Our favorite secret natural area is an eight- or 10-acre fen at the bottom of a basin of hills covered with oaks, hickories and red cedars.
We've been going there for several years, in search of turtles (which we thought would be plentiful but which, for reasons we can't explain, are not), birds and wildflowers. Of the latter, we've found some good ones -- rose pogonia, purple milkweed, grass-of-Parnassus, shrubby cinquefoil, pitcher plant, round-leafed sundew, and fringed gentian, among others.
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| The group makes its way across the fen, through the thick stands of hard-stemmed bulrush. |
So what is a fen? It's an open-canopy freshwater wetland fed by groundwater that percolate up through bedrock of marble or other calcareous rock. As a result, its waters are alkaline, which creates a somewhat harsh environment that is ideal for specialized species.
The fen we visit is hard to get to, requiring a long walk through the woods, and then, because of the rivulets and muck, hard to slog through once you're there. Some of our staff visited the place yesterday afternoon, with a handful of other local field biologists. It's unlike anything else in Westchester County and always blows knowledgeable naturalists away. Below are pictures of shrubby cinquefoil in bloom and the flower of the pitcher plant which, like the sundew, is carnivorous -- it gets its nutrition from bugs it traps and consumes.
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| shrubby cinquefoil flowers, in close-up. |
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| Pitcher plant flower. |