Sightings and soundings

I took a walk at about 6 this evening, having returned after being away for about ten days. The green skunk cabbage leaves have thrust themselves up about a foot tall now; I'll need to take my camera there tomorrow and get a few photos. It's a lovely, soft time of day to walk and look for birds. On the road down toward my neighbors the McWilliams' I heard a couple of warblers--the yellow warbler and the yellow-rumped warbler, but didn't see them. Then near the orchard, I came on a pileated woodpecker, who flew about and sang. I got a good look at him. Marta and I had seen and heard one just like this about a month ago, but way down past the skunk cabbages. I wonder what their range is and if this was the same one. Meanwhile the usual bird suspects have been about. Ten days ago I was hearing robins singing cheerfully, even at night; the chickadees and white throated sparrows have been singing their spring songs, and I heard a phoebe about. I've seen the song sparrows but haven't heard them. And the hermit thrushes are back; I can hear them at dusk and dawn now. Among the others are the crows and doves. This is the best time to see the warblers, as the trees haven't leafed out yet. I hope to get out and walk about every day for the next week or so, though my principal work about the place is clearing out a part of the woods where a storage building is going, and working some lime and organic fertilizers into the garden soil.

The Same Skunk a Week Later

Cabbage, that is. Here is the same spadix and spaethe one week later, April 17. Parts of the flowers have blown off in the wind, clinging now to the inside spaethe "walls." A new forming, light green cabbage leaf is visible in the lower left of the photo.

Early Springing

One of the earliest among the wild flowers hereabouts in the spring is the skunk cabbage, so-called because of its faint skunk-like scent, and also because of its appearance later in the year. The colors of the emerging skunk cabbage leaves are a spectacular combination of green, maroon, and yellow, streaked and striated on some, solid on others. 

They push up from the ground in swampy areas. These are along the walk in the woods behind the house, down the road nearly to my neighbors, in a low area where a seasonal stream runs. The skunk cabbages also line some of the drainage ditches beside the road. At this time of the year they are one of the few new flowering plants that can be seen. Along with the plentiful green mosses, the emerging skunk cabbages mark the greening of the year, well before the grass rises green from its winter brown.

According to the 19th-century botanical books that I consult, the skunk cabbage is of the Arum family, the Aracae order, and the Symplocarpus genus. Symplocarpus is Greek for “fruit grown together.” 

Gray’s Field, Forest and Garden Botany (1877) describes the only American species as Symplocarpus foetidus, “sending up, in earliest spring, its purple tinged or striped spaethe enclosing the head of flowers…..” This head of flowers, or spadix, is undeveloped at this time of year, but it can be seen “hiding” inside the spaethe. 

In its construction the skunk-cabbage is like the jack-in-the-pulpit [see this blog's entry for Dec 5, 2010] in that it has a spadix inside a spaethe, and over the year the flowers develop into a fruit or berry. The skunk cabbage differs from the jack-in-the-pulpit in that the flowers of the latter are formed without a perianth or calyx, on a more or less spoon-like spadix; whereas the skunk cabbage flowers have a 4-leaved perianth on a globular spadix. Later in the year the large, ovate, heart-shaped, veiny cabbage-type leaves will appear, and I will try to monitor them in photos as the year itself unfolds on the island.

Photos of skunk cabbages © 2011 by Jeff Todd Titon
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