The early mornings that were filled with as many as twenty kinds of bird songs six weeks ago are now silent except for persistent red-eyed vireos, wood peewees and indigo buntings. By afternoon, the songs of insects, crickets, katydids and cicadas have overtaken those of birds. While crickets and katydids chirp, creak and click in meadow grasses, cicadas make a buzzing trill in trees, filling the void left by birds.
Summer flowers are fading now. The fireweeds and milkweeds that thrived in July now stand with fewer blooms. But here too, their passing is quickly filled. Sunflowers, goldenrods and asters flourish in this late summer sun. They provide enough variety and color to give us a full fall floral bouquet. At the woods' edge, blueberries, raspberries, and for some of us, blackberries reach maturity and give me reasons to pause in my route.
Stepping into the woods, I note that among the shadows, ferns grow thick and with ample rainfall this summer, they stand up to five feet tall. Almost no wildflowers bloom in these sites of less sunlight, but I do find one. Here, bent on the forest floor, is the strange Indian pipe. A plant of only a few inches high, it is entirely devoid of chlorophyll and so all parts - stem, leaves and flower - are white. In the shade, it does not need or use this food-making greenery and gets nutrition from decay matter in the soil. Though flowering plants are rare here, the woods has an abundance of another growth: mushrooms.
Mild temperatures and plenty of rain seem to be the two ingredients for a prolific mushroom growth, and August often provides both. They come up quickly on the leaf-covered ground or on downed logs and rotted stumps. With a little searching, one can find dozens on a walk at this time. Appearing in all shapes, sizes and colors, fungi are immensely diverse. Most that we call mushrooms have the characteristic shape of an umbrella. They grow with a cap placed on top of a stem. Under the cap, most have gills (where the reproductive spores are produced) and sometimes a ring surrounds the stem. Most of the color seen on mushrooms is on the caps. Within our regional woods, we may find mushrooms with caps of red, brown, green, yellow, gray and white. Though these colors catch our eye, they seem to be of no value to the mushrooms.
On of my favorite mushrooms to find at this time is the Waxy Cap mushroom (Hygrophorus). Typically, they grow only a couple of inches above the soil, but by being brightly colored and in groups, they are frequently seen. Caps may be varied in color patterns, but reds and yellows are dominant. And when other mushrooms may have such tones only in the cap, Waxy Caps are regularly colorful throughout cap, gills and stem. The name of Waxy Cap refers to the texture of the flesh of these small mushrooms.
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Waxy Caps abound in the woods of late summer, but I have often seen them in lawns as well. (Walking in the yard or mowing grass may cut down mushrooms, but since the part we see above the ground is only the reproductive structure, we have not really hurt the fungus.) This is a beautiful time to explore the Northland and these various mushrooms are only part of the bounty that we can now discover here in August.
