View From A Campsite

VIEW FROM A CAMPSITE
 October 04 & October 06

When a flock of grackles accumulated noisily in a black cherry tree behind us, it was the first sign of life at our campsite in almost a day, except for a chipmunk who chattered from somewhere hidden in the background. Somehow we had expected something a little more profound when we carefully picked out our campsite in a heavily wooded section of Sandbanks’ Woodland Campground, but not so buried in the wilderness that we couldn’t take advantage of what the clearings just beyond the trees away might bring. Sparrows of many species were congregating and we wanted to see them too, without straying too far from our campsite.

Two days later, it appeared, right after an all night rain. A yellow-bellied sapsucker made a brief visit to a conifer beside the trailer, spiralling around the trunk in a business like fashion, but always aware that I was watching its antics carefully. Like a sentinel, it heralded the appearance of a half dozen flickers, followed by a red-breasted nuthatch, then a pileated woodpecker which refused to come any closer than a tantalizingly 50 metres or so at a campsite down the row. It took at least a day for the forest to wake up to the fact that a naturalist was present, and their cooperation would be appreciated. The chipmunk carried on endlessly through it all as though trying to circulate that very message. But its voice paled compared to the alarm note of a wood thrush as it echoed off the forest edge. It seemed late for a wood thrush to be around, but only because we don’t always recognize their indistinct calls as they are migrating south, well into October. However, a great crested flycatcher that “weeped” its shrill call, startling a passing robin, as well as us, was quite late, and totally unexpected.

The rains that arrived the previous night had brought on other things too. My wife was the first to spot them – two medium sized puffballs, roughly the size of volleyballs, growing on the ground from a neighbouring vacant campsite. The campers from Barrie who packed up an hour after our arrival had thoughtfully left them there for us to see. Grabbing my camera, we set off exploring, not realizing until much later we had a forest of shaggy manes growing right beside the trailer.

The variety was amazing for in the campgrounds at Sandbanks, staff encourage visitors to leave fallen branches and dead wood alone, and let the natural processes work on their own, breaking down the solid wood into usable products for the living things around them that follow in their wake. Fungi depend on them for survival, and the rotting wood depends on the fungi to assist in their breakdown. The rotting logs, pieces of bark, dead branches and old vegetation are part of a forest’s strategic plan to provide nutrients for the new vegetation that follows. When gathered and burned in a fire pit, this valuable material becomes lost to new growth in a campground woodlot, probably already suffering unspeakable indignities from repeated trampling by roaming campers, occasional litter, not to mention graffiti and vandalism.

With cameras slung over our shoulders, we penetrated the woods with the only footprints we left being those from our hiking boots. We poked our way along, stopping here and there, revelling in the display of fungi that surrounded us as a result of the damp conditions. Fungi are intriguing, and it is such an involved study, I have barely penetrated the surface. It was for that reason I uploaded 20 photos of what we found into the Photo Gallery of my website, and invited public participation as we worked toward attaching labels to each of those we found. One tree was speckled with delicate pinkish dots. “Slime mould called Wolf’s Pink or Toothpaste Slime,” volunteered one Thomasburg resident to my query. Another I titled “Travelling Upwards”, a photo of a colony of miniature bracket fungi escalating the trunk of a dead tree, was suggested to be Tyromyces Chioneus. The latter gives us some idea of how complicated the process can be when many species don’t even have common names, and others are guesses, at best, since photographs fail in providing critical features that serve to identify a fungus as to species.

Chicken of the Woods was another in the series, and one which looked like coral was though to be Comb Tooth. Unusual names for sure, and suggestions even came through on what books I could obtain to add to those I already have in the field of mycology, a science that is still very young with scientific names changing as we learn more. Meanwhile, as a novice, I had a lot of fun with the Gallery on my website, naming them as inspiration struck. “Mini Puffball Parade” was just that – a marching of miniature puffballs on a rotting log. “I am Curious Yellow” has still not been identified, nor has “Climbing the Tree”. And with these photos were those of the bizarre – not fungi, but oddities found as we walked along. Two trees that had become fused together were titled, “Till Death Do Us Part.” Another, “Widow Maker” is self explanatory, and a deeply gouged tree stump I called “Close Encounter” likely would have an interesting story to tell, if it could speak.

Meanwhile, one set of mushrooms I called, simply, “After the Show,” was a sombre reminder that after several days at the Park, many of these inspirational mushrooms had finished their spectacular performance, and were now leaving the stage. The spectacular and spongy shaggy manes that had captured my attention earlier, were now tiny, lifeless pipe stems capped in inky goo. They fell over easily as the wheels of our travel trailer eased past them and left the campsite that afternoon.