North Shore Naturalist

It's now been a few weeks since the first spring ephemerals started blooming. Although many of them are still in bloom, there time is coming to an end until next year. Luckily the second wave of blooms are here to take their place. As I've been exploring for the last few days I've been taken aback by how many blooms are out, every year around this time I forget the absolute biomass that our ecosystems produce, although just for a short time before fall and winter return. Graham's rockcress Rock whitlow mustard - special concern Lowbush blueberry Serviceberries Fire cherry Bearberry Hookedspur violet Virginia strawberry Small pussytoes (almost in bloom) Virginia saxifrage Sand bittercress Rock harlequin Nodding trillium Pink lady's slipper Striped coralroot Dwarf bilberry is a rarer species, I found it but sadly didn't find any flowering plants Some other noteworthy finds recently:  Cinquefoil sp. (I think maybe costal cinquefoil, but I'll have to check back ...

Three days ago I was headed home from Two Harbors. I figured I'd stop at the Split Rock wayside and spend a few minutes at the beach. That turned into about four hours. First I sat and just watched the waves coming in for a while and when I got bored of that I started looking at some of the roses on the eroding stream bank. I've found quite a few Diplolepis radicum galls there in the past, and today was no exception. I've only seen this species along the shoreline on eroding hills, which makes sense as they mostly gall underground on the rhizomes.m This is the only habitat that you see a bunch of rhizomes exposed at the surface. I'd guess that this species is pretty ubiquitous throughout the region though.  Diplolepis radicum gall on a rose rhizome While doing that I heard a few load slaps on the water, I kept looking back but could never find the culprit, I assumed it might be a fish jumping. Then on the third slapped I watched the water for a few minutes to try to fig...

I made my way out to a nice stand of northern red oaks, planning on looking for bud galls but got distracted by other things. Today's focus ended up being finding things living inside of acorns. As I was walking along the trail I noticed that some of the acorns were just staring to sprout and send out their radicles. This reminded me of a little inquiry project I did last year when it was getting pretty late in the spring and all of the viable acorns had sent out their radicles (some were even starting to leaf out), so it was obvious which ones were not viable. I assumed that the main culprit was an acorn weevil (Curculio sp.), but decided to cut open ten acorns to see why they didn't germinate. Of those ten, eight of them had obvious weevil damage (usually the larva was still present). To my surprise two of them had cryptic cells of a gall wasp in the genus Melikaiella! With this in mind, I was curious what else I might find inside of these acorns. The most charismatic find of...