by Les Harrison | Feb 4, 2017
Valentine’s Day is just a few days away and this month’s theme is evidenced by the color red. Red hearts, bows, roses (imported this time of year from South America) and candy in red boxes
This hue is not frequently seen in Wakulla County in the mist of winter’s grip, but this year azaleas bloomed in January. Still, red highlights in lawns, pastures and other open areas tend to attract attention.
Mature Column Stinkhorns are in striking contrast to most other local mushrooms. These were growing on the edge of the UF/IFAS Wakulla County Extension Demonstration Garden where wood chips are plentiful.
Photo: Les Harrison
The reason is simple. A mushroom species is taking advantage of the cool weather and available moisture.
Clathrus columnatus, the scientific name for the column stinkhorn, is a north Florida native which is common to many Gulf Coast locales. This colorful fungus has also been known by the common name “dead man’s fingers”.
The short lived above ground structure is usually two to six inches high at maturity. This area is known as the fruiting body and produces spores which are the basis for the next generation.
Two to five hollow columns or fingers project upwards above the soil or mulch. Coloration of the fruiting body can range from pink to red, and occasionally orange.
The inner surfaces of the column are covered with stinkhorn slime and spores, and which produces an especially repulsive stench. This foul odor is useful though, attracting an assortment of flies and other insects which track through it.
A small amount of the mixture of the brown slime and spores attaches to the insect’s body. It is then carried by these discerning visitors to other bug enticing spots, usually of equal or greater offensiveness to people. Spores are deposited as the slime mixture is rubbed off as the insects brush against surfaces.
Decaying woody debris is a favorable environment for the column stinkhorn to germinate. As the wood rots bacterial activity makes necessary nutrients available to this mushroom.
Other areas satisfactory for development include lawns, gardens, flower beds and disturbed soils. All contain bits and pieces of decomposing wood and bark.
Occasionally, column stinkhorns can be seen growing directly out of stumps and living trees. Presence on a living tree is a good indication the tree has serious health issues and may soon die.
This fungi starts out as a partially covered growth called a volva. The portion above and below the soils surface has the general appearance of a hen’s egg and is bright white.
The term volva is applied in the technical study of mushrooms, and used to describe a cup-like structure at the base of the fungus. It is one of the precise visible features used to identify specific species.
The cool wet weather currently in Wakulla County combined with local sandy soils and available nutrients create ideal growing conditions. While rarely notices during initial stages of growth, they are quickly spotted at or near maturity.
There are other stinkhorn mushrooms in Wakulla County, but they are not as common. In addition to North America, member of this fungi family with a fetid aroma can be found in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.
Photo: Les Harrison
While not likely to be a Valentine’s Day gift, it still has a distinct place in the local environment. Get close and it is difficult to overlook.
To learn more about Wakulla County’s mushrooms, contact your UF/IFAS Wakulla Extension Office at 850-926-3931 or http://wakulla.ifas.ufl.edu/
by Les Harrison | Jan 8, 2017
Some of the most picturesque and scenic natural areas along north Florida’s Gulf Coast are found in Bald Point State Park. The 4,065 acre park is located on Alligator Point, where Ochlockonee Bay meets Apalachee Bay.
Easy access to water activities at Bald Point State Park.
Photo: Les Harrison
Bald Point State Park offers a variety of land and water activities. Coastal marshes, pine flatwoods, and oak thickets foster a diversity of biological communities which make the park a popular destination for birding and wildlife viewing.
These include shorebirds along the beach, warblers in the maritime oak hammocks, wading birds, and birds of prey in and around the marsh areas. The boardwalk and observation deck overlook the marsh near the beach.
During autumn bald eagles and other migrating raptors, along with monarch butterflies are frequently viewed heading south to a warmer winter.
Bald Point offers access to two Apalachee Bay beaches for water sports and leisure activities, and these facilities include a fishing dock and picnic pavilions at Sunrise beach, North End beach and Maritime Hammock beach. Grills and restrooms are also available, but pets are prohibited on the beach.
Pre-Columbian pottery helped archaeologists identify the park’s oldest site, placing the earliest human activity 4,000 years ago. These early inhabitants hunted, fished, collected clams and oysters, and lived in relatively permanent settlements provided by the abundant resources of the coast and forests.
In the mid-1800s and late 1900s, fishermen established seineyards at Bald Point. These usually primitive campsites included racks to hang, dry and repair nets. Evidence of the 19th to 20th century turpentine industry is visible on larger pine trees cut with obvious scars.
Bald Point is an excellent location for both wildlife viewing and birding.
Photo: Les Harrison
Among the varieties of saltwater fish found in the brackish tidal waterway are redfish, trout, flounder and mackerel.
Today’s visitors may fish on the bridge over tidal Chaires Creek off of Range Road, and in Tucker Lake, by canoe or kayak. Sea trout, red fish, flounder and sheepshead are common catches, and this is an excellent area to cast net for mullet or to catch blue crabs.
Bald Point State Park is open 8:00 a.m. to sunset daily, with a charge $4.00 per car with up to eight people, or $2.00 per pedestrian or bicycle
More information is available at the Florida State Park site.
There are numerous trails where the visitor and explore Florida.
Photo: Les Harrison.
by Carrie Stevenson | Jan 8, 2017
Arbor Day has a 145-year history, started in Nebraska by a nature-loving newspaper editor who recognized the many valuable services trees provide. We humans often form emotional attachments to trees, planting them at the beginning of a marriage, birth of a child, or death of a loved one, and trees have tremendous symbolic value within cultures and religions worldwide. So it only makes sense that trees have their own holiday. The first Arbor Day was such a big success that his idea quickly spread nationwide–particularly with children planting trees on school grounds. In addition to their aesthetic beauty and valuable shade in the hot summers, trees provide countless benefits: wood and paper products, nut and fruit production, wildlife habitat, stormwater uptake, soil stabilization, carbon dioxide intake, and oxygen production. If you’re curious of the actual dollar value of a tree, the handy online calculator at TreeBenefits.com can give you an approximate lifetime value of a tree in your own backyard.
Arbor Day events in the western Panhandle.
While national Arbor Day is held the last Friday in April, Arbor Day in Florida is always the third Friday of January. Due to our geographical location further south than most of the country, our primary planting season is during our relatively mild winters. Trees have the opportunity during cooler months to establish roots without the high demands of the warm growing season in spring and summer.
To commemorate Arbor Day, many local communities will host tree giveaways,plantings, and public ceremonies. In the western Panhandle, the Florida Forest Service, UF/IFAS Extension, and local municipalities have partnered for several events, listed here.
For more information on local Arbor Day events and tree giveaways in your area, contact your local Extension Office or County Forester!
by Laura Tiu | Nov 18, 2016
Snorkeler at Morrison Springs – Laura Tiu
Morrison Springs Bald Cypress
There are over 1000 springs identified in Florida. In the Panhandle, the majority of the springs are karst or artesian springs rising deep from the Floridan Aquafer System within the states limestone base. Springs are unique and can be identified by perennial flows, constant water temperature and chemistry, high light transparency. This yields a freshwater ecology dependent on these features. Springs are classified based upon the average discharge of water but can exhibit a lot of variability based on water withdrawals and rainfall. These springs are some of our most precious water resources, supplying the drinking water our communities rely on, as well as providing great recreation opportunities.
Morrison Springs is a popular spring in northwest Florida and is one of 13 springs flowing into the Choctawhatchee River Basin. It is a large, sandy-bottomed spring surrounded by old growth cypress. The spring pool is 250 feet in diameter, discharges an average of 48 million gallons of water each day from three vents into the Choctawhatchee River as a second magnitude spring. The spring contains an extensive underwater cave system with three cavities up to 300 feet deep and is popular for scuba diving, swimming and snorkeling, kayaking, canoeing and fishing. Historically, it was privately owned and was a popular swimming hole for locals. In 2004, the state of Florida purchased the land containing the spring in the Choctawhatchee River floodplain. The land was leased to Walton County for 99 years. The county created a 161-acre park with a picnic pavilion, restroom facilities and a wheelchair-accessible boardwalk. A down-stream boat ramp provides access to the river away from swimmers and divers. There is no entrance fee.
Morrison Spring is filled with abundant fish and plant life. Fish include largemouth bass, spotted bass, hybrid striped bass, bluegill, sunfish, redbreast sunfish, warmouth, black crappie, striped bass, catfish, alligator gar, bowfin, carp, mullet and flounder or hogchoakers (freshwater sole). It is also home to some nocturnal freshwater eels that swim around the vent and delight the divers. Most are gray, about an inch in diameter and maybe a foot or two long. The spring supports many trees, plants, and grasses including bald cypress, live oak, red maple, pawpaw, red and black titi, Cherokee bean, sweetbay, blackgum, juniper, red cedar, southern magnolia, laurel oak, tupelo, hickory, willow, wax myrtle, cabbage palm, saw palmetto blueberry, hydrangea, St. John’s wort, mountain laurel, water lily, pickerelweed, pitcher plant, broad leaved arrowhead, fern, and moss.
Morrison Springs was previously considered one of the cleanest springs in Florida until 2010 (Florida Springs Initiative). All of Florida springs are currently at risk as the state population continues to increase. Spring flows are decreasing as the result of increasing extraction of groundwater for human uses. Development, and the resultant over pumping, and nitrogen pollution from agriculture both have impacts on the aquifer recharge areas. Existing groundwater pumping rates from the Floridan Aquifer in 2010 were more than 30% of average aquifer recharge (Florida Spring Initiative). The University of Florida IFAS Extension Agents in the Panhandle occasionally conduct interpretive guided tours of the Springs to help citizens understand the importance of protecting this unique water source.
by Will Sheftall | Oct 22, 2016
What do the Ochlockonee and Aucilla rivers have in common? Not much, it would seem, beyond the fact that both have headwaters in Georgia and flow through Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. These two rivers do share the distinction of being unusual, although they’re unusual in very different ways.
The Ochlockonee runs yellow-brown between Leon and Gadsden counties.
Photo: Rosalyn Kilcollins
The Aucilla is a blackwater stream that goes underground and rises again before reaching the Gulf – a disappearing act that has fascinated early settlers, paddlers and naturalists alike. The Aucilla drains a smaller watershed, has lower flows, and features stream channel sediments that are predominantly sands and decaying organic material – the sediment signature of coastal plain streams with water stained dark brown, the color of tea.
In fact, blackwater rivers like the Aucilla get their color by steeping fallen and decaying tree leaves and twigs in slow-moving water, just as we steep shredded tea leaves or ground up coffee beans to dissolve their tannic acids into beverages. Blackwater steeping occurs in swamp forests up river tributaries, and in oxbow sloughs and other quiescent side channels of the downstream reaches. These form as a river “in flood” meanders and changes course within its floodplain.
The Ochlockonee is unusual among rivers originating in the Coastal Plain: in its upper reaches it has alluvial characteristics common to streams flowing from the Piedmont. The Ochlockonee drains soils rich in silt and clay that give it a yellowish brown color when those extremely fine sediments are suspended in the water. Land use activities such as paving roads and tilling farm fields elevate the fine sediment load when it rains by setting up larger volumes of fast-moving runoff. Higher rain runoff volume and velocity conspire to erode bare fields, construction sites and river banks, accentuating this river’s color.
But in spite of these differences, the Aucilla and Ochlockonee were once branches of the same river drainage system – the Paleo-Ochlockonee River. How could that possibly be? Well, sea level rise has drowned the lower reaches of this once mightier river, leaving its upper branches to empty into the Gulf separately, as smaller streams.
Sea level along Florida’s Big Bend coastline has been rising since the end of Earth’s last Ice Age – roughly 18,000 years ago. Our shallow, gently sloping underwater continental shelf was exposed during that last period of glaciation. As higher temperatures began melting ice sheets, not only did sea level rise, but more water evaporated and fell as rain. Southeastern rivers began carrying greater volumes of water.
Before annual rainfall reached today’s level during this prehistoric period of climate change, it is likely that the Aucilla from headwaters to Gulf was even more discontinuous than it is today. A current hypothesis is that the Aucilla was more like a string of sinkholes than a river, resembling its lower reaches today in a section known as the “Aucilla Sinks.”
The Aucilla is a tannic river. Thus not as yellow-brown but rather more “blackwater”.
Photo: Jed Dillard
But the nature of the Paleo-Aucilla is just one part of this intriguing story. Using sophisticated technology, scientists have discovered clues about the ancient route of the entire Paleo-Ochlockonee as it meandered across that more expansive, exposed Continental shelf to the Gulf.
In their 2008 publication Aucilla River, Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy reports that, “Ten thousand years ago, the Florida coastline was located 90 miles away from its present position. Scientists have discovered a buried river drainage system indicating that approximately 15 to 20 miles offshore from today’s coast — and now underwater — the Aucilla River combined with the Ochlockonee, St. Marks, Pinhook, and Econfina rivers to create what archeologists call the Paleo-Ochlockonee, which flowed another 70 miles before reaching the Gulf.”
“Well, I’ll be!” you say, “That’s all pretty cool to think about.” That was my reaction, too, until I remembered that this process of sea level rise continues still, albeit at an accelerating rate thanks to global warming. Which means our rivers that join forces today before emptying into the Gulf will one day be separated. Sea level rise eventually will dismember the Wakulla from the St. Marks, and the Sopchoppy from the Ochlockonee – but thankfully not in our lifetime.
True, that’s happened before, but long before humans were on the scene. Today and for many tomorrows to come, I am grateful that we and our children and grandchildren have a wonderful watery world patiently awaiting our exploration, not far beyond the urban bustle of Tallahassee.
We’re far removed in time from the first humans beckoned by these rivers. A pause in the rate of sea level rise 7,000 years ago enabled development of coastal marsh ecosystems and more successful human habitation – supported in part by the bounty of fish and shellfish that depend on salt marshes. Farther upstream and still inland today, the sinks and lower reaches of the Aucilla hold archaeological sites about twice that old, that are integral to our evolving understanding of very early prehistoric human habitation on the Gulf Coastal Plain.
If you’re intrigued by the myriad of fascinating rivers and wetlands of the Big Bend region – this globally significant biodiversity hotspot we live in, and want to experience some of them first-hand, you’re in luck. Several Panhandle counties offer Florida Master Naturalist courses on Freshwater Systems (and also courses on Upland Habitats and Coastal Systems). You can check the current course offerings at: http://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/fmnp/
You can also explore on your own. There are many public lands in our region (and across the Panhandle) that provide good access.
Go see the Aucilla’s remaining string of sinks by hiking a short segment of the Florida Trail through the Aucilla Wildlife Management Area in Taylor County. And the Ochlockonee’s floodplain of sloughs and swamps, bluffs and terraces by taking trails that follow old two-track roads “down to the river” through the Lake Talquin State Forest in Leon County.
Get some maps of your public lands, get some tips on trails, get outside, and go exploring!
by | Oct 14, 2016
Beech, magnolia and native
river cane (arundinaria) characterize hardwood forests in the Red Hills
Photo by Jed Dillard
I grew up in the Georgia Piedmont outside Athens, a land of bright red sticky clay, rocks and cold weather. In addition to the ubiquitous Georgia pines, hardwoods including white oaks, hickory and beech grow there. I had no clue the Red Hills of Florida and South Georgia would mimic much of that habitat and provide the benefits of fewer rocks to blunt shovels and less cold weather. Now, I can hardly imagine living anywhere else than in one of its beech – magnolia forests.
A friend of mine was doing some work for my neighbor and took the time to look for wild turkey roosting places and walked down to the creek bed through beech, magnolia, spruce pine, white oak and hickory to where the wild azalea grows. “Those sure are some pretty woods, “he told me.
He was describing the upland hardwood forest described by the Florida Natural Areas Inventory as “a well-developed, closed-canopy forest dominated by deciduous hardwood trees on mesic soils in areas sheltered from fire. It typically has a diverse assemblage of deciduous and evergreen tree species in the canopy and midstory, shade-tolerant shrubs, and a sparse groundcover. “ Blaisdell, et al characterized their location as areas “too steep for logging, farming, or grazing and are mesic (wet) enough so that fire rarely occurs in them. “
Many of these areas are relatively small and have escaped intervention. These small areas contribute to patchwork landscapes which provide the key requirements of wildlife habitat- shelter, food and water. Turkeys roost in the spruce pine over the creek and the hens build nests and forage with their poults on the seeds and bugs of the adjacent open fields. I had always thought of Florida as a sandy coastal environment, but these hills have more clay than most Florida sites underneath them. The combination the canopy’s protection of the moisture in layers of organic matter and the soil’s clay maintain a fertile, well-drained soil profile which supports a wide variety of plants and a varied supply of mast.
Of all its flora and fauna, one of its most intriguing species is the Barred Owl, Strix varia. Judy Biss of Calhoun county’s December 4, 2015 Panhandle Outdoors Article, Owls, Florida’s Remarkable Nocturnal Birds of Prey describes the natural history and biology of owls in Florida. The first time I heard a nearby Barred owl, I thought I was in presence of a fierce beast, surely a panther, at least a bob cat. The Tarzan movies filmed at Wakulla Springs used the Barred Owl calls for jungle sounds. Barred owls thrive in this habitat. The open forest floor and mature trees give them room to navigate and an abundant variety of prey. Snags and trees whose limbs are broken off by wind, provide cavities for them and other cavity nesters.
Pretty woods? Upland Hardwood Forests? Climax Beech Magnolia Forests? No matter what you call them, they’re one of the jewels of North Florida’s range of habitats. Get out and enjoy them.
References and additional information.
http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/extension/4h/ecosystems/upland_hardwoods/upland_hardwoods_description.pdf
“The Role of Magnolia and Beech in Forest Processes in the Tallahassee, Florida, Thomasville, Georgia Area”. Blaisdell, Wooten and Godfrey. Tall Timbers Research Station
http://fnai.org/PDF/NC/Upland_Hardwood_Forest_Final_2010.pdf
