Spring trudges onward
From a week ago and the first sighting of the Symplocarpus foetidus (Eastern Skunk Cabbage) for the year (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9891793), they're now well underway and highly visible in their usual haunts. I took a bunch of snaps of them today because I want to illustrate how variable they are. These guys are a well-known and readily identified species for me, and still there is a lot of difference in how they look for their flowering form. Knowing what is 'normal variation' and what is 'holy smokes, this is a whole different kind of thing!!!' is something you get from looking at a lot of examples of the thing and its close relatives. So, here are some nice pictures illustrating the variation in Symplocarpus foetidus that one might find along the same creek bank on the same day within a population that has coexisted there for the last thirty or so years (can't speak to when I was a small kid, but they've been there since I was about twelve or so).
A Very Red One: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9979853
A Medium One: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9979846
A Greenish One: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9979834
If you didn't know a whole lot about skunk cabbage, you might be thinking that these were three different kinds, based on the colors of these samples. Heck, you might not know that these samples were the hoods for the flowering bits and that the actual plant has a rosette of ginormous (for PA) simple green leaves with a strong central vein. You might think that the huge rosette of leaves thing was a totally different plant unrelated to these maroon-and-green early spring jobbies.
But I've seen me some skunk cabbage and I know (locally) where and when to look for it. Where? At the creek that runs into the top of the lake by Kutz's. (I can find them other places, but this is the "I want to look at some skunk cabbage and I'm in a hurry and I don't want to piddle around hunting for it" location. It's a perennial, so when you find some, you can go back and visit it every year if you want and it should still be pretty much where you left it.) When? You can see the flowering hood things from about the last week in February to around St. Patrick's Day in March. Three weeks, or so, I think, but I will track that more closely this year as part of the Flowering Plants project. The large green rosettes of leaves aren't up until after the flowers depart and I think they arrive in late April, but I have not got actual notes about that. I'll try to do better going forward.
Not only do I know where and when to look for it, I have some idea of what is 'normal variation' for the species. So I am not confused by it. But this is a real issue for people going out into the woods and looking at stuff to see if it's thing A or thing B or thing C.
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