Schoodic Mountain, The Maine Woods in Autumn

This is some of the flora and fauna of the Maine woods in autumn.

Maine 2012 (Autumn fungi)

I've fallen behind in blogging, so will just pour this beauty onto the page in one big post.  Maine (or anywhere in New England, to be honest) in the fall just can't be beat.  I grew up there, and here's a picture of my homestead ... long before I was a resident there.  The house is some 150 years old.

Sullivan, Maine.

An autumn hike (Cyndi).

Autumn leaves, beech tree.

Blueberry fields in the fall.

Wave impact at Schoodic Point, Acadia National Park.

Northern Gannet.

Another treeline, this one at the edge of the salt spray zone, showing the pink granite bedrock of the Maine coast.

I'm tempted to say this is an angry ocean.  It was heaving and churning with a stiff breeze blowing cold spindrift onshore amid the clacking of cobbles and the explosive whoomp of the waves compressing air in the caverns at the edge of the sea.  But the ocean is dispassionate, and the seawater coursing through our bodies cares not for the external tempest we call life.

A herd of brown toadstools, showing off their gills.

A shelf fungus exudes moisture from its pores in the damp forest.

Squirrel.

A Hydnum type of fungus, I believe.

Lobster fungus, and though it may not be as tasty as the crustacean, I'm told it is edible ... but check this out carefully before you take my word for it.  I have not eaten one.  I am quite cautious about eating mushrooms, because one wrong identification can have disastrous consequences.  I do love to look at them, though!

Mushrooms and moss.

A yellow Hydnum type fungus.  I'm not a mycologist, but with this many non-vascular plants to be found ... if I lived in Maine, I think I would be!

If this was red, I would have called it "British Soldiers."  But it is pink, and I think it may be the fruiting bodies of a form of lichen.  This is a close-up, they're very tiny.

A colorful toadstool, perhaps in the Amanita family, a deadly poisonous one.

A pure white mushroom with wondrous translucency showcasing the gills.

Autumn color reflected in the ripples of an abandoned granite quarry now filled with water.

The brilliant varied color of Staghorn Sumac in the fall.

Schoodic Mountain

On nearly the final day of our vacation we set off through the Maine woods to climb Schoodic Mountain, which rises on the mainland with a commanding view past Mount Desert Island and beyond to the open ocean. Looking north, one sees unbroken forest canopy and in the far distance Mount Katahdin, Maine's tallest peak and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

Large boulders, decaying logs and colorful leaves made this a wonderful hike.

Here a piece of bark from the White Birch tree rests among the leaf litter on the forest floor.

Beech trees were turning a golden yellow.

Amazingly, even this fungi was a bright yellow.

This log had many shelf fungi displaying concentric lines of brown and white.

There were even some of the "classic" variety of toadstool, with stem and cap.

We saw lichens, liverworts, and mosses galore. This image shows browning leaves among the Reindeer Moss (Cladonia rangiferina). It is actually a lichen, not a moss. And, yes, Reindeer do eat them (though there are not Reindeer in Maine).

These colorful fungi were peeking through the leaf litter as well. It was as if even the fungi wanted to get in on the colorful autumn celebration.

Overhead, a Hairy Woodpecker was hard at work on a decaying tree. I was initially disappointed when it took flight, but then became elated as it landed on a closer trunk with this gorgeous background of golden foliage framing it.

These Puffballs are inhabiting a rotting Birch trunk.

Cyndi often lagged behind, as I hurried toward the summit. I'd look back to see her prone on the ground, taking another photo of some unusual fungi. I'm not showing you all the different types I photographed ... and Cyndi found and documented even more than I did! The trail itself was gorgeous, and wild, and would serve well as an example of how to manage a wilderness resource. The trail was easy enough to follow, but largely untrammeled, with an outstanding opportunity for a primitive, unconfined type of recreation. I want to thank the State of Maine for preserving this area in such a pristine condition.

As a youth, I attended a meeting in which citizens had come together to try to formulate a plan to preserve this unique and beautiful area. Though we were warned of the dangers that it could be "loved to death" if its beauty was too well advertised, I'm pleased that it did not become a woodlot or gravel pit.

The natural inhabitants of the area thank you all for your support, and for keeping the wheels of progress off their backs.

And from the summit of Schoodic Mountain, here's a view over the lakes and forests of inland Maine. Looks rather flat, doesn't it, compared to the Northern Rockies? The ponderous glaciers of the last ice age rested heavily on this land, and ground inexorably south as far as what is now Manhattan Island in New York. That slow grinding polished some of the rock like mirrors, and sheared off most anything that stuck up toward the sky. This region of Maine rests on a solid batholith of pink and gray granite.