6:30 – 7:30

Stetson Tastes

 

I came to the Stetson woods today with an appetite.  After a great cross country meet, and an exciting fight to ensure that our mascot did not fall into the hands of the treacherous Connecticut College cross country team I had worked up an appetite.  The sky was darkening quickly but it was only 55 degrees outside, so I got right to work as soon as I arrived.

Expecting very little taste-wise, I attempted the Norway maple leaves.  My intuition was right; these leaves simply tasted like bland lettuce leaves with no texture.  Moving on to sugar maple leaves I found no improvement.

In search of any leaf taste at all, I tasted a yellow, green and yellow-orange maple leaf to see if there was any difference.  There was none at all.  Continuing throughout the site to buckthorn, ash, dame’s rocket, multiflora rose, winged euonamous, japanese bayberry and several others I found nothing different in taste; the little differences came in texture only.  The wild garlic mustard was only different flavor.

Moving on to the berries that remained at the site I opened a buckthorn and tentatively licked the dark mass inside.  I immediately regretted it.  There was absolutely no sweetness, and a terrible unfamiliar aftertaste lingered for about 2 minutes.  I realized that at this time of year, there was a reason that these berries were the only left.  In the name of natural investigation, however, I soldiered on.  I tasted the Japanese Bayberry and damned my curiosity; these berries were awful too.  I looked to the only birch tree at my site in hopes of clearing my palette, but its lowest branches were decidedly out of reach.  My taste tests were over.  There was still more to examine beyond taste.

On the Northern end of my site a (approximately) five by fifteen foot pool of water formed.  The pool looked to be about 6 inches deep (roughly) at its deepest section and gradually shallowed at the edges.  Exact measurements were impossible though.  Just like the ground around the pool, the pool bottom was covered with a thick leaf layer.  Around the outside, I spotted a new fungi that I’ve since identified as the Coprinus comatus or the shaggy ink cap.  Wikipedia claims that it is a great edible mushroom and is even cultivated in China.  It’s just my luck that only thing I decided not to taste is in fact a delicacy.  Finishing my pond examination I noticed 4 slugs around the outside which I was unable to identify but were about an inch and half long, a pale beige/white in color with a mottled back.

Thinking back to my initial visit into this site, I do not remember many open spaces.  Now, however, it seemed as if much ground cover had been smothered by a layer of leaves and they would not emerge again until next year.  But not all openness,  was seasonal.  Of the maples on the southern side of Stetson, there were three rather large branches that had been partially separated from their tree.   In the center rested many black locust branches.

As I began to leave, it seemed the entire woods seemed to be thinning out in preparation for winter.  The berries that remained seemed at best bad-tasting and at worst, inedible.  But as I prepared to leave I saw signs that this wasn’t a barren site.  A small grey moth perched calmly on a late-blooming goldenrod, apparently probing it for something more tasteful than what I’d found.  Next to it, clung a small grub about 3/4 of an inch in length.  Giving this creature a closer look before I finally left, I picked it up.  It did not appreciate my offer of hospitality.  It quickly curled up, and excreted a huge volume of foul green liquid onto my hands.  Tasteless.