Meanwhile...

It is August and that means the daylight each day changes quickly. 

August through November are the three months of the year where I can't seem to sit still. The weather is changing, the hours of daylight are changing.

I begin to chase the changes in the forest like I do with early spring. 

As the heavy growth of gooseberry bushes begin to drop leaves and other plants in the undergrowth begin to drop seeds and wilt, I find moving through parts of the forest easier.

This morning I got a fog notice on the weather app. I knew it would be foggy in the valleys because it cooled off so much overnight. I hoped the fog would drift up through the forest.

Off I went as soon as the sun began to peek through the trees. It was humid but not really foggy.

Our busy road:

On the way back home I took a different way and...

.... found some Indian Pipes 
aka Ghost Plants or the Scientific name:
Monotropa Uniflora .

I think these are some of the coolest plants that can be found in a forest.

Boy was I pleased to see that the high humidity, even though the fog dissipated quickly. It provided a beautiful morning atmosphere.

My favorite maple tree in the woods northeast of us.

The sights were pretty amazing as was the light.

I also stopped and took an opportunity to do something that has been on my mind since I got those little dragons.

An idea came to mind when I was looking at my collection of rocks. My son gave me a really cool rock years ago.  To me it looked liked a petrified egg.

I'm pretty sure ... well, this has to be...

I mean...

what else could it be...

but 

a Dragon Egg?

However....

I think someone else must be interested in it!

I spotted two Rock Monsters!

Glaciator and Sulfrix to be exact! 

Oh No!

Silly me. How I do love to play.

I think I should keep an eye out for Princess Sara and her Knight to see if they will come to the rescue in the Big Wild Forest.

😉

Hot and Stuff

This is just going to be about things I've seen over the past week including things of beauty, things that make me curious and things I photographed just because.

Wednesday's storm front. I was on the way to CrossFit when I saw that I was driving into the heart of a huge cell. The closer I got to town, the meaner it looked. According to the weather service it was to go northeast of us. 
I don't like storms, I don't like to be in storms. 
I've been in two tornadoes and one really exceptional storm in 2007.

I pulled over to the side of the road and grabbed my camera. I only had my IR camera with the 850nm filter. It really only captures stark black and white and really highlights details in clouds. We had some winds when the front came through along with rain but thankfully no damage.

Other areas had hail and up to 3 inches of hard quick rain.

Shot of the neighbor's cattle pasture at dawn. Yes, the cow in the middle of the photo is pooping. 

Dogwood. I found some! 

Wild Grapes! They look plentiful and I wonder about making grape jelly.

That would take a LOT!

Sumac. It looks like it wants to start turning colors! Heat and drought stress?

Elderberry flowers. Most are done flowering now and the berries are turning dark. This one had a tiny bee on it.

Queen Anne's Lace in the meadow across the fence to the east of us.

Ohhhh!

Chicken of the Woods? I saw it, I didn't pick it because it was too beautiful. However I would like to have an expert by my side to try something like this. 

Apparently my soldiers will keep an eye on it. It was too bloody hot and stormy to continue wandering around the woods with the heat and 'thick' air. But I will get back to it!

Indian Pipes! Generally they grow near an old oak's roots especially those oaks that have 'health' issues. Interesting to note that so many life forms are so intertwined with the forest like that. I mean I knew it, but I didn't KNOW it.

Moving right along. 

Last thing. 

The storm Wednesday night. Uffdah. The winds were pretty nasty so it looks like today is my day to go see if trees fell on the fence. Our corn was flattened and I found branches this morning down by the stock tank which is over 100 ft from the trees in one direction. Branches were down in another direction too and some found way out east of the house. No damage to buildings but small branches on top of the shed too! Interesting. You may be able to guess what I will write about later!

My Fungi Fun

For my work out of the day...yesterday, I was supposed to go out and power walk or jog and see how far I could go in 30 minutes.

Simple right?

So I grabbed my lighter sweatshirt and Charlie and we headed off with my phone on a map my hike app running. I had my little camera with me and decided ... you know... just in case....

So an hour and a half later, I'd actually covered over a mile. But I had spent so much of it peering into moss covered logs and crawling around mule dung, rotten wood, and searching under leaves.

Cool huh? Velvety Black Earth Tongue Fungi. Eww. I saw these last year and wondered what they were. This year I went to Mushroom and Fungi book to look them up. 

Red Banded Conch. On the same log but on the underside. By the way those little fungi from my last outing? They are on this log too! I counted 4 types of fungi on one log!

While not really a fungi, these Indian Pipes are often mistaken for them. They are of the blueberry plant family and are white as they have no chlorophyll. 

I have no idea what these little ones are, I will have to go back and see how they change!

These? Inky Caps. At least I think so. I'll go back and see if their tops turn black and icky. That will identify them for me. I'll go back and check them out if it ever stops raining.

I don't know the ID of these either, but I am working on it.

The top photo was taken on Sunday. The bottom was taken 5 days later. 
And there still is a slug at the end of them!

Oh and for the workout? Guess I'll have to have a Do Over!

Phone calls and walks

The Ghost Plant or Indian Pipes are coming up! I love these things!

The shot below is 4 days later:

After leaving an early morning message with the Tree Trimming Service, a message with a neighbor, and calls to the VA, emails to one doctor, and re-scheduling appointments...and a run to town for groceries...

I decided to take out the dynamic duo.

I really don't like to wait around for return phone calls. However, I was smart enough to leave my cell phone number as an alternative to the house phone. I wonder? How many folks still use land lines? We decided to keep ours basically for 911 calls. I don't have to describe where I live, the dispatcher knows immediately because I am calling from a land line.

Anyway...

Sven deferred to Charlie, following him all over. He took turns between coming for a neck rub down and petting to trotting after Charlie. Sven is a great hiker and because he was bottle raised he is very attached to humans. The two of them are great friends and practice grooming each other. Sven will nibble around Charlie's shoulders and Charlie will lick Sven.

Below, Fleabane flower with a crab spider.

It was just one of those hikes where I walked the trail and basically followed the dynamic duo allowing them to pick the way.

I was trying out my converted IR camera and the 550nm filter. The filter works better with sunlight, foliage, water, and sky as elements in it, but I had to test it out in the woods of course. And why not?

The spectrum of colors comes out incredibly different than what a person could imagine.

Well this was not much of a shot...
But it turned out better in black and white...

and the Indian Pipes didn't reflect anything as they don't have chlorophyll in them so black and white was the way to go. They would have appeared blue otherwise.

After Rich's PT and the Nursing Home visit today, I think I have some free time.
I think I will head out on the bicycle and see what I can come up with.

The yard work is done and I have a lot of other small odd jobs that need doing, but for a most of them I need some help from the neighbor to get started.

I'm going to take the metal tracks of the skid steer and send it in for maintenance. I won't put the tracks back on as I don't anticipate driving through the soupy quagmire that Rich used to. But it may be handy to move some dirt for me!

Have a great day.

HOT~and Humid.

I like summer, truly I do. But sometimes we get these streaks of Hot & Humid weather and I decide that I am not going outside again until...

It cools off a bit!

Morris and I did go for a walk the day before the heat wave struck. It had been so long since I'd gone exploring at the creek.

We crossed the fence into the neighbors pasture as our woods were so thick with growth past the mule's fence-line.
Note to self. When fall arrives we need to repair that one section!

We followed the creek and climbed rocks down into our bottom.
I had expected that the recent hard rains would have washed some of the weeds that are crowding the creek away. 

There is water under these plants! The bottom was covered in Jewel Weed. A quick word about Jewel Weed, the soap made from this plant will put a stop to most any kind of itch and is wonderful to use on bug bites too.

This is how the larger sections of the little creek looked.

And this is how it looks after some cold weather.

Morris and I got quite warm and decided to go home rather than explore anymore in the creek bottom. There was simply no air movement at all and we both were quite hot.

The only good thing I can say about all of this hot and humid weather [and the rain] is that cool fungi will be popping up in the woods here and there and it is rather fun to go hunting them with the camera.

However, our little 'hot' trip was not in vain.

Morris and I found dozens of places where Indian Pipes were coming up out of the ground.

I usually don't look for them until the second week in August, but there they were!

Hopefully the weather will cool off enough so that I can go out this weekend and find some more!

So today, after chores, it looks like another day of working inside on pulling down the old dark paneling in the living room.

The animals all have nice cool shady spots to get into and plenty of fresh cool water. 

A Walk with Old Dog

Yep, Morris and I went for a nice long hike yesterday.  He supervised while I re-cut part of my mule trail in the woods.  Over the summer the berry briers had grown into the trail and I opened it back up now that Autumn is near and the plants are done growing.

We found some interesting plants while we were out hiking.

Here is Blue Coshcosh, also part of the Barberry family.  Scientific name: Caulophyllum thalictroides (L.) Michx. Family Berberidaceae 

It was a startling color to find in the woods.  I'm sure these have grown near my path before but perhaps I just have not seen them!

Just a bit further on we found some more Indian Pipes.  They seem to be abundant even though it is very dry in our area right now.

Yesterday was one of those almost perfect summer days.  Warm with a nice breeze during the day and last night it got down to 59 degrees!
Normally we experience some rather hot and muggy August days.

Actually our whole summer has been milder than in years past.  It has shown up in some of our garden plants, the cool nights have kept them from producing normally.

Yet the milder not muggy and horridly HOT days have provided for better hiking weather.  Morris thoroughly enjoyed playing leader.

He is very good at finding obscure deer trails for us to follow.

Old Dog is a good dog.