MD C&O Canal Section 3: McKees Beshers to Dickerson Conservation Area

For our next section of our C&O Towpath walk, my sister and I did the 14 mile stretch from McKees Beshers Wildlife Management Area to Dickerson Conservation Area in Montgomery County, MD. This section takes up a huge river bend in the Potomac. It was a fine misty day with a low cloud deck and a few sprinkles early on, but with beautiful filtered light we were snapping wildflower pictures and shots of fungi and forest the whole way. 

Large-Flowered Leafcup, Polymnia uvedalia - a nice find!

The canal was built on the bend and in places it hugs tall cliffs while the enormous flood plain spread out towards the Potomac. It was nice to find a hardy Large-Flowered Leafcup growing right on the canal. In New York this is a threatened plant and as far west as Wisconsin, it receives protection in many conservation areas. It's not rare here, but not common either. Its superpower is surviving floods along moody rivers, anchored tight with massive root systems, able to re-emerge even when buried beneath many feet of flood-built sandbar and silt bank. 

Rough Horsetail, Equisetum hyemale - a "living fossil" 

Another alluvial survivor is Rough Horsetail, a plant that has survived since Devonian times, four-hundred million years ago, when it first appears in fossil records. This period was when much of the surrounding rust iron sands were deposited from eroding mountain ranges to form the thick red sandstone cliffs that rise up along the canal. We imagined the landscape of the Devonian where this first plant emerged - a drifting continent of the southern hemisphere, Gondwana, that would eventually drift north and become part of the great Supercontinent Pangea. Horsetails hung on for the ride and have survived eons of change. 

A very young tree bank hedge - roots will knit a vulnerable bank in place. 

A mature tree hedgerow to shade the path and anchor the rise. 

Along the towpath (thank you Justice William O. Douglas) trees grow purposefully along the canal. It's hard to know which were planted by nature and which were planted (or protected) by people long ago to serve the needs of canal operations. Either way, the utility of trees in the ancient art of hedge building for farming, fencing, and road support, the park service approach to managing them seems to be paying heed to this old tradition. There were many tagged and flagged trees along the way marked for care, removal, or trimming and there was a stretch of new tree-hedge that will serve to hold banks in place as the open hedge matures. It's great insurance against the damaging floods here.  

Smooth Blue Aster - a fall beauty.

Fall Phlox, Phlox paniculata 

Gold Moth cat, Basilodes pepita - in a "you can't see me" head tuck 

Flooding is part of the annual cycle of the life of a Piedmont river. There have been some real whoppers in my lifetime here on the Susquehanna and the general store/cafe at White's Ferry was sure to remind us that the biggest and most destructive floods of the Mid-Atlantic have happened within living memory. I remember like it was yesterday when Tropical Storm Agnes dropped feet of rain in our area of Southern PA/ Northern MD in 1972. Our family was stranded in the creek valley where we lived, surrounded by a lake of water. A mother Bobcat and her kittens took shelter in our basement and floated happily around my father's office on a sofa cushion until the flood subsided. A National Guard helicopter dropped food, emergency supplies and even the U.S. Mail (!). In this big bend of the Potomac, floods can be catastrophic particularly where people have built things like towns, canals, homes. But it was the Civil War that turned Edwards Ferry and Whites Ferry canal towns into militarized war zones caused both canal towns to decline and floods after the war swept what remained downstream.   

The developed floodplain often included ferry crossings and fords. 

The cycle of flood and saturated soils has been critical to such rich plant and animal life of the flood plain. But as easily as floods can deposit nutrient rich materials within these woods, they can just as easily remove them. Flood scouring creates interior ponds that fill with amphibian eggs and calling frogs. River boulders and large cobble are piled against enormous Sycamores that are more than able to bear the force and weight of moving water. Floods also carry seeds in and out, some native and others alien, invasive weeds. It seems this was a good year for Japanese Hops on the river bank. Ouch.

Wingstem, Actinomeris alterniflora, tall stems and floppy flowers.

Dryad's Saddle Cerioporus squamosus, a large 15" bracket fungi, holding water.

Wood Ear Fungus - a little flabby.

We assisted a Box Turtle, a heavy and healthy female, across a road and watched a Black Rat Snake explore a tree along the path. There were dozens of Painted Turtles hauled out on logs in the canal, their shells covered in pond weed and algae looking like great lumps of moss with heads. Frogs chirped and growled and barked and bellowed from the floodplain and the watered sections of canal and interior scour ponds, an amphibian paradise. 

Black Rat Snake, 4' and curious.

This old Maple shaded the lockhouse in the 1800s at Lock 26

Because a flood plain is a risky place to put a business or home and because there is fierce development that threatens to gobble up the natural heritage of Montgomery County, this river corridor is protected conservation land. For now this landscape serves as a natural commons, blending historic preservation with natural history and providing people with quiet sanctuary of protected lands - especially in these strange times. The idea of an ecological commons along this river is not new, however, as environmental historian James Rice argues in his book Nature and History of the Potomac Country (2009). I'll review that book for our next section hike and post it here.   

The Great Bend section. 

Notes:

A great collection of pictures of the old maple at Lock 26 https://www.canaltrust.org/discoveryarea/lock-26/

James Rice. Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 

 

PA Piedmont Forest Glades: Grasslands Under Canopy

The Piedmont Foothills of Pennsylvania contain a variety of habitats that harbor unique plant and animal communities. One of my favorite places to aimlessly wander are the dry ridge tops of these hills where forested grassland can often be found growing on thin, rocky soils. In fall, as the canopy thins and grasses begin to yellow,  winds from the north drive out the heat of summer and receive the first waves of warblers and hawks. These high glades have experienced a range of human impacts in agriculture and logging, but with time they seem to have come full circle as productive forage patches.

 

These were natural high, dry pastures for cattle owned by early settler families who witnessed the last of the wild elk and bison to come through Pennsylvania to winter here. The Susquehannock people, too, were gone by the late 1700s,  along with their carefully tended fire-managed blueberry balds. Without the seasonal migrations of elk and managed fires, forested grasslands not grazed by domestic cattle, goats, and sheep soon succumbed to weedy undergrowth. Some of that weedy growth harbored toxic plants that made life difficult if not deadly domestic animals and their farm families. 

Back when families drank the milk from their own dairy cows, Snakeroot poisoning was common among those who pastured their cattle in wooded clearings. Tremetol, the toxin found in the plant can  cause heart problems and severe tremors - even death.  Before homogenization became standard practice in the dairy industry during the 1940s, tremetol was carried undiluted into dairy products like milk, cheese, and butter.  Accumulation of toxins in the body could seriously sicken and even kill anyone who consumed enough dairy and meat from animals that grazed on Snakeroot.  Young humans and calves nursing from their cow-moms were most at risk.  It was so common among farm families in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid-West that it was referred to as "the trembles." As noted in a circular published by the University of Illinois in 1935, "the progress of the disease is usually rapid and mortality is high..." (see Notes).

Northern Cinnabar Polypore.

Today there are no cattle left in this woodland pasture but the grasslands persist due to the heavy concentration of Whitetail Deer. They avoid the Snakeroot, so it grows in dispersed patches here and there.  As I was exploring,  two cautious bucks, each carrying heavy racks of antlers, kept a wary eye on me but did not leave the glade.  A doe and two fawns of this year and a third, a yearling, grazed unconcernedly on the edge of the woods near a picnic site where the grass is cut and White Clover is abundant.  Between me and the clover-eating deer stood a patch of highly invasive Beefsteak Plant with its small spikes of purple-pink blossoms and deeply veined leaves.  This garden escape is a real problem in the D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania area, readily displacing natives and easily reseeding via wind into dry sites. Like the native Snakeroot, it is toxic to grazing animals but it was pretty clear that these deer don't like it either. I wonder if next year this patch will reseed into the glade and displace the grasses preferred by the deer? 

Beefstake Plant, Perilla frutescens.  Invasive!

I wanted to go much deeper into the dry glade but the deer were there and I felt it best to let them graze in peace. As I stood at the edge looking in, I was gifted with a Common Yellowthroat male still singing his "witchety witchety" song, decked out in his somewhat faded black mask. He'll be moving on tonight continuing his journey south. Not so the deer, which rely on these forested grasslands for fall and winter forage and I hope next fall it will not be a huge patch of Beefsteak Plant! 

Notes: 

University of Illinois, Extension Circular 436: "White Snakeroot Poisoning" (1935)  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/32957/1057734.pdf?sequence=2

MD Soldiers Delight Natural Environmental Area: No Calcium and a Red-Mouth

We hiked today for a few miles through Soldiers Delight Natural Area in Western Baltimore County to listen to and explore the varied habitats of a serpentine barrens. The underlying bedrock and thin soils are full of heavy metals, mineral poor, and inhospitable for most plants. The words toxic, poisonous, and rare seemed to pique my teenage grandkid's interest as I described this protected landscape.  

Serpentine bedrock and thin soils below the grasslands.

There many kinds of "barrens," and this was Kenz's first time on a serpentine barrens, an uncommonly rare ecosystem found in Maryland, quite different from her beloved and plentiful pine barrens of New Jersey. We hiked through the high grasslands and down through richer woodland along small streams. We compared the variety of plants we experienced in each place. It is mid-September and many native grasses are in bloom. Goldenrod lights up the hillsides in swaths of yellow. Virginia Pines framed the old fields and - our favorite - scraggly old Post and Blackjack Oaks, stood defiant against the harsh conditions of nutrient poor soils. 

The stark differences between the plant communities on serpentine soils and what was growing down slope in richer soils was dramatic. The difference between the two sites comes down to Calcium.  A micro-nutrient essential for plant growth, the absence of Calcium is a limiting factor for what can and can't grow in serpentine areas.  On serpentine bedrock and its weathered, thin soils, Calcium is absent while Magnesium is very high. It's a toxic environment where grasses and some very tough trees dominate. 

We encountered a Common Wood Nymph butterfly on its last legs, flopping and weak, struggling across the trail. I moved it carefully to the side and watched as it struggled to climb a blade of Purple Top Grass in a sea of Little Blue Stem, an iconic species of the Eastern Prairie. We looked hard for some of the rare butterflies as well but struck out this time. 

As we walked, I was thinking about all the different kinds of prairie that I've visited. I love them all. Grasslands are some of my favorite places to be, especially the rolling Blue Hills of Kansas and the gravel prairies of glaciated Illinois and Wisconsin. The oak-savanna of Iowa and the Appalachian balds are some of my favorite butterfly spots.   I remembered the Scrub Oak leaf that a grad school friend brought me from the high chaparral of California and wondered where I'd put it.  I found it later pressed in my Peterson's Trees of the Western U.S. still smelling of sagebrush. I found a fallen Post Oak leaf to compare it to at home. 

Little Bluestem, iconic native Eastern Shortgrass species. 

 Dense Blazing Star, an autumn-blooming grassland flower.

Purple False Foxglove

Calcium is essential to plant growth and is absorbed by roots and carried upwards through the xylem to where it is used to build cell walls, especially at the growing tips. But it cannot be stored by the plant - it must be readily available when needed in the soils where the plant grows. Serpentine is a terrible "keeper" of Calcium  and challenges plants with a superabundance of heavy metals. Kenz is just beginning sophomore year in high school and takes her first biology course this semester, so a discussion of micro-nutrients and cell growth seemed the perfect topic to mention as we walked. Hiking through Calcium deficient fields of prairie grass made a great see-for-yourself experience of adaptive and tolerant plant communities.

Down-slope forest

We looped around through Greenbriar thickets and mixed oak-pine mixed deciduous woods and made note of how trees contributed leaf litter and decaying wood to building a soil base. Here we found a variety of fall fungi and made quick forays into the woods to snap pictures of those that caught our eye. Are there fungi in the grasslands? we wondered. Are mycorrhizal networks present in serpentine soils and if so, how do plant communities utilize them? Ah, ecology, I said to Kenz, who gave me the famous teenager's shrug.  

Wrinkled Psathyrella, Psathyrella piluliformis 

Turkey Tail, Trametes versicolor

Agaricomycetes sp

This mushroom's collar has just fallen away. 

The coolest find came from the woods. The bright red, yellow-rimmed Red-Mouth Bolete (below) is a poisonous mushroom that practically screams 'Don't Eat Me!" Because we were in a protected area I didn't want to disturb anything so I explained how, when sliced open, the flesh of this big poisonous mushroom turns a crazy blue when exposed to air. Okay, that impressed the teenager. Poison! Bleeding blue! Now we're planning a search of a our local game lands woods for the Red-Mouth Bolete here in PA where we might have the opportunity to open one up. 

Red-mouth Bolete - Poisonous beauty

Notes:

Friends of Soldiers Delight website offers a ton of conservation and history information. Lists of rare species can be found here.  https://soldiersdelight.org/article/soldiers-delight-barrens-preservation-of-a-rare-ecosystem/

The In-Between Season

It is late summer and with the barest of hints, the seasons begin to blend one into the other so that when I look up from treading the trail with Amos, I think I notice some small change, a falling leaf, a shift of light. I can see a little more of the scaffold of the forest. The old Dogwoods in the meadow always catch my attention when the crickets go full chorus at their loudest. These are survivors of blights and fungal attacks and so are twisted and gnarly and tough.  

Mennonite couple on a woods walk in early September.

Another week goes by and now I am sure of it - autumn is on the doorstep. Cooler nights sweep in with a cold front that seems to shove all things hot and humid out to sea. The Walnut in the bottom of the yard is simultaneously turning yellow and shedding leaves. Birds begin their southerly migrations. The Catbirds are gone. I already miss them. I'm drawn to almost daily walks on the game lands and my local state park, Susquehannock.

Bjerkandera adusta, a common bracket fungi on hardwood logs.

I was hiking with family this weekend on the C&O Canal, the next section of our end-to-end walk from Washington D.C. to Cumberland, MD. While we chatted about things happening in our lives, we stopped frequently to remark about sounds and colors. "This is becoming my favorite time," said my niece, "the in-between summer and fall."  We noticed low light by late afternoon and by five p.m.,  Barred Owls echoed through the swamps at McKee Besher Wildlife Management Area, our destination for the day.  We slowed our walk to take in the setting sun and the darkening lowland woods  

Turkey Tail, Trametes versicolor, another common autumn bracket fungi. 

The in-between time is subtle yet exciting. The PA Game Commission has turned on its popular live streaming Elk Cam up in Elk County and I bookmark it on my computer anticipating the action of the rut. As I write this post, there is a  streaming chorus of field crickets and conversational crows in a cut-cover corn field and I stop what I'm doing to take a scan of the woods edge. I go back to my writing when a deep grunt erupts from the woods and I quickly switch tabs to take a look as the camera scans the clearing. Elk? Bear? I make my annual vow to get up there and go elk watching on those amazing public lands. 

Old blazes mark a well-trodden trail at Susquehannock State Park. 

Since our treks to Hawk Mountain, I've seen a dozen Coopers Hawks shoot through the woods on my walks.  I've  heard as many Red-shouldered and Red-tailed Hawks. At night Screech Owls whinny and Lightning Bugs flicker their very last. The last flash I noted was Thursday night. None since. Thistles, Fleabanes, and Milkweed have gone to seed.  Sunflower heads are drooping and nodding in the garden and sparkle with Goldfinches picking seeds. I filled my feeders for the first time since late spring. Before I could get to the porch,  a Red-Bellied Woodpecker and her two offspring came right away to investigate. 

Painted rock sits peacefully in a tree cricket-filled forest. 

The Red-Bellied Woodpecker was teaching her young ones to take seeds from the feeder. She was patient and tender and allowed me to stand nearby as she demonstrated how to chose a seed, crack it, and discard the shells. She chittered to them as they perfected their take-and-break method. I could hear the crackle of sunflower seeds and watched white flakes of shell drop to the grass. The scene was not the electric red and yellow of mid-October, nor the sizzle and drench of a hot humid day, but it has a tender energy that defines this in-between time of transition. 

White Wood Aster

Great Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica

Walking Amos in game lands over in Holtwood, I took in the big view and noted the colors and sounds of the meadows. Grasshoppers were everywhere, rasping and chewing, exploding up just as my boot touched the ground with a startling snap and clatter of wings. There are no complex algorithms or mechanized process to consider, just the shortening of days and the timed responses to shifts in the photoperiod to elicit the first elk bugle of the year, for Fleabane to burst its encapsulated seed head, and to ignite this chorus of insect song and grasshopper profusion so loud I can hardly hear a single bird call. There are no elk here, but I wish there were. I vow again to make the journey north - and soon.

Seedheads burst open, ready to catch a breeze.

The in-between is not all peace and cricket song, however.  Black bears are increasingly emboldened by the quick pickings in the orchard and farm yard. Winter is coming and they are beginning to feed heavily, greedily, on anything they can rustle up - even if it's on the front porch. It's best to bring in the bird feeders at night. Hawks leave piles of feathers where they've picked off a neo-tropical migrant near the feeder station. With each brush of a hurricane from the south or swift moving front from the west,  there are new obstacles to climb over or through as newly windthrown trees and or broken limbs lay across the trail. These are the exclamation points in an otherwise slow turning of September's transition.

In a time that is generally quiet, and for some, spiritual, yet we are challenged to accept the harshness of nature along with the beauty. We live in an altered state of nature, a condition born of hundreds of years of human management and so it's easy to feel settled and peaceful. But the struggle for winter's survival begins now and in earnest, no matter how simplified we've made the landscape. People who live close to the land, however, do not ignore subtle signals and they are busy preparing,  taking inventory, and stocking up. Venison will be in the freezer by Christmas. Canned vegetables are filling the pantry now. Refilled water jugs are stowed out of sight for when the power goes out come winter storms. 

Goldenrod signals the time to prepare.

Most of us live in a de-natured world. We no longer fear our natural environment so it doesn't figure into modern living.  Nothing much is left in our human-controlled landscape that could eat us, so other than threats of severe weather, natural environment is relegated to the background. Here on the game lands, however, I see another subtle sign of a season's turning - the presence of a man and his hunting dog, both outfitted in blaze orange but without a gun for today is Sunday. Soon we are chatting as our dogs sniff and wag and greet. 

Walking Amos in the game lands.

It has become something of a fall tradition that we walk our dogs on Sunday mornings and eventually cross paths.  His yellow lab, Cory, stands patiently while coonhound Amos bounces all around. Cory's dad catches me up on all things Game Commission and he's not too happy about a recent change.  As frustrating as the regulations are to him, however, he says he's glad we have so much public hunting land to use. He volunteers with a fish and game club to help clear trails here and he knows how precious this landscape is. "Seems like every time I turn around, Lancaster County is turning another farm into a subdivision."  

Hairy Thoroughwort and Clubmoss. 

At the end of the 19th century, Pennsylvania's landscapes looked very different. Most forests had been logged off. Farmlands, much of it degraded and exhausted, took the place of the woods. Deer were rare. Elk and bear and mountain lion had been hunted to extinction. The Game Commission formed out of the State Sportsman Association in an attempt to stop the wastage and begin the process of restoring habitat and populations of game.  By 1897 laws and regulations were enacted to protect what little was left but with an eye to the future. Enforcing those new laws was dangerous work. Nearly twenty wardens were shot and killed by 1905. That same year the PGC was given the task to acquire and secure as conservation acreage and twenty game lands were established. Now there are 335 designated conservation areas protecting 1.5 million acres for regulated public hunting, the protection of natural heritage, and the increase of biodiversity. 

From the Hawk Watch Overlook, Susquehannock State Park

After our game lands visit, Amos and I stopped by Susquehannock State Park and wander out to the overlook where a pair of hawk spotters had set up their scopes and cameras. I asked about the early count so far. I'm told there have been a few osprey and quite a few hawks. The spotter showed me her clipboard. I mentioned I'd been up to Hawk Mountain a few weekends in a row recently. "Aren't we lucky?" she says, "To be able to catch the early stream of migrants?" As I look upriver across the Susquehanna Valley I am thankful, too, that we have so much protected land - almost everything thing in my view is conservation land. The trees looked a little yellower and the sky heavy with cold front squall clouds, subtle signs of changes to come. 

Notes:

My niece and I marveled at the past-bloom sunflower fields at McKee Beshers Wildlife Management Area near the C&O Canal. Acres of heavy, nodding heads of sunflower seeds made for the biggest feeding station I've ever seen. 

 https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Pages/publiclands/central/sunflowers.aspx