We spent our first night on Isle Royale at Daisy Farms. I have a map of the eastern end of the island shown below. There were some pretty heavy duty thunderstorms during the night, and we were glad to be in a shelter. During the evening and the night, the loons were calling. When the thunder crashed, the loons answered. Some people have reported that the loons kept them up all night with their load calling, when I heard them at night, I smiled and went back to sleep. I found it very cool to hear them. The loons were always away out from shore, and we never took a good photo. but there is a fuzzy one below, and here is a link to the Common Loon page of the Cornell Ornithology site. The sounds there are very good.
We had been planning to move to the Moskey Basin campground on day 2, but with the threat of more rain, we decide to leave our camp at Daisy Farm and hike to Moskey Basin and back on day 2. It turned out that the trail was a rough one, and very wet from the rain overnight. We did manage to get to Moskey basin, but it took a bit longer than I had thought. Once there we had our lunch on the dock and took in the scenery.
One plant the we had seen on day one not in full bloom, we finally saw in bloom, allowing us to figure it out as Cow Parsnip or Heracleum maximum. The top photo is showing the the flowers just emerging from a modified leaf the was wrapping them up. On the left hand side of the photo you can see how the flowers are wrapped up tight. In the second photo the flowers have fully emerged. The plant is fairly large (5 feet tall), with some leaves the size of dinner plates.
We saw a flower that immediately reminded us of a bindweed flower, but when we looked closer, it was not on a vine, but rather a short, upright plant. Hmmm, and in some cases the flower was almost as big as the plant. I looked in Newcomb's in the bindweed section to get an idea of how the flower was described, and there I found the Low Bindweed, or Calystegia spithamaea. Another new flower for us!
One of the plants that we saw on all of days on Isle Royale was Fringed Polygala or Polygala paucifolia. These colorful flowers were along many of the trails.
Another flower we saw a lot of was the Twinflower (Linnaea borealis). This plant usually has two small flowers on a stalk, and grows off of a vine. We also saw this trailing down rocks. We learned later that this was a favorite flower of Carl Linnaeus, founder of the modern system of botanical nomenclature, and was named for him after his death. |
We also saw Wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) in bloom on the island. In the photo below is is also shown with Yellow Hawkweed, which was common on the island
Along with the Yellow Hawkweed, there was a red hawkweed present, probably Devil;s Painbrush.
The trail wore us out pretty well, here we are in front of our shelter, looking barely awake.
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After dinner, we decide to go for a walk, and ran into a group looking in one direction with cameras whirling, it was a moose cow and her two calves! It was pretty dark for photos, but we took a bunch an managed a few to come out. The mother was completely oblivious to us, we were no threat to her or her calves. The calves on the other hand were a bit skittish. Mom just walk through the campground, munching on thimbleberry leaves, with barely a look in our direction
That was the end of Day 2 on Isle Royale - more to follow.