On the Trails of IES

Trail Report for Oct. 11, 2006

Just around the corner at the entrance of the Gifford Garden is one remaining blossom of something like a geranium.
In the poison plants bed was monk's hood.
Adam's needle - a yucca - and Trumpet gentian were in the xeriscape garden.
Elsewhere, summer displays were being exchanged for autumn arrangements.
On the way along the moody Little Bluestem Meadow, I noticed a dark spot on a goldenrod. It was a bumblebee, but it was not alone. Easily half a dozen other creatures were in there with it.
Only pieces remain of the mushroom in the Old Gravel Pit that has been in the last several Trail Reports.
The view from the Wappinger Creek Trail was one that I look forward to each year.
That mushroom near the footbridge over the brook was getting sort of dry looking.
The Sedge Meadow Trail was the bird trail today with, among others, both palm and yellow-rumped warblers, and a hoard of cedar waxwings.
On the way out, there was a little dead 'possum, oddly with no talon marks, no teeth marks; it was just a little... well, flat.
When I turned and looked back I was able to recognize lawn mower tracks.

The decaying leaves had made the Pond a mysterious black.
Plump thrushes (ah, but which ones?) were crossing the end of the pond gobbling spicebush berries.
Along the boardwalk through the Fen I was arrested by the unusually powerful fragrance of witch hazel.
Not much farther along I was taken by the ghostly leaves of male berry.
And there, around the corner, was poison sumac, at a comfortable distance, in its autumn glory.
Up in the limestone cobble a scurrying movement along the old log caught my eye.
A chipmonk? No, a winter wren!
I left the Glen with a smile - and a smug one - for having spotted this "mouse with wings" - and for having gotten a shot of it.