Northwoods Naturalist

Today David, Brie, Logan and I drove to the end of the driveway and snowshoed around for a while, collecting birch bark for winter survival class. From a distance I noticed one of the large maple trees had a streak of darker bark running up and down it. As I walked closer, I saw it was because that part of the trunk was wet. I gave it a little taste and it was nice and sweet. Yep, the sap of at least a few of the sugar maples is flowing, in January! Quite a surprise, usually in this area the maple tapping season begins in early April and lasts for a couple of weeks. But, with such warm weather today and the past week or so, I guess it isn't so surprising.  Sap flowing down a sugar maple (Acer saccharum) trunk This is quite the phenological event. So far it's been an exceptionally warm winter with little snow, lots of things seem to be happening "out of season" this year. Snowshoe hares had white coats with no snow to camouflage them for quite a while, (each day there

Ever since I first ran into Abrothallus peyritschii a few moths ago, I have been obsessively searching for more lichenicolous fungi. They are quite an interesting group of organisms; being so understudied, along with being rather small and indistinct always makes them fun to stumble across. I had been researching some species to go and try to find in the field. One of the species that I read about was Abrothallus halei; the holotype for which was collected by Cliff Wetmore just east of Hare Lake back in 1999, but wasn't described until 2010. Apparently there have only been collections from MN, WV,  ME, and Norway, so I figured it would be worth the effort to go and look for. Little did I know the adventures that that would bring about! The first trip out to Goldeneye Lake was on Jan. 4. I had been there a couple of months before on a natural history hike with Charlie. From that I knew that there were quite a few older maple trees absolutely covered with tree lungwort, I figured it&