Late fall forest in Vermont
Kent McFarland
Nature is putting on its final, colorful autumn show. Leaves are turning and falling, bees are buzzing around the asters, and mushrooms are putting out their final fruit. Don't blink or you'll miss it!
By Spencer Hardy
October is kind of like closing time at a dive bar for bees—full of dudes hanging around on the few remaining flowers, drinking, and looking for love.
You see, female bees are the ones that do the hard work of gathering pollen, building nests, and laying eggs. Except for non-native honey bees, bees in Vermont are annuals. Once the adults pupate and emerge, they only have a few months (or even weeks) to live, and must do everything they can to pass on their genes to the next generation.
For simplicity, bees can be separated into two types. There are those in which the males and females overwinter. Then there are those in which mating occurs at the end of the season and only the adult females survive the winter (hopefully fertilized with all the genetic material they need to produce female offspring next summer). In the Northeast, the latter type is composed of Bumble Bees (genus Bombus) and Sweat Bees (family Halictidae) and it is these two that make up the majority of October bees.
On warm afternoons, especially early in October, any remaining flowers can be a hotspot of activity. Male bees primarily visit flowers to drink nectar and to find a mate, so they tend to be less picky than their female counterparts, which are most interested in gathering pollen from flowers. Late blooming non-native flowers such as zinnias and cosmos can be popular with these indiscriminate guys, though native species like asters, goldenrods, and perennial sunflowers are the best bet for adding biodiversity (and color) to our built landscapes, and are often humming with bees and flies late into the fall.
With cooler temperatures and lower angle light, fall can be a wonderful time to work on your bee photography and identification skills. The limited flower options tend to concentrate any remaining bees and the fall colors make an artistic background.
As always, we encourage folks to share their observations to the Vermont Atlas of Life on iNaturalist. Don’t forget that the platform can be a great way to see what others are observing and which species you are most likely to find in your area. The iNat community has found some pretty incredible records well into October that have been valuable in extending our understanding of late-fall bee diversity—and the next big discovery might just be waiting in your backyard!
By Ryan Rebozo
You may not realize this, but leaves actually make their way down from the tree canopy to the forest floor throughout the year. But in our deciduous forests, fall is signaled by leaves changing into fantastic colors, then dropping into a thick, crunchy carpet not long after.
For some homeowners, these fallen leaves become a seasonal chore to be raked, blown or otherwise removed. But in both natural and human-dominated landscapes, these leaves play an important ecological function. As Martin Lukac and Douglas Godbold put it in their book Soil Ecology in Northern Forests, leaves are the “doorkeepers of forest carbon.”
While still green, leaves collect sunlight and carbon dioxide to create the biomass that drives the food web. When they fall to the forest floor, they contribute to nutrient cycling, through decomposition.
Besides the addition of forest carbon, these fallen leaves add structural value to the forest floor. Leaves and other organic matter make up the “O Horizon”, the topmost layer of the soil profile above the top mineral soil layer. Its depth can vary drastically based on habitat type and disturbance history.
This layer plays a number of important roles, from reducing soil erosion and retaining moisture, to supplying nutrients and supporting a diversity of micro- and macroorganisms. It even provides a place for invertebrates and amphibians to overwinter.
The importance of leaves is not limited to forest floors. Fallen leaves left in place or strategically put in garden beds can act as natural mulch, adding nutrients, retaining water, and even supporting local biodiversity.
As caterpillars finish feeding on the leaves of a tree, they drop to the ground in an attempt to pupate in the leaf litter below. Leaves left at the base of the tree can begin to develop this “soft landing, support the germination of native plants, and allow caterpillars to complete their life cycle.
So this fall, consider leaving the leaves as another step towards improving your local environment.
By Meg Madden
October—and fall mushroom season—is upon us, and plenty of Vermont fungi are adding to the spooky Halloween vibes.
While carved jack o’lanterns are lighting porches and front steps, their mushroom counterparts illuminate the forests with an eerie glow. The bright pumpkin orange Omphalotus illudens, or Eastern Jack O’ Lantern Mushroom, is bioluminescent! Amazingly, the gills of this species emits a faint green light that can be seen on the darkest of nights. The light is produced by an enzyme called luciferase, the same type of chemical responsible for bioluminescence in fireflies. You can find these large, showy mushrooms growing in dense clusters on hardwood stumps and buried, decaying tree roots. Foragers hunting for edibles such as Chicken Of The Woods and Chanterelles should be careful not to confuse them with the poisonous jack o’ lantern mushroom. Though not deadly, consumption can cause severe gastrointestinal symptoms that can last several days.
This month, the ghostly white forms of Shaggy Mane Ink Caps (Coprinus comatus) may be haunting a lawn near you. Particularly abundant after rain, these cylindrical mushrooms can seemingly appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. Ink cap mushrooms undergo a self-digestion process called deliquescence, whereby they turn themselves into inky, black goo. The spores of shaggy manes, otherwise trapped deep inside the bell-shaped caps, are exposed to air currents as the mushrooms melt themselves from the bottom up. This species can go from pristine white to a black puddle on the grass in as little as 24 hours! Ink cap mushroom ink can actually be used for writing and drawing. The illustrations in the book Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake were created using the ink from shaggy mane mushrooms.
It’s not difficult to see how Dead Man’s Fingers (Xylaria polymorpha) got its name. The slender, crusty, charcoal gray to black mushrooms of this macabre-looking fungus resemble creepy corpse fingers in a spine-chilling movie. Though often found growing singly or in small groups on decaying logs, sticks, and wood mulch, they occasionally appear in larger numbers—zombie apocalypse-style—as though the hands of the undead are clawing their way out of the forest floor. As frightening as that may sound, Dead Man’s Finger fungus is actually quite beneficial, happily going about its important job as a decomposer. As critical members of nature’s recycling crew, fungi such as Xylaria polymorpha play an essential role in forest ecology. Without them, wood would never decay, we would be buried deep in piles of dead trees, and valuable nutrients would be locked up and unavailable to other organisms. Now that’s scary!
