Hiking Part II

This past Sunday, I went hiking with Zoe and our new friend Tom, who we met last time we were hiking. Tom put up some photos here. If anyone can tell me what those tiny blue flowers are, I'll be deeply grateful. I just love them.

Naturalism things of note:

We saw an indigo bunting, which was incredibly blue and beautiful and flew along with us for a hundred yards or so, flying ahead and waiting on a low branch until we got too close and moving on again. This isn't my photo, obviously, but this is what it looked like:

I found and ate some wild blueberries at the top of the hill. And shared. I didn't eat them all myself.

We saw a wild turkey running, which always cracks me up. They're so ungainly and they run slowly, especially for birds that can fly pretty quickly.

I saw some cool lichen-y, fungus-y things. I don't know how to tell the difference. I think of lichen being flat and fungus being raised, but I'm pretty sure it's not that simple.


I particularly like the combination of the chalky-white lich-gus and the greyish-brown bark and especially the textural justaposition, the way there's a quieter background texture and the fung-chen is composed of all of those individual pieces that move around into their own pattern. There's a way to knit this into something extraordinary, I can feel it. I just can't quite see it yet.

We were on the same stretch of the AT that we hiked before, but we deviated a little, going a bit beyond where we'd stopped before and also checking out one of the shelters. The shelter had a notebook for people to sign in and one through-hiker had left this clever little card. It had his website on the front and answers to some frequently asked questions on the back.

Comments

[Martha]

Those pretty blue flowers are forget-me-nots. The stuff on the trees is definitely not lichen. That's the ruffly flat stuff. I'm not sure of the line between fungus and mushroom though.

Wow, you are lucky to have seen an indigo bunting. Those are amazing birds! I remember one smacked into my grandmother's picture window and she put it in a box hoping it would wake up. Even when it was clear that the little bird was dead, my grandmother couldn't bear to throw it away because it was so rare and beautiful. So she had a box in her freezer with a sign that said indigo bunting, do not throw away-FOR YEARS.

[Sue]

I agree, the tiny blue flowers are forget-me-nots. The stuff on the tree is a shelf fungus, not a lichen. Interesting factoids for the day: A lichen is a symbiosis, composed of a fungus and an alga living together. They can be crusting, flat and ruffly, or three-dimensional. What we think of as a "mushroom" is just the fruiting body of a fungus. :-)

[Vixen]

My husband and I hiked the AT. We've made it from GA to the Maine border where I fell about 25ft down a cliff. (I walked away with only a sprained ankle.) We hope to finish Maine one day.

My days on the trail were some of the most amazing experiences of my life.