Life on the Outer Coast

Yesterday the Forest Ecology class and I walked to Hart Lake with Robbie Littlefield to look for culturally significant plants. The girls tasted spruce tips and twisted stalk, which they seemed to prefer over the pickled seagull egg they had tried earlier. The balsamic vinegar masked any specific taste of the seagull egg, so I don't have a real idea about the taste of seagull vs chicken, but the egg was very rich.

The trail itself isn't terribly attractive. Kind of early clearcut, but seeing Hart Lake was nice. I suspect that after the trailside vegetation recovers that the trail will be more pleasant. Collected Carex aquatalis and Equisetum fluviatile from the shore of Thimbleberry Lake. We found one Viburnum edule blooming beside the trail between the two lakes.

This morning biked over to Moller Park to check some of the plant identifications from the bioblitz site. Was happy to confirm Veronica americana. It was just starting to bloom. The pinnate branching of the leaf veins vs the more palmate branching of the Mimulus guttatus seems to be a good character when the plants are young. There was another small herbacous plant just starting to bloom that I'll have to go back to look at next week.

Found a small patch of Eriophorum chammissonis blooming. Also collected two Carex and Luzula parviflora from the lake edge. The small Carex is keying out in group II, C. laeviculmis, but I'll probably have to resort to FNA to confirm it. The large Carex seems to be C. aquatilis.