My Kind of Friday Night!

Friday evening I found myself driving down Hamilton-way to complete some salamander surveys for work.  Having walked the site dozens of times this summer I have got to know the post-spring ephemeral ground cover fairly well, the odd Spinulose Wood Fern, patches of Clearweed, dead Garlic mustard stems, a few patches of sedges, but for the most part detritus and deadfall.  So upon seeing a fern that looked a bit different, the lowest pinnae pointing downward, I was quite happy to spend a moment looking it over.

I've seen Northern Beech-fern (Phegopteris connectilis) plenty of times in the Sault Ste. Marie area and other shield locations.  This fern was different, 'frillier', among other things.  I remembered working through keys awhile back and noting that one of the distinguishing features of the rare Broad Beech-fern (Phegopteris hexagonoptera) was the wing on the rachis between the lower pinnae (see the second photo, a rachis is the stem' and pinnae are essentially the 'leaflets' coming off the stem).  What I recalled was that the lower pinnae in 'connectilis' wasn't actually connected, and hexagonoptera was; I mean both have connected pinnae along the rachis but I seem to have embedded this in my head as a memory hook.

Anyways, my Friday night got a bit more interesting looking down at a patch of about 7 Broad Beech-fern, about 25 fronds in total.  This species is listed a Special Concern and S3 (20-100 occurrences) in Ontario.  Looking at my copy of the Atlas of Rare Vascular Plants of Ontario (Argus and White 1982) I see the species has a distribution essentially from Essex County to Niagara as well as a concentration in the Kingston/Thousand Islands area.

Another distinguishing feature is the glabrous (or nearly-so) stem.  Northern Beech-fern has hairs and scales on the stem. 

 

A shot of the habitat, lower slopes deep in the Dundas Valley with a canopy of Sugar Maple, American Beech with occasional Red Oak and White Ash.  There is a small groundwater seepage nearby.

I first spotted the fern on Friday and the Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) had not yet begun to bloom.  Alas, today the interesting gangly yellow flowers were out in profusion, a nice sight at a location where there are many of these shrubs in the understory at the high elevations.

Still plenty of Eastern Red-back's out and about, I like these quick little guys.