Red Pine Is Probably Virginia Pine, Also Called Scrub or Jersey Pine

November 18, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  When I get out of bed around 9 this morning, I see Moi still in her bathrobe sitting at her laptop on the kitchen table, and I realize she hasn’t taken Mway yet for a morning walk.  So I think to myself, I so enjoyed going out in the morning yesterday that I’ll take advantage of Moi’s inaction and take Mway out myself – plus this will allow me not to have to rush around so much this afternoon before going to work tonight.  Moi frowns when I tell her this, but she accepts it.  Mway has already built up a lot of anticipation in her psyche.  When she sees me putting on my walking clothes she starts staring at me, pacing, walking in front of me and looking around her shoulder.  (Moi tells me, by the way, that her fiddle student Alma told her yesterday that she discovered she had a tick bite this past week; a red circle developed around the bite; her doctor prescribed doxycycline.)

State of the Path:  Moi did let out the chickens – I see the cage door open, but I don’t see them anywhere.  I’ve brought my Audubon tree book.  I first note that there are two evergreens around Moi’s garden pond; I don’t know exactly what kind they are.  What I’d like to do is bone up on evergreens and start trying to identify everyone on our property.  Today though I’m just going to focus on Moi’s pines down at bug land.  From the evergreen at the center of the side path – I shouldn’t have been calling it a cedar – a bluejay flies onto a branch in the sumacs.  It sees me coming and flies away right away.  On a small tree covered with vines I spot some white fluffy stuff in what I eventually realize is a bird’s nest.  A little further on I see a white blanket or something on the ground, and I believe this is where the bird got its white fluffy stuff for its nest.  Cardinals flit through the trees; I hear a woodpecker but don’t see it.  Behind the honeysuckles that have now shed many of their leaves I can now see the TV set near the Boy’s tree fort.  As I round the path, I half expect to scare out the doe; apparently she’s already gone looking for food this morning or she’s abandoned this spot as a safe resting place.  A flock of black birds fly over the corn stubble in Hutchinson’s field.  I note a lot of tree branches piled up along the hedgerow: was this here before or has PPL recently trimmed around the electric pole here?  I look at the evergreen; I’d like to identify this someday but it’s going to mean trampling through a lot of briars.  In bug land, the ground of the path is saturated with water, and there are streaks of water on top of it -- again so glad to have decent boots.  I walk along the creek, cross the swale where water trickles slightly, cross the plank, round the crest, and when I come back through the “chokeberries” see a brown bird I’d like to think is some kind of sparrow.  It’s so hard to identify these brown birds; the distinctions between them are so minute; and I only see this bird for one second.  I come up to Moi’s pines.  I guess from what Moi told me she actually planted these trees here; she wants me to identify them so she knows they’ve been planted in the best soil, which would be clay here.  Besides the saplings, there are three trees.  They’re all sort of irregular in shape, though the one closet to the brown grasses of bug land is so irregular it looks at first glance like a different species, but all its attributes are the same as the other two trees.  Yesterday I thought maybe these were Virginia pines, also called scrub pines or Jersey pines – Moi made a face yesterday when I mentioned these last two names to her – but everything I look at today confirms my guess.  The bark looks like the bark in the photo -- Audubon calls it brownish-gray, although I think reddish-gray might be more like it.  The bark looks somewhat scaly to me.  The needles, bundled in two, look “slightly flattened and twisted.”  And when I look at and feel the cones, boy, they are “narrowly egg-shaped,” “almost stalkless,” the cone-scales are “slightly raised” (they’re also suppose to be “keeled,” but I have no idea what this means) but most of all when I touch them, god, they have one “long slender prickle.”

State of the Creek:  I miss the log jam.  The bend here is just smoothly flowing water now.  At the bank, some of the ground has partly caved in, a root running along the ground.  I look at the log where it landed beside the other log; I don’t quite know which one is which, and I can’t see them too well because there is a tree, bushes, and briars growing on the bank that obstruct the view.  It looks like one of the logs has been lifted up on top of the other -- it would be fun to walk along on top of them, but they’re on the other side of the creek.  At the crest of the skating pond, I see deep into the trees on the other side of the creek a deer stand someone built next to a tree – I don’t know if I ever mentioned this before; I’ve never seen anyone in it, and I don’t know if our McNeighbor who owns this land (McMansion at the top of the ridge) ever uses it.  In front of the stand, I see paths where it looks like the fallen oak leaves have been washed away; this must have been from water gushing down here in the last rain.

The Fetch:  On the way to the clearing, I see that the goldenrod behind the “chokeberry” is getting flattened down from Mway running through here on our latest walks.  I continue thowing the stick in the same places I did yesterday, trying to coax Mway as much as possible away from the streak of water down the middle of the clearing.  A good many fetches – Mway comes back chomping on the stick without dropping it, the indication that she’s ready to move to level 2.  But I have to tell her to “put it down” three times before she drops it, and when she comes back again, I start shouting “put it down” several times then quickly get fed up, soon telling her “good enough.”