Monday, March 18, 2024

Worst. Sugaring Season. Ever.


 2024 was a memorably poor maple sugaring season in Connecticut; certainly the worst since I began keeping a close eye on maple sugaring, in ca. 2010, though I'm not yet sure what the old timers are saying. I started my one tap in late January, about three weeks earlier than the traditional start time, to try to get ahead of the warm weather, but even that was probably too late. I collected maybe 8 gallons of sap by early February, brewed a few pots of maple sap tea, boiled the rest down to about 2 cups of nice light amber syrup, and that was it. The tap has been dry since the first or second week of February. All in all my total production was about what you would expect from a single decent week in what ought to be a six week season. 

 What went wrong? I have a few ideas, mostly warm-weather related:

  • It's been a really warm winter, with only a couple of weeks of snow cover, and no serious cold periods to speak of. According to NOAA data via Weather Underground, meteorological winter (Dec 2023-Feb. 2024) was the warmest on record for a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast, and near-record-warm in southern New England, with temperatures averaging about 6-8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Sugar Maples need a cold winter dormancy to stay healthy, and in particular require freezing nights and daytime thaws in late winter to trigger sap flows. 
  • The growing season last year was generally cloudy, humid and rainy. This meant less sun than usual for photosynthesis, and thus less sugar stored by the trees. The soggy summer of '23 also caused a widespread outbreak of a fungal leaf disease, Maple Anthracnose, which caused leaf drop and an early end to the growing season in late summer.  
  • 2023 was also a "mast year" for Sugar Maples, meaning that they set much more seed than usual. So, in addition to losing out on sugar-producing opportunities last year due to cloudy weather and disease, the trees were using up much more energy and nutrients than in a typical year, making tons of seeds. Excessive seed production last summer probably left the Sugar Maples with less sugar than normal stored in their trunks this winter.  
 I suspect that all of these factors were in play, with bad weather last summer, a massive "mast" production of seeds, and an overly warm winter weakening the maple trees and sending them into 2024 with less stored sugar than normal. Then, record warmth and spotty snow in January and February led to an early, brief and unproductive sugaring season. Strong El Nino climate conditions would have contributed to the warmth and storminess, against a backdrop of steady temperature rise from global warming; the fact that a mast year coincided with these factors was just bad luck. We'll see how the trees do this spring and summer. I'm hoping they will recover quickly, but the long-term outlook for species of cool northern forests, like Sugar Maple, in southern New England is probably not fabulous.


 

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Mt. Washington Wildflowers

Cairn on the way to the summit of Mt. Washington, NH. July 2023.
 Mount Washington is the highest mountain in New England, and infamous for the "worst weather in the world," including the highest wind speed ever recorded outside of a tornado or tropical cyclone. The strange, vast landscape of broken rocks on top of Washington and its neighboring peaks and ridges is home to a unique flora, with a mix of widespread north-temperate woodland plants, as well as rare stragglers from the last ice age, which are mostly confined to the arctic today.

Maianthemum canadense

Maianthemum canadense, the ubiquitous Canada Mayflower, grows in my lawn back in Connecticut, literally a few feet from my door, and is also common in the shelter of rocks quite near the summit of Mt. Washington. On the mountain, the plants were in bloom not in May, but in the middle of July. 

Trientalis borealis

 Starflower (Trientalis) is a common spring wildflower in my area. As with Canada Mayflower, its blooming season was delayed by about two months at high altitude in the Presidentials. I think that the chartreuse-and-black lichen on the rocks in most of these photos is Rhizocarpon geographicum, Yellow Map Lichen.

Maianthemum, with Clintonia brorealis and Chamaepericlymenum (Cornus) canadense

Shaded, sheltered slopes above treeline on Mt. Washington are also home to Clintonia and Bunchberry, two typical woodland wildflowers of northern New England. These occur south into Connecticut, but aren't common in my area. In the lowlands, these bloom a month or so later than Canada Mayflower, but their flowering seasons were all crammed together into mid-July on the mountaintop.

Phegopteris connectilis

The fern that grows closest to the summit of Mt. Washington (that I saw) was Narrow Beech Fern, Phegopteris connectilis. In southern New England, N.B.F. is a delicate little fern of cool, shady ravines and streamsides, and it was a bit of a surprise to see it near the wind-blasted peak of Washington. It was confined to seepy crevices and the shelter of overhanging rocks. Dryopteris species (Wood Ferns) started to appear at lower altitude, near tree line and in stunted alpine Balsam Fir forest, or Krummholz.

Diapensia lapponica and Sibbaldiopsis tridentata

Diapensia or Cushion-plant is one of the relictual arctic plants of Mt. Washington, growing as tight mats and mounds of leafy rosettes on fully exposed ridgelines. It is one of only two representatives of the minor family Diapensiaceae (order Ericales) that I have ever seen in person, the other being Galax, a beloved high-altitude wildflower of Appalachian peaks. Diapensia is in fruit in the photo; the white flowers are Three-toothed Cinquefoil (Sibbaldiopsis, or formerly Potentilla tridentata), which was growing squeezed in between the Diapensia rosettes. Diapensia is rare in New England, growing on only the highest peaks in the far north, whereas Sibbaldiopsis is a widespread inhabitant of rocky, open hill and mountain tops.

Rhododendron groenlandicum with Vaccinium uliginosum

Labrador Tea, formerly genus Ledum but now classified as Rhododendron groenlandicum, is a shrub of the arctic tundra and wet boreal forest, that gets down into New England as a resident of alpine habitats and sphagnum bogs. The leaves have a pleasant wintergreen scent, and can indeed be used to brew an herbal tea. The photo of Labrador Tea in flower also includes a small, round-leaved blueberry relative, Alpine Bilberry (Vaccinium uliginosum), which is another arctic shrub that persists as an alpine plant in temperate climates. Bilberry seems to be the woody plant that grows at the highest altitudes on Mt. Washington, almost all the way up to the summit.

Minuartia groenlandica

Greenland Stitchwort (Minuartia groenlandica, formerly genus Arenaria) is a tiny clumping plant that grows very close to the summit area, often in disturbed gravelly areas. Weirdly, this alpine/arctic species also apparently occurs in a few low-altitude coastal populations in Maine.

Salix argyrocarpa

Mt. Washington is home to several species of low-growing arctic willows, at the southern limits of their distributions, as well as some hybrids among them. I'm not sure that I can identify the ones that I saw from my photos, but this one is possibly Salix argyrocarpa, Labrador Willow.

Tuckerman Ravine, with one patch of snow left on July 12, 2023.

 Mt. Washington is cold enough that there is some permafrost at the top. A bit of snow remained in Tuckerman Ravine when I visited in July this year; it's difficult to get a sense of scale from the photos, but that little white spot is as big as a house. The weather was relatively mild and pleasant for the start of my hike, but the clouds closed in and the weather took a turn for the worse in the afternoon. My group, some of whom had climbed from the base at the AMC center at Pinkham Notch, got to experience a taste of the worst weather on Earth, but were very glad that I had driven my car to the summit. After taking some pics with the summit sign, with fog all around and about 20 feet visability, we crammed into the car and had an easy drive out of the arctic tundra, back down to the familiar New England woods.


Friday, February 17, 2023

Conophytum Webinar

 

I'm going to be doing an online talk about Conophytum this Saturday, February 18, at 1:00 PM EST. This will be hosted by the Cactus and Succulent Society of America and is free; register at the CSSA website. A recording will be available on the CSSA Facebook page for a limited time, the week following the live talk. The presentation will be "Conophytums of Distinction" and will be a general introduction to these charming little succulents, with a focus on special varieties, cultivars and hybrids in cultivation. 

On Sunday I'm going to be doing another Zoom talk, on "Cape Geophytes," about South African bulbs, tubers and corms, for the Cascade Cactus and Succulent Society in Seattle. I'm not sure if there will be a way for non-members of the Cascade cactus club to view this one.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Superb Owl Sunday

Barred Owl (Strix varia) in Mansfield, Ct,  December 2019.


You can tell that this owl photo is from a couple of winters back, because it was actually snowing then. The winter of 2022-23 has been practically snow-free so far, with January temperatures running about 10 degrees (F) above normal, and only two severe but short-lived cold snaps, one last weekend and one around Christmas. 

Maple sap collection, Feb 11, 2023

I wasn't certain how to handle maple sugaring in a winter like this, and held off on tapping any trees until after the cold outbreak last week. The sap has been flowing like gangbusters the past few days, with my one tap yielding about two gallons per day. I probably could have gotten started in January; I hear that some local sugar shacks started their operations weeks ago. The weather looks good for sugaring in the immediate future, with freezes most nights and some more unseasonably warm days, but I'd also expect the season to end early if this pattern continues. 

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Just in time for Darwin Day, researchers in the Yuan Lab here at UConn have published a prestigious cover article in the journal Science.  The work deals with the mechanisms of speciation within the genus Mimulus (Monkeyflowers), where a novel gene that produces small, regulatory RNA molecules, is involved in the evolution of changes in flower color and pollination syndrome. There is a less-technical article on the research in UConn Today. The Science editors apparently didn't think that the Yuan lab's photos of Mimulus flowers were quite of the quality that they wanted, so they had a professional photographer poking around the greenhouses last month to get some additional illustrations, which is how I first learned about the new publication.



Monday, October 31, 2022

Halloween Corpse Flower


 Just in time for Halloween, a Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum) bloomed last night in the greenhouse at Eastern Connecticut State University. The teaching/research greenhouses there are not usually open to the public, but Prof. Bryan Connolly was kind enough to allow people in to see it on a Sunday evening. 

Here at UConn Storrs, we have a few A. titanum plants that are getting to be fairly large, but are still immature. It may be a couple of years before we get flowers.

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There was a short article about the ECSU Corpse Flower in the Hartford Courant.