back in the fog

Another pea-souper this morning blotting out the view across the bay, across the creek and even across the marsh. As I've mentioned before, the fog makes visibility difficult but audibility actually increases and, surprisingly, some of our local birds were active and singing loudly -- perhaps a way of communicating through the fog. The Purple Martins and even the martin house were invisible but the rolling, chirping of the birds overhead was loud and clear; are there really insects flying in the fog and, if so, can the martins really find them? Loud Baltimore Oriole calls as the orioles moved from one area to another must convey information about their location. The mournful whistles of a visiting Eastern Wood-Pewee also cut nicely through the mist.

The fog also shows off one feature of our local natural history that is often overlooked: the sheer number of spiders. The top of every bare twig on the vegetation in and around the marsh is covered by a messy lace of spider web, not the neat classic web of the orb-weaver spiders but a crest of loose threads at the apex of every dead bush and literally hundreds of them throughout. Each one is presumably the property of a different individual suddenly made visible by the glistening pearl-like droplets of water condensed out of the fog and now forming a necklace on each thread. Who knew there were so many spiders in the marsh? It ought to be possible to identify this species by its very characteristic web formation.

Although many flowers like the sun, the lack of it has not inhibited the appearances of some new blossoms. The most flamboyant is, without a doubt, the massive white flowers of the Big-leaf Magnolia (it might just as easily have been named Big-flowered Magnolia). Yesterday these were inside huge green buds and you had to look hard to notice them. Overnight these enormous white blossoms popped open. They will shortly collapse into a mass of huge white petals but at the moment they are still erect. Eileen Schwinn calls them Jurassic Park trees and these are certainly Jurassic Park flowers!

At the opposite extreme from the magnolias is the beautiful little six-pointed terrestrial white star of the Starflower. According to the books, this little gem is supposed to inhabit "cool or moist woods and high slopes" but we have a bed of it in sandy soil and pine needles; it is regular in mid- to late May.

In general, we are at the height of the second round of spring flowers. Apple blossoms are completely gone, Lilac is on its way out, Beach Plum as well as the Blueberries and Huckleberries are past their prime. Mony of the escaped garden plants are blooming right now: Wisteria, Lily-of-the-Valley, Bittersweet (the greenish flowers are easy to miss) and the bush form of Honeysuckle with the familiar honeysuckle yellow-and-white flowers and red or orange berries. Presumably this is another introduced species but just exactly which one?

The mid-May star of the Pine Barrens is the Flowering Dogwood, already past its prime. In some parts of the woods where the oak trees were hard hit by an infestation of a small geometrid or looper, the canopy has opened up and this has actually favored the dogwoods which have been making a striking display. The one 'wild' flowering dogwood on our property was at the edge of a right-of-way that had to be widened when we did renovations on the old house. I specifically marked the tree for preservation so it was, of course, the first thing that the contractor chopped down. Miraculously, it has sprouted from its roots and it will, we hope, reflower one of these years. Incidentally, in spite of the name of the plant, the showy blossoms are actually not flowers per se but consist of four showy white bracts that surround a cluster of small greenish flowers.

Other native flowers are starting to show. Two plants in the lily family, Wild Lily-of-the-Valley and False Solomon's Seal, are beginning to bloom and Chokeberry -- in spite of its ugly name, a handsome flowering shrub in the rose/apple family -- is sporting little bouquets of white flowers on the marsh edge (it does have puckery berries in late summer/early fall). Blue or Oldfield Toadflax is another pretty little early spring flower with an unattractive name; it grows in pure sand and is in full display (or just past) right now. There is a beautiful stand of it in the dunes at Cupsogue west of the parking lot just behind the (dying) Black Pines.

Another botanical feature of the moment is Pitch Pine pollen. I have discovered that it is not spring flowers that make me sneeze and cough at this time of the year but the wind blown pollen of Pinus rigida. You might not notice the pollen in the air but you can see it by looking at the edges of any puddle or pond. The yellow color is the pine pollen.

I almost forgot to mention the avian event of the morning. Our dooryard Carolina Wren resumed loud singing right out the kitchen door a few days ago and the prevelence of low buzzing sounds out back has raised suspicions. This morning a little covey of wrens exploded out of a bush as the adult birds tried to call attention to themselves and away from the 3 or 4 youngsters who scattered into the surrounding greenery, trying to escape detection. Carolina Wren, which stays here all winter, is almost always the earliest of our songbirds to produce young.

Eric Salzman