Thuja, or the White Cedar

Don took Larry and me on a nature walk on one of our last days on Drummond Island. He’s a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin and a specialist in evolution, with a special interest in how the forests are changing and what needs to be done to conserve them. He showed us how the deer are eating the little cedar saplings, the thuja (the “th” is pronounced, unlike in German or French), as soon as they come up over the level of the snow, so that the thuja, so distinctive to the region, are dying out. One of the things that need to be done, he says, is to reduce the deer population by changing the hunting policy to include the does.

Tiny cedar saplings with verbena

It’s been an unusually rainy summer, so we saw a startling array of funghi. And the moss was lush. See the stream of selected photos on Flickr.