Ponkapoag 2016

This was our forth annual week at the AMC Ponkapoag camp, and our first time at a cabin within sight of the pond.  While I was busy studying much of the time, I did walk a bit and got out on the pond a couple of times.

Watching the sun set from my desk on the first full day.
If I have to be studying, at least I've got the best office!

A nice breeze off the pond for days meant no pages stayed on my desk
without rocks holding them down.

 The pond, and an animal I didn't expect to see in it (northern water snake, I think).

Mid-week sunset over the pond.

Puppy belonging to the camp manager went after a stick floating in the water, and returned through white water lily pads (Nymphaea odorata) and tape grass (Valisneria americana).

One of the rare times my son was on the dock instead of in the water.

Nearly all the other kids were much younger, but he was a good sport.

 

 Gypsy moths are another of the imported dangers to the forest.

Each of the brown egg masses on this trunk were laid by a female moth

that feasted as a caterpillar in the same tree.  The eggs will hatch next spring.

 I wrote about this situation three years ago:

"In an open woodland of oak and pine, a dead tree leans on a live tree.  The two form with the ground an isosceles right triangle, the live tree and the ground forming the right angle, the dead tree, fallen from twenty feet away and landed neatly in a crotch of the living tree twenty feet up, the hypotenuse.  -or not really neatly, since the dead tree shed rotten branches as it struck, which now form a sort of giant squirrel's nest where the two trees come together. 

"What happened here?  The living tree is a black oak, tall and straight with the high and narrow crown of a forest-grown tree, its only flaws the vulnerable crotch, a small dead sprout at its base, and a small dead limb in its crown.  From its state of decay and that of its branches, the other was long dead before its fall, so of unknown species, and a little bigger than the one-foot diameter of the black oak.  Perhaps the dead tree got its start a few years or a decade before the living, or perhaps the two were age mates, even siblings, the dead tree's slightly greater and earlier girth the result of a sunnier location, or a little more moisture.  What killed the one?  Not age, but some ill fortune--an infestation of caterpillars or a fungus borne by insects burrowing into its wood, a drought.  Perhaps it died when struck by an earlier dead-fallen tree now long vanished into soil. 

"How will events fall now?  Certainly the dead tree has damaged the slender forked oak, and that in a singular stroke of bad luck: the forking stems so narrow that a matter of a few degrees either way in the fall would meant a complete miss.   Perhaps the falling tree was so decayed that it did little damage.  Or perhaps even so the rotting wood provides habitat to a fungal or insect invader.  Moreover, yet another dead tree, somewhat smaller, stands at a similar distance, and inclines a little toward the burdened oak.  Might lightning strike twice?  Indeed standing dead trees are not uncommon in the wood.  Of course, the tall tree might equally benefit from the deaths of neighbors--if they stand southerly, the openings they create allowing more sunlight to feed the tree.  Every forest is indeed a slow race, with the prize of vital sunlight to the tree that can keep its crown above its shading neighbors.  But the future is never secure, and with the vagaries of chance even the most virtuous may succumb before their time."

The wood is scattered with glacial erratics--boulders bulldozed into place by ice sheets

and left behind at the end of the last ice age.  These boulders have had ten thousand years

 or more to develop "character."

The less water-phobic of our two little dogs went paddling with me about midweek.  (Actually, I did all the paddling.)  A tiny island beckoned.  Its size made possible a nearly-complete census of flowering plants in the space of a few minutes. 

 

Goose poop is the foundation of the soil here.

 
Golda, my assistant, eventually decided she'd seen everything.


 
"Island biogeography" this ain't: the fifty feet of shallow water
separating the island from the mainland is no barrier to plant or animal migration.

 No one was more pleased to be back ashore than Golda.
 She went directly to the door of the cabin.  She was not entirely pleased with me.

Pond Flowers

In a new annual tradition, we spent an August week in a cabin at the Appalachian Mountain Club camp on Ponkapoag Pond's eastern shore--our third annual stay. Ponkapoag is in a little corner of eastern Massachusetts' wonderful Blue Hills Reservation, near enough to two highways that, when the insects and frogs take a breather, you can hear the hum of the traffic.  

 Our first full day there was a rainy one, but no one minded.

 This is a boating crowd--mostly human-powered.

 After three years, this is "our" cabin.

 There is something very relaxing about a rainy day, Beatrice and Golda agree.

 The boys would chime in, if they weren't so busy.

Lots of things in flower in Ponkapoag Pond, Canton, MA.  In fact, more of the true pond plants appear to be in flower than not.  In a few hours of paddling over several days I managed to photograph most of them.

 White water lily (Nymphaea odorata) is our most fragrant and perhaps most beautiful pond plant.

 

 I was surprised to see a pink water lily for the first time ever.  This turns out to be

a form of the same species that's usually white.  Since I didn't see it the last two years,

I expect it is the same plant, but triggered by the environment to produce the pink color. 

 

 The yellow-flowered asterisk-like plants in front of the pink flower are bladderworts (Utricularia inflata) that get nitrogen by sucking tiny creatures into their tiny underwater bladders.  White branches filled with air (hence the Latin name), keep flowers where pollinators can reach them.

 

 

Yellow water lily is in the same family as the white, though you wouldn't think so 

by looking at the flowers.  Outside the flowering season, you can tell them apart 

by leaf shape: leaves of white are nearly round, those of yellow are larger and oval. 

 Fanwort (Cabomba caroliniana) usually grows entirely underwater as long stems covered 

with lacy leaves with forking branches (the whole effect giving it another common name: 

coontail), but at flowering time the growing tip begins producing simple, oval leaves 

and emerges from the water to make its white and yellow flowers available to pollinators. 

 

Floating heart (Nymphoides cordatum), though in the same family as the two water lilies, has smaller leaves than they do, and a bundle of roots suspended below the leaves.  It is not in flower now.

Wild celery, aka tape grass (Valisneria americana), is neither a celery, nor a grass, but a member of the Frogbit family.  Its long strap-shaped leaf has lateral divisions that give it a chambered look.

Water shield (Brasenia schreberi), differs from pond lilies in having oval leaves with the

leaf stem attached at the center of the bottom of the blade.  It is not in flower right now.

 Half the Michals-Brown armada was in residence a the camp, including the sail/rowboat Bebe, above, and below Serendipity (green) and Musketequid (blue, dead center).

 

 

On our last day, Beatrice joined me for a paddle around the entire pond. 

I have ideas brewing from the pond for future posts.