your hands.) The husk comes off pretty easily. Then I put the largely dehusked nuts in a bucket of water and use a still wire brush to complete the cleaning."

Identifying butternuts: "Butternut bark is characteristically a lighter gray with broader ridges than black walnut (but not always). Easier to tell for sure from a twig with a terminal and a few lateral buds. If you slit the twig, butternut will have a dark chocolate-colored, chambered pith, and the leaf scars typically have a hairy fringe (or mustache) along the upper margin. When the leaves are still on the tree the leaf rachis will be tomentose or pubescent (hairy). Not sure if this carries over to fallen leaves on the ground in the winter. Finally, butternut trees often have poor form. In contrast, black walnut has a buff-pink chambered pith, no hairy fringes along the top edge of the leaf scars and the rachis is smooth (among other differences)."

Some additional reading recommended: 

On butternut seed propagation/germination:

https://htirc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SeedPropagationProtocol.pdf

 

On butternut conservation:

https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/FNR/FNR-421-W.pdf

Phyllis Marchand and the Benefits of Deer Culling

This past Sunday, Oct. 17, my Sustainable Jazz duo performed at a tribute to Phyllis Marchand at the DR Greenway's Johnson Education Center. 

Phyllis was mayor of Princeton Township for 14 years. For those accustomed to Princeton having an all-Democrat town council, it's astonishing to read that when Ms. Marchand was first elected in 1986, she joined a township committee that had been all-Republican.  Her long tenure preceded the merging of township and borough. Since I lived in the borough, she was not really my mayor, but her environmentalism has had a lasting impact on the natural areas I've helped to manage over the years. 

Among her many achievements, her courage in starting a deer culling program 21 years ago had all kinds of longterm benefits--dramatically fewer car accidents, recovery of native plant species, improved wildlife habitat, and a healthier deer herd. The culling program was very controversial at the time, with Mayor Marchand and other supporters having to endure heated criticism and personal attacks. 

The data are very strong on the benefits of annual culling by professional hunters. Here is some data collected for a post about deer hunting in 2013. Deer killed in roadway collisions dropped from the high of 342 in 2000 down to 68 in 2010. In 2019, 555 deer were killed in the township by vehicles and amateur hunters. In 2010, after ten years of professional deer management, the total number killed by vehicles, hunters and professionals had dropped to 286. Thus, one can say that investing in professional deer management actually has served to reduce the total number of deer killed each year. 

The township tried to save money by cancelling the deer culling in 2014, but deer numbers rapidly increased and the annual contract with professional hunters was quickly reinstated.

Given all of Phyllis Marchand's contributions to society through her long life, I had assumed that the deer culling issue was larger for me given my primary interest in nature. But the NY Times began its lengthy obituary with a detailed account of the controversy surrounding deer culling, including one sentence that is demonstrably false:

In the end, town officials declared the program a success because it had reduced collisions between deer and vehicles by 40 percent. But it didn’t solve the problem. The deer remain abundant, and while Ms. Marchand had contracted with White Buffalo for only five years, the town is still using its services.

The contract has been in place every year since 2000 except for one, and the deer herd is now small enough that many native plant populations have been able to recover. The obit doesn't mention the ecological benefits, but the article it links to does. Spicebush--a native shrub that is particularly important for bird habitat--is a dramatic example of recovery, once liberated from intense deer browsing. And the reduced browsing pressure has allowed many native wildflowers to bloom and provide nectar and pollen for insects. Having banished wolves and other predators of deer from the landscape, we then bear the responsibility to keep deer numbers in some semblance of ecological balance. Hunting is a way of stepping in to fill the void in natural predators. Mayor Marchand understood this twenty years ago, and weathered the storm to institute a policy that has proven its worth.

Phyllis Marchand, I've learned through her family, was a great fan of music sung by Nat King Cole and others. Sustainable Jazz usually plays all-original jazz and latin, but we added some of Phyllis' favorites from the American song book, including High Hopes, first sung by Frank Sinatra--a song whose lyrics can grow on you if you happen to have a dream. It's interesting to read in wikipedia that John F. Kennedy used a version of High Hopes as a theme song in his presidential campaign in 1960. 

Optimism, Habitat, and Landscape

If people love trees so much, then how do we explain Jill Biden's choice for a painting that was part of Inauguration Day ceremonies in the Capitol rotunda. Painted by African American artist Robert Duncanson as the Civil War was looming, Landscape With Rainbow depicts a pastoral paradise in which a young couple and their cattle head back to a homestead blessed by a rainbow. 

A closer look reveals that the distant hills in the painting are forested, but it is pasture--albeit a bit overgrazed--that dominates this optimistic landscape. Though people love trees, we also love vistas, which trees are very good at blocking. Who hasn't climbed a mountain, expecting a grand vista at the top, only to find that trees have grown to block the view? 

It seems strange sometimes that communities don't actively seek to create and preserve vistas, given how pleasing they are. If people can see into the distance, maybe they'll think into the distance as well. A vivid memory from the Sourland Mountains, just up the road from Princeton, is a view of the Manhattan skyline. It came as a complete surprise, and was made possible only by the ongoing suppression of trees along the gas pipeline right of way that extends up and over the mountain ridge. Ideally, vistas would be made possible in our world by something less linear and fossil fuel-related than a pipeline, but our approach to managing preserved open spaces seldom offers an alternative means of creating areas that are more open. 

Also running counter to open space preservation norms, the focus of optimism in the painting is a house, embraced by nature, towards which the rainbow, people and animals all point. One approach to purchasing open space for preservation is to demolish any buildings left on a newly preserved property. We had to overcome this bias against buildings embedded in open space in the process of saving Veblen House and Cottage at Herrontown Woods. 

One question, then, is how to adjust the classic view of open space--as uninterrupted forest--to consider the clear attraction we have for the mosaic of habitats depicted in this painting, where people play an active role in the landscape. What is pleasing to people can also serve the needs of biodiversity. At the Botanical Art Garden at Herrontown Woods, we are actively preventing a forest opening from reverting to the deep shade that stifles the growth of so many native plant species less gifted with height. Succession to forest need not be considered the only natural destiny for a landscape. Historically, such forest openings would have been maintained by periodic fire, in what is called a fire-climax community. 

Though a deep forest of towering native trees can evoke a sense of awe and reverence, and deserves to be preserved, many areas of preserved open space are thick with stunted, second-growth trees. Add the typically dense layer of invasive shrubs and the effect becomes cluttered and claustrophobic. As the death of ash trees due to the Emerald Ash Borer opens up the forest canopy, we may want to manage some of these openings to create a more varied habitat. If the non-native invasive shrubs can be limited, and young trees kept from reclaiming the sunlight, there are many native shrubs that could flourish in a more illuminated understory. Spicebush, hazelnut, serviceberry, native azalea, blueberries, Viburnums, Hearts-a-burstin'--these are a few of the native shrubs that would bear abundant fruit for wildlife if given more sun. 

One of the most optimistic moments I had in my life had some parallels to the Duncanson painting. I was driving out of Washington, DC after picking up a passport. The president at the time was highly competent and believed in government, and the WhiteHouse gleamed brilliant white in the afternoon sun as I drove past. On the radio was a live broadcast of Copeland's Appalachian Spring, broadcast from the Library of Congress in honor of its premier performance there some 50 years earlier. Along the roadsides as city began to transition to countryside were prairie grasses, golden in autumn. The youthful roadside vegetation resonated with the music of spring's awakening, and a sense of the nation's promise. 

Grasslands, meadows, shrublands--these are the younger landscapes, whose dynamic growth happens at our own height rather than far above. Their flowers and foliage also serve the insect community through the summer when deep forest has gone floristically silent. The aim here is to become more strategic and discerning about trees, to determine where they are precious, and where they might best be managed to serve ecological and aesthetic goals. 

In a Hidden Valley, Sudden Abundance, and a White Squirrel

Some of my favorite memories in nature are of sudden abundance. Day to day, walking through a woods or stepping into the backyard, we tend to see one or two of this or that bird or flower. The dispersed, low-key nature we typically see contrasts with accounts from long ago, when endless flocks of passenger pigeons darkened the sky, and herds of bison stretched to the horizon. As a kid, I read of distant streams or lakes teaming with fish. "Where lunkers lurk just below your boat" was one memorable headline. On a few occasions I convinced my father to drive me to them, trips that repeatedly ended in disappointment. 

Serendipity, however, has served up sudden abundance a few times in my life. One fall day early on in my small Wisconsin hometown I was walking home from school when I happened to look up and saw the whole sky filled with monarch butterflies heading south for the winter. There was the small inlet we canoed into in the Quetico, where we happened to look down and saw the shallow water was thick with a school of walleye, from which we quickly caught a delicious dinner. During our time in North Carolina, there was the time when hundreds of cedar waxwings enlivened our neighborhood for a couple days with their antics. And each year in the fall, I'd hope to be around when a large flock of migratory robins, with a few scarlet tanagers mixed in, would descend upon our yard, strip the flowering dogwoods of their ripened berries in an orgy of consumption, then be gone. Even the small park behind our house here in Princeton served one evening a few years ago as a stage for sudden abundance, when winged ants began emerging from the ground, attracting hundreds of dragonflies which in turn attracted a flock of swallows, spectacular fliers all.

This summer, serendipity served up sudden abundance in the most unlikely of places: a hidden valley in Princeton Junction. One afternoon I was standing outside a strip mall with a few minutes to kill, and decided to check out the woods behind the row of businesses. In retrospect, I was just following the flow of the pavement like any self-respecting raindrop would have done, but this going with the flow was taking me away from the human mainstream into another world.

There, beyond the edge of the asphalt, the land dropped down into a woodland like no other I have ever encountered. Perhaps only a botanist would have recognized the extraordinary nature of the nature that stretched before me. Clethra as far as the eye could see. Okay, let me explain. Clethra alnifolia, summersweet, sweet pepperbush, call it what you will, is a native shrub with a fragrant flower sometimes used in landscaping. 

Now, if you're into native plants, you may start to wonder where they typically grow in the wild. Many of the more popular ones--like Clethra, or Virginia sweetspire, bottlebrush buckeye, oak-leaved hydrangia, purple coneflower--have proven rare or non-existent in the wilds I've explored over the years. This could be due to the myriad ways in which we have transformed the landscape, from development to draining to fire exclusion. Or it could be that their home habitat is remote from places I've lived. In the case of Clethra, I had never seen it in the wild save for one sorry specimen holding on next to the towpath along the banks of Lake Carnegie. 

It was a surprise, then, to step behind a pizza joint just up from the Princeton Junction train station, and find myself gazing out on a sea of Clethra, growing like a weed. 

Ostrich fern is another plant I've rarely seen in the wild, and here it too was growing in abundance, giving the woodland a tropical look. 

Returning later with a pair of rubber boots, I waded out into the mud to explore this hidden valley, several times almost losing my boots in the thick muck. 

Here are a few other sudden abundances and rarities--plant, animal, and human--that I encountered:

On the hammocks of high ground surrounded by the mucky soils, Hydrangeas were in full bloom, reaching up to 17 feet tall.

Under a canopy of black gum, red maples and oaks, there were lots of Magnolias

and highbush blueberries.

Netted chain ferns, which bear a resemblance to the much more common sensitive fern, were tucked in among the massings of ostrich ferns.

A small, bent over tree with a curious compound leaf caught my attention. It wasn't a walnut or ash or anything else I could think of. I was excited at the thought that I had discovered a very rare tree, and stumped several botanists before sending a photo to Bob Wells of Morris Arboretum. He promptly identified it as poison sumac--something I hadn't encountered since field botany days in Michigan. The ID explained the skin rash I had been dealing with since handling it.

As with the poison sumac, there was just one Styrax, which showed the remains of its pendulant flowers, and one native azalea. All of these are rarely seen in the wild.

Only towards the other side of the valley did it become clear why this habitat was so different from what can be encountered in Princeton. Most of the stormwater runoff from the strip mall is somehow channeled to the far side of the valley, where it has eroded the stream and exposed the underlying gravel and sand. Simply by crossing Route 1, I had left the piedmont clay of Princeton and entered NJ's sandy inner coastal plain. Though erosion has changed one side of the valley, the other side is fortunately bypassed by the runoff, allowing the mucky soils and hammocks to persist in something close to their pre-development state.  

I had just counted my 30th wild hydrangea blooming in the valley when I saw a man with a white beard walking down into the woods. Scampering about 30 feet ahead of him was a white squirrel. I had already encountered so many unusual plants in this valley, and now I was seeing a white squirrel for the first time in my life. It's distinct appearance lent magnificence to its every move, as if a spotlight were upon it. This photo is the best I could manage with my cell phone as the man continued down the slope. The white squirrel can be seen in the lower right corner. 

He didn't seem to notice me, so I called out to ask him something about the squirrel. He turned and began telling me about a white squirrel he had befriended some years back. It had been a true albino, with pink eyes, and he had trained it to come to him for food. It had gotten to the point where it would come inside. He said that he'd start opening the door for the squirrel to go in his house, and the squirrel would push it further open and come in. He said the true albinos supposedly can't see as well, and that's one reason why it might have allowed itself to be tamed. One day it disappeared, and a friend told him it had been hit by a car. 

The white squirrel I had just seen was one of the albino's offspring. Actually, he explained, they are called silver squirrels, because they have a little gray on their backs, but are otherwise white. Squirrels are really smart, I interjected, expecting him to marvel at how remarkable squirrels are, but my thoughts on their intelligence made him think instead of how you can't keep them out of a house, and how squirrels had gotten into an old neighbor's attic and nearly destroyed her house. He was clearly not one to romanticize animals.

I asked him if this hidden valley is protected, and he said they have had to fight to keep the developers out of it. They lost about 60 feet of it when the strip mall developers wanted to build off the back. Lots of trees lost. He later said there's no organization, just the neighbors who border the property. He had a t-shirt on that said "REAL MEN DON'T NEED INSTRUCTIONS". I asked to take a photo of the shirt, as an excuse to photograph him. He said yes, and pointed out the hammer on the shirt, accidentally cut in two by a table saw. His name was John.

We walked down to the stream, where he said there had been a bridge that got washed out. The bridge turned out to be a long timber, 8x8, which he lifted back into place with some effort, but still impressive for his age. He said the neighborhood is called Berrien City. 

I told him how amazing this valley was for a botanist like me. He said when he'd first heard about the house they bought, and heard it was in Princeton Junction, he pictured something urban. But finding this valley behind it changed his mind. He asked if I'd seen the pond, and when I said no he offered to show me. 

As we maneuvered through the woods thick with sweet pepperbush, he began telling me about his early days, living on the outskirts of Langhorne, PA. He had wanted to be off the grid back then, bought a house that hadn't been lived in for 30 years, had a hole in the roof, one bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. They had a 2 year old son. Their water came from a spring up the hill. A number of them living there dug underground pipes to direct the water to their homes. He said he was at the bottom of the line, and had 600 feet of regular garden hose that the water flowed through to get to his cisterns--one of concrete and two of stainless steel. The cisterns were always full and overflowing, and to keep the water flowing through the hose in winter he had to keep the faucet open in the kitchen. If the hoses froze, he had to gather up all 600 feet and bring them in next to his woodstove to thaw out. He heated completely with wood until their son was seven. The house had 30 amp service, and there was some sort of radiant heater he could turn on to warm the outhouse seat before he headed out there in the winter. They heated water on a stove, and bathed in a tin tub in the kitchen. They ate squirrel and raccoon. The raccoon, he said, actually tasted good. A possum they tried, though, tasted like a McDonald dumpster. He still chops wood. His son, a policeman, still heats his house with wood, even though they have a regular furnace. His son uses a woodsplitter, though. 

The subject of raccoons got him talking about how he used to pay his mortgage with roadkill. Raccoon pelts fetched $50 back in 1980, and fox $75. He'd keep them in his freezer, skinned or sometimes not, until he had enough to make a delivery. It didn't take many to come up with 300 bucks. 

John told me more stories as we stood next to the stormwater pond, in this otherworldly valley hidden behind the loading docks and clustered storefronts of a strip mall that looked like any other in America. I wished I had turned on my phone's recorder to capture his voice and more fully document his story. Much of it involved his life in the fur trade in the 1980s, driving fur traders along a circuit from NY City out to North Carolina, north to Ohio and Pennsylvania, then back to New York, sometimes with $100,000 worth of furs in the back of the truck. It sounded like an updated version of trade in the 18th century. As a line of work, it probably met its demise in the 1990s, when animal cruelty concerns came to the fore. And I doubt a mortgage could be paid off in the 21st century with roadkill. 

Heading back to my pickup afterwards, as if to bend my mind once more before emerging from the woodland, I saw another white squirrel, or perhaps the same one, racing up a tree.

A Honey Bee Swarm, and a Specialist Native Bee on Spring Beauty

A couple interesting sightings of bees in Herrontown Woods recently. Working on trails on April 12, I paused and heard what sound like a buzzing coming from somewhere nearby. With so many machines of transport shut down due to the pandemic, it was quiet enough in the woods to hear what turned out to be a swarm of honey bees 40 feet up in a snag, still erect but completely stripped of branches. They were flying around a hole in the trunk. I went to get another load of stepping stones from our stockpile, but by the time I returned a half hour later, they were gone.

Some internet research led me to an entomologist at Cornell University, Scott McArt, who was kind enough to reply:

"From what you describe, it’s very likely a colony that swarmed. During swarming, half of the bees will leave the hive with their old queen, while the other half of the bees will stay in the hive with a new queen. The exiting bees will typically leave the hive and congregate on a nearby branch for a few minutes or hours, then move on to the next branch (or their new home, once they’ve found it). It’s an impressive sight when thousands of bees assemble onto the branches and/or move en masse to the next location, hence why it’s called a “swarm”." 

"Mid-April is a bit early for swarming, but not unheard of, especially since there’s been some warm weather and flowers popping up over the past few weeks. Aside from a bear getting into the hive, it’s really the only reason you’d see thousands of bees up in a tree right now. So if you didn’t see a bear, I’d say you saw a swarm :)"

Another bee sighting was much more subtle. Over the past month, the most numerous spring ephemeral wildflower has been the spring beauty. Again working on a trail, I happened one day to look down and see a tiny bee visiting one. I was crouching down to catch a photo when the bee dropped off the flower and stood motionless among the dead leaves--reminiscent of the freezing behavior rabbits use when approached. The same happened another day when I again sought a photo.

I was able to find mention of a Spring Beauty Bee (a miner bee named Andrena erigeniae) in a list of specalist bees.

An article in the Baltimore Sun entitled "Searching the Forest for the Bees" describes the bee's lifestyle, which includes only a brief appearance in the spring. It's useful to know that honey bees are not native to America.

"Unlike honey bees, which congregate in hives, most of the forest bees are loners that spend the bulk of their lives in the ground. They emerge for just a few weeks in early spring to pollinate flowering plants, shrubs and trees before the forest leafs out and shades the understory from the sun.

Many are "specialists," Droege said, focusing on a particular type of plant or flower.

For example, he said, there's a bee that specializes in collecting nectar and pollen from spring beauty, a ground-hugging pink or white wildflower that's one of the earliest harbingers of spring. One can't exist without the other, he said. In fact, many flowers have features that attract particular pollinators, while discouraging or excluding others.

"Flowers were all designed by bees," Droege said, over millennia of co-evolution."

 As a botanist, I had naturally assumed that all bees were designed by plants.

Solace and Beauty, Peace and Quiet at Herrontown Woods

As a big economy is brought to its knees by a tiny virus, many of us larger species have been getting outdoors to find solace and beauty in a nature that quietly perseveres, largely unfazed by an economy's wild swings. With the machine world's background din newly subdued, there's a greater depth to the peace and quiet to be had during a walk in the woods.

At Herrontown Woods, we've made a few changes in response to the public health crisis. The popular walking sticks are now in storage for the duration,

and the chairs at Veblen House are practicing social distancing.

It can be reassuring to find simple pleasures in small things. Remnants of Elizabeth Veblen's english garden are being protected and restored. These are a few of the many daffodils planted last spring. Others of her own plantings are coming back, simply through our holding off on mowing until the leaves have had a chance to recharge the roots for next year's blooms.

A few snowdrop blossoms remain from the broad sweeps of blooms earlier in the spring.

I glanced up from work at the botanical garden next to the parking lot, and saw this blossom that finally revealed the identity of a mystery tree that has been growing there, tilted almost horizontally--a willow.

This small patch of frizzy grass growing near Veblen House looks to me like poverty oats grass--a native species of Danthonia. Most turf grasses are non-native, but I've long speculated about what a native lawn might look like, populated by Danthonia, Dichantheliums, and the soft fescue one can still find in older lawns.

Diminutive American hollies stand out in the winter woods. They remind me of the hemlocks in the New Hampshire forests that would remain small for decades in the dense shade, ready to launch a burst of growth if and when the death of a nearby tree allowed some sunlight to reach the ground.

These little leaves could easily be mistaken for some diminutive wildflower or weed, but they are the leaves of Hearts 'a Bustin', a shrub that can reach 10 feet high but which has been laid low by deer browsing. It's an old story: the nonnative Euonymus alata shrub dominates in much of the preserve, while this native Euonymus americana barely survives, all because deer prefer to eat the native. We've taken a few of these remnant nubbins and planted them in cages in the botanical garden, so people can see what they are supposed to look like.

It's hard to capture in a photo the expanding flower buds of a highbush blueberry. They tend to be loners in the understory, hard to tell from other shrubs unless you develop an eye for their fibrous, brownish bark low on the stem.

The hazelnuts we planted are already busy, with their male catkins hanging down. Blueberries, hazelnuts, pawpaws, plums, butternuts, persimmons--these are part of the edible forest concept that is appealing even though it has, so to speak, yet to bear fruit.

This rock, along the yellow trail, seemed to be looking back at me. Was it chance that gave it acorn eyes?

In March, it's very easy to see what I call the "second forest." Having come from different climates, introduced species tend to leaf out earlier than the natives. This photo shows a broad swath of privet leafing out in the understory, beneath native trees still in their dormant brown.

The "second forest" is also visible in the fall, when the nonnative privet, multiflora rose, and honeysuckle remain green after the natives have dropped their leaves.

The combination of winter forest and brightening days makes for a wonderful time of year to explore patterns, like this corky bark, unusual for an ash tree. This may be an example of a tree's bark getting more distinctive with age.

With nature as the consummate artist, each boulder in Herrontown Woods tells a story that weds life and stone, organic and inorganic, present and past.