Posts in Category: bog
White-fringed Bog Orchid: Saco Heath
White-fringed Bog Orchid: Saco Heath, Saco, Maine, USA — We are taking a break from my coverage of the Panama trip for today’s photos. My friend Stef and I spent a morning at Saco Heath…a remnant raised (or domed) peat bog in Saco, Maine…the most southern such bog in Maine. We were too late in the season for most of the bog specialties…we only found one Pitcher Plant…but we did find a small stand of White-fringed Bog Orchid at the far edge of the last hummock before the Atlantic White Cedar Island. A beautiful plant that, despite its common name, also grows wild in wet meadows and forests…though I have never seen it anywhere but in a bog in Maine. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications. Processed in Pixelmator Photo and Apple Photos. These are actually two identical frames. The close up is just heavily cropped to show the flower detail, and then expanded in Pixelmator using their Machine Learning tool, for pixel count. ISO 100 @ f7.1 @ 1/1000th. Minus .7EV exposure compensation to hold detail in the whites.
Laudholm Bog Panorama
What a day! The best that fall 2021 has to offer. Great sky, some color in the trees, and the open expanse of the remnant bog at Laudholm Farms in Wells, Maine, USA. This is a “sweep panorama” with the iPhone SE and the Sirui 18mm ultra-wide lens. A lotta pixels in there! Apple Camera app. Processed in Apple Photos.
Sundew!
Sundew, Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson, Maine, USA — As promised, we are here today to celebrate Sundew! Sundew is another carnivorous bog plant. Instead of drowning its prey, as the Pitcher Plant from yesterday does, the Sundew has little sticky spikes on open pads that attract insects. The insects get stuck and the nutrients are absorbed. You can see a couple in the shots here. A tiny back beetle, and small green caterpillar of some sort. Sundew is hard to see, even in a bog full of it. The little sticky, spiky, pads are often all that rises above the level of sphagnum moss, though the first shot above shows more of the plant, and those pads are less than 1/4 inch across. In good light you look for the glitter of the crown of tiny sticky beads of gue on the tips of the spine. And then you get in really close for a photo. The shot that shows more of the plant was taken at 600mm with my Sony Rx10iv from about 3 feet (and that was an exceptionally large plant), but the other two are from my iPhone SE with the Sirui 10x macro lens attached. I had to get down on my knees and elbows and bend over the edge of the floating platform, to get the phone within about 1/4 inch of the plants for those shots. Then I had to get back up…not easy at my age. The things we do. 🙂 Still, I would do it again, just for the privilege of seeing and celebrating the strange and wonderful carnivorous, bog dwelling, Sundew plant!
Pitcher Plant
Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson, Maine, USA — I spent the day with the Holbrook Travel group at Hog Island Audubon Camp yesterday, and presented an afternoon workshop on nature photography. One of the highlights was a visit to the bog platform at Hidden Valley Nature Center in Jefferson. I have never seen a better display of Pitcher Plant. (We also found lots of Sundew plants, which I will feature in another post.) Pitcher Plant is a carnivorous plant. Insects are attracted to the water in the pitcher and then, because of the structure of the plant, can not climb back out. They are digested in the pitcher and the nutrients feed the plant. They have a strange flower that is mostly bract. We have them in the remnant bogs in Southern Maine, but nothing like the display at Hidden Valley…just that much further north. Photos with the Sony Rx10iv at various focal lengths for effective framing. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications. Processed in Polarr and Apple Photos.
Grass Pink clusters
There are always a few “clusters” of Grass Pink Orchids (when there are Grass Pink Orchids at all), and it is common for one plant to have several blossoms, but this year in the remnant bog at Laudholm Farms the orchids seemed uncommonly clustery and particularly prolific. And who can object to such a display, especially when dealing with a beautiful flower that, due to lack of habit, is becoming rare? Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent (top panel) and 62mm (bottom panel). Macro mode (in the Scene Modes). Processed in Polarr and assembled in Framemagic.
Winter flag over the bog…
Grass head, The Bog at the National Estuarine Research Reserve at Laudholm Farm, Wells Maine
The subtle colors with glints of reflected light in the emerging peat bog at Laudholm Farm (Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve in Wells Maine) form and interesting backdrop for this dried grass head growing up through what looks like it might have been Meadowsweet. One corner of a wet field at Laudholm is slowly turning into a bog, or remains a bog, while the rest of the field dries out. I am not sure which way it is going. In early winter, yesterday when Carol and I visited, it is just an empty stretch of boardwalk, but this little still-life caught my eye.
Sony RX10iii in-camera HDR. 234mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure: 1/250th @ f4 @ ISO 100. Processed in Snapseed on my Android tablet.
Northern Leopard Frogs Rule!
Northern Leopard Frog. Alwive Pond, Alwive Pond Woods, Kennebunk Land Trust
There may have been no Moose at Alwive Pond in the Alwive Pond Woods Preserve of the Kennebunk Land Trust, but there were certainly a lot of Northern Leopard Frogs. I do not know what the tipping point is, but there are ponds in Southern Maine where the Bull Frog predominates to the exclusion of Leopard Frogs, and there are ponds where the Leopard Frog appears have displaced all the Bulls. Alwive Pond is Northern Leopard Frog territory! They were everywhere along the pond edge in the boggy peat. You can actually get pretty close to a Northern Leopard Frog…much closer, in my experience, than you can get to any Bull Frog. 🙂 I love the pattern on the skin, and I find the Leopard Frog elegant, when compared to a Bull Frog. I am glad to find that they have their strongholds, places where the Northern Leopard Frog rules, and that one is in Alwive Woods.
This is a collage of 4 views, representing 3 frogs, assembled in Coolage. All images with the Sony HX90V at various equivalent fields of view, from 50mm to 200mm. Processed in Lightroom.
Grass Pink Orchid
Grass Pink Orchid, Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms. ME
The little remnant bog at Laudholm Farm, smaller than a baseball diamond, seems to be particularly healthy as bogs go, and produces several interesting species of bog wildflowers. This is Grass Pink, one of Maine’s few native orchids. The name is peculiar. The single leaf may be grass-like but the flower, at least as it grows in Maine, is certainly not pink. It is obviously purple, which is only made more certain when it grows, in our bogs, next to another Maine orchid, the Rose Pogonia, which is, in fact, very pink (See my post on Rose Pogonia here). According to my little bit of research, the presence of Grass Pink is a good indicator that the bog’s surface and the ground water are healthy and pure. It is very sensitive to contamination. It is one of the few orchids to be “right side up”…having its fringed lip at the top when the flower is mature. All orchids start out with the lip at the top, but the stem holding the flower twists as the flower matures so that the lip is presented at the bottom. Very strange.
Grass Pink is also one the few orchids that can be grown from seed…and you can buy plants for wet sunny corners of your yard…or for inside cultivation. I far prefer to find them growing in the healthy little bog at Laudholm Farm. 🙂
Sony HX90V at 44mm equivalent. 1/320th @ ISO 80 @ f4.5. Processed in Lightroom.
Grass Pink, bog orchid
A collage of Grass Pink from the bog at Laudholm Farms
Grass Pink certainly got shortchanged by the naming department! This little bog orchid, which I found growing in abundance along with the more common Pink Pagonia, in the tiny section of bog at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm Farm, should be called Purple Pulpit Flower, or Yellow Bearded Purple Bog Orchid, or certainly something much more grand than “Grass Pink” . I mean! Look at it! Anyone passing out names should be impressed. I certainly am. Bad day in the naming department, is all I have to say!
Again this panel is a mix of telephoto macros at the long end of the 600mm equivalent zoom on my Olympus OM-D E-M10, and true macros with the ZEISS Touit 50mm macro on the Sony NEX 5T. There is indeed, some variation in the purple/pink color of the blooms. A volunteer at the Reserve, who we happened to meet on the bog boardwalk, suggested that it had to do with how long the blossom had been out. She speculated that they fade in the sun. Could be. We saw a few that were definitely pink…but most were shades of purple.
As above: Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom and Sony NEX 5T with ZEISS Touit 50mm f2.8 macro. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Panel assembled in Pixlr Express.
Rose Pagonia
I spent several pleasant (if hot) hours at Saco Heath the other day. Saco Heath is one the southern-most Peet Bogs in the North-east, a remnant bog just north and West of Saco Maine, now protected by the Nature Conservancy. The Rodora is all gone by, only the last of the Sheep Laural is in bloom, and even the Pitcher Plant flowers were well past their prime. But the Rose Pagonia is in bloom. Rose Pagonia is the most common bog orchid at Saco Heath (it may be the only one…it is certainly the only one I have see there), but it is certainly worthy of a close look.
This panel combines telephoto macros taken at 1200mm equivalent with the Olympus 75-300mm zoom, and conventional macros taken with the ZEISS Touit 50mm f2.8 macro. Most of the orchids, of course, are well out from the boardwalk, where only a telephoto view is possible. A few are close enough so that, if you sit right down on the boardwalk and hang over the edge, you can work them with a shorter macro. 🙂
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom and Sony NEX 3N with ZEISS Touit 50mm macro. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Assembled in Pixlr Express.
I will be sharing more of the images from my visit to Saco Heath, but for the full effect of the day, you could visit the gallery at Gallery: Hit the Slideshow button for an easy stroll through the Heath.