6:30 – 7:30<\/p>\n
Stetson Tastes<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>I came to the Stetson woods today with an appetite.\u00a0 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. \u00a0The sky was darkening quickly but it was only 55 degrees outside, so I got right to work as soon as I arrived.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Expecting very little taste-wise, I attempted the Norway maple leaves.\u00a0 My intuition was right; these leaves simply tasted like bland lettuce leaves with no texture.\u00a0 Moving on to sugar maple leaves I found no improvement.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>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.\u00a0 There was none at all.\u00a0 Continuing throughout the site to buckthorn, ash, dame\u2019s rocket, multiflora rose, winged euonamous, japanese bayberry and several others I found nothing different in taste; the little differences came in texture only.\u00a0 The wild garlic mustard was only different flavor.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Moving on to the berries that remained at the site I opened a buckthorn and tentatively licked the dark mass inside.\u00a0 I immediately regretted it.\u00a0 There was absolutely no sweetness, and a terrible unfamiliar aftertaste lingered for about 2 minutes.\u00a0 I realized that at this time of year, there was a reason that these berries were the only left.\u00a0 In the name of natural investigation, however, I soldiered on.\u00a0 I tasted the Japanese Bayberry and damned my curiosity; these berries were awful too.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My taste tests were over.\u00a0 There was still more to examine beyond taste.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>On the Northern end of my site a (approximately) five by fifteen foot pool of water formed.\u00a0 The pool looked to be about 6 inches deep (roughly) at its deepest section and gradually shallowed at the edges.\u00a0 Exact measurements were impossible though.\u00a0 Just like the ground around the pool, the pool bottom was covered with a thick leaf layer.\u00a0 Around the outside, I spotted a new fungi that I\u2019ve since identified as the Coprinus comatus <\/em>or the shaggy ink cap.\u00a0 Wikipedia claims that it is a great edible mushroom and is even cultivated in China.\u00a0 It\u2019s just my luck that only thing I decided not to taste is in fact a delicacy.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Thinking back to my initial visit into this site, I do not remember many open spaces.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But not all openness,\u00a0 was seasonal.\u00a0 Of the maples on the southern side of Stetson, there were three rather large branches that had been partially separated from their tree. \u00a0 In the center rested many black locust branches.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>As I began to leave, it seemed the entire woods seemed to be thinning out in preparation for winter.\u00a0 The berries that remained seemed at best bad-tasting and at worst, inedible.\u00a0 But as I prepared to leave I saw signs that this wasn\u2019t a barren site.\u00a0 A small grey moth perched calmly on a late-blooming goldenrod, apparently probing it for something more tasteful than what I\u2019d found.\u00a0 Next to it, clung a small grub about 3\/4 of an inch in length.\u00a0 Giving this creature a closer look before I finally left, I picked it up.\u00a0 It did not appreciate my offer of hospitality.\u00a0 It quickly curled up, and excreted a huge volume of foul green liquid onto my hands.\u00a0 Tasteless.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 6:30 – 7:30 Stetson Tastes \u00a0 I came to the Stetson woods today with an appetite.\u00a0 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. \u00a0The sky was darkening […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12614],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-10-stetson-hall-parking-lot-woods"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/biol225\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}