Light rain fell as I left the Valley but, as usual, it fell more heavily as I neared the downtown area. Fog lay thick over the channel and monstrous cruise ships vied for docking space, ready to disgorge thousands of tourists. Despite all that, a friend and I went up the tram on Mount Roberts to do a little exploring on a day in mid-July.
Surprise! As we started up the trail, the skies almost cleared and we were ahead of the mobs of visitors. As I looked down the channel, I could even see boats on open water through breaks in the belt of fog. Owing to several constraints, we turned around a short distance above the resurrected cross, at the spot where we usually find frog orchids, which were not yet open.
Bird activity was meagre, offering only quick glimpses. I think I saw a golden-crowned sparrow, maybe a fox sparrow and some kind of warbler. On the way down, I was startled almost out of my boots by an equally startled something that crashed off in dense vegetation, never to be seen. Maybe a grouse?
The flower show was dominated by geranium, with considerable paintbrush and valerian in some spots, and several other species here and there (groundsel, bistort, miners’ lettuce, etc.). Fireweed buds were not yet open. The tiny white flowers of valerian and partridgefoot were visited by even tinier beetles and flies, doing who knows what. There were a few bumblebees and I watched some of them. They usually showed clear preferences, often for geranium flowers, sometimes briefly touching paintbrush or monkshood but quickly going back to more geranium. One bee found some little stands of whorled lousewort and spent her time poking into one flower after another, ignoring everything else.
Tree foam can form when running water collects debris and dissolved materials. (Photo by Kerry Howard)
One day toward the end of July, I walked with a friend up the Crow Hill trail and through the big meadow, avoiding the muddiest spots made by recent deluges. We immediately discovered that a bear had been there before us, leaving a trail of bent vegetation, numerous digs in the moss layers, and a tidy scat. I sure would like to know what it was grubbing for!
We found lots of the small white swamp gentians, but none of the big blue ones that we had found in a previous year. Bog Swertia (its common name is the same as its genus) was blooming, with fringed grass-of-Parnassus in places, and even a nice stand of purple monkshood in one corner. Scattered here and there were quite a few ladies’ tresses orchids in full bloom. Chocolate lilies had produced fat seed pods but, interestingly, almost always just one pod per stem, rarely two. But this plant often bears several flowers on a stem — was pollination limited this year or did the plants here have insufficient resources to produce more fruits?
Cheerful little white eyebrights lined the trail. So-called sticky false asphodel (formerly Tofieldia, now Triantha glutinosa) had set seed, and fat green caterpillars were busily chewing on the reddish capsules and enclosed seeds. These caterpillars do not get stuck on the sticky stem as smaller bugs do — where they can be digested by the plant, which gets some nutrition that way. We noticed that the leaves of wild crabapple trees were already turning shades of orange, but surely it was too soon for fall to be here! Several of the small shore pines bore large “galls” on their usually-dead branches. These are probably caused by a fungus known as the western gall rust. I’ve been told that branch death usually comes not from the fungus itself but from secondary infections by other fungi or insects.
A green caterpillar chews on a capsule of sticky false asphodel. (Photo by Mary F. Willson)
Another friend noticed some foamy bubbles on a tree trunk and wondered what made it. We speculated about the water balance of the tree, given the recent big rains, but that was way off base. It seems that such foam is a bit like a sort of soap, forming as rainwater runs down the trunk. That stem-flow picks up debris and chemical molecules from the bark and perhaps the air, and in the moving water, that makes the bubbles. That’s rather like what sometimes happens in some of our streams, which get loaded with tannins and other dissolved chemical molecules too, making suds-like foam on the stream. That’s not necessarily pollution; it can all be from dissolved natural materials.
Out on the dike trail in late July, walkers spotted a brood of mallards in the deep pond behind the little shelter. Nine tiny, fuzzy ducklings! That was a treat. But we wondered how well such late broods are likely to survive, compared to broods earlier in the season…
• Mary F. Willson is a retired professor of ecology. “On The Trails” appears every Wednesday in the Juneau Empire.
