Field and fen at Franklin Parker
Having been blessed with an excess of energy at the beginning of the summer, I went out in the field again on June 16 on a trip organized by the Mt Cuba Center, and led by Emily Tinalli and Renee Kemmerer, to see some typical New Jersey Pine Barrens flora at the Franklin Parker Preserve.
We started off outside the preserve, examining a roadside patch of candyroot (orange milkwort). A wet ditch nearby held a variety of other interesting plants, including bog clubmoss and bushy bluestem. Entering the preserve, we followed a sand road across the old CNJ Southern Division, picking up typical dry-habitat species like bearberry, pine barren sandwort, and goat's rue. Thanks to directions (and transport) from Mark Szutarski, we got to examine a field nearby which held a spectacular specimen of clasping milkweed.
A wetland below one of the former cranberry bogs held a nice example of Sparganium americanum (bur-reed), with its distinctive infructescences. Our path led us through typical pitch pine-scrub oak forest, with a varied and mostly ericaceous understory, to a fen on the branch that drains the eastern portion of the old bogs into the West Branch of the Wading. A few rose pogonias were still blooming, and the bladderworts are in flower. Encouraged to explore the fen, we cautiously brachiated from white-cedar to white-cedar, finding Sabatia difformis blooming and Lophiola aurea under way. Perhaps the best find was a single Narthecium americanum, the yellow asphodel--extirpated from the rest of its range (where it never seems to have had more than a tenuous footing in historical times), its beautiful yellow spikes are no longer to be seen except in the watersheds of a few Pine Barrens rivers.
The herps were also on hand: I spotted a carpenter frog happily bobbing in the cedar water, and a green frog sheltering near some sundews at water's edge. (Sadly, no picture of the king snake that swam up to join the action shortly after Emily plunged into the fen.) The hot trek back along the old bog edges did reveal a Nuttallanthus canadensis popping up in the dry sand.
I went over to Webb's Mill afterwards and shot a few pictures I haven't logged yet, but by then I was out of water and ready to go home. Still, a good day, and an interesting return to the Pine Barrens after several years away.
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