Field of trillium
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Spring

  • Traveling Cherry Millipede

    Traveling Cherry Millipede

    In 2023, I started seeing these millipedes that I had not noticed in the past. The iNaturalist site said these are the Traveling Cherry Millipede (Pleuroloma flavipes). One can see these little guys from North Dakota, to Connecticut, to northern Louisiana and even southern Texas. The traveling cherry millipede does secrete toxic cyanide compounds to…

  • Northern Blue Flag Iris

    Northern Blue Flag Iris on the edge of the pond

    Last year I photographed the irises on the west edge of the pond, but I never saw them in bloom. This year I did the workday on June 1st and the irises were in bloom. Now, one can identify them as northern blue flag irises (Iris versicolor, which means “variously colored”). The iris has 6 petals,…

  • Spring Beauty

    Spring Beauty Flower

    The Spring Beauty (Claytonia) is one of the spring ephemerals. It is a low plant with loose clusters of 5 petals white or pink flowers, striped with dark pink. It has a pair of slender leaves This picture was taken on April 4, 2024, on our first Spring Serendipity Walk. In the morning at 10:00,…

  • Spring Ephemerals in Scarlett Mitchell Woods

    A single trillium

    e-phem-er-al something that lasts for a very short time : ‘fashions are ephemeral’ The word is derived from the Greek ephemeros, ‘lasting for only a day’. To read more about spring ephemerals see this article by Robin Sweetser. This article will talk about the following 10 ephemerals:

  • Spring 2024 Serendipity Walk – Path Less Taken

    Path less taken walk collage

    The last of four Spring Serendipity Walks took place on May 18, 2024. This time we focused on Scarlett Mitchell Woods – West, sometimes referred to as the Korschak section after the previous owners.  It took 25 years to procure this section with funds from the City of Ann Arbor, a grant from the State…

  • Spring 2024 Serendipity Walk – Creatures of the Pond

    Spring 2024 Creatures of the pond, collage

    Michael led us on a walk to the pond and looked for bugs, larvae and nymphs in the water. We found a red water mite, water fleas, a blood sucker and a variety of larvae. The pond was not teeming with bugs and larvae as was expected. The bugs and larvae are food for other…

  • Prickly Ash

    Prickly Ash Collage

    Prickly Ash (Zanthoxylum americanum) has a long litany of common names including toothache tree on Wikipedia. The oil extracts from the bark of the prickly ash have been used in traditional medicine and studied for antifungal and cancer killing properties. This was photographed along the path to the pond.

  • Bloodroot

    Bloodroot plant

    Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) sounds like a plant from Professor Pomona Sprout’s Herbology class at Hogwarts. It is definitely a real plant. In reading Wikipedia, one learns that the red sap can kill skin cells but may find some use in helping with cancer. This plant was near the entrance where the path branches towards the pond.

  • Springtime on the Pond

    Springtime in the animal kingdom means a time of rebirth. This was evident from this picture taken on April 26, 2024 at the pond by Pat of a mama and her 9 ducklings.

  • Spring 2024 Serendipity Walk – Birding and Mindfulness

    Birding and Mindfulness walk collage

    Thanks so much for attending our Birding and Mindfulness Walk held on Saturday, April 20 – 10:00 am.  Hope you had as good a time as I did! I looked up the swallows that were so gracefully flying over the pond and then, prompted by a list of swallows, clearly remembered that they were Rough-Winged swallows.…