Ramble Report April 20 2023

Leader for today's Ramble: Linda

Author of today’s Ramble report: Linda. Comments, edits, and suggestions for the report can be sent to Linda at Lchafin@uga.edu.

Insect identifications: Dale    Fungi identifications: Don

Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble. All the photos that appear in this report, unless otherwise credited, were taken by Don Hunter. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on your screen.

Number of Ramblers today: 39. Three new ramblers joined us today: Donna, who has been a greeter for the Children’s Garden; Toby and Mark, who were recommended by Richard; and, Caroline, a UGA student. Welcome!

Today's emphasis: Seeking what we find in the Lower Shade Garden, the White Trail spur crossing the powerline prairie, and the first half of the Blue Trail.

Today's Route:  We walked through the Lower Shade Garden, then crossed the road to reach the White Trail Spur and the prairie. We then entered the woods, and bore left onto the Blue Trail which we followed to a point above the Mimsie Lanier Center for Native Plants. We bushwhacked a short distance to reach the Center's service road and from there returned to the Children’s Garden.

Readings:

Don read Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

Linda read an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s essay “Upstream”:

“I walked all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot…The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles…Little by little, I waded from the region of the coltsfoot to the spring beauties. From there to the trilliums. From there to the bloodroot. Then the dark ferns. Then the wild music of the waterthrush…I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.”

OBSERVATIONS:
As ramblers gathered, Don photographed some plants in the Children's Garden.

Purple Foxglove flower with splotchy red nectar guides

Wild Indigo

A bumblebee, its pollen baskets loaded with golden pollen, is visiting
an Ohio Spiderwort flower.

In the Shade Garden...

Bishop’s Hat or Red Barrenwort, a European member of the Barberry Family

Golden Spikemoss
photo by David J. Stang, Wikimedia Creative Commons

Golden Spikemoss is sometimes called Peacock Fern, but both names are misnomers: this plant is neither a moss nor a fern, but a member of a different, ancient lineage that also reproduces by spores. It is native to western Sub-Saharan Africa and islands off the coast of northwest Africa. Spikemosses first appeared in the fossil record about 383 million years ago, approximately 250 million years before the arrival of flowering and fruiting plants.

Sassafras sapling in the Shade Garden
There are no mature Sassafras trees that we know of in the vicinity so this "planting" must be the result of long distance travel by birds or squirrels.

 

Sassafras leaves come in three shapes: mitten (two lobes), glove (three lobes), and unlobed. Bark from Sassafras roots has been used as a medicinal for thousands of years. Its powdered leaves are the “filé” in filé gumbo, thickening and flavoring that famous Cajun dish. It was also used to flavor root beer, candy, and toothpaste. [Note: safrole, the physiologically active compound in Sassafras, has been shown to cause cancer and liver damage in animals; in 1976, the US Food and Drug Administration ruled that products containing safrole could not be sold for human consumption.] Sassafras leaves are larval hosts for 38 species of butterflies and moths.

Sassafras leaf shapes
Photo by Metro Parks, Butler County, Ohio

 

Tulip Tree flower with ant licking sugary nectar produced by nectar glands in the orange petal patches. Tulip Tree flowers are also visited by honey bees, native bees, and hummingbirds.

Tulip Tree flowers produce an amazing amount of nectar – in one study, a 20-year old tree produced 8 pounds in a single season. In addition to ants, the flowers are visited by a range of pollinators including honey bees, native bees, and hummingbirds, all of which lap up the nectar. Squirrels, bears, and the occasional rambler (below) have also been seen sipping Tulip Tree nectar and eating the flowers.

Pale Yellow Trilliums are still in flower in the Shade Garden

Sweet Shrub, yellow-flowered cultivar ‘Athens’

Once on the sunnier White Trail, we began to see some cool-season grasses in flower. Cool-season grasses flower in the spring after overwintering (in Georgia) as a rosette of leaves. Unlike the large, showy warm-season grasses that flower in late summer and fall, these species typically have smaller, more delicate flowers.

Yellow, twisted anthers and white, brushy stigmas of Needle Grass flowers

The long bristle at the tip of the Needle Grass seed is spirally twisted; it responds to changes in humidity by twisting and untwisting. If the seed has fallen “nose-down,” the twisting motion of the long bristle screws the seed into the ground. Once lodged in the soil, tiny, stiff, downward-pointing bristles at the "nose-end" anchor the seed in the soil.

Needle Grass seed with long twisted bristle at the top and short, downward-pointing bristles at the base

Witch Grass overwinters as leafy stems then flowers in April and May

Witch Grass flower cluster

Close-up of Witch Grass flowers
Don’s close-up photo of Deer Tongue’s flowers captured the brushy female stigmas and the oval, pollen-producing anther sacs, all emerging between the scale-like lemmas that enclose the ovary.

Native Blue Grass species are small, cool-season grasses with tiny flowers. The anthers are lavender and the brush-like stigmas are transparent.

Small's Ragwort flower heads are beginning to open. Its leaves and stems are hairless except for patches of white fuzz at the base of each leaf. For ramblers who enjoy botanical esoterica, (and you know who you are, Avis) the white fuzz is officially known as "floccose tomentum." Three species of Ragwort bloom in succession in different habitats at the Garden each spring: Golden Ragwort in Dunson Garden, Butterweed in the floodplain, and Small's Ragwort in dry, sunny, upland areas.

Funnel Spider webs are abundant in the powerline prairie. Dale wrote about these spiders on 30 August 2018: “Funnel Web spiders weave a non-sticky platform of silken threads with a short, cylindrical tube at one edge. The tube serves as a refuge for the spider. When a wandering insect walks across the web the spider detects the vibrations from its footfalls and rushes out from its refuge to grab and bite its victim. The bite injects a venom that paralyzes the insect and begins to digest its internal organs. The spider carries it back to the refuge where it consumes it.”

Bottlebrush Buckeye, planted along the edge of the powerline prairie many years ago, leafs out much later than Painted Buckeye and Red Buckeye, which typically break bud in early March. Each of these young leaves has five drooping leaflets that will eventually spread horizontally. At the bottom of the top photo, you can just see some strangely shaped leaf-like structures; below is a close-up. These almost-but-not-quite-leaf-like structures stumped us, so I consulted Ron Lance, author of “Woody Plants of the Southeast: a Winter Guide,” and an expert horticulturist and botanist. Ron says these are an “oddly reduced first set of leaves just out of the bud [with what] look like rudimentary leaflets borne on a winged petiole that is kind of a transition between bud scale and petiole. I have seen similar weird half-leaf/half-bud scales on Aesculus indica [Indian Horse-chestnut] seedlings growing back after freeze damage, but not with a full set of five little leaflets.”

The bark of young Black Cherry trees, branches, and twigs is marked with horizontal lines of lenticels, patches of loose cells that permit the passage of carbon dioxide into the tree and oxygen out of the tree. These horizontal lines are still visible on the flaky bark of older trees.

Black Cherry leaves are pretty generic in appearance but can be identified by the two tiny red glands at the base of the leaf blade or nearby on the leaf stalk.

Most nectar-producing glands are found deep inside flowers where they attract pollinators. When they occur outside the flower, on leaves or stems, they are called extrafloral nectaries and usually play a role in defending the plant from herbivores. Black Cherry extrafloral nectaries begin exuding nectar soon after the leaves emerge from the bud. The sugary nectar attracts ants (usually Western Thatching Ants, Formica obscuripes) who supplement their sugar-rich diet by eating tasty Eastern Tent Caterpillars which are just at that moment hatching from eggs laid the previous fall. Nectar production from the leaf glands peaks during the first three weeks after bud break, at the same time that the caterpillars are no more than twice the size of the ants, making them just the right size for an ant's dinner. Eastern Tent Caterpillars are the primary defoliators of Black Cherry trees, making ants important players in protecting the new leaves of this widespread species. Photos of Eastern Tent Caterpillar nests and ants are here.

Just off the trail, we saw a young Black Cherry tree infected with Black Knot, a fungal disease. Black Knot infects other cherry species, both native and non-native, as well as wild plums, and weakens and sometimes kills the trees. More info here.

 

Perfoliate Bellwort with its three-sided fruit

Green-and-Gold

Smilax (aka Greenbrier) vines are famous for their tough, prickly stems carried aloft on the branches of trees. Most people aren’t aware that there are several species of herbaceous Smilax, with soft, spineless stems and delicate, pale yellow-green flowers. This newly emerged plant is probably Huger's Carrion-flower, Smilax hugeri, rising from a large tuber. We’ll return in the next few months to confirm that name as the plant puts out more leaves and reaches full height (as much as 15 feet if it’s Huger’s). The common name refers to the flowers which attract fly pollinators with a rotting-meat smell.

Nearby, a stout, purple-striped Smilax stem, looking a whole lot like an asparagus spear, has recently emerged. This is one of the woody, high-climbing Smilax species. Tendrils and young leaves are just beginning to expand at the growing tip.

Adder's Tongue Fern
Plant with both sterile and fertile leaves (left, Janie K. Marlow)
Fertile leaf close-up (right, Don Hunter)

Looking as un-fern-like as possible, Adder’s Tongue Fern is always a treat to see but is easily overlooked or mistaken for a seedling of a lily or orchid. Unlike most ferns, its small, fleshy leaves are not divided into leaflets nor do they bear spores on their lower surfaces. An Adder’s Tongue plant bears only two leaves: a smooth, oval, fleshy sterile leaf up to 3 inches long, and a narrow, pointed fertile leaf with two rows of spore-producing sporangia. The fertile leaf with its pointed tip – somebody’s idea of a snake’s tongue – arises on the stem near the base of the sterile leaf. Each plant has up to 20 roots that spread and proliferate, forming clonal patches. This species is fairly common in north and central Georgia but is easy to miss; look for it in the spring when the presence of the fertile leaf makes it somewhat more conspicuous. It likes successional woods, bottomlands, and grassy openings at the edges of thickets.

We bushwhacked downhill from the Blue Trail to the Mimsie Lanier Center for Native Plants where we found lots of plants in flower.....

Georgia Rockcress

American Wisteria

Gray Rosemary, a member of the Mint Family, is native to longleaf pine sandhills and coastal dunes in Florida and Alabama (but not Georgia).

Southern Beardtongue, so called because of the hairy, yellow “tongue” that projects from the throat of the flower. The tongue is actually a highly modified stamen, now functioning to brush pollen off the bodies of visiting bees. The remaining four stamens (white stalks with purple pollen sacs at the tips) curve inside the upper surface of the flower tube. The conspicuous purple stripes are nectar guides that guide pollinators to the nectaries deep within the flower.
[Remember, you can tap on your screen or double-click to enlarge a photo]

A close-up view of Southern Beard-tongue buds reveals the dense glandular hairs that cover the flowers, leaves, and stems of this species.

On our way back to the Visitor Center along the Mimsie Lanier Center service road, we saw some of the species in the “second wave” of spring wildflowers...

Cut-leaf Evening Primrose

Florida Betony

Opposite-leaf Dwarf-dandelion

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Purple Foxglove          Digitalis purpurea

Wild Indigo                  Baptisia sp.

Bishop’s Hat/Red Barrenwort             Epimedium alpinum X E. grandiflorum

Golden Spikemoss       Selaginella braunii  synonym  Lycopodioides braunii

Sassafras         Sassafras albidum

Tulip Tree, Tulip Poplar    Liriodendron tulipifera

Ohio Spiderwort     Tradescantia ohiensis

Daddy Longlegs     Family Opiliones

Pale Yellow Trillium     Trillium discolor

Sweet Shrub ‘Athens’     Calycanthus floridus cv. ‘Athens’

Needle Grass     Piptochaetium avenaceum

Small’s Ragwort     Packera anonyma

Bottlebrush Buckeye     Aesculus parviflora

Large-seeded Forget-Me-Not     Myosotis macrosperma      

Black Cherry     Prunus serotina

Funnel-web Spider     Family Dipluridae

Deer Tongue Witch Grass     Dichanthelium clandestinum

Perfoliate Bellwort     Uvularia perfoliata

Bloodroot     Sanguinaria canadensis

Chattahoochee Trillium     Trillium decipiens

Poa grass     Poa annua

Huger's Carrion-flower           Smilax hugeri

Wild Onion     Allium sp.

Green-and-Gold     Chrysogonum virginianum

Hickory (sprouts)     Carya sp.

Christmas Fern     Polystichum acrostichoides

Smilax (shoot/sprout)     Smilax sp.

Black Knot fungus     Apiosporina morbosa

Eastern Red Cedar     Juniperus virginiana

Loblolly Pine     Pinus taeda

Adder’s Tongue Fern     Ophioglossum pycnostichum    synonym: Ophioglossum vulgatum var. pycnostichum

Cutleaf Evening Primrose     Oenothera laciniata

Florida Betony     Stachys floridana

Georgia Rockcress     Arabis georgiana

American Wisteria     Wisteria frutescens

Gray Rosemary     Conradina canescens

Mouse-eared/Lobed Tickseed     Coreopsis auriculata

Southern Beardtongue     Penstemon australis

Witch Grass     Dichanthelium sp.

Opposite-leaf Dwarf-dandelion, Weedy Dwarf Dandelion     Krigia caespitosa

Ramble Report April 13, 2023

Leaders for Today’s Ramble:  Bill Sheehan & Heather Larkin.

Today’s emphasis: A bird’s-eye view of insects that feed on spring oak leaves.

Link to Don Hunter’s Facebook album for this Ramble. Photos that appear in this report were taken by Don [DH], Heather [HL] & Bill [BS].

Announcements: Heather: Piedmont Gardeners 30^th Garden Tour of Athens, Saturday April 15 from 10 am to 4 pm.

Number of Ramblers today: 30

Preparing to seek what we find [DH]

Today’s Route:  From the Right of Way parking lot to the Blue Trail and back.

We first gathered around the low-hanging branches of the large Water Oak by the parking lot. Everyone was encouraged to look for insects and bring interesting leaves to a picnic table for discussion. After that we rambled across the street to Compost Pile Row (where there are accessible hickories), up to the Blue Trail and to the left for several hundred yards (where there are saplings of Water Oak, White Oak and Southern Red Oak along the trail). Thanks to Gary Crider for suggesting the Blue Trail for its oak saplings!

INTRODUCTION

Bill read two of his favorite quotes about nature and provided some factual prose from Doug Tallamy’s delightful 2021 book, The Nature of Oaks.

• "It is fortunate perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them" 
  -- Aldo Leopold
• “It’s the small things that run the world. … The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don’t need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change. … But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species would go on for more than a few months.” 
  — E O Wilson, 1987

Why focus on oaks when looking for insects?  

As Tallamy puts it, “oaks support more forms of life and more fascinating interactions than any other tree genus in North America.” There are more oak species in North America (91), and in the world, than in any other genus of trees.

• There are far more moth and butterfly species that feed on oaks than feed on any other tree species. “The number of caterpillars hosted by North American native plants varies in anyone location from well over 500 caterpillars species (oaks) to no caterpillars at all.” “Oaks represent less than 2% of our woody plant diversity but support at least 30% of our moth species.”
• There are nearly 800 species of plant-feeding gall wasps in North America, and most of these have specialized relationships only with oaks. And most of these species have two different generations each year, one with both females and males, the other with only females – and both wasps and the galls usually look quite different!

What do birds eat?

“Most songbirds in North America are primarily insectivores, particularly during the all-important nesting season, with seeds and berries, only supplementing their diet. Their nestlings are unable to digest seeds at all; thus, most of our bird species cannot reproduce without a ready supply of insects.”

• Tallamy found that one chickadee family fed their babies 350 to 570 caterpillars every day. That's 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise one family of baby birds.

Plants have developed numerous strategies to avoid being eaten by herbivorous insects. And herbivorous insects have developed a vast range of strategies to avoid being eaten by birds or parasitized by parasitoids. The goal of today’s walk was to adopt a bird’s-eye and parasitoid’s-antenna’s view of the insects that feed on spring oak leaves – and think about what strategies the insect herbivores might be using to evade birds and other predators.

The notes below are organized by tree species since most of the insects we saw are tree specialists.

MULTIPLE OAK SPECIES

Oak Leaf Rolling Weevils (Homoeolabus analis). These fascinating little critters feed on several species of oak. The adult weevils measure and cut with their mandibles strips of the leaf tip into what looks like a tiny egg roll that hangs from the midvein. The beetles are careful to leave the midvein intact so it supports the leaf roll. When done, the adult female inserts an egg, which hatches into a larva and eats the leaf roll. It is not uncommon to see three or four egg rolls on a branchlet. How fascinating can you get?

A little egg roll carefully cut and rolled by mama weevil, and left dangling from the midvein. [HL]

• There’s a good account of the biology with great photos from the Univ of Florida.
• Also check out this time lapse video of a related Asian species.

Oak Treehopper (Platycotis vittata). Treehoppers are plant sucking insects. Both nymphs and adults are strikingly beautiful but look different. Tallamy describes the maternal care behavior of this species, which is highly unusual among nonsocial insects. The mother stays with her young –- lined up along a twig or branch -- and protects them for weeks until they reach adulthood. There’s a spring brood and a fall brood. Tallamy claims that these insects can only thrive when the oak tree sap is flowing up in the spring or back down in the fall, and that it is therefore adaptive for the mother to invest in guarding her young rather than laying more eggs elsewhere.

TOP: nymph.[HL] BOTTOM: molting group. Circled: freshly molted adult; nymph.[BS]

RED OAK GROUP

Dryocosmus Gall Wasps.  We saw galls of two species of Dryocosmus gall wasps that look entirely different. Both are found on a variety of oaks in the Red Oak Group; we saw them on Water Oak and Southern Red Oak.  

Dryocosmus floridensis (no common name) induces a rosette gall which looks inverted.

Inverted rosette gall (contains one chamber) [DH]

 Succulent Oak Gall Wasp (Dryocosmus quercuspalustris) induces a green ball which contains a free rolling cell inside. The cell contains a larva which will complete its development inside the rolling cell before chewing its way out of both the inner cell and the outer gall. Perhaps the unattached nature of the cell makes it difficult for an insect predator or parasitoid to grasp and penetrate the structure.

Gall wasp develops inside the free-rolling cell (note emergence hole in cell).[BS]

WATER OAK (in the Red Oak Group)

Amphibolips melanocera (no common name). This gall has a green ball like the Succulent Oak Gall Wasp above, but the small chamber in the middle is attached with radiating fibers, making a beautiful mandala-like structure in cross section.

Inner wasp chamber suspended by radiating fibers.[DH]

Melikaiella Gall Wasp. This is one of the many gall species that still needs more collections to ascertain its true identity, according to Gallformers.

Multiple tiny wasps develop in separate chambers.[DH]

SOUTHERN RED OAK

Fusiform Oak Apple Gall Wasp (Amphibolips acuminata).  This is a large and striking fleshy gall, pointed and speckled on the outside and juicy wine-purple on the inside. It forms on just a few Red Oaks; we found it on Southern Red Oak. Interesting that this gall wasp is in the same genus as Amphibolops melanocera, but looks so different.

This huge gall nourishes a tiny wasp (cell in lower right of bottom photo) [BS]

WHITE OAK

Wool Sower Gall Wasp gall (Callirhytis seminator).  These are the insect equivalent of charismatic megafauna – beautiful and hard to miss. We saw a White Oak sapling on the Blue Trail with four large balls. We pulled down the crown of the flexible sapling to take a closer look. The gall is composed of several dozen capsules, each containing one wasp larva. Each red spot on the surface corresponds to one capsule. We cut a gall in half to see the layout. Sometimes you will see a gall that has been torn open. This is actually one of the few galls large enough for birds and perhaps squirrels to bother attacking.

A large gall producing many wasps, each in a small kernel near the center. [DH]

WHITE OAK GROUP

Oak Petiole Gall Wasp (Andricus quercuspetiolicola).  This gall is solid with the consistency of a hard apple. It contains many cells each of which will produce a tiny wasp.

Kind of like an apple? [DH]

HICKORY

Phylloxera galls. Hickories and oaks are the trees that host the greatest diversity of galls in our area. Hickories (including pecan and walnut) host galls of phylloxerans (tiny aphid-like sucking insects), as well as gall midges, which, like gall wasps, induce a mind-boggling diversity of gall structures. We didn’t see gall midge galls today, but we did see Phylloxera galls on hickories in Compost Row.

The fundatrix (upper right) has already given birth to hundreds of young'uns. [DH]

Phylloxera complex life history from the Internet: Eggs hatch in spring. Feeding by the newly-hatched immature fundatrices induces galls on young twigs, on petioles, or at bases of leaflet main veins, sometimes in clusters. The galls are globular, pale yellowish green tinted with red before opening, but afterwards becoming leathery and black. On reaching maturity the fundatrix reproduces parthenogenetically inside the gall, depositing up to a thousand eggs. The eggs hatch into nymphs that feed and eventually develop wings. Finally, the galls split open and the (all female) phylloxera emerge to lay eggs on leaves. These eggs hatch male and female phylloxera that mature and then mate. Mated females lay eggs that overwinter.

BOX ELDER

Box Elder gall midge (Contarinia negundinis). This little fly larva feeds in the buds and makes swollen chambers at the bases of the leaves.

Swollen petiole base made by gall midge (a true fly) [DH]

Erineum Gall Mites. Some tree species that don’t have beautiful wasp or midge galls nonetheless sport specialist mites -- trees like Box Elder, Beech and Gum (Nyssa). The galls all look fairly similar: a wart-like protrusion on the top of the leaf with a hairy pouch underneath. Don’t expect to see the mites, though, even with a 10x hand lens. They are sometimes too small to be seen with a dissecting microscope (45x)!

Mite galls are tree specific but most look similar: warts on top, hairy depression below. [DH]

GENERALIST

Puss Caterpillar/ Southern Flannel Moth cocoon (Megalopyge opercularis). These cocoons are made of extremely tough material. I had trouble cutting one with a razor blade. But when the adult moth is ready to exit the chamber he/she simply opens the circular door on one end (left side in this photo). 

Kevlar of the insect world... [HL]

LEAF RAMBLING MEDITATION

Leaf rambling can be a form of meditation. Stand in front of a branch at eye level and just look until things start to appear. 

Mornings are usually best for observing insects because it’s cooler (insects move less) and there’s often less breeze. But you don’t need live insects. You’ll probably first notice places where leaves have been eaten, from tiny pin pricks to big chunks. Who ate that and where are they now? Could the hole have been made when the leaf was just emerging out of the bud and enlarged as the leaf grew? You’ll notice leaves tied together; is the caterpillar still there? The longer you look the more you’ll notice smaller and smaller things. A 10x hand lens is a good investment, as is a dissecting microscope. When you notice something interesting you may notice more of them wherever you look. That’s how many predators forage: by developing search images.

Leaf rambling uncovers a hundred little dramas. Every part of every plant — leaf, petioles, stem, flower, fruit, even roots — is a potential food source for the rest of us living creatures, created out of sunlight and thin air by plants.

RESOURCES

Dough Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks. (2021)  Gives a good ecological overview of Oaks and presents, month by month, fascinating accounts of the birds and insects that interact with and oaks.

For gall identification: Start at the free website Gallformers.org, which was created by avid citizen scientists and links to iNaturalist. If you post your finds to iNaturalist you can tag an expert from Gallformers and they will usually get back quickly with helpful information. WARNING: You must learn tree identification to get good at gall identification: most gall makers are host plant specific, so the first question on Gallformers is, ‘What is the host plant species?’ Native Trees of the Southeast is a good guide.

Plants make galls to accommodate foreigners: some are friends, most are foes. Marion O. Harris and Andrea Pitzschke, New Phytologist, 2020.  A good overview of all kinds of galls. It’s surprisingly well written for an academic review paper.  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31774564/

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Ramble Report April 6 2023

Leader for today's Ramble: Linda

Authors of today’s Ramble report: Linda. Comments, edits, and suggestions for the report can be sent to Linda at Lchafin@uga.edu.

Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble. All the photos that appear in this report, unless otherwise credited, were taken by Don Hunter. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on your screen.

Number of Ramblers today: 33

Today's emphasis: Seeking what we found on our way to and along the Purple Trail and the Purple Trail Spur.