18 images in the slide show for November – less skewed toward botanical subjects than recent months. Outings to Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, Springfield Conservation Nature Center and Josey Ranch Lake increased my opportunity to photograph wildlife. It was good to see winter and migrating birds…more of those in coming months (probably).
Enjoy the November slide show!
Ritter Springs is a park near Springfield MO – north of the city in a rural area. It was our first visit to the park (one of our exploratory day trips this fall). There is a one lane paved road a short distance into the park then a gravel parking lot. A gate blocked the gravel road down to a pavilion; near the gate there was a map of the park and its connections to other nearby parks via trails.
The park would have been a lot more scenic a few weeks earlier before most of the leaves fell. When we were there, drives of leaves accumulated everywhere…filling any low areas.
Even so we enjoyed our walk through the woods along the road and on mowed trails – looking for photo opportunities. I spotted shelf fungus that were bright spots in the fallen leaves,
A buckeye butterfly in a sunny spot,
The torn end of a recently fallen branch,
Some red leaves still on a young oak…protected from the wind by the bigger trees,
And a tree top full of cones.
But probably the tree I got most excited about was the Osage Orange. The tree had a very limited range in pre-colonial North America but has been planted by settlers as a hedge where its thorns deterred free-range livestock from vegetable gardens and corn fields. It also has historical significance in plains states where is was widely planted in rows for windbreaks. This time of year it is easier to identify the trees with their huge fruits….or simply looking up after seeing one of the greenish orbs on the ground. There are a lot more of the trees in Missouri than in Maryland!
I took a closer look at one of the fruits.
Next time…we’ll go further into the park…maybe even all the way down to the Little Sac River!
The Springfield Botanical Garden is already one of my favorite places to walk around….easily taking the place of Brookside Gardens in Maryland. We parked near the rose garden. The roses were looking a little challenged by the summer heat but there were plenty of summer flowers to enjoy: cone flowers, zinnias, sunflowers (to name a few).
The hosta garden is always a cool and damp oasis. We arrived before 8 AM….before the heat of the day. I enjoyed photographing the flowers and leaves with water droplets on them.
There was one caladium leaf that had a shape like butterfly wings!
The lilies were still blooming profusely (see the June post for earlier in their bloom period). I took very zoomed images to avoid spent blooms that are part of the scene this month. It seemed that mesh had been put around more of the beds…maybe deer have become a problem.
I hadn’t noticed the Osage orange tree near one of the pollinator gardens before. It is full of fruit now. It is an interesting tree….without an efficient means of propagation without human assistance. Its seed dispersal evidently was via extinct megafauna (giant ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, etc.). But – it was widely used for fencing/wind breaks by settlers and has been planted in all 48 contiguous states of the US and in southeastern Canada. It is not a rare tree even though it could become so without continued attention.
Stay tuned…in a few days I’ll post about the animal life I noticed in the garden this month.
Continuing from yesterday -
Seeds that help with identification include tulip poplar (the pods stay on the trees releasing the seeds during the winter breezes to clog up any nearby gutters!),
Osage orange (that fall to the ground and are only moved around my people these days…they were planted for fence rows after the dust bowl because they are hardy, and the seed balls are easily broken apart and planted),
Sweet gum (the spikey seeds are a hazard in suburban yards and drive ways), and
Black walnuts (there are always nuts under the tree but the squirrels may carry then a little further away so look at the shape of the tree too).
Of course – there are trees that are not as easy to identify. That’s why I carry a small book – Winter Tree Finder – when I am hiking in the winter and looking at trees. I found mine at a used book sale, but they are available new from Amazon as well.
The Howard County Conservancy organized a winter hike for its volunteers last week on the Trolley Trail (Trolley Trail #9 near Ellicott City/Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum). We were celebrating the end of another fall field trip season. About 40 people met in the Banneker parking lot and headed out.
The connecting trail from Banneker to the Trolley Trail was through the forest and very muddy. There was an Osage orange tree that had dropped its fruit recently. Most of the fruit look pristine. When I got home, I did some research and discovered that the fruit is not eaten except sometimes by squirrels. One theory is that the fruit was eaten by large mammals that are now extinct (ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon) and that these animals would have spread the seed. Now the tree is propagated by people for its wood and as windbreaks.
We headed north on the Trolley Trail first. I didn’t take many pictures because I was so busy trying to keep up with the group. It was the same the last time I was on the Trolley Trail in 2015 with my Master Naturalist class (posted about it here).
There was some stream restoration (and maybe something else since there is infrastructure like sewer lines in the streambed) that was active next to the trail. The stream did look more scoured than the last time we were in the area.
We reached the end of the trail at the north and retraced our steps…passing the trails to Banneker to continue south on the Trolley Trail.
We got to the part of the trail that was damaged in the last flood. Repair work was not complete, so we stopped before getting down to Ellicott City; I turned around and took a picture back along the trail. The asphalt of the trail was damaged by the flood; the asphalt edges were uneven, and pieces were missing.
There were bright green Christmas fens on the cliff to the right
A little further back up the hill, winter trees looked good against the sky. It’s easy to pick out the sycamores this time of year.
A waterfall was scenic rather than roaring. I thought more about what it must have been like during the flood to sweep away asphalt a little further down.
We’ve gotten so much rain this fall/early winter that the moss is thick and bright green – like a carpet.
We made the muddy trek back up to Banneker to retrieve our cars…and head for lunch with healthy appetites.
Copyright © 2024, Gwen Morrison. All rights reserved.
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
Copyright © 2024, Gwen Morrison. All rights reserved.
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