The amazing Snaefellsnes peninsula of Iceland

The Snaefellsnes peninsula in western Iceland is known for its dramatic landscapes, but nothing can prepare you for just how dramatic and all within a few miles of each other.

Our first stop at Budir to see the Black Church surprised us with some stunning mountain scenery as well.

Mossy lava covers much of the ground on this peninsula.

Mossy-covered lava is really a composite of over 130 species, including several species of ferns.

This iconic church sits by itself on the edge of the coast, which is probably why it is so well photographed.  It’s not unusual to see black-painted houses in Iceland; perhaps they draw and maintain more of the heat in this frozen landscape.

Sea cliffs at Arnarstapi just west of Budir were particularly interesting because of the exposed columns of basalt at their base.  New and interesting-looking lava formations are scattered along the coast, as you hike on a cliff side trail from Arnarstapi to Hellnar.

A picnic table overlooking a natural arch lava formation at Arnarstapi — the perfect stop for lunch.

Route 54 took us over a mountain pass from the south coast of the peninsula to the north side. There was stunning mountain scenery all along the way, making me think I was at 12000 feet in the Rockies.

Waterfalls and mountain peaks, what more could you want?

Finally along the north coast of the peninsula, we spied a long stretch of black sand beach, and the coastal peaks that dot the landscape here.

Another iconic spot, beloved by photographers, is the Kirkjufell peak that rises steeply from the ocean to form a peak from one view, and a long exposed ridge resembling a cathedral from a side view.  Nearby is the waterfall named for the peak and often photographed with it, if you have the time for a bit of a hike.

Turning around from the view of Kirkjufell, you see the lovely harbor area of Grundarfjördur, a fishing village on this north coast.

And of course there are lots of birds to find and identify along this coast, but that’s the subject of another post.

 

A walk in the forest

Rothiemurchas forest in the Cairngorm National Park of Scotland was once the center of the great 12th century Caledonian pine forest, and some of its patriarchal trees may still stand.

Rothiemurchas forest near Aviemore has some of the oldest and largest Scotch pine in the U.K.  

We found some new (to us) birds here, as well as some familiar ones, but one of the surprises was all the red squirrels in this part of the forest. They are about the size of the North American gray squirrel, but with much bushier tails, and ear tufts. In many places these native squirrels have been displaced by the introduced gray squirrels.

The forest here is a mixture of very young and very old pine, along with dense stands of birch, and remarkably little undergrowth.

Although most of the birds were found high in the tree tops, a few cooperated by flying in close.

Coal tits are close to the same size as Black-capped Chickadees, and resemble them in looks and behavior.

European Siskin look like a combination of American Goldfinch and Pine Siskin. The males are bright yellow, with paler females that look very much like the American Siskin.

This is lambing season in Scotland. Twins scamper over to their dams for reassurance and a drink when we get near to take their photos.

Into the rainforest

We left the delightful warm weather in Lima for the steamy jungle in northeastern Peru, where plants thrive, insects diversify to eat them, and birds that eat both the insects and or the plants adopt outlandish colors and decorative feathers to show off.  In other words, we are immersed in DIVERSITY.

Explorama lodge on the Amazon river

We headed down the Amazon river about an hour from Iquitos (in northeastern Peru) by motor boat, to Explorama Lodge, where we would stay in non air-conditioned lodging, with cold showers to cool us down after trekking through the steamy jungle. Boat trips out on the river and walks through the rain forest provided opportunities to see some of that diversity.

Passion flower butterfly

Heliconia flowers, a relative of banana, are actually colorful, waxy bracts, in which the actual flowers hide. They advertise their sweet nectar to hummingbirds with bright red and yellow colors.

Scarlet macaw, really up-close, a family pet of river villagers

The White-chinned Jacamar is shades of iridescent teal and green with a chestnut cap and a white chin of course.

Poison dart frogs are tiny but bright and can be found in the moist forest floor or lower vegetation.

Are you seeing a pattern here of vividly bright colors of tropical flowers and animals?  I wonder why that is?  Your thoughts?

A good omen

I count it as a good omen that the first animal I saw on this trip to Peru was a Monarch butterfly.

Monarch butterflies are probably resident year-round here in this equitable climate.  I hope these populations are healthier and more numerous than the ones that migrate to the U.S. from Mexico.

Walking among the high rise buildings and city industry of the Miraflores area of Lima, the only living things to be seen were people and plants.  So when we stumbled across a park dedicated to the fallen defenders of the city during the War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile in 1881, I was delighted to find a few birds in the trees and a few Monarchs nectaring on the Lantana blossoms.

One of many statues in the park commemorating the fallen defenders, some of whom were apparently young children.  Colorful buildings, too.

the amazing California Bay

The California Bay tree, also known as the California Bay Laurel or California Laurel, and a host of other names, is one of its kind, the only species in its own genus, and quite an interesting plant.  Bay trees are part of the coastal forest and unique to the California floristic province.

Mixed oak-bay coastal forest at Huckleberry Botanical preserve in the Oakland hills.

Their leaves are more pungent than the Mediterranean bay used in cooking. My husband once stuffed a chicken with bay laurel leaves before cooking it on a Boy Scout camping trip and found it completely inedible.

Like some other coastal tree species, California bay have a swollen base of root crown called lignotuber which protects delicate buds that sprout when the central trunk has been damaged.

Stump sprouts in California bay laurel shoot upward from the root crown.

The resultant growth of multiple stems emerging from the root crown makes this forest look like a dense jungle.

Atypical growth form of the California is bay tree, where numerous sprouts have replaced the central stump that might have been damaged by fire or storm.

Multiple stems of California bay laurel tower over the fern understory on the banks of a small creek.

On the more southern-facing (I.e., sunnier and drier) side of the creek, the trees are predominantly California Live Oak, with noticeably fewer laurels and no fern understory.

What a difference the microclimate of this forest makes.  We wore our jackets while hiking through the dark, shady north facing laurel forest, and worked up a sweat climbing the sun-exposed hills of oak forest.

Mixed hardwood-coniferous forest in the Huckleberry Botanical Preserve is truly impressive.

color me beautiful

The Amur Maple forest has once again reached its full fall splendor.

The introduced Amur Maple is really more of a tall shrub, but it grows so densely along the roadside it forms an almost impenetrable forest.

Dense thickets of Amur Maple crowd out and shade out natives that might grow there —  really the only thing this species has going for it (in my opinion) is the brilliant color display of its fall leaves.  The ground cover beneath the trees looks like a collection of fallen leaves, but on closer inspection, it seems to be a mini-forest of Amur Maple seedlings, ready to bolt up as soon as a light gap appears in the forest overhead.

Bare branches above, lots of colorful leaves on the ground — right?

There are some fallen leaves here, but there are more tiny seedlings, each with just a few leaves, carpeting the ground and leaving no bare areas for anything else to invade.

It’s a very photogenic forest, and easy to walk through since there is no understory.

The birch in the background established itself first here, but the Amur Maple seedlings beneath the birch will make it impossible for birch seedlings to get established.

but what color!

Another glorious Indian Summer day

Door county sights

The Door county peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan north of Green Bay, Wisconsin seems to enjoy a different climate than the surrounding part of the state.  Stepping back a couple of weeks from the peak fall color of central Wisconsin, trees are just barely tinged with red and gold, and the weather is balmy instead of chilled.  Maybe it’s the lake effect.

We hiked along the limestone cliffs at Cave point county park on the eastern edge of the peninsula and marveled at the way the trees could seemingly grow right out of cracks in these 400 million year old rocks that have been polished smooth by glacial action.

Pounding waves undercut the limestone bluffs and create caves along the shoreline.

Water near the rocks is crystal clear and a beautiful jade green color.

A mixed forest of white cedar, alder, beech, and maple is mostly stunted in its growth because of the lack of soil covering the limestone.

Water runoff from waves or rain/snow fall removes a lot of what little soil accumulates, and most of the trail along the shoreline involves walking over exposed tree roots.

In a couple of weeks, the fall color here will be stunning, just as advertised in the Door county brochures.

Adjacent to Cave Point park is the much larger Whitefish Dunes state park, which runs the length of the sandy shoreline here.  Plant life here faces a different challenge than growing through cracks in limestone, namely establishing roots in a shifting surface of sand with little subsurface moisture.

but as always, wherever you go, life seems to find a way…

how to eat a juniper berry

The fall harvest season is on:  it’s time to pick pumpkins and apples, the last of the field corn and soybeans; and if you’re a bird and you like fruit, it’s time to feast on the berries of the eastern red cedar, commonly known as juniper.  Actually to be entirely correct, these “berries” are actually just fleshy cones that surround a few seeds within.  They are covered with a waxy coating, which is also digestible if a bird has the right pancreatic enzymes to break it down.

Yellow-rumped Warblers love these juicy “berries”, gobbling them up whole.

Sometimes this large round nugget is a little hard to choke down, though, and the bird continually adjust the berry’s position in its mouth before swallowing.

Dark blue ones are the ripest, green ones the least ripe, and the birds seem to be quite choosy about which ones they take.  There are so many berries within reach, but this bird needs to stretch upside down to get the perfect one.

Robins joined the feast, with three or four birds all foraging within a few feet of each other.

Being a much larger bird than the warbler, the robins had no trouble downing the berries, one after the other.

Robins toss their heads back as they swallow, and occasionally lose the berry in the process.

A couple of catbirds got into the action as well, but they preferred to consume their berries in private, away from the camera lens.

Juniper berries are the only fruit/spice from conifers we use in cooking, and of course they give gin its characteristic flavor.  Beneath the waxy coating, green pulpy flesh surrounds a few seeds.  Fruit-eating birds normally quickly separate the pulp from the seeds in their gut, digesting the sugary pulp and converting it to fat stores rather quickly.  They then excrete the seeds as they fly off to other foraging areas, thus helping the plant spread into new locations.

But seed-eating birds might have a different strategy…

This female cardinal was systematically picking off berries and crushing them between her mandibles, squeezing the pulp and then discarding it.

It’s hard to tell whether she discards the pulp to get at the seeds, or discards the whole mass after squishing out berry juices.  

Seed-eating specialists probably have stronger gizzard muscles  that can crush the seeds to extract their nutrients, and seeds typically have higher fat and protein content than the sugary, pulpy mass that surrounds them.

Whatever the strategy, juniper berries provide a useful resource for migratory as well as non-migratory birds in the fall.

North Shore color

And so it begins, the slow march toward another winter.  But first we are gifted with the brilliant colors of fall.  We traveled to the north shore of Lake Superior to get our first glimpse of this year’s color show, and weren’t disappointed.

Arriving in the evening at Lutsen ski area, I wasn’t sure we would get any good views of the fall color on the hills.

But the weather cleared up for at least a couple of hours early the next morning.

And the hike around the trails on Oberg mountain was definitely rewarding.

Trails were muddy and slippery, but colorful.

View of Oberg Lake from the north side of the mountain trail, looking northwest where the color change was most evident.

Next to Oberg Lake was an enticing wetland area that should have had ducks, loons, or at least one moose.

Lake Superior in the distance was overcast and gray instead of its usual brilliant blue which makes such a nice contrast with the orange and yellow of the hillsides.

With the recent rain just days before we arrived, the rivers and waterfalls were overflowing with rapidly rushing water.

Even the smaller creeks had rapids. It’s easy to see how trees get swept downstream with high volumes of water flow that wash away the soil around their roots.

Cascade Falls, south of Grand Marais always has impressive waterfalls, but their volume and noise level after recent rains was remarkable.  The water is coffee-colored from the leaching of leaf tannins in the wetlands upstream: the more extensive the drainage of wetlands, the darker the amber brown color of the water (and waterfall).

One point in the waterfall trail gives you a view of three of the six or seven cascades in Cascade Waterfalls.

Another view of the cascade with a slower shutter speed.

butterfly “bushes”

Late summer flowers are attracting an abundance of bees and butterflies to residential gardens now, but by far the most attractive flowers seem to be those of the succulent Stonecrop (Sedum species) and Violet butterfly bush (Buddleya species).  Late summer generations of American Painted Lady are passing through the area in great numbers, probably on their way south to warmer winter climates.

A Painted Lady delicately inserts its proboscis into each open flower on a gigantic blooming head of Stonecrop.  They are easily recognized by the owl eyes on the underside of their hindwings and orange and white splotches of color on the topside of their forewings.  Newly emerged butterflies are brightly colored with entire margins of their wings intact. 

Apparently they like the nectar of Zinnia flowers as well.

But it’s the butterfly bush (Buddleya species) that is the most popular with the butterflies.  The large Eastern Tiger Swallowtails have a size advantage and might try to monopolize a flower spike,

This female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail looks a little beaten up with frayed hind wings. The eggs she will lay or has already laid will develop through the caterpillar stage and into pupae that overwinter as a chrysalis. These butterflies don’t migrate.

but the fast-darting American Painted Ladies just skip around and beneath them to feed.  You can tell this is a butterfly flower from the flatenned floral disk with a thin, elongate flower tube that likely has a nectar reward at its base.

The swallowtail has inserted its proboscis deep into one of the flowers (I colored light blue) of the flower spike.  Long, thin floral tubes like this would exclude almost all of the bees and flies and are probably much too narrow for hummingbirds to utilize.  Thus — an exclusive butterfly resource.

A Silver-spotted Skipper tried to feed on the butterfly bush along with the other butterfly species, but seemed to be excluded or chased off. So, it settled for whatever the Hosta flowers had to offer.