Variations on Lifeforms

I was walking around my yard today and ran into a few plants that I thought have never seen before. I used my google image finder to discover what they were.  The first one (shown above) is called claytonia perfoliata, or more commonly known as miner's lettuce or winter purslane  It is a flowering plant in the family of Morntiaceae.  I have now read up all about it, and it does have green leaves, and it was the green leaf variety that I have seen before, but those leaves and stems will turn this strange pinkish yellow color if there is too much sun and a lack of water.  They are edible, but I will pass on tasting it this time.  It is an annual plant native to the western mountain and coastal regions of North America.

Below, another plant, only a few feet away, is shown below.  It is called pterospora andromedea, also commonly known as woodland pinedrops or giant pinedrops.  They appear as a tall redish-purple plant

that often resembles emerging asparagus spears.  It produces a cluster of small, nodding, bell-shaped flowers that can range in color from white to creamy-yellow or reddish. The stems are noticeably sticky to the touch due to glandular hairs that excrete a sticky substance.  Pinedrops lack chlorophyll and therefore cannot perform photosynthesis. This gives them their non-green, "ghostly" appearance. 

Pinedrops are mycoheterotrophic plants. Instead of making their own food from sunlight, they derive nutrients through a parasitic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. These fungi are themselves connected to the roots of nearby coniferous trees, typically pine trees

Pinedrops are found in moist to dry shaded coniferous or mixed forests across North America.  They are often found in small clusters and may not appear above ground every year, only emerging when environmental conditions are ideal. 

The world is almost infinite in the variations of its life forms.  All we have to do is open our eyes and look around to see this.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone

We decided to install a water fountain in the patio/deck area behind our house.  The reason we made the decision to place the fountain there was because we were being disturbed by a low level din from a highway about a mile away that we could hear, albeit ever so slightly, when we were out on the deck, especially in the evenings. We found the low level highway din very disturbing, to say the least.  The new fountain masked the noise of the highway fairly well.

Shortly after we installed the fountain it started being visited by many varieties of birds: robins, finches, jays, humming birds, crows, etc. and the honey bees from the hives that we also have in the back yard.  We enjoyed all of these visitors, at first.   However, the crows kept coming to the fountain to wash their food, primarily chicken parts, and leaving the bones in the fountain after they were done eating all the meat off them, and they would also scare away the other birds that wanted to share the water.  There was one family of crows that lived in the oak tree about 50 feet from the fountain. That particular crow family was part of a murder of crows that lives in the neighborhood. (Yes, if you didn't already know, a flock of crows is called a murder!)  Together, the crows were taking over the fountain and scaring away the other birds and the bees.

So, in order to keep the crows from coming to the fountain, I installed a small scarecrow immediately above the fountain, attached to a railing.  This didn't seem to phase the crows.  They were still coming on a regular basis to use the fountain as their dinner table, leaving the bones behind.  I escalated, by putting an orange colored college pennant I had into one of the hands of the scarecrow.  This combination of either the orange in the pennant, or possibly the wind making the pennant flap in the wind was too much for the crows to take and they have now departed permenently.  Fortunately, the other birds and the bees could care less about the scarecrow and the pennant and they still come to visit the fountain on a regular basis.

We then noticed that we could still hear a very faint sound of the highway over the sound of the bubbling water in the fountain.  I next purchased a small white noise machine and plugged it in and left it sitting right behind the base of the fountain.  I selected the sound of  a gentle babbling brook from the various choices available and turned up the volume.  It sounds just like the original fountain, but more intense.

So, now it has been almost a month without the crows and I have deemed the scarecrow with the orange pennant waving in the breeze an unqualified success.  I have now looked up why scarecrows behave this way, and have discovered that the moving parts seem to be necessary since the crows are very smart, but not smart enough to understand the moving parts.