Appendaged Waterleaf...the Happy Mother's Day flower!

Back on May 9, 2009, I posted a letter from a young Tufted Titmouse to her Mama on Mother's Day. In her letter, she mentions "charming little lavender flowers" growing at the base of the tree she and her mate had chosen to make their home. Yesterday when I took my walk along the Little Miami, her tree was still there and so too were her lavender flowers, Appendaged Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum). Unfortunately, Mama and Papa Titmouse chose other lodgings this year, but I thought we could have a look at the beautiful spring wildflowers she loved...

Appendaged Waterleaf, Hydrophyllum appendiculatum, in all its lavender splendor!

...the delicate papery petals of Hydrophyllum appendiculatum are a soothing blue-lavender color and often seem to glow softly in the lush green of spring.

...did I mention Appendaged Waterleaf is quite hairy?

...each blossom is about a half-inch and forms a graceful, fluted bell. The five stamens extend from the bell. You can still see pollen clinging to the anthers of the blossom on the right.

Hydrophyllum appendiculatum's leaves are Maple leaf-like and often have white spots on them resembling water spots, which is the reason for its name, Waterleaf.

Although Mama and Papa Titmouse were absent from their tree this year, a young Squirrel Nutkin was making good use of it by climbing up and down the trunk...until he realized I was there and then took off in a frenzied terror (no doubt to the comfort of his mama) through the waterleaf patch, causing the flowers to sway gently on their long stalks as he passed through them.

Happy Mother's Day!

(especially to you, Mom!)

That darn squirrel...

...is just getting too cute for his own good!

This morning while nosing around in the fresh snow, Squirrel Nutkin found a stash of peanuts, sunflower seeds, and dried fruit. He would push his little head around in the snow and come up a few seconds later with a seed and a snowflake face.

Squirrel Nutkin using his head as a snowplow...

...ratcheting up the cuteness ratio...exponentially...

(I love how his little paws form a heart.)

Little snowflake squirrel…

...mid-morning solstice snow dots your fur and falls quietly with promise. And your tiny little paws hold seeds you can eat while three faces on the other side of the glass watch, thinking you’re the most important creature on earth at that moment.

Shock and Surprise in a Buckeye Tree!

Earlier in September, while walking on the Little Miami Trail, I stopped to admire a Buckeye Tree. The buckeyes were still encased in their spiny capsules, and I wanted to get a photo of their neat texture. As I was zooming in on a branch with three buckeyes hanging off, a squirrel parted the leaves and came face to face with me. He froze in total shock. He didn't know what to do! I was shocked too and also had that delayed motor response that accompanies total surprise. It was pretty cool--we both froze for a micro second, each reading a thousand thoughts in the other's eyes. Then I snapped a photo, and at the same moment, he skedaddled out of there (yes, "skedaddled" -- no other word will do). It all took place so fast, and that look of sheer terror and surprise on the squirrel's face made me laugh out loud!

When his little foot pushed that leaf down and he saw me, he froze! He truly was shocked and surprised to see me. He had been so intent on running up and down the branches knocking off the buckeyes he wasn't paying attention to what was on the other side of the leaves.

In a flash he was gone...turning and running up that branch where he looked at me from a safe distance.

I stayed around to watch what he was doing. He would run to the end of the branch and knock off a buckeye. He wasn't gathering the seeds because they were still encased in the husks, which hadn't even started to ripen and split. Instead, he would hang there at the end of the branch and gnaw on the part of the twig where the buckeye had been. What? I had no idea what that was about, so when I got home I did a little research. I found buckeyes are poisonous to most animals, but squirrels can eat them. They don't particularly like them, but they will do in a pinch. I also found many references to squirrels eating the pith from terminal twigs, and one direct account of Fox squirrels in Illinois eating the pith of Buckeyes (Havera, Stephen. 1976. The American Midland Naturalist, 95(2):462-464). Yeah! Maybe that's what my little squirrel was doing. From the USDA Forest Service of the Northeastern Area:

"Buckeye pith contains 66 percent raffinose, a sweet-tasting 18-carbon sugar that is much sweeter and contains potentially more energy than sucrose." I'd go for sweet sugar over a bitter seed any time! If you're wondering what pith is, it's,"the soft, spongy, innermost tissue in a stem" -- as defined in my "National Audubon Society Field Guide to Trees," Eastern Region.

The Ohio Buckeye (Aesculus glabra) -- Ohio's state tree

My cousin, Mary Ann (the one from California--I have three!), just sent me a link to "The Cheeky Squirrel Photo Crasher." Click here...it's pretty cute!

A secret window through the green…

Walking along the familiar wooded corridor of the Little Miami Bike Trail, I paused for a second to look through the heaviest of green, listening. It’s always when I slow down that I see the most amazing little things. Secret things. Actions not made for us, but that we are compelled to watch and admire…and marvel at. Quietly.

These two young squirrels were eye level from where I was standing. They did not notice me (or at least the pretended they didn’t). Perhaps siblings, they were grooming each other, companions totally at ease.

I wish I spoke squirrel...

...because Squirrel Nutkin is obviously trying to tell me something. Although, knowing Squirrel Nutkin it probably has something to do with peanuts, or namely, the lack of peanuts in the feeder. 

Peanuts in the morning, 

Peanuts in the evening, 

Peanuts at suppertime...

All I want is peanuts...

Yes, peanuts all the time.

(...or sunflower seeds. I can do a number on them also.)

Squirrel Nutkin on our backyard deck...

Here is a test video of cute Squirrel Nutkin:


Squirrel Nutkin on our Deck from Kelly Riccetti on Vimeo.

It was a dark and windy night…

Today I drove over to the Cincinnati Nature Center, but when I turned left onto Tealtown Road, a huge ROAD CLOSED sign was blocking the way. During the very windy night, tree branches and electric wires had come down and were blocking the road. Luckily, I had Jill the GPS Girl in my car and pulled her out and plugged her in. She took me down Binnens to Baldwin to Tealtown, and I was able to squeak in from the other direction. Binnens and Baldwin are one-lane roads and go through some very beautiful countryside. It was the first time I had been on those roads, and I was happy for the detour. When I finally arrived at the nature center, it was practically empty, and the visitor’s center was close. I had chosen the nature center for today’s adventure because I wanted to use their research library to follow up on a previous post (Ice Shots…) and find out a bit more about why birds don’t freeze. So many of my friends had asked me, and I knew the basics, fluffing feathers to trap body heat, torpor (lowering body temp to conserve energy), the physical structure of the feet and legs (scales, no sweat glands), and the complex network of blood vessels in the feet of ducks and water birds that act as a heat exchanger, but I wanted to find more technical and detailed information.

Instead, I took a test video of a cute chickadee foraging on the ground:

Chickadee at Cincinnati Nature Center from Kelly Riccetti on Vimeo.

Usually the rainbow appears after a storm, but last night, the rainbow appeared before the winds and storm arrived. It was incredibly bright and Spot-man, of course, noticed it first and yelled for Matty and me to look out the window to check out the intense color:

What a difference a day makes…

Today the temp hit 56, a far cry from the weather the past couple of weeks, and with the warmer temps, the big melt. As I was writing this, a huge slab of snow and ice started sliding off the roof. Such a sound! The scraping and sliding started slowly and then picked up speed, scaring me for a split second until I realized what it was. I hope the gutter didn’t get knocked off and a few shingles dragged with it. I think it’s supposed to be warm again tomorrow, a nice surprise for early February!

Just a few days ago Squirrel Nutkin was playing 

in the snow on my deck, scrounging out peanuts 

and looking incredibly cute. He was watching 

me intently as I sat on the floor in the kitchen 

snapping photographs of him right and left. 

Squirrel Nutkin pays us a visit.

Not 30 minutes after the Beatrix post, Squirrel Nutkin showed up for a little peanut action. Rick the Reluctant Birder, ready as ever with the camera, fired off a shot capturing Nutkin’s cute face.

Beatrix Potter, Natural History Hero

For Christmas my girlfriend, Cheri, gave me the book “Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature,” by Linda Lear, and last night I started reading it. I love Beatrix Potter, and pretty much anyone who knows me knows it. Naturally, I'm drawn to her illustrations and children’s stories. Right now I have “The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” next to my bed because last week I needed a Beatrix word fix:

“Nutkin danced up and down like a sunbeam; but still Old Brown said nothing at all.”

“Like a sunbeam…” So perfect, so simple. However, the other reason I admire her and think of her as a Natural History Hero is her scientific mind and her efforts at habitat conservation and protection. Years ago, while reading about lichens, I was happy to learn Beatrix Potter was an amateur mycologist with original theories on symbiosis, hybridization and lichens…and even better, she was the person who figured out their secret! When Cheri gave me the book, I quickly checked the book’s index and found pages 72-129 are devoted to her scientific research and theories on lichens and the years she spent meticulously painting the region’s fungi. Last night I couldn’t resist jumping ahead to a few of those pages:

“Time has been far kinder to Beatrix’s scientific efforts than her contemporaries were. When she tied up her portfolios of fungi paintings with ribbons many years later, she could not have known that her conclusions about the symbiotic nature of lichens and the hybridization of fungi would later be proved and accepted. Nor could she imagine that her watercolours are considered so accurate that modern mycologists refer to them still to identify fungi. Her ephemeral hope that her drawings might some day illustrate a book by an expert mycologist was realized in 1967 when W.P.K. Findlay, a past president of the British Mycological Society, used fifty-nine of them in his volume for the “Wayside and Woodland” series of natural history. No doubt it would have pleased her, but it was, as she feared it might be, a dull book to all but the experts.”

…and from her journal on November 17, 1896:

“I think one of my pleasantest memories of Esthwaite is sitting on Oatmeal Crag on a Sunday afternoon, where there is a sort of table of rock with a dip, with the lane and fields and oak copse like in a trough below my feet, and all the little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass and under the leaves all down below, like the whistling that some people cannot hear of stray mice and bats, and I sitting up above and knowing something about them.

I cannot tell what possesses me with the fancy that they laugh and clap their hands, especially the little ones that grow in troops and rings amongst dead leaves in the woods. I suppose it is the fairy rings, the myriads of fairy fungi that start into life in autumn woods.”

The New York Times on the Web has Chapter One of Liaisons of Life by Tom Wakeford posted. If you're interested, the chapter is a condensed explanation of her life and her scientific pursuits.

...and on the University of California Museum of Paleontology's site, a nice explanation of what a lichen is:

"Lichens are unusual creatures. A lichen is not a single organism the way most other living things are, but rather it is a combination of two organisms which live together intimately. Most of the lichen is composed of fungal filaments, but living among the filaments are algal cells, usually from a green alga or a cyanobacterium.

In many cases the fungus and the alga which together make the lichen may each be found living in nature without its partner, but many other lichens include a fungus which cannot survive on its own -- it has become dependent on its algal partner for survival. In all cases though, the appearance of the fungus in the lichen is quite different from its morphology as a separately growing individual.

The true identity of lichens as symbiotic associations of two different organisms was first proposed by Beatrix Potter, who is best remembered for her children's books about Peter Rabbit. In addition to her books, she spent time studying and drawing lichens. Her illustrations are still appreciated for their detailed and accurate portrayal of the delicate beauty of these bizarre organisms."