Quarry Curiosities, Part 2 - The Red-necked Grebe

Or, "Life below the Surface "

The ice had melted, but not all the snow, when a Red-necked Grebe landed on the Halibut Point Quarry last March. These birds can sometimes be seen at sea or along the shore during the winter. It was the only time I've seen one in this freshwater sanctuary.



Red-necked Grebe, March 2018

The bird was in transition to breeding plumage, just beginning to show the more vivid coloration for which it is named.

Beside the beaver lodge

I wondered if it had come for a brief respite or recuperation. It made the rounds and stayed a week. 




That meant it had to be either flying out daily for food or finding it here.

The grebe soon answered that question. Diving like a cormorant it brought up a fish.

This was not a minnow like the Ring-billed Gull had caught at the surface. The grebe shook its prize to subdue it before swallowing.

The grebe revealed its out-sized propulsion system for out-swimming fish under water. I had a new ally for exploring life below the surface.

Next week: the Green Heron

Quarry Curiosities 1 - The Ring-billed Gull

Or, "Life below the Surface "

Just like on the shoreline, most of the gulls you're likely to see on the water and ledges of the Halibut Point Quarry are either Herring or Great Black-backed Gulls. They gather there sedately resting from the hurly-burly at sea.

The supplicating newcomer at center

Last year about this time a Ring-billed Gull tried to join the established group.

The Ring-billed Gull sitting high in the water

Perhaps its tattooed look about the head and neck offended the clean-patterned majority, or perhaps it was the perky buoyancy.

Pleading for acceptance

Entreaties shunned

Forlorn isolation

Though it failed to ingratiate itself the Ring-bill proved agile in the air.

 

It darted to ripples appearing now and then on the quarry surface.



 

While the other gulls preened it chased minnows leaping from the water.



The little fish were evidently forced up by a predator below. It dove on them from above.

The Ring-bill stayed around for a week last summer profiting from a fish population previously unknown to me, and inaccessible to the customary gulls. Then it disappeared. Curiously, I haven't seen it on the quarry pond again.

I began to wonder what else might be going on down there.

Next week: the Red-necked Grebe

Fruits of Halibut Point

All fruit develop from flowers. Flowering plants, the modern edge of vegetative evolution, universally depend on fruit for the success of their seeds. These truisms shape the botanical definition of fruit, which is more precise than the culinary one that classifies corn, beans, and tomatoes with the vegetables. Botanists view fruits more scientifically than do grocers.

Black cherries

Cherries are ripening now in a bumper crop because of the season's excellent rain pattern. When fully mature with a deep purplish black color they offer a zesty if astringent flavor in a pea-sized package. An experimental sample puts a wine-like taste on your tongue. Trees dispersed throughout the State Park can flavor your whole loop around Halibut Point.

Tupelo drupes

Like the cherry trees, tupelos also form drupes, seeds inside a stony pit surrounded by an edible layer that compensates birds for distributing the seeds far and wide.

Tree swallows plucking bayberry drupes on the wing

Up and down the shoreline tree swallows are fattening up on bayberry drupes for their imminent migration.

Sumac, the "Lemonade Tree"

The tiny drupes of sumac trees make a tangy drink. Steep the clusters in hot water or dry and store them for winter refreshment. The juice also inspires an adventurous cocktail.

Crabapples

Fruit of the apple clan are easy to recognize as sweet, sour, and juicy. The succulent structures grow out of other parts of the flower than the ovaries, placing them in a category called pomes.

Rosa virginiana fruit

Rose fruit are similarly structured but without appreciable assets for our diet. Their small size might lead us to think of them mistakenly as berries rather than pomes.

Nightshade berries

Berries are produced from the ovary of a single flower in which the outer layer of the ovary wall develops into a fleshy edible portion. For example bittersweet nightshade, a vine clambering  malodorously around Halibut Point, is a close relative of fruit-producing tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes.

Grapes



Cranberries

Grapes and cranberries are among the native berries of Halibut Point. Bananas, watermelons, and avocados are berries that have not yet proven hardy here. Pumpkin berries are currently attaining immense bulk in local gardens.

Cedar waxwing eating honeysuckle berry

Humanly toxic honeysuckle berries should be left to the birds.

Catbrier berries

Barberries

Catbrier and barberries produce fruit edible to birds and potentially to people.

Strawberries

On the other hand the several kinds of strawberries growing wild on Halibut Point are botanically not true berries. Like raspberries and blackberries they are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them aggregate fruit rather than berries. *

Hickory nuts

When a flower's ovary wall develops into a hard shell it produces a fruit called a nut with a seed at the center. 


Fruit of grasses

Grass seeds also develop within a thickened ovary wall to form a fruit grain.

Devil's beggar-ticks

You and I have from time to time helped distribute fruit of the Devil's beggar tick as burrs stuck to clothing.

Black swallowwort

Black swallowwort enlists the wind in its distribution plan.
 

Juniper "berries"

Circling back to a primary botanical distinction, all fruits come from flower-bearing plants, the angiosperms. Cone-bearing plants, the gymnosperms such as pines and junipers, never have flower structures nor, technically, fruit. Their seeds are not surrounded by fruit tissue. The term comes from the Greek meaning 'naked seed.'

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* Technically a strawberry is an aggregate accessory fruit, meaning that the fleshy part is derived not from the plant's ovaries but from the receptacle that holds the ovaries. Each apparent "seed" (achene) on the outside of the fruit is actually one of the ovaries of the flower, with a seed inside it.

Fear and Loathing in the Landscape

"Japanese Knotweed: The Invasive Plant That Eats the Value of Your Home"

(Headline from a 2014 article in Newsweek

Japanese Knotweed is one plant on the Massachusetts Invasive Species list that gets universal attention for its insidious ways. It rockets out of the ground in spring with bamboo-like stems surging to six feet, leafing densely and more shrub-like than its 'herbaceous perennial' botanical category would suggest. It's rhizomes gallop through the earth from their food banks in massive root clumps. Control and eradication advice reads like the sober experience of guerrilla fighters emphasizing long-haul commitment and integrated, full-spectrum excavation, starvation and poisoning over several years at least. As many homeowners have found, a campaign to eliminate it from established gardens requires relentless vigilance and records few complete victories.

Japanese Knotweed at Halibut Point

The main knotweed intrusion at Halibut Point is restrained by mowing around its perimeter, which curtails expansion into the lawn. To unprejudiced eyes the established clump offers lush heart-shaped foliage in the summer heat and racemes of fragrant flowers in August. Myriad wanna-be offshoots dot the surrounding turf, regularly decapitated by the mower.

Knotweed at the precipice

A few outposts of knotweed struggle to make a go of it in wooded areas where tree competition suppresses them. Fortunately the plants rarely if ever produce viable seed to disperse. But even the smallest bit of stray root can launch a new colony. At one place along the Back 40 trail some root material was evidently thrown over the edge of a gully and sprouted up to embrace ironically the DANGER sign at the precipice. 


 


Knotweed nectar entrances all kinds of bees, wasps, and flies, to its credit in the natural world but probably not to most human passersby.

 

Japanese knotweed thrives in open, often waste places where it can dominate and exclude plants of lesser stature. Aggressive as it is, it has not made substantial inroads at Halibut Point because of regular mowing of the meadows, because it does not adapt well to woodland tracts, and because the original heath plants are better suited to the thin-soiled moors.

It is other invasive non-native plants like bittersweet, English ivy, winged euonymus, buckthorn and honeysuckle that have established a more prominent presence throughout the Park. All of them thrive in the lightly shaded understory of re-developing woodlands on former pasture and quarry land. They have the potential to suppress herbaceous natives and out-compete less robust indigenous shrubs. As the area moves toward a new naturalized equilibrium it will inevitably incorporate substantial numbers of these at some cost to the bio-diversity of both flora and fauna.

These alterations will not necessarily reduce the amount of wildlife in the Park but they will quite likely reduce its variety in the way that suburban development does. Some species will adapt, others shrink to enclaves or disappear. Halibut Point will continue to offer human sanctuary but its ecological riches will be diminished. Other than natural preservation of the coastal rim, this may be the most realistic future for a small-scale, passively-managed tract returning from highly disturbed use.

Invasive Plants

The race to life at every level depends on disturbance and response, never on equilibrium. Every cell and seed jostles for existence. Their individuality evolves within a context that seems stable enough to be called a system, a coherent accommodation of disturbances.

Relatively rapid disturbances from outside a system are termed invasive. They upset our conservative consciousness unless, like each tilling of a field or building of a home, we emphasize beneficial gains.

Given the scope and acceleration of man-made change, what is the fate and value of native plant communities? Why, and how purely, should they be defended?

Queen Anne's Lace on the Halibut Point shoreline

Queen Anne's Lace, a non-native plant, has few detractors at Halibut Point. It graces the landscape with lovely and fascinating features. It takes hold in rugged terrain without appearing to be pushy. On the other hand it shows more of a tendency to colonize freely the grasslands of Cape Cod to the chagrin of nativist champions.

Dandelion

Dandelions, one of the most widespread plants introduced to America in colonial times, have situated themselves as liberally around the meadows of Halibut Point as they have Everyman's lawn. Yet they get a pass in The Invasive Plant Problem published on the Massachusetts government website. Its author Dr. Paul Somers distinguishes between being "weedy" and being "problematic in the more natural surrounding landscapes"-- a provocative notion to the homeowner but a thoughtful entry point to our topic.

Conversely, Black locust, Dame's rocket, and Yellow iris are among the plants gaining only slight ground at Halibut Point that have been categorized invasive by the Massachusetts Invasive Plant Advisory Group.



Black locust tree in flower on the quarry rim

Dame's rocket at woodland edge

Yellow iris in wetland

Local conditions have not allowed them to spread beyond toeholds in the Halibut Point landscape.

Phragmites, the Common reed, in meager quarters

Phragmites grows aggressively anywhere it can get a start in moist soil. It headlines any list of invasive plants but it too has garnered a limited presence at Halibut Point. The thin stand pictured here has attained only dwarf proportions in a damp swale by the seashore. It has achieved dominance in one wet spot by the parking lot but hasn't encroached on the swamp across Granite Street, perhaps shut out by the densely woven cattail root mass.

Human industry on the moors at Halibut Point

Much of the windswept open space on Halibut Point originally lacked enough soil to support agriculture or pasturage. Indigenous plants there remained relatively undisturbed by human occupation and re-colonized the moors after granite quarrying ceased.

The native Rosa virginiana at home on thin soil

Within this tangle of hardy shoreline creepers the Virginia rose has succeeded over species less drought and salt-resistant.

Rosa multiflora sprawling on old pasture land

Exotic plant species find easier entry on the arable acres once cleared for farming. Upland re-naturalization over the last eighty years has incorporated a mix of novelties among the natives. Free-seeding Rosa multiflora that had been imported from Japan to stabilize eroded American landscapes has established extensive thorny thickets. They are opportunistic but not necessarily invasive in the sense of intruding on vulnerable ecologies, since pre-existing systems had been eradicated. Much of the State Park is progressing through successional stages toward a mature woodland that will resemble but not replicate the original forest. There will be additions, subtractions, and new proportions.

The fruit of Oriental bittersweet showcased on the old barn

Many of the introduced plants had useful or attractive features. In some cases their damnable vigor was part of their initial appeal. 


Bittersweet vine enmeshing a cedar tree,along with poison ivy

Oriental bittersweet's behavior turns thuggish as it suppresses the innocent trees that it utilizes as scaffolds to sunlight. 


Catbrier blanketing shrubbery

But then native catbrier and grape similarly smother anything they climb on, until ultimately shaded out themselves by the light-excluding canopy of the maturing forest.

Grape vine surmounting a tree

It's the instinctual way of natural increase, and it characterizes recent centuries of human dominion on the land. Imagine substituting the word 'cultures' for 'plants' in this statement on the Mass.gov website: "Exotic, invasive plants create severe environmental damage, invading open fields, forests, wetlands, meadows, and backyards, and crowding out native plants." In the mirror of history Homo sapiens is the most invasive species of all.

Our enterprise has intentionally or inadvertently affected all life on earth. The flora of Halibut Point is more diverse than ever as newcomers have filtered in. But bio-diversity worldwide is declining as species are driven to extinction. The consequences have ethical and practical dimensions.

Purple loosestrife at the edge of a cattail stand

A few decades ago, as many people were enthralled by purple loosestrife's vivid transformation of local wetlands, it dawned on close observers that this escaped European species was dooming other parts of the ecosystem. Importation of beetles that feed on loosestrife in their native lands has checked the invader to non-threatening numbers apparently without collateral damage. This biological re-balancing represents a success story in environmental intervention. The preservation of wetlands has particularly active allies.

Part of the refreshment of wild spaces is that their dynamics are not managed by human hands. Their internal aspirations and tragedies proceed awesomely beyond our control, design, or prayers. The fittest or luckiest survive in an incalculable web of neighborly invasions.

It seems unlikely that we could reverse the influx of non-native plants in the public landscape even with the mobilization of Maoist level political will. The plant communities will have to reach their own accommodations with selective management for sanctuaries of special interest or rarity.