Confirm Morrow's, Still Not Sure About Pink Bush

April 29, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  Moi wakes me by clanging something in the bathroom, and when I get up I have the impression that she’s already taken Mway for her morning walk because the dog is lying in her bedroom and not pacing around.  So I don’t take her out for a walk until about 2 pm, an hour and a half before I have to leave for work.

State of the Path:  This morning I did more research online about honeysuckles bushes and learned much I think about Tartarian (pictured in Audubon), Morrow’s, Arum, and bella or pretty honeysuckle.  So the focus on my walk today is to try to identify the honeysuckle bushes better.  When I inspect the first couple bushes I encounter, by the outbuilding, by the pig pen, and out along the orchard, I do find today, contrary to what I thought yesterday or the day before, that they do have slightly hairy undersides, which seems to be the distinguishing characteristic of the Morrow’s honeysuckle.  None of the bushes I look at have an egg-shaped leaf with a tip at the end, so this seems to rule out any Arum honeysuckles.  The only other really different honeysuckle bush I encounter is down by the creek, beneath the big trees, closest to bug land.  This one has pink flowers that have not yet fully opened, and could be the pretty or bella honeysuckle, although this could be a Tartarian honeysuckle instead, which can have either white or pink flowers.  I see some bumblebees flying around the bushes as I look at them.  And the leaves are starting to come out in the big trees by the creek – pretty soon I’ll be able to tell if they’re oak or something else like ash.  These big trees are engulfed by the honeysuckle bushes, as well as by multifora bushes, and you don’t see any leaves on them except way high up.

State of the Creek:  Don’t pay much attention to the creek today, except to note that the sun is shining in the water and showing up the moss growing around rocks and sticks in the water.

The Fetch:  Because the gnarled stick broke yesterday, I bring the “pro-quality” one today.  Although she doesn’t overtly complain about it, and indeed shows nothing but enthusiasm, Mway only fetches the stick about four or five times.

Violets, Gill-of-the-Ground, Cheeses, and Shadows of Striders

April 8, 2010.  Thursday.

Situation:  After we visit the tax lady in the morning, I take Mway out about 12:30, so I can rest up later for work tonight. 

State of the Path:  When I step out on the porch, Moi is on the stoop, shaving off the bark of a sapling for a pole in her new wigwam, which she calls Wigwam II.  As she carries the sapling down to the wigwam, with Mway following her, I go out to the old orchard to look for jack-in-the-pulpits, which Moi says I might find now underneath the kids’ broken down tree fort.  I don’t see any jack-in-pulpits, but all throughout the orchard floor, mixed among the spring onions and other grasses, I see purple flowers, which I first mistake for gill-of-the-ground but later learn from Moi are violets.  Audubon suggests to me that they may be either dog violets, which have leaves and flowers on the same stalk, or common blue violets, which have leaves and flowers on separate stalks – if I remember, I should be able to tell tomorrow which ones these are.  I meet Moi down at her wigwam, and we walk down to the creek.  There Moi points out to me some gill-of-the-ground, which I now am reminded actually has more of a blue flower than a purple one like the violets.  She then discovers some of the little white flowers that I had first noticed a week or so ago (they are a little bigger now) – and she tells me they are cheeses.  “What?’ I ask.   “Cheeses,” she repeats, “Like cheese, only cheeses.”   And indeed I find cheeses listed in Audubon, although the leaves in the photo don’t look like what I remember seeing down by the creek.

State of the Creek:  Moi watches some water striders in one of the pools of the creek and says, “I like the way the water spiders cast shadows.”  I look into the pool to see what she’s talking about.  I see a couple striders, and they seem to have big globular appendages attached to their undersides that move in tandem with their upper body.  “That can’t be their shadows,” I exclaim, as Moi walks away.  And I look at the striders for a while, and only when I see one pass very close over a rock and the globular appendages disappear am I convinced that I’m looking at shadows.  I come to realize that when the strider passes over a rock that is deep enough in the water, the sun casts a shadow onto the rock that distorts their spindly legs into fat blobs encircled by a ring of light.

The Fetch:  One fetch.  When I get back into the house I am sweating and dying for a glass of ice water.

Identify the Ghost Flowers as Pennsylvania Bittercress

April 6, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Last night Moi downloaded a bird identification app on her iPhone.  It show pictures and plays bird calls.  It seems like an ideal resource, but I don’t know how much use I will be able to make of it.  I’ve never had a cell phone, and the only way I might be able to use Moi’s is to bug her to use it for me.  As it turns out, I have no work today, but I do have to go out on work related errands, including getting gasoline and oil for the lawnmower.  I hate to begin mowing the grass, but it is getting high in a few places, and since my mower won’t go through high grass, I worry about keeping up.  I take Mway out for her walk about 4:30.  Just now, Moi has called me down to her computer.  She has been looking online to try to identify the ghost flowers, and she found a site with a lot of photos, showing plants at different perspectives – and yes, indeed, we found our plant: it’s Pennsylvania bittercress.

State of the Path:  Moi follows me out as far as the outbuilding, where I’ve seen and heard a lot of bees.  Moi worries that the bees might be making a nest in the building, and I worry too, because that’s where I store the lawnmower during the summer.  It’s very warm today, almost too warm for my long-sleeve workshirt, but because of ticks, I’ll wear this all summer along.  Throughout the field now, it seems there’s a layer of green, sometimes showing quite conspicuously, sometimes partially hidden under the brown dead goldenrod and blackberry brambles.  The wild onions in the old orchard are high, and joined together now by other grasses.  Over the grasses are the light green leaves of the Russian olive and honeysuckle shrubs, beneath the still gray black walnut and ash trees, which are the last trees to get their leaves.  Down by the seeps in bug land, the new green grass is already about six inches high, and there is new green grass sprouting all among the dead brown grass of bug land.  I see even more may apples coming up than I did yesterday, and I delight in seeing the yellow trout lilies, sprinkled along the banks of the creek.

State of the Creek:  As I walk along, I wish I could identify the birds I keep hearing.  The creek water is brown, and it’s barely moving in the pools.  Beyond the oaks, I hear a splash in the water – I don’t see what it is, but I guess that it’s a frog.  Last year dozens of frogs would leap in the creek water as I walked on a typical summer day along the bank.

The Fetch:  The clearing is now all green grass, and some of it’s getting high.  When I get there, I don’t see Mway, but then I spot her sniffing around in the sumacs.  I call her, and to my surprise, she doesn’t come running over to me right away.  I call her several times, and finally she comes.  I toss the stick once; she dashes after it; then she runs past me to head back to the house.  As she’s walking by the sumacs, I see her duck her head to peer once quickly through the trees – in the hope of maybe catching sight of whatever it was she was sniffing at before.