This Memorial Day weekend, I traveled with my family to the Poconos and came across some pretty amazing things during a nature walk--the Tumbling Waters trail, which we picked up at the Pocono Environmental Education Center. My first find was a familiar friend, the millipede who I found after turning over a decomposing log...one of my very favorite things to do. If you've read any of my earlier posts, you know that I've had previous experiences with millipedes, learning the hard way that they release a noxious liquid that stains your hands if you hold them for too long, say, during a hike. So this time, I left the little guy alone and simply took photographs.
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| Photo by Sharon Seitz |
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| Photo by Sharon Seitz |
They curl up to protect themselves. They are really quite sturdy and quite beautifully striped--burgundy and dark brown with feathery maroon legs. Millipedes have two pairs of legs on most body segments. Despite "milli" in their name, millipedes do not have 1,000 legs, but common species have anywhere from 36 to 400 legs. The variety I saw is called Narceus americanus commonly called the American Giant Millipede, because it can grow to four inches long.
On this same trail, and to my amazement, I came across not one, but two solitary pink lady's slippers, which is a member of the orchid family. It is really, really rare to see one of these showy flowers in the wild. First of all, it takes many, many years for a seed to become an adult plant. Also, plant collectors like to dig them up and take them home because they are so unusual-looking. And lady's slippers can't grow without the help of a certain fungus and bumble bees.
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| Photo by Sharon Seitz |
The lady's slipper seed does not have a food supply inside it, like most seeds do. It needs the threads of a fungus in the Rhizoctonia genus to break open the seed and attach themselves to it. The fungus will pass on food and nutrients to the lady's slipper seed. The plant will return the favor to the fungus when it is older. The fungus can soak up nutrients from the lady's slipper that it could not get by itself.
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| Photo by Sharon Seitz |
Because the lady's slipper is a closed flower, it takes a strong insect to get inside. The flower smells sweet, so the bumble bee is tricked into thinking it holds nectar. When the bee gets inside it not only finds no nectar, but it realizes it is trapped. It cannot get back out the way it got in. The bumble bee explores and find a new way to squeeze out of the flower. To do so, it must push past the pollen-covered stamen. If the bee gets tricked by another lady's slipper, it will deliver pollen from the first flower, and get covered with pollen again by the new flower. The bee may do this several times before it figures out to avoid lady's slippers. The bee gets nothing out of the relationship but the plant could not make new seeds without the bee.
Another animal I saw was Glyptemys insculpta or the Wood Turtle. I just found this reptile during a walk on the grounds of the Fairway Villas in Bushkill, where we were staying. The guys had just finished playing basket and were blobbing, but I was aching to go for a walk. So I took my camera and started photographing wildflowers. I was walking on a path when I came across the turtle basking in the sun. At first, I thought it was a tortoise because it wasn't in the water and it looked kind of dry. It wasn't until I got home and did a few minutes of research that I discovered the turtle was a Wood Turtle, a species of special concern in Pennsylvania and New York. Needless to say, when I texted a photo of this cool turtle to the guys, they immediately left the villa and met me with their cameras and couldn't stop photographing this handsome turtle.
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| Photo by Sharon Seitz |
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| Photo by Sharon Seitz |
