♪ (Rudy) How do you like this weather today?

(Beryl) It's pretty nice.

I didn't expect it to be this warm.

(Rudy) It really is nice temperature-wise.

I'm sorry that we got a little bit of rain, but this is the time of year for the rains that really cause things to change.

That's what we're going to take a look at today, some of those early changes, awakenings.

(Beryl) Buddings and things like that.

(Rudy) Yeah.

(Beryl) Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers, and with me is Rudy Mancke, Natural History Curator of the South Carolina Museum Commission.

We're at Poinsett State Park, and you're probably wondering what we're doing in the rain on a day like this, which is a good question to ask you, Rudy.

(Rudy) Well, one of the things we make everyone aware of is that we don't set things up, and it's very obvious today.

If we'd had our way, it would have been a much prettier day, but maybe because of the show we're doing this kind of weather is exactly what we should have, because it's the warm spring rains like the one that has just passed through here and is still drizzling on us that really causes plants and animals to begin to crank up again in the spring of the year.

We're sort of late wintertime now in South Carolina.

Many times you talk of the seasons changing -- fall, winter, spring, summer, and very distinct seasons.

(Beryl) It doesn't really happen that way.

(Rudy) It's not really a circle of the seasons.

It's more like a pendulum this time of year because it's swinging.

The nights will be cold, and it feels wintry.

Then the days will be warm, and it feels like the spring, then back to winter, and back and forth.

This is confusing to us, but the plants and animals out here seem to be pretty well adjusted to what's going on.

(Beryl) How do they understand that?

We'll be taking a closer look at that later in the program today.

(Rudy) The temperature seems to be important, but you remember about the leaves falling up in the mountains.

We said day length has something to do with some of these changes, and day length, instead of getting shorter, is getting longer, and these plants especially seem to be very attuned to that, and I think we are, too.

I've felt different feelings now that spring is coming.

Perhaps you feel the same kinds of feelings I do, and I think we can see how this warm spring rain is affecting the plants and animals here at Poinsett State Park.

(Beryl) Let's see what we can find out today.

(Rudy) This is a neat park, and I hope we can prove that.

There's some stuff right over here that's kind of interesting.

The wall, itself, is sort of unique because it's made out of a rock called coquina.

It's one of the sedimentary rocks made out of fragments of seashells, and the ocean is not here today, but we do know it was once here because of rock like this available.

What kind of fern is growing off of it?

Do you see that over there?

(Beryl) I think that's our old friend, the resurrection fern.

(Rudy) Marvelous.

See how green it is now and unrolled?

It has resurrected itself.

This wetness has really caused a change to occur.

(Beryl) Moss all over the place, too.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Notice how quickly these plants come on, and notice the plants living in that rather rough environment are some real primitive ones: the lichens, the ferns, and the mosses.

These are all plants that have been around for a long time and are used to some pretty harsh conditions.

(Beryl) Are you suggesting if we had been here, say, a month or so ago, we wouldn't have found that wall as green as it is today?

(Rudy) It wouldn't have been quite so green, and the ferns there would probably have been rolled up in a ball and probably brownish instead of green in color.

There's a lot of life that's been right beneath the surface all winter that's ready to go, and I think we can see signs of that pretty easily.

Matter of fact, look across the road.

I think you can see something has sort of unrolled.

See that yellowish material hanging down, one of the early flowers?

(Beryl) Let's get close enough to see what it is.

(Rudy) Yeah, let's see what that looks like up close.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) Just be careful of the puddle with the rain dripping on it.

This is one of the neatest plants for a number of reasons, and I like it especially in the spring because it tells me spring is coming.

Hold on to that just a minute.

Let me reach down and break off a little piece.

(Rudy) There we go.

(Beryl) It's kind of weird.

What is it?

(Rudy) Yeah.

It's one of the shrubs that never really gets to be a large tree, known as an alder.

This thing always grows in wet places, and we are down near a creek that has a little extra water added because of the rain.

Early in the spring is when this thing flowers, and there are male flowers and separate female flowers on this tree.

These things that hang down are masses of male flowers which produce yellowish stuff.

What do you call that stuff that blows around and gets in your nose?

(Beryl) Pollen.

(Rudy) Pollen.

Tremendous amounts of it, and these little things here that are sort of a burgundy color are the female flowers.

(Beryl) They look like composite flowers, but they're not, are they?

(Rudy) No.

This form of flower production is called a catkin.

Quite a few trees have them.

They always hang down.

Usually these are wind pollinated.

The wind just blows the pollen from this catkin up to this material up here or over to here as it's blowing now.

(Beryl) It's trying to blow us as well.

(Rudy) Pretty stiff breeze, yeah.

The interesting thing is that once the pollen fertilizes the eggs in here, these little things develop eventually into cone-shaped fruiting bodies, and my mother used to take these, and other women used to take these, and make corsages out of them because these look like small pinecones, and they fit in well and nicely on a corsage, especially around Christmastime.

When you see the alder catkins unrolling, ah -- (Beryl) You know that spring is coming.

(Rudy) It seems spring is on the way.

These have unrolled a little earlier this year than I had expected, but they're a better judge of the situation than we are sometimes.

One other thing I noticed when I ran down there, do you see the little pile of white stuff, fluffy stuff, on the branch?

(Beryl) Yeah.

It looks like a dread insect.

(Rudy) It is a group of insects that look like they have spent a good bit of the wintertime there, which is a little unusual.

They're called woolly aphids.

(Beryl) I think they're common to most gardeners, aren't they?

Are they related to the ones that lay on plants?

(Rudy) Related to the little green aphids that cause problems.

They're sap-suckers, and these are sitting on the alder taking sap, and not only do they use it for food but they also produce a substance -- see that woolly, white stuff that's blowing in the wind a little bit -- that is protection for them.

They live in masses, and a lot of times when you see them on alders or beech trees, if you shake the limb, they will all begin to shake their body together.

When they're moving like that, instead of looking like a whole lot of individuals, it looks like one big something stuck to it.

They also produce a substance called honeydew, which drops out, very sweet, gets on your car windows sometimes, and it's a very sticky substance.

(Beryl) Sappy.

(Rudy) Yeah, but there are a lot of insects that come, ants especially, and milk these aphids and get that honeydew out and use it for food.

Why don't we hurry on.

There's another thing I want to show you, another flower.

See it way in the distance there off of a tree?

(Beryl) Let's move where we can get a better view.

(Rudy) It is hard to see from here.

Let me put the alder down and grab that umbrella.

This is one of the trees this time of year that really brightens up a drive when I go down the highway.

In wet places especially these trees are fairly commonly seen and with flowers this time of the year, and the flowers, I think you can see pretty well there, are a reddish color, and the common name for this tree is red maple.

In almost any season of the year there's something red about it.

The branches are reddish in the winter.

The stem on the leaf is red in the summertime -- the petiole, it's called -- and then in the early spring, the flowers are reddish.

We can go ahead and take this umbrella down.

I think it's stopped raining for awhile.

We better keep it close at hand, though, in case we need it.

Most people don't consider those flowers very much.

You see trees around your yard flowering often and don't even realize what those things are hanging off the oak trees, for instance, and that's one variety of flower.

(Beryl) We think of flowers as having big petals, and just big flowers.

We don't look for the variety.

(Rudy) Nature does come up with a great number of flowers like the great number of plants that she comes up with.

Variety is extremely important.

It's the spice of life.

In nature it really is important to have that variety, and that's why we worry about it when large numbers of plants or animals die off very quickly because that cuts down on the amount of variety, and that seems to mess things up as far as the balance of nature is concerned.

Another name for that tree besides red maple is swamp maple, because look.

(Beryl) It's definitely in a swamp.

(Rudy) It's usually in a wet place.

It does quite well or does best in wet places.

Red maple, and it will have fruit on it pretty soon, and this tree comes and has flowers and fruit aboard before leaves come, kind of an interesting twist to things.

(Beryl) Rudy, let's check out some of the other varieties here at the park.

(Rudy) Let's just head back down.

(Beryl) Glad it stopped raining.

(Rudy) Oh, man, it's nice.

Now that we're inside of the park, Poinsett State Park, I think you can really be amazed with the feeling almost of being in the mountains.

I get that feeling, especially because of that.

(Beryl) The mountain laurel, sure.

(Rudy) Yeah, mountain laurel, and mountain laurel is a plant that's found most abundantly in the mountains and on the piedmont of South Carolina, but this plant's also found scattered around the coastal plain, especially in low areas like this that are moist and that are cooler than the surrounding areas, and probably what that tells us is that back in time when the climate in South Carolina was colder than it is today, these plants had a much greater range.

Now that the climate has warmed up, they're most commonly found where it's still cooler, but they're also found in low areas that are a little cooler than the high sand hills around us.

It's got early flowers coming out here and last year's fruit hanging down on it, and it's one of the evergreens.

Now, what is this stuff that's hanging from it, though?

And this is an amazing combination of plants here.

(Beryl) Oh, the Spanish moss.

I think it's absolutely beautiful.

(Rudy) Spanish moss, and you remember in Congaree we looked at it.

We talked about it a little bit.

Let me pull off a little and talk for a second about the fact that this, instead of being a parasite, is a green plant and makes its own food.

(Beryl) It's hard to believe that's a green plant.

(Rudy) Yeah, and after a good rain like we've had today, you can see, if you look carefully -- (Beryl) It is green.

(Rudy) -- it's green.

The scales will absorb water and allow light to pass through and allow you to see the chlorophyll underneath.

It is covered with gray scaly material.

It is one of our flowering plants, too, which is -- (Beryl) It flowers?

(Rudy) -- yeah, which is a shocker, and usually you can find the flowers on here.

They look like little bromeliad flowers.

As a matter of fact, you see that thing right on the tip?

(Beryl) Oh, this?

(Rudy) That one right there, yeah.

That's a developing flower on this plant, and if you know what a bromeliad flower looks like, this will resemble that flower because it's in the bromeliad family, or the pineapple family.

It's not a moss at all, and yet that's what we call it.

This was used to stuff car seats in the Model-T Fords and during World War II.

(Beryl) I don't remember those.

(Rudy) You don't remember those days, do you?

I don't, either, but I was told that you strip off the scales around it and actually use the inner dark lining of this plant to stuff car seats and other things just as a filler.

That's kind of interesting.

When you see mountain laurel draped with Spanish moss, it's an unbelievable kind of experience because there's not many places you can go in the state and find that naturally happening, and that makes Poinsett State Park -- (Beryl) A special place.

(Rudy) -- in my mind, a very special place.

Let's see what else we can find down the road.

Those were early flowers on that Spanish moss.

They really are a little more distinctive later on in the season.

Sometimes you actually find long, little capsules on there.

That has the fruit in it, seed in it.

(Beryl) We take Spanish moss for granted here, and you don't realize until you go into another part of the country that it's something special for us.

(Rudy) Well, it is.

It's only found on the coastal plain in South Carolina.

People have tried to transplant it, but it just simply doesn't do well.

It's called an epiphyte, which when you break that word down, epi means upon, and phyte means plant, and it's a plant that actually grows on another plant.

Lots of orchids are epiphytes, but Spanish moss is the most common epiphyte that we've got, and you see it all over the trees here, quite a mass of it.

(Beryl) Just beginning to bud, too.

(Rudy) Yeah, and it doesn't really look like a green plant from here.

The gray color is what you generally can see.

(Beryl) Rudy, that actually looks like a lizard over there.

(Rudy) Beryl, you've got good eyes, because that is one of the common lizards around the state.

I didn't expect to see him on a day like today.

The rain and the sunshine may have brought him out.

He's flattened against the dogwood branch there.

This one we call a chameleon all the time because it is capable of changing its color from this brown color you see here to more of a green color, sometimes even bright green.

(Beryl) Then it's part of a camouflage because now he looks like he has a piece of moss running down his back.

(Rudy) It has a lot to do with the temperature and the emotions of the animal as far as the color is concerned, temperature around him.

This is one of the reptiles and cannot really control his body temperature internally like we can, and so in the wintertime these things are not very active, but it's feeling almost like spring today, so he's come out to get a little bit of sunshine and get cranked up.

The better name for this animal really is green anole.

He's not a true chameleon, but he is one of the lizards known as anoles, and they're usually greenish in color in warm weather, when you see them out.

This time of year they're usually greenish in color.

Fabulous animal, and when you look at that, if you can use your imagination a little bit, you can think back when his relatives, millions of years ago, were dominant animals on the face of the earth.

We still have a number of reptiles that are interesting, but they're not the dominant animal anymore.

What a beautiful animal.

We might keep our eyes open for some other reptiles and other animals that are coming out into the warmth.

(Beryl) Oh, you're trying to press your luck today.

(Rudy) Well, I heard some spring peepers down here, a very small frog, that are peeping, or calling, this time of the year.

Early in the spring is when they come out.

We hopefully can listen to some of them.

Look at that.

Isn't that unbelievable?

(Beryl) It looks like a fuzzy buddy, but it's a mushroom, isn't it?

(Rudy) It is one of the mushrooms, and notice that it's growing on a tree that is still alive.

See, that tree is water oak, and it's still alive and kicking.

Most of the fungi grow on plants that are dead, but this fungus is doing quite well on a tree that's alive, and it's one of the edible mushrooms.

(Beryl) Is that what a mushroom is, a fungus?

(Rudy) Yeah, it's a fungus.

It's one of the edible mushrooms, and if you look carefully down here, you can see these little tooth-like projections, and these are sometimes known as the teeth fungi, or another common name, if you know what a hedgehog is, as a hedgehog fungus.

(Beryl) How do we know it's edible, because that's a real question with mushrooms?

(Rudy) You mean how somebody walking in the woods would know whether something was edible or not?

(Beryl) A mushroom in particular.

(Rudy) Yeah.

The easiest way to keep from getting in trouble is to remember that the one thing that tells you a mushroom is edible is if it comes in a tin can or wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf.

It is extremely hard for most people to know mushrooms well enough to identify them as either being edible or not.

This happens to be one of the easy ones, one of the very, very different mushrooms.

It does not look like most mushrooms.

It doesn't have a stalk and a little cap on it.

It's quite different from the mushrooms that you find most commonly, and this is just the fruiting body.

This is the way this thing reproduces.

The main part of the body of this mushroom is inside this tree.

(Beryl) Inside the tree?

(Rudy) Inside, under the bark.

If you really want to see what mushrooms look like that aren't on the surface, and most of their action is underground, peel back some dead wood off of a log or pull back some leaves on the forest floor, and often you'll see lots of little white or yellowish threads running through the ground.

Those are called hyphae, and those are really mushrooms, not in the reproductive form but just in the growing form on the ground.

Very interesting, and I've seen maybe two or three of those in my life, so that's a nice one to spot.

Let's keep on down the road.

(Beryl) You just destroyed my myth of mushrooms that looked like little umbrella caps.

(Rudy) Most that look like that are called toadstools because the toads are supposedly going to get under there to get out of the rain.

This lake was built, I think, about 50 years ago or so.

There was a grist mill right down the way, and now it's used by the state park people for a swimming lake, at least part of it, and I think you can also fish here.

It's really low because in the wintertime often people will lower lakes to kill off vegetation in the shallow water and also to do repairs on the dam or the diving area or something like that.

(Beryl) Occasionally we see a turtle snapping up out of the water.

(Rudy) Yeah, it was neat back there.

You noticed the turtle, a couple of turtles, floating lazily.

They're reptiles, and when it's warm in the spring, they come out and get as much sun as they can.

They spend their winters hibernating in the mud and gunk on the bottom of lakes like this.

(Beryl) Rudy, it's awfully rocky here.

Why is that?

(Rudy) Well, remember the coquina that we saw in the back.

This is coquina that's just weathered out here or been dumped here at one point in time or another.

It might be good just to stop and get a piece of this and take a look at it, because, remember, we said coquina was rock that was made up of shell fragments.

(Beryl) Uh-huh.

Is it a kind of fossilized material?

(Rudy) Yeah.

The shells really are fossils.

They're remains of animals that died in the past.

Let me just get one piece here.

Come here and take a look at this, Beryl.

Look at all the shell fragments.

(Beryl) Oh, you can see them.

(Rudy) They're everywhere!

Some of them -- look at that little shell, looks as if it hasn't changed much since it was living in the ocean.

This material is very interesting because it can be worked, and the buildings behind us here, the foundations are made out of this coquina, and in Florida where it's common, they build lots of buildings out of it and roads.

(Beryl) It looks awfully porous, though.

(Rudy) It does weather quickly.

If you cover it, you're in pretty good shape, but if rain continues to hit on it and hit on it, it can dissolve away some of this material, but this is fairly solid stuff.

[bird chirping] (Rudy) Listen to that kingfisher.

Did you hear him call behind us?

They're fishing right out here in the shallow pond.

There are other animals that we might see under some of this material.

Let's just pick this piece up carefully and see if we can come across something.

(Beryl) Rudy, it looks a little like a dead fly of some sort.

(Rudy) You're in the right category.

It is an insect, and I'm afraid it is dead, but at least we can get some idea of what the animal looked like.

Let me get up a little closer to you.

Do you know what that is?

(Beryl) No, not really.

(Rudy) That's called a dragonfly nymph.

It's an immature form of a flying machine that we looked at quite a bit in the spring and summer, and I look forward to seeing again this spring and summer.

One thing that happens when the water is down is that lots of animals that live in the shallows lose their lives, because they can't migrate down as the water migrates down, and get left high and dry.

(Beryl) Why didn't he stay moist enough under the rock?

(Rudy) One of the problems is this thing breathes with gill-like structures in the rear end of its abdomen, and you have to have a good amount of water around that to keep it alive.

Once they dry up, then your life is gone because you can't get the oxygen necessary to survive.

It's amazing to think that these animals now live a great deal of their lives in the water using gills, and then they eventually hatch out of the water, shed their skin, grow wings and then invade the air, breathing air now -- not oxygen out of water, but oxygen out of air.

Totally different change.

If the dragonfly, as he's changing, falls back into the water -- if he gets wings and he falls back into the water, he drowns.

(Beryl) He can't adapt again.

(Rudy) No.

It's an amazing thing.

Metamorphosis is changing forms, is what that word means.

It's unbelievably interesting and very intricate, and the insects are good examples of what metamorphosis can do for you.

It allows the immature one to get food in a totally different area, in this instance, than the adult.

Both are animal eaters.

This is, or used to be, quite a predator.

Let's go ahead and leave the remains behind because nature recycles itself.

There will be something that will take advantage of this.

One thing that's important to do whenever you turn over rocks, or logs, or whatever, looking for things -- (Beryl) Put them back.

(Rudy) Yeah.

That's somebody's home, and let's leave it as much like it was when we came as possible.

Let's head out and see what we can see on the dam.

This has become a beautiful day, hasn't it?

(Beryl) It sure has.

It goes to show, if you wait long enough, nature provides you with something very special.

(Rudy) This is the season when changes do occur rather rapidly, and it's a lot of fun to be here.

We saw a little butterfly go by back there, a spring azure butterfly, which says spring to me.

(Beryl) It sure does.

(Rudy) And look in the shallow water.

(Beryl) Oh, Rudy, we've talked about them as we walked along the beach, but now you can really see the turtles.

(Rudy) Fabulous animals.

Not much of them from this angle because of the glare, but looks like sticks sticking out of the water.

(Beryl) They seem to be sunning themselves, or something, sticking their heads up.

(Rudy) That's exactly right.

They're a real early reptile to get out of the mud.

They spend the winter in this mud and stuff on the bottom of the lake, bob up to the surface to get some sun, and if there were logs, they would be sitting on the logs getting all the way out of the water, but there's not much in this lake.

(Beryl) Do they hibernate all winter?

(Rudy) Yeah.

That's very interesting because they hibernate under water.

It's a very odd relationship, because how do they breathe?

They're air-breathing animals.

(Beryl) Next question.

(Rudy) They have a large bladder that can store water and move water in and out, and it acts like a gill for the turtle, so it uses a gill-like structure to get through the winter, and uses lungs to get through the rest of his life, and the reason he's bobbing up at the surface is because he's filling his lungs with air.

This is a neat time to look, see way at the upper end of the lake, and you can see a little delta formation.

See, the creek that's coming in, filling this lake with water, is also carrying silt, organic debris, and eventually this lake won't be here unless we keep cleaning it out, because nature is always changing things.

It comes in here, fills the lake, and then we have land here instead of lake.

(Beryl) It's moving it on out.

(Rudy) Yeah, it's interesting.

Change is significant in the spring.

This is a great time of the year to be aware of that.

That kingfisher is still calling out there.

(Beryl) And you are resisting the urge to call back.

(Rudy) I can't rattle like a respectable kingfisher, so I better not do that.

Let me walk behind you a minute and take a look at something.

Remember, we've called this show "Awakenings."

Buds are about to burst on lots of plants that aren't out yet, and sassafras is one.

Look at the size of those buds, really large.

Sort of have greenish-yellow bark covering on the branches, and a tree that man has used for years and years and years to make sassafras tea from, that many people believe to be sort of a cure-all sort of remedy.

It's real good tea.

I've had it.

I don't know whether it does anything good for me, but it is nice and spicy.

This is the time of year when many things are out.

We've seen red maple, which has already flowered, and, remember, we said would have fruit even before leaves.

This one is another one that gets flowers before leaves, and they're yellowish in color, kind of a nice, bright yellow.

(Beryl) They're nice, but since it's so early, don't we run the risk of maybe losing some of these buds and flowers?

(Rudy) Sure, and the bud scales that overlap on this, protect it from cold to some degree, but once it swells a great deal, then if it opens, yes, it's running a risk, but nature is used to running risks.

Lots of things don't make it and have become extinct because they're not good at the odds, but the animals and plants that are used to running the risks can solve problems like this, survive, and sassafras seems to be one.

We found fossils way back in time of this tree in South Carolina.

(Beryl) Gosh, we've seen butterflies and turtles, all sorts of things.

(Rudy) Great day.

(Beryl) It makes you wish spring would be in full blossom.

(Rudy) I hope that next time we see these people, it will be in full blossom.

(Beryl) I hope so, too.

In the meantime, get out in your backyards and the parks and look for the signs of spring.

They're everywhere.

Rudy, let's keep looking.

(Rudy) Okay.

Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 ♪