PA Game Land Wander

Close to home are four different tracts of land under the management of the Pennsylvania Game Commission. These are public hunting lands where we can go to hunt deer, turkey, squirrel, rabbit, and other game animals to put meat on the table. I'm lucky to have Game Lands tracts of  #83, #181, #288, and #136 near by, certainly within my ten-mile-radius of stay-at-home range.

Pincushion Moss

Now and then a relic of an old farm appears and I am reminded of the families that lived on these old roads. Tractor parts, old pails, farming implements - all sooner or later work their way through the leaf litter.  A slender white-walled tire has become a play ground for fox kits. A locust fence post bears the marks of a buck in rut. 

Battered old bucket

Ruin is in place here:

The dead leaves rotting on the ground,

The live leaves in the air

Are gathered in a single dance

That turns them round and round.

The fox cub trots his almost pathless path

As silent as his absence.

These passings resurrect

A joy without defect,

The life that steps and sings in ways of death.

- Wendell Berry, from Sabbaths - 1979, IV

Ground Pine, a club moss

I love coming across the club mosses since it's a plant that vines through all of my hikes from Vermont and Prince Edward Island to New Hampshire and Wisconsin. It's Pleistocene ancestors towered fifty feet above the ground. There are two places north of here where I can go to find fossilized trunks of the tree-form club moss. 

Sharp-shinned hawk feather

Pattern is everywhere in the old pine woods. From the cross-crossed needles that carpet the forest floor to the yellow-on-green veining of the leaves of Downy Rattlesnake Plantain, my eye is drawn to the way lines and colors compete for attention and how some animals and insects adopt these patterns to blend in with them. Though a hawk feather stands out on the ground, I hold it up against the pattern of the pine branches above and almost lose sight of it.

Downy Rattlesnake Plantain

The pine woods were planted in the 1960s when many state agencies were still adhering to the "plantation" model of reforestation - planting in neat rows all of a same species. The woods in this particular game land are way past their prime and were never timbered out or select cut. It's a mix of dark shade, toppled trees aged out, and a persistent thicket of an understory made up of black cherry and beech that will one day replace the pines and allow other species to grow. 

Dried raceme of Rattlesnake Plantain

A concern for native orchids, however, is plant collectors. I was out walking on sunny May afternoon in a distant tract of #136 and found two very nice folks loading their Subaru with two five gallon buckets of Lady Slippers they'd dug from the forest. They played innocent but I had the sense they were pretty good at what they were doing. I took their plate number down and called my local warden when I got home. He was happy to report that this couple were "old hands" at orchid theft and that the plants had probably already been put into containers and sold, but that he would pay them a visit. I learned later that they were fined.

Wild orchids, like the Rattlesnake Plantain, are commonly found in rich woodlands. Pennsylvania has 54 different species of native orchid found in our woods. The little Rattlesnake Plantain makes its presence known year-round by keeping intact its woody-stemmed raceme that stays erect above the forest floor. One tract of game lands that I love to explore has yielded over a dozen orchid species, but it takes a slow, mindful hunt to find them, and a good bit of bog-edge walking. 

Black Puffball

Spotted Wintergeen

After wandering off-trail through the old pine woods we jumped back on the main trail, an old road, and wound all the way around the tract for a three mile loop. Another cold front was building from the west and the woods filled with mist and light rain by the time we climbed back into the car.