Might Be Red Pine

November 16, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Moi tells me it’s suppose to rain hard this afternoon, so I think I’m going to take Mway for a walk this morning before I go to work.  I’m looking through the conifer section in Audubon; there are a lot of pines pictured there, and I don’t know if I have any hope of identifying those in bug land.  (By the way I come across Russian olive while leafing through the book; the photo looks something like those shrubs I’ve been calling Russian olive – have I checked this out before?)  Although I thought about going back to wearing my safari helmet, I’m going to stick to wearing a bright wool cap – never know when there might be someone with a gun out there.

State of the Path:  Hear the drizzling rain falling on the plants, but I don’t feel or see any drops landing on me.  I reflect how nice it is to have a good pair of boots.  Beyond the first line of sumacs, Mway stops to poop – she slowly moves up after each dump, looking behind her, I guess, to make sure I don’t walk into her – four short turds in a row.  Beneath the pin oak, a branch snags my wool cap.  But after that, I’m wise to the multiflora briars that snagged me yesterday, and my cap doesn’t get snagged again.  However, coming through the locust trees, a multiflora branch that I must have cut down this summer gets caught on my pant leg, and as I’m pulling that off me, a twig from a tree branch slips under my glasses and pokes me in the eye.  I cross the plank and round the crest of the skating pond, and then I stop at a Russian olive to doublecheck it against the photo in Audubon.  It’s started raining harder though, the pages are getting damp, and I figure I better just concentrate on the pines Moi wants me to check out.  They’re only a few feet ahead of me.  After taking off my gloves and leaning the sticks against one of them, I first check to see how many needles they have in their bundles: turns out to be two, which matches the number for jack pine.  However, Audubon decribes jack pine cones as “long…long-pointed, and curved upward,” and the cones I’m looking at are short.  Furthermore, the range map shows jack pine as occurring much farther north.  The pages are getting splattered with rain drops, and I have to move quickly.  I see that red pine, also called Norway pine, has two needles in a bundle, their cones are “egg-shaped,” and they range “south to Pennsylvania.”  I’m afraid my book will soon get too wet: I decide to tell Moi that they might be red pines.

State of the Creek:  The raindrops make ripples in the otherwise motionless pools of water; the stream bed is black in most places, filled with gray decaying leaves.

The Fetch:  I toss the stick fairly deep into the goldenrod, often throwing it behind the “chokeberry,” where it takes Mway some time to find it.  I’m worried about getting wet now, and I toss the stick as fast as I can.  After I don’t know how many fetches, Mway eventually keeps chomping on the stick after she brings it back.  I first tell her “good enough,” but then when she doesn’t follow me when I turn around I tell her to “put it down.”  Still she doesn’t drop it, just keeps chomping on it, and I get fed up and say “good enough” again.  Back in the house, Moi asks me what I’ve found out about the pines.  I tell her I think they might be red pines, but as she’s grilling me on soil habitat and I’m leafing further through the book, I realize that the characteristics I selected could match at least two other pine species as well: table mountain pine and scotch pine.