Honestly, this blog started on the subject of floodplain forest and the story of trying to run a 10 year monthly journaling project at Bartholomew’s Cobble, in dubious conditions. As you can see from the photograph, it was (another) soggy, foggy mushy day following the deep freeze that hit just before, continuing through much of the winter holiday week. The Housatonic had flooded and frozen over the banks, but was back to normal water levels. Vast 2” thick trapezoidal flats were crashing down, puzzling together rather impressively. Some flats were hanging off of bank tree well over six feet up from the current water flow. It was pretty amazing.
A day or two before the monthly class, I do a pre-class reconnosanaince of the area we are going to study. This time it was clear that there was no way we were going to make into the flood plain forest, seeing it was ice- plain forest. This is where being a lowly nature artist can get me in trouble, seeing as it is tricky to find stuff to draw from distance, in dubious conditions. I better have some good information about things like “what’s going on under the ice in a floodplain forest” because without it participants are going to be pretty pissed that they came all this way for what looks to many like nothing.
Bowing in gratitude to the editors of Google, Mass.gov, Wikipedia, UNH and Go Botany, I was all excited about explaining that winter floodplain forest ice was acting as protection from dehydration of the mud for critters who live there in the winter like the endangered wood turtle and Jefferson salamanders. The floodplain forest has a billion important jobs to the river ecology, not the least of which is water filtration of toxins. It is an excellent habitat for insect larvae, birds, muskrats, beavers, bobcat, deer, willows, elms, silver maple, hog peanut, moon seed, willow, avens and, well, poison ivy.
I am severely allergic to poison ivy. I look at it and prepare to bathe in Technu, while figuring out the best time to aim for the E/R assuming that the flare will happen over the weekend, most likely early Sunday morning and while crossing my fingers that just looking at it really doesn’t increase the likelihood of getting it. I am not a fan.
But, my eye was caught by poison ivy being a member of the cashew family. I love cashews. I went down the Google rabbit-hole to find out what poison-ivy is good for. And, yes, according to Penn State Extension Service, rabbits do eat parts of poison-ivy. So, do deer, bear, muskrat, crows, turkeys, robins, bluebirds, phoebes, waxwings, racoons, tufted titmice and pretty much everybody else I listed in the paragraph above.
Though we non-ecologist humans might not agree wholeheartedly with this concept, poison ivy is considered a pioneer species. This means that it can be an important early growing, hardy plant, setting roots, following lichen, fungi and mosses in the forest succession process following severe landscape events. It is, in fact, a bioindicator of eco-system health.
Poison ivy as a groundcover provides cover for small animals. Though it is cited as a great way for lizards and mammals to get up trees, I suspect they could do it just by hanging on the bark, so I’m not so impressed with that bit of information. Providing places for butterflies, moths and other insects to spend their pupal phases, it is source of dinner items for the birds, amphibians and critters who like caterpillars and such.
It can be made into an indelible ink and due to it still being viable after being inundated with wastewater, it could possibly be used as part of sewage treatment protocols (thank you Go Botany).
Category “who knew?”, right?