Red Maples

Female Red Maple Flower

Spring is at a full sprint now. This week-end I snapped pictures of the flowers of a few of the trees in bloom. Initially I thought the above and below pictures had to be two different species of maples, but when I got back to the house to consult the books they turned out to be the male and female versions of red maples.

Male Red Maple Flower

A sod webworm moth

Lesser Vagabond Sod Webworm (Agriphila ruricolella)

This is one of the common little moths that flutter up as you walk through the long grass. It's common name refers to the caterpillar stage that lives in amongst the thatch feeding on grass at night (pdf). It is one of the few native bugs that seems to do well in the mostly foreign roadside environment.

Northern Crab Spider

I came across this beautiful little green spider yesterday evening as i was out inspecting the 2011 trees. The light was very poor so I didn't catch much of the detail of this little guy but you can make out the unique pattern on its abdomen. The bug guide identifies him as Mecaphesa asperata one of the crab spiders. Crab spiders are camouflage specialists, they don't spin webs, instead they hang out in likely locations, such as flowers, where insects are likely to land and then just wait for the insects to come to them. I must say, I don't expect this guy fooled too many insects. He doesn't blend in well with a dead red maple twig.

Summer Transplants

Last August I transplanted a few seedling into the 2009 square to fill in some gaps where the trees had died. There were six red maple seedlings, two cedars, a pine tree and what I believe is an ash tree; all less than a foot tall. I figured that August was a good time to transplant the trees because the trees had had the summer to build up their energy reserves while it gave enough time for the trees to put some roots down before the frost. Initially they all seemed to do very poorly. The deciduous trees very quickly lost their leaves, the cedars turned an olive brown colour and the pine showed no sign of growth. Finally in October one of the maples started putting out new growth just in time for the frosts to kill it off.

With that inauspicious start I was worried the trees wouldn't survive the winter but this spring they are all showing promising signs of life. The buds on the pine tree (see above) are swelling, the maples look healthy (to right) and the cedars are greening up. These small trees were transplanted from flower gardens and from under trees where they had planted themselves. In the case of the cedars they had rooted in among the pebbles under the eaves of the house and came away with bare roots. It amazes me that they all survived since I don't know how many roots they lost in the transplantation. Yet the late august seedlings have a better record of survival than the potted trees transplanted for the city last spring. I'll save their sorry tale for another post.

In Bloom:
Forget-me-not
Dandelion
Yellow Rocket
Garlic Mustard
Trillium
Serviceberry

Nitrogen deficiency

Here is a maple where you can see that the leaves are yellowing between the veins showing it is lacking nitrogen. In the grass around the maple you can see the purple vetch a nitrogen fixing legume is doing exceedingly well. These two facts may be related. It seems like the purple vetch is doing better this year than either of the previous two years. In the previous years birdfoot trefoil seemed to be the dominant legume creating large mats but now in the square where the trefoil has been uncut for the third year now, the trefoil is losing out to the vetch. On the westside where this is only the second year without mowing the treefoil is still going strong.

Here is a link discussing the use of trefoil as a pasture crop. One thing they note is that while it is a perennial it needs to self seed if it is to become permanently established. I think we might have a situation where the trefoil needs a more disturbed and open location to get established than the vetch and that when young can't compete in the long term with the faster growing grasses and the weeds.