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This is the famous Davie Poplar, approximately 350 years of age.

At dusk, hundreds and hundreds of Chimney Swifts swirl in vortex above, before darting into the hollow trunk to spend the night. An Eastern Gray Squirrel, however, awaits their arrival, fulfilling its classification as an omnivore. [see 3rd photo].

30 years ago, Dr. Jerome Jackson had amongst the slide set for his students of Ornithology, a photo that elicited primal gasps of horror and shock. The photo showed in gruesome detail an Eastern Gray Squirrel holding a male Northern Cardinal like an ice cream cone. The head of the cardinal had been devoured.

The memory of that photo sprang to mind when I espied the Eastern Gray Squirrel lingering around the hollow into which the Chimney Swifts would descend. And then it quietly slipped in to greet them upon their arrival.

I finally came to the realization that a lot of the sedges I have been seeing here in Portage County that belong to the section laxiflorae are indeed Carex leptonervia. I had previously assigned these specimens to Carex blanda, but noticed that what I was calling C. blanda was quite variable, and some of that variability coorelated with habitat type and quality. In fact, I don’t think many keys do these species justice in there differences. C. leptonervia is a sedge of higher quality habitat. It is generally a little lengthier, thinner, and ‘greener,’ and the perigynia are different. But let me be clear, in spite of the name, the perigynia of C. leptonervia are not nerveless, but the nerves are less frequent around the perigynia than in other laxiflorae species. They also (the nerves) seem to be less dimorphic than in other laxiflorae species of which have prominent nerves roughly opposite from one another, and then have many more faint nerves running length wise between them, while in C. leptonervia, the less prominent nerves are just barely so. I also noticed that the carpellate scales are generally shorter in C. leptonervia than in C. blanda, but this may not be consistent as I have not seen this characteristic represented in any key.

Hope this description helps those who may be struggling with these species like I did.

Rainy morning with thunderstorms and we got soaking wet, so this is the only picture I took during this hike. I was happy I had brought a dry change of clothes in the car so I could switch out the wet ones before the next hike in the afternoon.