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/

MD Soldier's Delight Natural Environmental Area

This five + mile hike was done over two days while I was visiting a family member who is in a physical rehab center nearby.  Knowing that I must at all costs get in at least 3 miles a day, I snuck off during his PT time to walk the very muddy trails at Soldier's Delight Natural Environmental Area. Afterwards I snuck back in to to see how his PT went and to say goodbye and head home. The second day I was so muddy the reception desk lady almost made me shed my boots before going up to see Poppy but when I showed her how muddy my socks were she said "Oh, never mind!" 

First day hike on the Serpentine Trail - wet, rainy, muddy.

The protected area encompasses several hundred acres and contains over 30 rare, threatened, and endangered plants. This is a little depressing considering that barrens ecosystems once occupied over 300,000 acres in Maryland and Pennsylvania. There's been a decades-long battle with developers and zoning to get as much of this eastern prairie conserved. Still - the developments are closing in.

Big 'ole hunk of serpentine, several hundred pounds of dense, heavy chromite ore.

Like the Nottingham Serpentine Barrens close to where I live in PA, the thin, nutrient-poor soils make living here tough unless you are a pitch pine, post oak, or a native grass like Big Bluestem. Being the middle of winter, however, not much was green or growing except the rugged little pines and blankets of moss and reindeer lichen (Cladonia), but without the tall cover of grasses it was easy to see surface mines, pit mines, and serpentine formations. From the mid-1800s valuable chromite  was processed out of the serpentine and sent to the steel mills of Baltimore. At one time the mines of northwestern Baltimore County served as the world leaders in chromium production.

Thin soils barely cover outcrops of serpentine.

The trails were flooded by two days of steady rains. I gave up trying to avoid the pools and mud pits  and just hiked right on through. The downhill trails flowed with water. At the bottom of the hills, the trails were indistinguishable from several busy little streams. Though not the right season to see them, many rare wildflowers have been found in these bottom wetlands where serpentine sands and clay wash off the hills and fill the streambeds with silt and fresh fragments of rock. It's a raw environment where water sheets off the exposed slopes.

Bottom-land stream

Human management of the land dates back to Native American hunting cultures when fires were set regularly to discourage the pitch pine and oak intrusions, keeping grasslands open and attractive to large herbivores. The burning continues under the direction of the state ecosystem restoration team but the only large herbivore left in this area, however, is the ubiquitous White-Tailed Deer, now forced onto shrinking ranges due to extensive housing developments that are closing in on the barrens.  The State has opened up a bow hunting season here to cull the herds that threaten to eat the rare plant communities. I wore my hunter's orange cap today as bow season ends at the end of January.

White-tailed Deer tracks.

Choate Mine, last used 1917-1918.

Chromite from the Choate Mine was used to produce paint pigments and I fondly remember my oil painting classes at Maryland Institute College of Art when instructors warned us "Don't lick your brushes!" But the chromium colors were spectacular on canvas and I can't tell you how many tubes I bought for classes from the college's art supply store.  Chromium reds, yellows, blues ...

Surface pit.

Cladonia macrophyllodes, Large-leafed Cladonia, showing off its little cups.

Minus all the green, growing things, my attention was turned to low-growing mosses and lichens. I really miss not using my macro lens and camera set up today. I guess one of my New Year's resolutions will have to be to get the old Canon cleaned and repaired and back in working order. The tiny cups of the Large-leafed Cladonia lichen made such a great show among the arched, withered grasses and I wished could have gotten some close-in shots.

Bracket fungi.

In some areas, the reindeer moss was so thick and wide it reminded me of the "grey meadows" of Prince Edward Island National Park. In other places I had to use my hiking poles to push apart the thick patches of Greenbrier in order to see the dark mossy ground below. Though DNR has done a great job ridding some of the natural area of this scourge with burning, Greenbriar overtakes much of the wooded landscape to the point it is impassable, closing in even on the trails.

Cladonia portentosa, Reindeer Moss, in a small "grey meadow"  

After hiking through water-filled gullies that looked more like streams than trails, I finally did reach Red Run, a sweet little stream that meanders through a bottom valley. The woods are thick with White and Red Oak and the Sassafras actually has height and girth as compared to the "stick-Sass" on the serpentine bluffs. I watched as small minnows darted out from under ledges and congregated in pools below ribbed-rock riffles.  Finally, the sun came out full force and the deep blue sky reflected in the stream.

Red Run

One of the greatest influences on my young naturalists life was Miss Jean Worthley who produced a public television show for kids called Hodge Podge Lodge. She grew up in this area and was fascinated in her youth by the prairie ecosystems of the barrens. Miss Jean was one of the leading advocates for the preservation of Soldiers Delight. I sang a little "thank you" song on my way up to the last great view across the Bluestem barrens prairie for having such a cool (though wet) place to explore.

The sun finally comes out!

Serpentine Trail (2.5 mi) and Choate Mine Loop (3.2 mi) 

Notes:

Good history on the Friends of Soldiers Delight -  https://soldiersdelight.org/article/soldiers-delight-barrens-preservation-of-a-rare-ecosystem/

A short film from MPT that includes Miss Jean!