This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have an overgrown bushy-tailed grain-like wetland grass: Giant Bristlegrass (Setaria magna).
Giant Bristlegrass is a member of the Bristlegrass genus, Setaria. Bristlegrasses all share a similar growth habit: stiff flower stalks with widely spaced leaves that end in a bristly cylindrical cluster of seeds. The most famous of the genus, Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica) was domesticated more than 10,000 years ago and is still grown widely as a food grain throughout Asia. Here in the Lowcountry, we have three native species of Bristlegrass (Giant, Coastal, and Marsh) and two invasive species (Green and Yellow). Of those, four are relatively small and fairly innocuous grasses that, to the untrained eye, can easily be mistaken for one another. However the fifth, Giant Bristlegrass, stands out above the rest, literally.
Giant Bristlegrass can easily exceed six feet in height with a seed head a foot long and an inch and a half in diameter. Individual plants grow as clumps and often have a half-dozen or more seed heads at once. When several plants grow together, they can really standout above a marsh or wetland. They grow in brackish marshes in saturated soils and tolerate periodic salt intrusion well. Seed heads mature in late summer and fall. The seeds of Giant Bristlegrass provide food for resident rodents and songbirds and migrating sparrows during winter.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re hearing the inane and insane babbling of the Boat-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus major).
The Boat-tailed Grackle is a large member of the Blackbird family, Icteridae, and is typically a foot or more in length. They bear a long and rounded tail, lanky legs, and a dagger-like bill. Males are an oily iridescent black that often runs into shades of indigo across the body. Females range from a washed-out walnut to cinnamon-chocolate plumage, either extreme contrasting their shale-black flight feathers. Both sexes wear a sour demeanor. A look of simmering aggravation communicated through piercing banana-yellow eyes.
The size and color of a Boat-tailed Grackle are usually more than sufficient to identify them at a glance. Yet they are even more easily identified by their voice. The song of the male is a lovely string of screeching hollers, garbled gargling, and ear-splitting buzzes that command attention but scarcely admiration. To make matters worse, they are non-migratory and live in colonies. So rarely is one treated to a single seasonal shrieking soliloquy rather than an unceasing quarrelsome quartet. Females are thankfully far less vocal, sticking to simple barks and squawks.
As mentioned previously, Boat-tailed Grackles live in sedentary colonies making them a year-round resident of Edisto Island. They are a coastal species that is highly dependent on salt marsh and other tidal wetlands for habitat. They’re often spotted roosting on hammocks, docks, and marsh grass or foraging on beaches, mud flats, and oyster beds. However, this here Grackle is quite adaptable and they’ve taken quite the shine to beach urbanization. Boat-tailed Grackles are omnivorous and they’ve found themselves at home with coastal commercialization. Much like our Laughing Gulls, they’ve taken to patrolling parking lots and wharfs in search of wayward scraps. Their colonies make good use of docks, bridges, and causeways as stages for their unintelligible ramblings and vantages for foraging. They nest low in wet thickets and over marshes, areas rarely disturbed and often nearby to coastal developments.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have an inhalable aromatic herb that’s a host for butterflies, Rabbit Tobacco (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium).
Rabbit Tobacco is a member of the Aster family. It’s found throughout South Carolina and the Eastern United States. It grows in open habitats on a wide array of soils but prefers dirt on the drier, sandier side in fallow hayfields. Rabbit Tobacco is an annual herb but interestingly it overwinters as a seedling to bloom and die in fall. It grows to about knee high on straight stems with foliage that gradually expands in breadth. The foliage of Rabbit Tobacco is lime-green and leathery above but upholstered below in a shimmering down of frosty silk that extends to its limbs and stem. The flowers of Rabbit Tobacco are small, white, and egg-shaped with an almost glowing golden opening at the tip. The flowers themselves are actually assemblages of many tiny flowers packed together. These packages of flowers are grown in clusters of a half dozen or so. Each of these clusters is again grouped into a half-dozen or so at the tip of each stem, and all of those groups are compounded into a collection of every stem and stalk that build into a cloud of flowers. This pale and puffy appearance makes Rabbit Tobacco stand out clearly from your average wildflower, floating like a foam atop the sea of undulating hay submersing a fallow field. The flowers of Rabbit Tobacco provide both nectar and pollen to our smaller native pollinators. They also smell like maple syrup! The scent of pancakes wafting in the breeze is unmistakable where these wildflowers thickly bloom. The flowers eventually mature into a cottony glob of tiny windblown seeds.
Rabbit Tobacco is the host plant for the American Lady butterfly (Vanessa virginiensis). The Lady’s caterpillars feed on the plant by weaving leaves and flowers into a protective shield around itself. These spiky red and white caterpillars can often be found nestled amongst the flowers of Rabbit Tobacco, munching away in their cozy cage.
As the common name alludes, Rabbit Tobacco is also an herb that has historically been smoked or burned as incense by both Native Americans and colonists. The plant indeed has quite a pleasant aroma when fresh, crush, or burned. Yet, the plant has no significant concentration of neurochemicals. It is smoked primarily for the flavor and scent as well as a myriad of purported health benefits. However, there has been no scientific documentation to corroborate any of the plant’s claimed medicinal properties. Most empirical evidence points to it being more harmful than helpful.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have a tottering tropical butterfly that vacations on our Island every fall: the Zebra Longwing (Heliconius charithonia).
The Zebra Longwing, or Zebra Heliconian, is a member of the Brushfoot family of butterflies, Nymphalidae. Practically speaking, it’s our only Heliconian in the States but has a close relation to the Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae). Zebra Longwings are one of those species with an eloquently accurate common name. One where simply remembering that name is sufficient to ID the species. To elucidate, Zebra Longwings have long wings with a zebra pattern on them. A granular matte-black back split seemingly six ways by a quartet of diagonal pastel-yellow stripes and a southward staccato string of spots that is echoed bi-laterally across its body and down its hindwing’s fringes. The down below of this two-tone show is highlighted by a sprinkling of carmine blotches along the flanks of our butterfly.
The Zebra Longwing is graceful and delicate in appearance, slowly fluttering in aimless ballet between the sun flecks of a shade tree. Departing, approaching, circling, wandering and returning through this haunt of its choosing. Rarely fleeing but scarcely approachable. Zebra Longwings are partial to shady, calm forest edges with little wind and dense vegetation. They patrol a territory of nectar plants throughout the day. Visiting the same flowers day after day from dawn to dusk. Zebra Longwings host on Passionflowers. Here in South Carolina, they specifically lay eggs on Yellow Passionflower (Passiflora lutea) which is partial to much the same habitat as our butterfly. Their caterpillar is as unmistakable and boldly patterned as its parents, with a porcelain white skin spotted and spined by glistening black. Zebra Longwings, as mentioned before, are a tropical species. They rarely persist in our State for more than a season and some years they hardly make their way to South Carolina. Yet, in other years they can weather a mild winter here on Edisto and appear the following spring.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a pink and prolific poisonous weed found throughout our state, Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana).
Pokeweed is a robust herbaceous plant found in a wide range of habitats across the eastern United States. It’s most often encountered in sunny areas on the outskirts of forests and along field edges. The plant reaches four to five feet in height and nearly the same in width but can get far larger if growing conditions are right. Pokeweed’s stems are thick, smooth, and dyed a deep fuchsia across the whole of the plant. The leaves are large, elliptical shaped, and often drooping. Pokeweed blooms throughout summer and fall, producing piles of flower spikes wrapped in tiny, five-petalled creamy-pink flowers. The old flowers set fruit as the new flowers emerge until the spike reaches about four to eight inches long. The berries ripen from an olive green to a deep, inky black that attracts fruit eating birds. Songbird species like Mockingbirds, Cardinals, Catbirds, and Thrushes dine on the berries and spread the seeds during their daily lives.
All parts of the Pokeweed plant are poisonous to mammals, especially the roots, but birds are immune to the poison. However, young Pokeweed leaves and shoots are often eaten by folks in the Southeast in a dish called Poke Salad. New growth is harvested and then boiled and washed in fresh water several times to denature and draw out the toxic chemicals. Then the cooked greens are served like Spinach. The berries can also be used to create a pink dye, which does retain its toxic quality.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, ubiquitous and unmistakable we have an energetic little insect: the Two-lined Spittlebug (Prosapia bicincta).
The Two-lined Spittlebug is what’s referred to as a true bug, a member of the order Hemiptera. This clade is the only clade of insects that can be accurately and technically refer to as “bugs”. The Two-lined Spittlebug is a member of the Spittlebug superfamily Cercopoidea, of which there are a dozen or so species within South Carolina. Yet, the Two-lined Spittlebug is by far the most easy to recognize Spittlebug and arguably the most common in suburban environments. It wears a set of oily-black wings, evenly divided by a pair of tangerine bars, above a head, belly, and thorax dipped in a lustrous garnet-red. When poked at, they will leap explosively into the air on powerful legs to take to the sky on sluggish wings.
Two-lined Spittlebugs, like Cicadas and Leafhoppers, make their living drinking plant fluids. Today’s bug prefers turf grass juice as a snot-nosed nymph and Holly liqueur as a refined adult. This gives them a solid niche in suburbia as turf grass is pre-requisite to a yard and nearly every one of those yards has some shape of Holly, be it a feral Yaupon, hedged Chinese Holly, or shade tree American Holly.
What gives Spittlebugs their common name is the way their nymphs feed. Spittlebugs lay their eggs on their preferred larval host. Upon hatching, the nymph latches on and begins to suckle from the vasculature of that plant. However, unlike most insects, Spittlebugs feed from the xylem of the plant rather than the sap filled phloem. The xylem is the layer that carries water and mineral nutrients to the leaves, rather than sugary sap to the roots, its sap is less nutritious. Spittlebugs actually have specialized gut microbes that produce the essential amino acids the xylem lacks. As a result of xylem feeding, the baby Spittlebugs ingest and excrete excessive amounts of water. That water is then frothed up by the bug into a protective ball of foam, which resembles saliva. The foam shields it from predators, sunlight, temperature swings, and the drying air. Throughout spring, the nymphs molt and grow until the adults emerge in summer. These adults lay their eggs and a second brood comes forth in fall.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, I have a hearty, hardwood-hungry, multi-layered mushroom for us to discover: Chicken-of-the-woods, Genus Laetiporus spp.
We have a few species of Laetiporus here in the Lowcountry. They all share a similar shape, stacks of irregularly swollen shelves, and have a dense, fibrous flesh. Each of our local species differ in color and location where they appear. Laetiporus persicinus is a rosy-brown and found above the soil at the base of a tree as a circular rosette of shelves. Laetiporus cincinnatus is a creamy-orange and also found at the base of trees. It’s seen as either a rosette or stack of shelves. Laetiporus sulphureus is a fiery blend of pastel-yellow and tangerine-orange and found growing out of tree trunks in stacked shelves. Laetiporus gilbertsonii var. pallidus is cream-colored with a soft wash of orange and most often found growing stacked out of cracks in Oak trunks. The name “Chicken of the Woods” applies generically to all these species but is most often assigned to L. sulphureus. I most commonly see L. gilbertsonii var. pallidus around Edisto, especially on the scars of grand Live Oaks.
All species of Chicken-of-the-woods are edible and get their common name from their flavor and utility as a chicken substitute. However, some people are intolerant of certain chemicals found in these mushrooms. So snack with caution and, as with all mushrooms, don’t eat anything you aren’t 100% sure on what it is.
Chicken-of-the-woods are fungi that infect Oak trees. They feed on the dead wood of Oaks. Often they’re found feeding on tree stumps, snags, and fallen logs. However, if an Oak has trunk damage, say from a lightning strike or wind-split trunk, the fungus can enter the roots through the soil and parasitize the tree. From the roots it will grow throughout the trunk. After many years of growing invisibly, the mushrooms will appear. What was first a polyp of orangey-foam soon blooms into a flush of large fleshy mushrooms. Dozens of eight to twelve inch shelves can stack atop each other seemingly out of nowhere. These ‘shrooms can hang around for months and may return year after year if conditions are right. These fungi do harm their host tree but, once the mushrooms appear, it’s generally too late to do anything for the tree.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it a towering purple pinnacled plant: Ironweed, genus Vernonia.
Ironweeds are herbaceous perennial members of the Aster family. They all have a straight, narrow flower stalk and vibrant purple or magenta flowers constructed from clusters of smaller disc flowers. The plants get their common name from the toughness of their stalks. In the Lowcountry we have three species: Stemless Ironweed (Vernonia acaulis), Narrowleaf Ironweed (V. angustifolia), and New York Ironweed (V. noveboracensis). Stemless Ironweed grows as a basal rosette of tongue-shaped leaves, produces a moderately sized flower stalk that’s mostly free of leaves, and loves dry, sandy soils. Narrowleaf Ironweed is similar in many regards to Stemless Ironweed but has long, narrow leaves across its stems and is partial to Longleaf Pine savannas and flatwoods. New York Ironweed is the most common species here on Edisto. It loves the wet clay soils and sunny clearings along the Scenic Byway and grows a narrow leafy flower stalk up to eight feet high. The stem of which becomes a deep burgundy and the crown of it bears an umbel of royal-purple blooms. Ironweed is a fantastic nectar plant that is adored by pollinators. Its seeds provide a ready snack to our wintering birds.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s an often overlooked cryptic critter, the Eastern Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus).
The Eastern Fence Lizard is a less than common lizard here on Edisto Island but it is nonetheless present, to some degree, here and in our neighboring coastal communities. It is most common in the upstate and has a preference for drier forest habitats. They are primarily arboreal and fill a niche somewhere between the canopy patrolling Anole and the leaf litter prowling Skink. Like all our lizards, they are predatory and hunt after a wide variety of insects and arthropods. The Fence Lizard is a fairly typical lizard length of most of a hand span and also about the width of a finger. Their features are more exaggerated than our other lizards by way of a short snout, tall brow, a slight beard, broad shoulders, and squared off sides. The real thing that sets them apart is their scales. They’re our only lizard with rough scales, lending a spiny aesthetic to their silhouette. Their coloration is usually a cryptic layering of grays and browns, although matte black is also a possibility. Surprisingly though, a true beauty lies below. The armpits and throat of the male Eastern Fence Lizard become a brilliant iridescent azure at the onset of their spring breeding season. The deep blue scales are ringed with black and flash brilliantly during their athletic courtship display.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a genus of flowering plants quite unlike anything else in the Lowcountry, the Yuccas of genus Yucca.
Yuccas, often called Spanish Bayonets, are common throughout the coastal plain of South Carolina and one species, Yucca filamentosa, is found all the way into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Members of the genus are easily identified by their blue-green, strap-like leaves that narrow to a folded point, singular stem, and summer blooms that bear head-high flower stalks dangling dozens of fist-sized, pendulous, ivory-white flowers. All species are evergreen, drought tolerant, and bloom during the heart of summer. Yuccas have robust root systems and, unlike Palmettos, will propagate clonally and regenerate if cut down.
On Edisto we have three species: Moundlily Yucca (Yucca gloriosa), Aloe Yucca (Y. aloifolia), and Adam’s-Needle (Y. filamentosa); each is more of a generalist than the last. Moundlily Yucca is fairly uncommon but easily found across the dune systems and barrier islands of Edisto. Its growth is relatively low and its leaves are relatively broad with smooth edges. Aloe Yucca is found across the Sea Islands of the Lowcountry and several miles inland. They have a tendency to clump together and have tall, erect growth habit that produces a spindly trunk beneath. Their leaves are long, narrow, and wield vicious terminal spines and a hacksaw inspired leaf margin. Aloe Yucca also produces a fruit, purple-green and reminiscent in shape to an overinflated baby-banana, which is said to be edible. Yet I can tell you, from personal experience, that that is up for debate. (To me it tasted, after baking, like wet slimy starch and burnt coffee grounds.) Adam’s-Needle is by far the most common Yucca in the state. It can be found from the blistering dune-scapes of the Atlantic Coast to the shadowed rain-slick slopes of the Blue Ridge. It grows low to the ground and often with company. The margins of its stiff, glaucous leaves fray away to leave telltale silver curls down their length, making it the easiest Yucca to identify by far.
