alpine plants

June0408 110, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

See if you can pick out the: alpine cranberry, blueberry, alpine raspberry (I think), as well as the lichens and a couple other alpine plants. All of them crammed into a crevice between two boulders atop Mt. Cadillac.

Mr. Loon

Mr. Loon, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

Towards the end of what turned out to be a ~12 mile hike on Sunday, we got to see a loon fishing in/on Bubble pond.

flower-filled tarn

flower-filled tarn, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

This is to make up for the icky wood-tick photos from yesterday. This is from Sunday's hike up the South Face trail up Mt. Cadillac. It had rained all day on Saturday, and so all the little tarns were filled, as well as lots of flowers being in bloom. I don't know what the white ones were, but the purple appeared to be in the rhododendron family (although maybe they were technically azaleas...).

camp dinner, friday night

camp dinner, friday night, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

Friday gave us decent weather, but we were moving around the island, and later setting up our campsite at the Blackwoods campground.

Dinner was low-key: garlic bread (fresh garlic); pasta and tomato sauce, and grilled asparagus and mushrooms (all cooked over the campfire, thank you very much!) Granted, I brought a tablecloth this time, which for a picnic table is probably silly, but it was nice to have a "clean" surface to eat from, and then hang up on the line afterwards. It's not as snazzy as it looks though: it's a polyester thing I found on clearance at LinensNThings, ha ha.

Lichens, several spp.

Lichens, several spp., originally uploaded by Margo and George.

Acadia is incredible for its sheer number of lichen species growing on various substrates. I won't go on at length here about them, but suffice to say I've come to appreciate and be amazed by these fungi-alga (or -cyanobacteria) symbiotic relationships. They're amazing.

The large stringy type front and center in the photo is of the Usnea type (Usnea filipendula?); so named for its production of (antibacterial) usnic acid. Also, historically there has been a folk remedy associated with this particular lichen - that is, that wounds should be staunched using this particular lichen. While the morphology is actually very convenient (the long strands with tendrils resemble cotton bandage - and so might function the same way) it turns out usnic acid (which this species produces) has antibacterial properties. Each species produces its own chemical defenses; usnic acid is just one of the many, often unique, chemicals produced by individual lichen species.

Lichens are bioaccumulators - while they are slow-growing and incredibly tolerant of their specific environment (and lichens of one kind or another can be found all over the globe, from Antarctica to the American southwest deserts to Alaska and the Maritimes, rocky shorelines and the foggy Pacific Northwest forests...), they are self-sufficient in that their pairing of fungal and algal (or bacterial) partnership grants them respiration as well as photosynthesis, so they obtain what they need from the atmosphere and go dormant when there isn't enough moisture present - they cannot excrete. Therefore, they're good indicators of the presence of airborne pollutants - some species tolerate certain contaminants quite well, while others will die off when the pollutant ratio climbs past a certain point.

Acadia simply has an incredible array of species, and is the reason I became interested in learning about lichens at all.
For a quick survey and a *far* better array of photos than my own, go here: http://www.lichen.com/portraits.html Their text book, which I used for my class, is incredible.

Lady Slipper orchid

Lady Slipper orchid, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

detail of the lady slipper orchids

Lady Slippers

Lady Slippers, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

Okay, these are the orchids, more specifically the Lady Slipper orchids that I saw as we repacked from a brief stay at Seawall Campground in Acadia National Park. I've always camped at Seawall, but this time around we decided to stay at Blackwoods CG because it was closer to most of the trails we planned on hiking, etc. (Ah, the price of gas).

Well, we arrived quite late Thursday night, so we set up our tents in the dark, and had just - *just* gotten to bed and were drifting off when the 4am Official Town Meeting of the Birds of D Loop warmed up. They are incredible. I had the leisure to count some 20 different bird calls just in our little area. There may have been more, I'm just not that good of a birdwatcher. At any rate, they kept us up for a while longer until I personally passed out from exhaustion.

Wood ticks

Wood ticks, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

These, however, are in my book, "bad bugs" - they are wood ticks. And there are a lot of them in our garden meadow. Lots of them. After I took this shot (and you can tell my hands were shaking) I smashed these guys. Oh, the violence!

Charlotte's children

Charlotte's children, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

I would normally be freaked out by spiders, but I had to give these ones the time of day: they will, after all, be good "bugs" in that they are spider eggs, so far as I know, and will go out and eat bad bugs. So, instead of smooshing them, I took a photo instead.

Yay! early radishes

Yay! early radishes, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

So, it was fun doing some of the thinning of the rows, since I discovered some of the radishes had grown so enthusiastically that the rows needed thinning and I could actually eat some of what I thinned. And hey, they're all photogenic too.