Benjamin and North Islands, part 2 of 2

One of the special treats of our little excursion to Benjamin and North islands was finding ourselves comfortable in shirtsleeves—no jacket needed, even when crawling out of our tents at six in the morning. How often is it that warm in Juneau!?

In addition to enjoying the marine wildlife, we wandered around on both islands, just exploring. We saw one young deer, with a beautiful summer coat of red, and lots of deer sign. Deer had cropped the leaves of false lily of the valley, occasional stems of twisted stalk, and most of the leaves from sapling crabapple trees. A little stand of skunk cabbage had been reduced to ragged nubbins. Fresh water seems to be in short supply, particularly on North Island, so we wondered how deer would get enough water.

We also found skeletal evidence of four long-dead deer, some apparently quite young, leading us to speculate about hard winters in these sites. Two lower jaw bones caused us to query ADFG when we returned. One of the mandibles we found had four cheek (grinding) teeth in place plus a fifth one just erupting at the back of the jaw. A mature deer lower jaw holds six cheek teeth (three premolars and three molars), and the full set is in place at an age of about two and a half years. The jaw with the just-erupting fifth cheek tooth had belonged to a young deer, perhaps nine to twelve months old, according to ADFG.

The ground, in some places, was riddled with small holes, just the right size for a red squirrel, but we saw no evidence of current squirrel activity: No busy little fussbudgets chattering at us, no middens of stripped spruce cones, and many of the holes had spider webs across the opening. This year, there are huge numbers of spruce cones still on the trees, so food supply for squirrels should be quite decent. We wondered, then, if there had been squirrels here in the past, but perhaps a year or two of poor cone crops had wiped them out.

Among the rocks on the uplifted beach meadows we startled several good-sized voles, which scooted quickly into handy crevices. How did they get to these islands? They can certainly swim well, but it’s a long distance, for a vole, from the mainland to the islands.

As we stood quietly in a beach meadow with a dense population of lupines, we heard tiny tapping sounds and soon discovered the source: Mature lupine pods were explosively twisting open in the hot sun and the dispersing seeds clattered softly down through the surrounding vegetation. At the upper beach fringe, a stand of cow parsnip presented heads of closely packed clusters of maturing seeds. We were fascinated to observe that each little cluster of seeds resembled a rose, carved in wood. So the whole head was, so to speak, a bouquet of wooden roses. Beautiful!

Some very sturdy, squat plants lined the top of one beach, and bore yellow daisy-like blooms. These beach grounsels, with large, spreading leaves, are very specific to this particular habitat type. Each yellow ‘flower’ is really an inflorescence composed of a ring of showy flowers around a disc of many, small, not-showy flowers, altogether forming the daisy-like composite inflorescence. We noticed that ants were visiting the central flowers, presumably sipping nectar. What an odd place to find ants, which don’t seem to be common in Southeast.

On the forest floor were numerous evidences of predation: Three piles of crow feathers (and feet), plus a regurgitated pellet with an intact crow foot. Four piles of gull feathers. Scattered plates of chitons. Sea urchin tests (a.k.a. shells). Some clam shells and small crab legs. Eagles and otters, and perhaps others, had found their dinners.

Other sightings:

• A row of extremely contorted spruces on a raised terrace well inside the present forest edge. What could be their history?
• A dogwood bush, normally shrub-sized, but in this instance sending a long branch or two far up along a spruce trunk, almost like a vine. Apparently its only chance to reach the light was to straggle upward, because the dense thicket of young spruce at the forest edge effectively blocked light from shrub-level.
• An orchid with vanishingly small flowers (with the regrettable name of adder’s mouth), presumably pollinated by insects as tiny as no-see-ums. Could those miserable pests actually have a use?
• Several specimens of slime mold, growing on fallen logs. One kind was white and spongy, the other was yellow and fuzzy-looking. Spending most of their lives as separate cells in the forest floor, upon some unknown signal the cells come together to form the visible mold, and reproduce.
• A family of Pacific/winter wrens in a heap of wind-thrown trees, the young ones curious, the parents wary.

From our perspective, our prowlings were profitable. These little explorations are like treasure hunts in which the treasure is unknown ahead of time but recognizable when one sees it.

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Tricky flowers

Most of our wild flowers are wide-open structures, just letting all the sexual parts hang out. Think of nagoonberry or cloudberry, asters, avens, silverweed, wild roses, geranium, anemones, and so on—all of these just present the sexual organs to whatever insect happens to land there. The smaller flowers of angelica and cow parsnip and their relatives do the same, but present the flowers in flat-topped bunches, making a good-sized landing platform for a visiting insect. It is then a relatively simple matter for an insect to walk around, picking up pollen from one flower and carrying it to another. Columbine and fernleaf goldthread dangle the sex organs loosely, downward or outward, where a visitor just bumps into them, when in search of nectar deeper in the flower.

Some of our flowers, however, are a bit more complex, requiring a visiting insect to do a little work or behave in a particular way. In these species, the sexual parts are typically enclosed within the flower—concealed in various ways. Here are some examples:

Lupine. Photo by Bob Armstrong

Lupine: Bees pry open the flower, and when they depress the lowest, keel-like petal, out pop the stigma (to receive pollen, if the bee carried any) and the anthers (containing pollen to be deposited on the bee and carried to another flower).

Twayblade orchid: A visiting tiny bee or fly pokes into the miniscule flower, bumping into a projection that releases a sticky gob that pulls out clumps of pollen. The pollen is stuck onto the insect’s face or head until another flower is visited and the pollen is inserted there.

Violet: Down in the heart of the flower, the stigma is encircled by closed anthers, packed tightly together (the technical term is ‘connivent’—conjuring up mental images of conniving and scheming deviously (!). A visiting insect displaces the stigma, pushing it to one side and perhaps depositing pollen, and only then do the anthers open, releasing pollen to be picked up and carried away by the insect.

Bog cranberry. Photo by Bob Armstrong

Blueberry, cranberry, shooting star, wintergreens (and tomato): Although the flowers differ in shape, all depend on what is called ‘buzz pollination.’ A visiting bee vibrates certain flight muscles (and buzzes), which causes pollen to shake down on the bee. If the bee already had pollen on its body, from another flower, it is brushed off onto the stigma.

Bunchberry/dwarf dogwood: the tiny flowers are clustered together, surrounded by white, petal-like bracts. Ripe flower buds open suddenly and the anthers explode their pollen into the air or onto an insect, when a tiny projection on one of the four petals is triggered, perhaps by an insect.

Lady-slipper orchid/moccasin flower: These flowers are doubly devious. They offer no nectar to insect visitors, who nevertheless prospect around inside the ‘slipper’, in hopes of a reward. But once inside that slipper, they cannot get out—except by squeezing through a tight opening at the back of the flower, where the sexual organs just happen to be located, convenient for pollen deposition and pick-up.

Bog laurel. Photo by Bob Armstrong

Bog laurel: When the flower opens, the anthers are held in little pockets on the faces of the petals, with slim filaments linking them to the center of the flower. This species is normally pollinated by bumblebees: when the bee lands on a flower, the anthers spring out of their pockets and dust pollen on the bee. The springing mechanism is reported to be very sensitive, so perhaps even small insects, coming in search of nectar, can spring the anthers free, but it is unclear if the pollen would land on their bodies and if they would be effective pollinators.

All these clever little arrangements are a small sample of the ingenious contrivances for pollination exhibited by flowers in more southerly latitudes, about which whole books have been written. The world of flowers is far more complicated than one might expect.