REPLACEMENT BCCCI WEBSITE

We will be closing down this web site on March 1, 2010. All future posts and information about the club will be available on our new website:

http://bccci.wordpress.com

Please join us at the new web site!

January Meeting, Sunday the 17th

Sunday 17 January 2010

Time: 2 pm

Orchids of Cape Cod and the Islands by Richard Eldred

Come join us for an illustrated talk on the orchids of Cape Cod and the Islands by the Vice-President of the BCCCI. The program will be held in the Tilley Conference Room, Gosnold Building of the USGS (United States Geological Survey), located at the WHOI Quisset Campus, 384 Woods Hole Road, Falmouth, MA.

Richard Eldred botanizing with the BCCCI at Crane Wildlife Management Area.

Mushroom Field Walk on November 15th

Lawrence Millman led a Mushroom Field Walk on Sunday, November 15that the Four Ponds Conservation Area in Bourne at 2:00 pm. Parking was on Barlow's Landing Road in Bourne.

Mycologist-author Lawrence Millman has studied mushrooms in places as diverse as the jungles of Borneo and Arctic Canada. He has done mushroom inventories for Wachuset Meadow Audubon Sanctuary, the Maria Mitchell Association in Nantucket, Fresh Pond in Cambridge, and the Makivik Corporation in subarctic Quebec. In 2006, Dr. Millman and a colleague discovered a polypore, Echinodontium ballouii, that hadn't been seen in a 100 years and was presumed to be extinct.

Larry gives Doug McGrady a copy of an article on the “real ivory-billed woodpecker”, a fungus of Atlantic white cedar thought to be extinct and recently rediscovered by Larry and a fellow mycologist.

Report of Field Meeting:

Members and guests present: Walter and Carol Knox, Nancy Wigley, Patrick Mauney, Pam Polloni, Jacqueline Webster, Douglas McGrady, Nan Galbraith, Katy Guerin, Katherine Scott, and Don Schall

Members were introduced to the life history, structure, and identification of mushrooms and lichens during a field program lead by Lawrence Millman of Cambridge, MA at the Four Ponds Conservation Area in Pocasset (Bourne), MA. The 156 acres of land comprising the Four Ponds Conservation Area was acquired by the Town of Bourne in 1983. The Four Ponds Conservation Area abuts an additional 312 acres of town forest and water district land to form one of the more significant undeveloped parcels of land in the Town of Bourne. The Four Ponds (Upper Pond, Freeman Pond, The Basin Pond, and Shop Pond) were created when dams were built to confine a freshwater brook running from the area known as “Head of the Springs”. The man-made ponds provided hydropower to local businesses, including an iron furnace, grist mill, and shops in the area. The Pocasset Iron Works produced iron stoves, kettles, fireplace tools, and utensils from locally mined bog iron. A small fish hatchery was located initially at the site of the old foundry. Later it was moved to the head of Upper Pond where millions of brook trout and rainbow trout eggs were packed in cheese cloth bags placed on trays cushioned with sphagnum moss and covered with ice for shipment to customers around the country. The eggs were sent by rail all across the country until the fish hatchery closed in 1934.

During the walk, Larry Millman introduced us to many species that would go unnoticed during a casual walk through the woods. We found species of Mycena, Russula, and Polyporus. Of particular interest to Larry was a small species that is locally rare, which he identified as Coltriciella dependens. The mushroom grows on the underside of a rotted log suspended in the space between the log and the ground surface. Its pores are on what would ordinarily be the upper surface of the cap.

Known previously from a few locations particularly in the coastal piedmont of North Carolina, this species, according to Larry, has been found five times between June and November 2009, in Lincoln and Concord and recently on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, indicating that either its range is extending north, or that it may have been overlooked.

Larry explained that the mushrooms or fruiting bodies of fungi can be collected without affecting the original fungus, since most of the living organism is the mycelium, which continues growing below ground or within a host plant. A small specimen was collected as a voucher for this occurrence in Bourne. It will be catalogued and placed in the MBLWHOI Library Herbarium.

Several mushroom references are available. One of the old field guides published by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., NY is Mushrooms of North America by Orson K. Miller, Jr. The guide includes a simplified picture key to major groups of fungi, a glossary, nearly 300 color photographs, and recipes. The Macrolichens of New England by James W. and Patricia L. Hinds was published by the New York Botanical Garden Press, 2007. A recent reference for the identification of lichens is Lichens of North America by Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff, Yale University Press, 2001.

Sunday October 18 Field Walk Canceled

Sorry, folks. But you are right, it is raining too much for a field trip.
Somehow it is a bit wet out there, though the temperature is not uncomfortable.

Have a great Sunday afternoon. We'll get together November 15, weather permitting!

Minutes of the September 2009 Meeting and Upcoming events

Minutes of the September 20, 2009 meeting of the Botanical Club of Cape Cod and the Islands at Santuit Bogs, Santuit, MA

Members Present: Pam and Chris Polloni, Rich Eldred, Jackie Webster, Alison Robb, Hilary Hunt, Patrick Mauney, and Betsy Davis were present.

Notes by Elizabeth Davis

On 20 Sept. 2009 Nancy Wigley led an interesting walk through the varied habitats of Santuit River, Pond and bogs Conservation Land at the Mashpee/Barnstable border.

We first walked through some quite old woods, and Nancy pointed out a huge, multistemmed White Pine (Pinus strobus). It had five main trunks, starting about two feet off the ground, most of which branched further higher up. I have seen several others like that, though not so big, one near the entrance to Seafarms conservation land in East Falmouth, another near Cavossa Excavations on Route 151. Probably the plants lost their leader shoot as 2-3 yearolds, releasing apical dominance so the five buds in the whorl below it all grew upward instead of outward. Pat Mauney suggested that they had suffered tip blight, a disease caused by the fungus Diplodia pinea. The larvae of the White Pine Weevil feed on the sapwood of the leader, and could also cause leader death, and similarly Northern Pine Shoot borer and Nantucket Pine Shoot Moth, even winter injury. A good blog for more information is www.nativetreesociety.org/multi/multitrunk_trees3.htm .

The star of the bogside was a big marsh of Golden (Nodding?) Bur-marigold (Bidens cernua) in full bloom. There was also a nice clump of Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis)in flower by a small dam. There were numerous goldenrods and asters in flower as well.

Pollution of Santuit Pond, on which the Mashpee Enterprise had a good article, was still evident in its cloudy green waters.

Up-coming Program Sunday October 18

October 18, 2 pm. Meet at Crane Wildlife Management Area, Falmouth. Don plans to join us. We shall work on adding to the plant inventory of Crane. Rain will cancel.

Directions: From Rte. 151 in Hatchville, turn north opposite Ranch Rd. on the entrance to Crane WMA, which is between the Nickelodeon Theater and a small baseball field. Continue north to the farthest parking area.

Upcoming Activities

Up-coming Programs

July 19, 2009 2:00 PM (postponed)

Crane Wildlife Management Area, Falmouth, MA

Members will work on updating the plant inventory for the conservation lands in the wildlife management area. l be cancelled if the weather in inclement.

Directions: Off Rte 151 in Hatchville, Falmouth, turn north between the Nickelodeon theater and the little baseball field. opposite Ranch Rd. Park at the farthest parking area at th end of the road. The walk will be cancelled if the weather is inclement.

August 16, 2009 2:00 PM

Coonamesset River Cranberry Bogs, Falmouth, MA

Members will work on updating the plant inventory the BCCCI generated for the cranberry bogs and adjacent upland areas. The plant inventory provides a record of the change in the plant community on the bogs and helps to identify potentially aggressive, non-native, invasive species.

Parking is available at the southern end of the bogs. Access to the parking area is off John Parker Road, down a dirt driveway, heading west toward the bog, very near the end of the road at Rte. 28 in East Falmouth. The walk will be cancelled if the weather is inclement.

Minutes of July Meeting

Minutes of the June 28, 2009 meeting of the Botanical Club of Cape Cod and the Islands at Wing Island, Brewster, MA

Members Present: Nancy Wigley, Rich Eldred, Betsy Davis, Patrick Mauney, and Don Schall. Guests were Sue Carr and Todd Kelley of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History.

Notes by Don Schall

Members of the BCCCI and museum associates inspected the meadow restoration area on Wing Island as part of a cooperative project between the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and the BCCCI. An initial plant inventory was completed not long after the original mechanical cutting of the wood shrubs and vines was performed by the town in the fall of 2004. The removal of the woody shrubs was necessary to restore approximately 8 acres of meadow and grassland habitat on the western section of Wing Island. After the initial cutting, the restoration area was burned to control stem sprouts from the cut woody vegetation. We first reported on this project in 2004 in one of our earlier newsletters (BCCCI Newsletter Volume 5, No. 2).

An inventory of the plant species observed in the meadow community and adjacent environments was compiled during the walk. The plant lists are available to the members.

More recently the meadow area was mowed by personnel from the Town of Brewster Natural Resources Department in the spring of 2009. As the woody vegetation is controlled, herbaceous grasses and wildflowers will become more abundant in the meadow community. We are particularly interested in seeing warm season grasses increase in abundance, since these species are representatives of the native flora. Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) occurs in the existing community and may become more common in the meadow community as conditions improve. Other warm season grasses to be encouraged include Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Indian-grass (Sorghastrum nutans), and Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum).

The restoration of the meadow habitat will create suitable habitat for state-listed species dependent on open sandplain grassland and coastal heathland habitats on the Cape and Islands. New England Blazing-star (Liatris scariosa var. novae-angliae) presently occurs in the upland meadow in the center of the island, and it is hoped that this state-listed species will spread into the meadow restoration area. The meadow habitat provides the opportunity for other rare and uncommon species to become established in the meadow. Plant species of interest would include Butterfly-weed (Asclepias tuberosa), Little Ladies' Tresses (Spiranthes tuberosa), and Bushy Rockrose (Helianthemum dumosum). Non-native woody shrubs and vines in the meadow community will be removed under the long-term management guidelines for the meadow restoration area.