sidetracked-by-nature

[sidetracked-by-nature]

Part of why I love nurse logs and nurse stumps so very much is because they are a perfect example of the life-death-life cycle in nature. Tiny bits of us begin dying--skin cells, epithelial sheddings, hair--from the moment we are born, and in a living ecosystem they are immediately scooped up by some other being who uses them to fuel another day of life. This conifer tree was feeding tiny detritivores and decomposers with flakes of dead bark and shed needles in its very first year, and at the same time drawing carbon from a million different deaths into itself from the air, storing more and more as it grew.

And now it passes that bounty directly on to more living green things and fungi and microbes. The nurse log may be the symbol of death renewed into life on the forest floor, but the tree was already within that reciprocal system from germination forward. So we too are dying every moment of our lives but also capturing the deaths of others to keep the flames within burning day after day. The apple that I eat is from a tree that wrapped itself around the mortality of countless corpses in the soil, recycled the carbon from a million places into vessels that hold the incomparable energy of the sun.

Once you look closely enough at them, life and death are not separate; they simply balance and rebalance throughout the existence of one being, until its story has ended while sparking the stories of so, so many others. The nurse log is becoming ferns and fungi, while the ferns and fungi will be forever inseparable from the ancient tree that gave them their start in life. The decaying wood we see here will eventually become imperceptible to our eyes, but it will persist through these and many, many other lives of the forest.

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Various species of bats covered in dew during hibernation

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Photos from April 2nd and 3rd.

Seeing the little flowers on the shrubs at school is so nice! I also saw these really neat looking berries I'd never seen before. Also the pollen in Virginia is god awful - send help.

IDs:

1. Indian hawthorn (pink flowers! I see a lot of white ones, but the pink was a nice surprise)

2. Japanese fatsia

3. Brown thrasher (very camouflaged!) in leaves

4. pollen on the ground after a big rain storm 🫠

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I got to go on my first birding field trip with my university's birding club this morning!

Notable sightings:

Blue headed vireo

Northern Parula (heard only)

This specific lil guy (Yellow-rumpedwarbler) with a POWER STANCE lol

picture is kinda ass bc its on my phone zoomed in like 20x but it makes it even funnier imo lollll

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I found a ton of little splitgill mushrooms on a tree near the water the other day! There were also LOTS of snails 🐌

IDs:

1. Splitgill mushroom (Schizophyllum commune)

2. Marsh periwinkle snails (Littoraria irrorata)

3. Male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)

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There was a fat little American Robin in my tree the other day 🥰

Plant ID: Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis)

Bird ID: American Robin (Turdus migratorius)

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This plant may be considered a weed by some, but they've always been one of my favorite parts of spring!

Plant ID: purple dead nettle (Lamium purpureum)

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I suddenly found myself hyperfixated on nature last week. So, I'm starting a new blog to dump all of my identifications and learnings! I've taken a particular interest in fungi, trees, and birds, so I expect I'll be posting quite a bit about that. Here's to growing closer to the world around me!

pictures in this post:

1. A baby plant growing inside of an Eastern redbud in my front yard! (Cercis canadensis)

2. Some neat lichens (unsure of specifics, but there's a mix of crustose and foliose) on a Japanese maple (Acer palmatum)

3. A branch of leaves of a Hidcote St. John's Wort shrub (Hypericum hidcoteense)