A production of... "NatureScene" is made possible in part by grants from the Close Foundation, Inc., helping sustain "NatureScene" for the past four years; Santee Cooper, where protection and improvement of our environment are equal in importance to providing electric energy; and by viewers like you, members of the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

♪ Hello and welcome to "NatureScene."

We're in northern New York State in the heart of the Adirondack Park, the largest park in the contiguous 48 states.

I'm Jim Welch with naturalist Rudy Mancke, and every season of the year here is special, but right now in autumn with the leaves changing and snow coming, too, it's a perfect time.

Oh, yeah.

It's a chilly day to be out, but this temperature drop is going to affect the color on those leaves, and we'll be looking at that later.

What a marvelous place, as you say, any season of the year, but I think it's prettiest in the fall.

Interesting geological story here, too, Jim.

This is a story of some very old rock.

The dates on the rock here in the mountains: 1.1 billion- year-old rock.

Yet, they're relatively new mountains here.

These Adirondacks have not been coming up much more than 10 to 15 million years, most people would say.

We're going to see how, as they uplifted, plants came in and settled into place, and the animals that came and followed.

Then we're also going to see signs of glacial activity.

It's an interesting story.

There will be a lot to talk about and some beautiful views.

In the north woods here, 46 peaks over 4,000 feet, some of those beyond us on the horizon.

(Rudy) Look at the color.

Look at those brilliant colors, those reds, probably red maple.

We'll hopefully get close to some of those.

Clouds hugging the high peaks there.

Really the highest point in New York State is here, Mount Marcy, 5,344 feet above sea level.

(Jim) Right.

(Rudy) You can see that in the distance over there.

(Jim) A snow dusting from last night's flurries.

(Rudy) A little bit of snow.

If you look at it carefully, it looks like it's domed up there a little.

There are a lot of faults here, a good bit of seismic activity even today, and that massive amount of rock has been rising for just a short period of time geologically, 10 to 15 million years.

The last thing to come affect these rocks were the glaciers, and these were covered with continental glaciers.

Then as the glaciers retreated, there were mountain glaciers tucked up in many of those valleys.

Hopefully, we'll see some signs of glacial activity today.

It's a young forest that we'll be looking at.

It's still developing.

That's one of the most interesting things about the Adirondacks.

This is a forest in progress, slowly but surely developing, and we'll talk about how that forest has come from somewhere else and now settled here.

It should be a good day.

Let's get started.

♪ (Rudy) The red colors are so nice here -- a red maple there.

(Jim) It's all around us, from the millions of red maple leaves on the ground and all around the sides.

(Rudy) Yeah.

This northern hardwood forest is what brings lots of people to the Adirondacks this time of year.

We're here at a time -- look at that on the ferns.

(Jim) The light dusting of snow from last night.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Probably hay-scented fern there.

That's a real common one, widespread here.

A little bit of snow left.

(Jim) That'll disappear quickly.

(Rudy) Once the sun hits it, that'll dissolve.

(Jim) Look on the water, some ducks that should head south soon.

(Rudy) Ring-necked ducks down there.

Look at them moving fast.

They're diving ducks.

You can see them up and down in the water, kind of like submarines going down and bbing back up at the surface.

(Jim) Looks dark and cold, but they'll be here a few more weeks.

(Rudy) A lot of nice wetlands here, and that's one of the birds you would expect at places like this and thriving even in that cold.

You know the water's cold down there, but they've got good insulation.

(Jim) This is a Huntington Wildlife Forest, and all these trees, some of them are experimental but most of them native.

(Rudy) Yeah, and the one we saw coming in here, and you can see it scattered around, red maple is a widespread species here.

It does well in high or low places, wet or dry places.

Soft maple is another name for it.

It doesn't live a long time, but it's come up and dominated here, and the colorful leaves on that tree are very nice.

But when you think of northern hardwood forests, you think of three trees.

I see one on the other side of the road.

(Jim) That's a yellow birch.

(Rudy) Yellow birch is one of the most widespread hardwoods here in the Adirondacks.

It's a large tree.

Leaves are not really changing quite yet.

That's one of the trio of trees, the three trees that dominate the northern hardwood forests.

The other one is right down here.

The yellow birch had kind of peely bark.

Look at the smooth bark on the American beech.

Leaves not even changing color there.

They're nice and green still.

That tree well known because the beechnuts that it produces is food for red squirrels that are here and eastern chipmunks, really an extremely important food plant for animals that live in the northern hardwood forest.

(Jim) The maple, beech and birch say north woods.

(Rudy) Yeah, and the maple you usually consider to be a member of that trio of trees is the sugar maple, and there it is with nice colors on the leaves.

That's sometimes referred to as hard maple.

It's widespread and typical of this northern hardwoods forest, New York State among them, and Vermont, I believe, and a couple of others, West Virginia.

(Jim) What's the underbrush here that -- heart-shaped leaves sort of?

(Rudy) Look at them.

They're opposite leaves, too.

That's kind of interesting.

There's so much of it here.

Hobblebush is one name for it.

I've always thought that made good sense because if you try to go through a thicket of that, it'll hobble you, it'll keep you from moving quickly through.

It's one of the Viburnum s, and it's in the honeysuckle family.

Look at the buds on that thing, Jim!

Naked -- you can see the growth, next year's growth, without any scales covering it.

Beautiful leaves now all over the place on the forest floor and above us.

Marvelous day to be in the woods.

♪ (Jim) October 1st, Rudy, but the cold air makes it feel like we're closer to winter.

(Rudy) There's a chill in the air.

It's kind of reminiscent of those days when glaciers were a little closer to this place than they are today.

The hardwood forest that we were walking through a moment ago was not the first forest back after the glaciers retreated.

(Jim) No?

(Rudy) The first forest that showed up here, and we know this from pollen analyses, was a coniferous forest, a northern coniferous forest, and we're walking through it now, and there are two trees that stand out above everything else.

One of them is a spruce; look at it right there.

That's a neat tree.

(Jim) Conifers are difficult to tell the difference between them.

(Rudy) The most common of the spruces here in the Adirondacks is red spruce.

When you think of a forest, northern coniferous forest, you think of a spruce-fir forest.

There's red spruce right there.

You can see the needles whirling around on the branch there.

I don't see any cones up at the top.

Right next to it is the fir represented here, and that is balsam fir.

See the way the needles spread out on the side of that tree.

(Jim) A very definite difference there when you look closely.

(Rudy) Yeah.

That is an interesting conifer, because look a little further down there and you can see some actual resins running down.

There are little resin blisters that form on that tree.

When you pop them and take that resin out, it's called Canada balsam.

It's used to mount slides for microscope use.

I remember using that in biology class, and that's what they get it from, this tree right here.

Again, the conifers have lots of resins that make walking through these woods smell good to us, but those are basically toxic to a number of insect species, so it's protection for the plant.

(Jim) Another indicator plant is the bunchberry along the side here.

(Rudy) Look at it!

Oh, man, isn't that nice?

Just look down right around that, and there are a number of interesting plants there.

Bunchberry is a good common name for that.

See the red fruit, and when I look at that, I think immediately of the dogwood family.

(Jim) Dogwood leaf.

(Rudy) See, that is Cornus canadensis .

That's the dogwood-like plant in that family, but it never gets any larger than that.

Then look at the mosses there, Sp hagnum moss everywhere.

Cool, moist, holding water, and that's a perfect situation for the coniferous forest.

Extra moisture, cooler temperatures.

(Jim) They're not all conifers here.

There's a deciduous tree.

(Rudy) American mountain ash, Jim.

Isn't that pretty?

Leaves just starting to change color and the interesting fruit.

It's a pome, so it's related to the apples, but that's a neat plant here.

Loves edges, never seen in shady areas but on the edge.

The two conifers we've seen and that mountain ash go all the way up to those higher elevations here in the Adirondacks.

♪ (Jim) Everything is beautiful here.

It's a great place for work and study.

Many students from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science, do their work here.

(Rudy) It's really great when you set aside an area like this, a natural area for research, and you keep looking at it for a long period of time, you learn a lot.

You see a lot you wouldn't see otherwise.

(Jim) This huge boulder tells a story.

(Rudy) This is something that really sticks out from everything else.

When you're in this part of the United States and you see a boulder like this made up of different rock than the rock typically found here, you call it a glacial erratic.

That's one of the big hunks of rock picked up by glacial ice and left behind as the glaciers retreated.

Look on top, Jim.

(Jim) Nature is coming back.

(Rudy) Interesting little community right there that's very different because it's a little above everything else.

White-tailed deer, which come through and snip off small trees oftentimes down on our level, couldn't get up there, so there would be certain plants that could do well if they ended up on top that wouldn't do well down here.

I see rockcap fern, very common, up at the top.

Pretty good common name for that fern.

Often you see it on rocks like that.

(Jim) The mosses next to the fern.

(Rudy) Lots of mosses, and I see some lichens there.

Again, that's an interesting combination.

Ferns, mosses and lichens on top of that rock.

(Jim) That's a beautiful sugar maple behind it.

(Rudy) Oh, gosh!

(Jim) Isn't that gorgeous?

(Rudy) Vibrant colors, wow!

Hard to believe the beauty, and, again, pigments, the yellows and the browns, were aays there masked by chlorophyll.

Once the chlorophyll is gone, they show up, and then the reds, anthocyanins, come into leaves where there's extra sugar.

Eventually the reds go, and the leaf changes to yellow.

Oh, that's nice.

That is really nice, and not only the sugar maple there but there's striped maple, another one of the maple species, right next to it.

Leaves yellowing now with the fall.

Temperature changes and shortening day lengths trigger that leaf color change.

It's interesting when you're standing by a glacial erratic like this to think back in time a little bit to when the glaciers were retreating.

The ice was moving away.

The climate here was cold.

Ten thousand years ago.

Ten to twelve thousand years ago or so.

What is going to be living here when the glacier moves away?

There are no plants here yet, but there are lichens like those on the rock that will come in and begin to break down the rocks forming some soil, and the glacier leaves behind some sand and other material.

What then would be the first forests that would move in as the glaciers move further away and the climate warms up?

Conifers come in.

The conifers come in.

They move in, like the ones we looked at a moment ago.

What follows those as the climate changes, still warmer?

Those northern hardwoods.

A mixed forest, then the northern hardwoods come in.

You can see the way the world was re-populated really fairly recently back in time.

If you wanted to see tundra, those lichens in bare rock, where would you go today?

Above 4,000.

You'd go up to the top, those little islands in the sky, and there's the tundra.

As you come down, what do you see?

Coniferous forest dominating, spruce-fir.

As you come down further, what do you see?

The mix.

The mix, and finally the northern hardwood forest.

It's great.

It's wonderful to see these connections.

In places like this, you see them clearly.

This is exciting.

Let's just keep going.

♪ (Rudy) Wolf Lake is something else.

(Jim) It's one of 2800 lakes and ponds, plus or minus, here in the Adirondacks but a cold breeze coming off it -- (Rudy) Oh, man!

(Jim) -- here at midday today.

(Rudy) Foaming up the edge, but look at the color across the way, Jim.

Isn't that nice?

(Jim) Autumn is a glorious time to be here.

(Rudy) Wow!

The colors we've been seeing up close, now we see at a distance.

There's a little rock outcrop up there.

Kind of a rounded mountain going back to those glacial times.

A lot of these lakes were formed by glacial debris that blocked the valleys, and then water filled them in.

(Jim) Great diversity of trees here.

(Rudy) Oh, wow!

Yeah, it's an interesting place.

Look right over here in the cove.

(Jim) A loon!

(Rudy) Common loon right out there.

That is a neat bird, so typical of these ponds in this part of the United States, slender body, almost like a torpedo.

(Jim) Once you see one, it's easy to remember.

(Rudy) That is an interesting animal.

Gone for a second.

Look over in the distance!

Look at the trees that stand up above everything else.

(Jim) Pines of some kind.

(Rudy) White pines.

That's another of the conifers that seems to be adjusted to this part of the United States, especially coming into open areas very quickly.

You see the whorls of branches on the pine.

That's the largest pine east of the Rocky Mountains.

(Jim) The loon's back up.

(Rudy) Look at that.

Oh, yeah, preening and wiggling a little bit and working, long beak, fish-eating bird, great swimmer.

Not very good at walking on land but marvelous in water and once it gets up in the air, it's a great flyer.

Soon migrating away from here -- (Jim) A deep diver.

(Rudy) -- further south.

(Jim) A good diver.

(Rudy) That bird has changed little over a long, long period of time, Jim.

(Jim) One of my favorites.

(Rudy) It's a neat animal.

(Jim) What's all the vegetation?

(Rudy) The plant that's so common right in front of us is called sweet gale.

If you were to break the leaves, they would be aromatic, kind of a sweet smell.

Typical of areas like this, a little extra moisture is what they need.

Then the little tufts of white, looks like cotton or fuzz... (Jim) A cotton-type grass one might call it.

(Rudy) Cotton grass is one of the common names.

A little here and more in the distance.

Really it's a sedge but likes to grow in wet places, and we're standing on more of the Sphagnum moss.

This is almost bog-like, and in this part of the world, there are so many interesting bogs with unique plants.

(Jim) Cold wind coming off the lake.

(Rudy) Yeah, it's chilly.

(Jim) Should we head on?

(Rudy) Let's head on, yeah.

♪ (Jim) Trails in here maintained by the Adirondack Ecological Center.

(Rudy) Isn't it nice to have a trail like this?

When there are low, wet areas, you've got a little bit of a boardwalk to get over it when it's wet.

Boy, this is a different environment.

It's so much fun to see a variety of habitats fairly close together.

(Jim) Low wetland.

(Rudy) Low wetland area, and the tree that dominates in here -- look, there's a young one coming up in front of us.

(Jim) Cedars.

(Rudy) Northern white cedar.

That is an amazing tree.

A little bit of extra moisture is nice.

It doesn't absolutely have to have it.

You see here that these things go up fairly high.

It's a canopy tree here that's dominating.

Boy, look at them over there going way up high above us.

That's the first tree species that was taken from America and introduced into Europe.

Arborvitae is the name, tree of life, because supposedly it was involved in saving the lives of Europeans here in the New World, and they carried it back.

Look at it coming up from dead material now.

Nature constantly recycling, taking dead stuff, making it alive again.

(Jim) So now there are northern white cedars in Europe, but they came from America.

(Rudy) Yeah, that's neat.

(Jim) What are the other plants?

(Rudy) Look down here.

This is strange because it's got fruit on it.

The fruit is sort of -- (Jim) The leaves have died.

(Rudy) -- knotting over and a reddish-orange color on it.

(Jim) What is that?

(Rudy) That's jack-in-the-pulpit.

(Jim) Far different from the summer.

(Rudy) Yeah, that is strange.

It's a perennial.

It's got an underground corm, it's called, where food is stored up, and when there's plenty of food, the flower that comes up has female flowers, and that's really fruit, so that's a ripened ovary.

Those were female flowers.

Sometimes it produces female.

Sometimes when there's not a lot of nourishment, it just produces male flowers.

Sometimes when there's not much nourishment at all, it just sends up leaves.

That's kind of a neat plant there.

Look beyond that.

I see a couple of ferns.

Sensitive fern -- in the cold weather that usually knocks those fronds back, but it's still alive and well.

Then a fern with more divisions in each of those fronds, or leaves, royal fern.

Boy, that is a beautiful fern.

Again, the color changing this time of year.

One other plant, low, wet places, you expect to see alders.

Speckled alder is the common name for that.

It's in the birch family, and look at the white stuff, those little white woolly things.

(Jim) Is it fruit?

(Rudy) That's aphids.

(Jim) Oh!

(Rudy) Those are little aphids sucking sap out of that plant, changing it into aphid.

The alder blight aphid is the common name for that -- isn't that neat -- and all along the underside of the stem.

(Jim) The alder's a favorite of beavers.

(Rudy) Yeah, and we should see good sign as we walk along this trail.

In the distance, there's the beginning of the Hudson River.

(Jim) Three hundred and fifteen miles from this area it enters the Atlantic, but it begins up here in Mount Marcy, so we are in the headwaters.

(Rudy) A lot of interesting wetlands.

♪ (Jim) Rudy, you talked about hobblebush earlier; we're going through it.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Witch hobble is another name for this.

You see thway it does make it tough to walk through, but this is certainly worth the walk.

(Jim) No question about what this is.

(Rudy) Oh, man, isn't that amazing?

(Jim) Great construction, looking all about here.

(Rudy) That's a good-sized dam.

Look at the height of the dam here, and no question that the beaver, Castor canadensis , has been at work.

A lot of those logs now have the bark stripped off.

(Jim) They ate that.

(Rudy) The beaver takes that bark and feeds on it, absolutely.

In the summer, it's eating other things, but in the winter, mainly the diet of bark.

Damming up a stream to form a pond that when you look out over the top there, the depth of water is pretty great.

That's a good way for the beaver to escape from predators, and sometimes it allows him to be active in the winter.

(Jim) It's good to point out man came in the 1700s trapping beaver all through the 1800s.

By 1904, they were mostly gone, and they had to bring some in.

(Rudy) That's right.

They were almost entirely taken away and then reintroduced.

This is the state mammal of New York State, and there's where he lives over there.

See the lodge against the bank?

(Jim) Oh, sure.

(Rudy) This isn't a big enough pond to have a lodge in the middle, so he's piling up wood and burrowing back up into the bank to spend the winter.

(Jim) Has his winter supply in there?

(Rudy) Winter supply of wood's usually on the bottom on the pond or stored close to where he's going to spend the winter.

This has stopped moving water, right?

(Jim) Right.

(Rudy) And so it's nice to have standing water.

That's a totally different habitat, and up here glaciers changed the environment a little to create lakes.

So did the beavers, and the greatest changer of the environment here has been man, no question about it, cutting the forest and modifying things.

That is a neat view back there.

Look at all the logs, the trees that the beavers have gnawed on the base of, and one of them has fallen into the water.

(Jim) Beaver dams are short-lived.

They're not forever.

They fill in, and they move on.

(Rudy) That's right.

This will turn into good bottomland.

The average life span on the beavers, 10 to 12 years, so there's a lot of work that continues to keep the dam in shape.

That's neat, interesting to see.

Let's continue.

♪ (Rudy) This has been a marvelous walk and a wonderful place.

(Jim) Beautiful place.

(Rudy) It's beautiful everywhere, and water really does make a lot of the difference here.

What a spectacular view.

(Jim) With 6 million acres, Rudy, we've just scratched the surface.

(Rudy) Well, there's something special about the Adirondacks, there's no doubt about that, and the color on that side over there is hard to describe.

I see movement right over -- look at this.

I see movement even though there's a big view.

Look at that great blue heron on the edge getting ready to grab something -- grabbed it!

(Jim) Oh, wow!

(Rudy) Right on the side!

Long necked, stiletto-like beak.

Oh, what a bird, in the shallows on the edge.

(Jim) What a sight!

He won't be here much longer with ice coming.

(Rudy) He's moving on down, just strolling along, long neck, looking around for movement on the water, taking fish and other small vertebrates and changing them into great blue heron.

(Jim) Will he return next year?

(Rudy) Yeah.

That bird nests in this part of the country, so you would expect it to come back and use this pond again.

Gosh, that's a neat animal.

(Jim) Some beaver work in here.

(Rudy) A lot of beaver work around the way.

I see a couple of lodges in the distance.

They're also shaping the world as we've already seen.

What an interesting mix of conifers and hardwoods all along those hillsides.

Look at that!

(Jim) Again, the painter's pallet.

(Rudy) My goodness, absolutely wonderful.

One other conifer that we have not seen yet, the larch, or tamarack.

Wet places are where you would expect it, and there it is coming up.

(Jim) A pale green.

(Rudy) Yeah.

The only conifer up here that sheds its leaves in one shot.

It's a deciduous conifer, which doesn't really sound right, but that's true here.

(Jim) Eastern larch is a tree you'd associate with the north woods.

(Rudy) Yeah, it's typical of this part of the United States.

You look one way, and it's nice.

You turn and look another way, and you've got something else interesting to look at.

A little bit more of a marsh there.

There's one plant that's very obvious out there that everybody knows, I think, by sight.

(Jim) Cattails.

(Rudy) Yeah, the old cattails.

Stem underground -- it's a rhizome -- and then sending up branches with leaves, and then the flower and fruit.

(Jim) Beavers modified this side, as well.

They move all over, coming back strong.

(Rudy) They've had a major effect here, and I think today has been fun because we've been able to see how glaciers have affected this area.

We talked about how the plant communities came back and the associated animals.

Then we talked about how beavers have modified the environment and changed it and shifted here and there.

Then we've talked about the effects of man, and it's interesting to come to a place like this, especially in the fall, because the beauty overwhelms you.

It's also nice to know the connections and the stories behind the scenes.

It's been a great day.

(Jim) It's beautiful, Rudy.

It's protected, and John Muir summed it up when he said, "Man needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature can heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

Adirondack Park in northern New York, wonderful place, come and see it for yourself.

Join us again on the next "NatureScene."

Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 ♪ "NatureScene" is made possible in part by grants from the Close Foundation, Inc., helping sustain "NatureScene" for the past four years; Santee Cooper, where protection and improvement of our environment are equal in importance to providing electric energy; and by viewers like you, members of the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.