Botany Of The North Shore

Today I went on a Master Naturalist field trip called Botany Of The North Shore. We met at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center which is a 90 minute drive from my place. Once there we moved to their new Lake Superior campus which just opened. We were the first group to enter this property which has never been developed so it has a high diversity of plants. We had 15 people in our group. All of us were vaccinated so although we had our masks in our pockets we didn't bring them out. The weather was perfect.

This clump of white flowers in the rock is called Virginia Sassafraxe.

This little fern is only two inches high and is called the Rusty Cliff fern. I was looking at this fern book, Ferns and Allies Of The North Woods, for identification purposes when I noticed the author, Joe Walewski, was also our leader on this botany trip.

This is a variety of sundew which is a carnivorous plant.

And these yellow leaved star shaped plants are butterwort, also a carnivorous plant. We saw all kinds of lichen today. One was called rock foam. Another was caribou lichen which looked like rock foam but didn't sit right on the rocks but on top of other plants instead. We also saw map lichen which is circular and yellow/green in color. If you look closely you can see black dots and black lines connecting the dots inside the yellow. Today was a good day. Tomorrow I have two more field trips to attend.