♪ ♪ (Beryl) Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers inviting you to join us for a nostalgic trip as Rudy Mancke, Curator of Natural History for the South Carolina Museum Commission, takes us back home to Spartanburg County.

This place is special to you, isn't it?

(Rudy) It really is, Beryl.

I think it's been said that you can't go home again, and yet I'm trying to today.

This is where I grew up.

We're near a highway, so we'll hear lots of cars and trucks.

It's a place people would come and say, "There's nothing special here," but I've looked at this place for a long time with a dog running along beside me.

I can remember distinctly as a kid coming over here.

I found all sorts of exciting things, and anybody anywhere in the state can go near their own home on an old road like this and find all sorts of wonders, much more than most people expect.

It's nice to be home again.

(Beryl) We'll look at plant life because it is winter, and we don't expect much animal activity.

(Rudy) Yeah.

We haven't seen many insects; but we're going to find maybe a cocoon, maybe some tracks, maybe there will be a few insects out, some bones; but the plants will be the big thing.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) It's nice to be out this time of year.

A little chilly and it's very, very refreshing to be outside.

(Beryl) Okay.

Well, lead on.

(Rudy) One thing I saw at the beginning that's an interesting plant that's really nice this time of the year.

Let's get down and take a closer look at this.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) This fern is very, very interesting.

Let me pull this away a little bit.

Let's get back on this side of it, too.

What you've got there is basically one leaf that's really broken into a whole lot of little leaflets, and then there's another stalk that's totally different from that.

You see a lot of little brown things.

Those are called sori, and in there are spores, and this thing is actually in the process of reproducing this time of year, and it reproduces, first, by producing spores which fall down and grow into a plant that then reproduces with eggs and sperm, and then you have a fern plant like this.

(Beryl) Will they bunch around the base?

(Rudy) The wind can blow those spores a good distance.

We've had some wind today, and usually this plant grows in wet areas, and this is a ditch.

See how wet those leaves are?

(Beryl) Uh-huh.

(Rudy) Really moist.

This is a wet area for this plant even though it looks high and dry.

A little lower, the water stands a little bit better, but great ferns like this are found around the state, and they usually grow in low, wet areas.

(Beryl) Look right there.

(Rudy) A little spider web.

It's called a funnel-web spider because it goes into a funnel shape at the end under the leaves, and the spider's hiding there, trying to feed on the few insects that are still active.

(Beryl) Will that one make it over the winter?

(Rudy) Probably not, but there's a chance young spiders can spin a cocoon of silk around themselves and make it.

Quite a few young spiders do make it over the wintertime.

I love walking in old, crunchy leaves.

Don't you?

(Beryl) Just rustle along here.

(Rudy) There's something else we need to take a look at.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) This is a great time to see how good you are, and I am, at identifying trees and other plants without leaves on them.

(Beryl) I'm no good at all.

(Rudy) I don't know.

You may be better than you think.

There are a lot of clues on any tree.

One thing that you look at first are the buds on the tree.

That's very important, and if you look at the buds on this tree, they are kind of distinctive, fairly large buds.

I see these a lot, and I know this is a sweetgum, but there are other clues to that.

(Beryl) I hope so.

It just looks like a bud.

(Rudy) See these ridges?

(Beryl) The bark is raised.

(Rudy) Yeah.

They're called excrescences.

That's just a big word for these flattened areas of bark.

You can actually see what looks like growth rings on those excrescences.

Not a lot of trees have those.

One up here that's common is called winged elm because these look like wings on it.

They have very small buds, so this one's not winged elm.

The excrescences and these large buds tell us it's sweetgum.

If you look up in the top, you'll also see fruit hanging on, which is the best clue.

(Beryl) That I can identify.

(Rudy) This would be sweetgum, and they're very common.

(Beryl) What makes excrescences?

I've never seen bark like that.

(Rudy) I don't think anybody can tell you what's happening.

When the tree is injured, there are more of these produced or thicker projections.

(Beryl) Maybe it's protection.

(Rudy) Maybe, and maybe it's a reaction to invasion by some outside force, bacteria or insects.

Speaking of insects, I think, if I'm not mistaken -- look here.

(Beryl) A cocoon.

(Rudy) Yeah, look.

This is something super because this is the cocoon of a moth known as the flannel moth.

It has an ingenius way of means of escape for the little moth.

Look at this, Beryl.

(Beryl) It has a door.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Isn't that unbelievable?

It looks like the door of a castle that falls down, and out prances not a prince, but a moth, a flannel moth.

(Beryl) How do you know it's a flannel moth?

(Rudy) This is the only kind that produces a cocoon like this.

It's got a little ridge on the top, little bulges, but the outstanding part is that trap door.

(Beryl) A trap door.

(Rudy) I think of these as mailboxes.

They look like a nature-made mailbox.

(Beryl) That's a good way to identify it.

(Rudy) The moth is inside.

There's nothing that has a cocoon like this, and what better time to look for cocoons because this is the way a lot of insects make it over the winter and with the leaves off the trees, then these things stick out like sore thumbs.

I'm going to carry that back.

That's neat.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) The moth has left this one.

Look at this tree behind you.

(Beryl) With the green shoots?

(Rudy) Yeah, see how nice and yellow-green, and that helps in identification.

This is one of the maples known as boxelder.

It's very common, especially in wet places.

I'm surprised to find it up this way, but sometimes nature does have surprises for us.

(Beryl) Why is it green when everything else is dying?

(Rudy) This gets pretty large.

Branches don't die on trees in the winter.

They don't really die on trees in the winter.

This is new growth on this tree.

It is the newest growth that is green, and eventually this will form sort of a whitish covering on it, and you won't see the pretty green color.

It's fairly, fairly distinctive.

One of the nice things about buds and branches on these maples is that they're opposites.

See the way these come off across from one another?

There are really very few trees that have opposite branches.

Maples and the ashes and the dogwoods do.

MAD, M-A-D, is the way to remember them.

(Beryl) MAD.

(Rudy) This is a maple.

Boxelder is the name.

We'll see some fruit later, because it should have shed some fruit, and we might find it in the road or somewhere else.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) There's one other that we want to look at while we're right here, and this is one that's not supposed to be in Spartanburg County.

It's one of the plants that's not native to South Carolina.

There are really two plants here that are not native.

Do you know what this is?

Often planted as a hedge, it's called privet, or Ligustrum .

(Beryl) Ligustrum I know.

(Rudy) Okay.

The fruit is fairly distinctive this time of year.

This is an introduction, and, again, it's escaped.

The seed are carried by birds all over and dropped.

That's one of the interesting things about the fruit on these plants.

That is, that it's got a soft outer covering, which birds can digest, but the seed inside usually is so hard that it's not digested.

(Beryl) And they drop it.

(Rudy) Passes through the digestive tract and gets dropped out.

My grandmother used to talk about birds planting trees along fence lines.

You always see trees there.

She was right.

They plant those trees there because they carry the seed and drop them out.

Do you see the other plant here that's not native, one we've talked about a lot?

Doesn't have flowers on it this time of year.

See the vine?

(Beryl) The vine that's twined in here.

(Rudy) What is that?

Do you remember?

(Beryl) Nope.

(Rudy) Japanese honeysuckle.

(Beryl) I wouldn't expect honeysuckle up there.

(Rudy) You find it up on things a lot, but a lot of times it covers the ground in this county and other counties.

Japanese honeysuckle is nice because it's forage for deer.

Deer do take advantage of it.

Here are two non-native plants hugging each other on the roadside.

Both still have green leaves on them -- (Beryl) Sure do.

(Rudy) -- and often keep them into wintertime.

There's a lot to see.

Why don't we head out and see what we can find.

The sun keeps moving behind the clouds.

(Beryl) It does.

(Rudy) Getting a little chillier every time it goes behind the clouds.

I saw some sap running out of this sweetgum, and it may be worth looking at it for a minute.

There are some insects that have been grabbed and even a spider that's been caught in the sap.

Have you ever wondered why you call these trees sweetgums?

(Beryl) No, but looking at the sap, I bet that has something to do with it.

(Rudy) Yeah.

If you scrape away the surface, it's real gooey, and take a whiff of it, it smells kind of sweet.

If you taste it, it is relatively sweet, and back before Beechnut and Spearmint and all these other gums were being sold, you could take a little bit of cornmeal and sort of rub it in this gooey material and make your own chewing gum, which happened to be sweet.

So we give the tree the name -- (Beryl) Sweetgum.

(Rudy) -- sweetgum.

It's a very common tree.

Quite a few insects have been attracted.

(Beryl) And trapped.

(Rudy) Most lose their lives.

Sometimes you actually find sap of trees with insects sort of fossilized within the sap.

It's kind of neat.

It's called amber.

You've heard of amber.

It's used in jewelry.

Sap is running out of trees even today.

There's so much to see.

Let's hurry and see what we can find.

Get back on the road a minute.

♪ I'm noticing the fact that over here we've got a forest that's sort of a mixture of plants, of trees.

A lot of pines, mainly in the back, pines.

But every now and then, sprinkled through... (Beryl) I see some hardwoods.

(Rudy) One of the neat things about the piedmont in South Carolina is that today it really isn't like what our ancestors saw.

The early European settlers, the other folks who settled in the Upcountry, did not find lots of pine trees all over the place.

It was really an oak-hickory forest up here in those years.

(Beryl) Where did all the pines come from?

(Rudy) There were a few pines scattered around, but what did the settlers do to the land?

(Beryl) They cleared it.

(Rudy) They cleared it.

When you clear it, you plant crops, and when the land's not fertile anymore, what do you do?

(Beryl) They moved on.

(Rudy) Move on, and you leave that old field.

What happens to an old field?

What does nature do with it?

Well, there is a pattern, and it is predictable.

It's referred to as old field succession.

(Beryl) Succession.

(Rudy) You begin with the open field, lots of grasses.

Other plants come in.

Broomsedge is a good one that we'll see scattered around here.

One of the first trees to come into that field -- (Beryl) The pine trees.

(Rudy) -- are pines.

I think almost all these are Virginia pines.

That's a typical plant on the piedmont.

The pines grow up, and one of the problems is they need a lot of sunlight to survive.

(Beryl) They keep reaching.

(Rudy) What happens to the pines that begin to develop underneath?

They die.

They're shaded out.

But guess what?

These old hardwoods can grow in the shade.

(Beryl) They grow underneath.

(Rudy) They begin to grow up and up and up, and eventually some of these are getting to the top of the canopy.

When they get up on top, they'll shade out those pines.

The pines will die off, and what will you have again?

(Beryl) A hardwood forest.

(Rudy) Another hardwood forest.

That's the way succession works, and it's really kind of exciting to see how the varieties of plants change as time goes on.

(Beryl) The process keeps going because on the edges we have pines growing.

(Rudy) In open areas, you begin to get pines again.

Once you reach oak-hickory forests on most of the piedmont, then you've reached a stage that's usually referred to as climax forest, which means you are as far as you're going to get, unless natural disaster comes in and strips it up.

(Beryl) Wipes it out.

(Rudy) Tears it apart, or humans come in and begin to change things again.

It's fun to see this going on when you understand what's happening.

Notice the red clay bank over here.

(Beryl) Uh-huh.

That's a Carolina piedmont trademark.

(Rudy) Sure is.

Do you know why the clay is red and not white?

(Beryl) It's the iron in the soil.

(Rudy) Beautiful.

These rocks that are decaying to form the soil are rich in iron, some of which was mined years ago in the upper part of South Carolina.

It stains the soil the reddish color that we see today, and that's so typical of the piedmont.

Changes are going on all the time.

We know the seasons change because we live long enough to see those every year, but there are other changes.

This climax forest takes maybe 100 years to go from old field to climax forest, and so it's hard to appreciate unless you know how to read the clues.

(Beryl) And know the story.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Let's see what we can find further on.

♪ (Rudy) I can remember pretty distinctly walking down this road as a youngster and finding a lot of the same stuff we found today.

(Beryl) Is it much like it used to be?

(Rudy) Yeah, for the most part it is.

Again, changes are subtle out here.

I've had a lot of fun at this place and this place in the woods that I want to take you to, that is kind of nice, a little open area in the pines.

Look at the river birch.

(Beryl) With the peeling bark.

(Rudy) Yeah.

That tells us we're near water.

There's some water down here in a floodplain right next to it.

Good to be back home again.

(Beryl) I bet there's a woods like this in everybody's memory.

(Rudy) I think so.

One of the things we can give our children is experiences like this and an appreciation for the world around them.

I think that's a gift that's invaluable.

It can be a lot of fun to them, and it can also be a lot of fun to the parents.

(Beryl) Oh, yes.

(Rudy) Look at this.

(Beryl) It's a bug.

(Rudy) Yeah, a little beetle.

One of a great variety of insects, coleoptera, or beetles, are a really successful group of insects.

There are more different varieties of beetles than reptiles and amphibians and birds and mammals combined.

(Beryl) Does that mean they have been around millions of years?

(Rudy) Been around a long time and do a lot of jobs well.

They reproduce very rapidly like all the insects, but these have come up with extra protection.

The top pair of wings aren't really wings anymore at all.

They're protective devices, you see.

(Beryl) It's a shell.

(Rudy) A hard shell made out of chitin, and a pair of wings underneath.

He's trying to lift off now.

See the way he's spreading the hard shell apart a little bit, and the membrane-like wings are underneath, and then he's going to try to fly away from us.

This one is one of the scarabs, one of the beetles that were once worshipped in Egypt.

Very interesting insects, and I wish him well during the winter.

(Beryl) I hope he makes it.

(Rudy) I hope he does, too.

Let's put him back down here, and why don't we be careful and head into this little cove area and see what we can find.

Some nice broomsedge.

(Beryl) Uh-huh.

Rudy, look at the mushroom sticking out.

(Rudy) This is a pretty common group of mushrooms that this is a representative of, Beryl.

Let me just pull this one up.

See the gills, or what are called gills underneath?

The gilled fungi, or gilled mushrooms, are very common.

There are quite a number of varieties.

Some are edible, and some are poisonous.

I rarely tell people about edible mushrooms because most of them are tough to identify.

(Beryl) Leave them alone.

(Rudy) It's best to eat the mushrooms you find in stores and not pick them unless you are an expert.

Do you know a little about the life of these gilled mushrooms?

(Beryl) Not at all.

(Rudy) It's weird because they spend most of their time under the surface of the earth, right under the top, little thread-like structures, some of which are referred to as positive threads, or hyphae, and some of them are negative hyphae.

When the negative and positive threads get together -- (Beryl) Like male and female.

(Rudy) -- they form a fruiting body.

That is the fruiting body that pushes its way through the ground and brings it to the surface.

(Beryl) And blooms out?

(Rudy) And blooms out.

The gills form.

They produce spores there, which are blown by wind all over this hillside.

Most of them don't make it.

Some of them do.

They grow into threads, and back they come.

(Beryl) That looks like one pushing out.

(Rudy) That is.

Look there.

It hasn't come all the way up, but you can see he's pushing his way through.

With tremendous force usually.

These can push up through a thin layer of asphalt.

(Beryl) They seem so fragile.

(Rudy) They seem very fragile.

Water can do marvelous things.

We've said that many times.

Inside of cells, it can cause them to swell, exert great forces and push these things up through something as tough as asphalt.

Another one of the mushrooms, same variety as that.

Look at that.

(Beryl) Coming through.

(Rudy) Fabulous.

The fungi are great because they take dead material and make life out of it again.

(Beryl) Recycle it.

Let's see what else has been recycled here.

(Rudy) All right.

(Rudy) Slow down just a second.

Take a look at a clump of plants here.

(Beryl) It's pretty.

(Rudy) These are common, and they're scattered around the state.

The common name is spotted wintergreen.

They start off with a little stalk and a white flower that hangs down.

Beautiful little flower, and as it forms fruit, it turns right side up, and there's actually a plant over there of spotted wintergreen with the balls of fruit.

(Beryl) Oh, right here.

(Rudy) Yeah.

It is interesting, real common.

(Beryl) There's an insect.

(Rudy) What you got?

(Beryl) Looks like a caterpillar.

(Rudy) Oh, yeah.

That's really neat.

It's one of the inchworm caterpillars.

You can see the way it humps its body along as if it's measuring.

A measuring worm is another name for this, but it's really an insect, a larva of a moth, which is known as the geometer moth.

They feed on plants in this area.

Look at the way he moves.

(Beryl) What's he doing out this time of year?

(Rudy) I would imagine he would have a cocoon built before long, because most of these butterflies and moths don't make it through the winter as caterpillars.

They either make it as adults, which is uncommon, or in a cocoon or a chrysalis.

(Beryl) He is precious.

(Rudy) Oh, that's neat.

Look at that.

(Beryl) He seems to have two different sets of legs, in the front and in the back.

(Rudy) Right.

The front legs are six in number and true legs.

The back legs have sucker-shaped devices and are called prolegs.

He won't have those when he becomes an adult, but those front six will be there in the adult.

(Beryl) I better put him back down.

(Rudy) He's a fragile animal.

A lot of things feed on him, but he'll blend in well there.

We wish him well.

Let's walk on out here.

One of the things that I've noticed -- let me pick up a couple of seed -- is quite a variety of seed that have blown in here, at least two different varieties.

Why don't I hold on to these, and let's take a look, see what these are.

This seed on the top is from one of the trees that we've already seen, the boxelder.

Remember, one of the maples.

All the maples end up with a seed like this, and a wing on it.

(Beryl) It looks like a paddle.

(Rudy) It's interesting, very typical.

Then this seed with a little wing on it is from one of the magnolia family, the tulip tree, or yellow poplar.

That's one that most people in South Carolina are familiar with, and both of these are interesting.

Those wings allow them to be blown by wind, like is blowing now, and carries them tremendous distances.

I don't see any tulip trees here.

I don't see any boxelders.

(Beryl) But we have the seed.

(Rudy) The seed have come over in these pines and dropped down, and some will go ahead and sprout.

One interesting thing about the wings on these is it helps them fly.

That's one reason we call them wings.

With the wind blowing, let me toss this one up.

See the way it helicopters down?

Try one more here, and it seems to spiral down.

Look at that.

Look at it, it even suspended in the air.

That allows seed to be disbursed a great distance away from the tree that is producing them, and that's another neat thing going on this time of year.

Look at the lichens.

(Beryl) All over the ground.

(Rudy) Phenomenal, covering this area up, and I see something.

See it hanging on the tree?

(Beryl) It's a cocoon.

(Rudy) It's gigantic.

It's last year's, but it's interesting.

Let's see what animal produced this and left it behind.

This is a cocoon of one of our large silk moths.

It's called a polyphemus moth.

It's a big one found statewide.

It has a wing span about like that when it comes out of a cocoon.

(Beryl) That's pretty large.

(Rudy) Really tremendous.

One of the interesting things about these moths is they have the capacity to spin silk.

This is silk.

(Beryl) That is silk?

(Rudy) Yeah.

It's made out of a variety of material called silk, and spiders spin silken webs, but that's from their rear end through spinnerets.

These caterpillars spin silk through glands in their mouths.

(Beryl) Their mouths.

(Rudy) Spin it around and around, and this is perfect insulation to get them through the winter.

The pupa is in there, and that's where the changes occur that take this from a larva to an adult.

(Beryl) Do they store food inside?

(Rudy) Food is stored inside their bodies.

The caterpillar, all it does is eats.

No reproductive system.

Inside here, it gets the reproductive system from nowhere.

It gets wings from nowhere, and the little mouth is a folded-up tube, rolled-up tube, and tremendous changes occur in that silken chamber.

(Beryl) I guess it really is a metamorphosis.

(Rudy) Fabulous to see.

(Beryl) It's a good term.

(Rudy) Total change in form, and that's exactly what it means.

There's one other place I want to go to not far from here and see if we can find some quartz crystals.

(Beryl) Let's go look.

♪ (Rudy) You can see this is a nice area for small quartz crystals.

There's not any too large, at least not that we've found yet.

(Beryl) But you see tiny flecks.

(Rudy) Yeah, they're real nice.

(Beryl) Look at them.

(Rudy) They look like pieces of glass, and they are made out of the same kind of material as glass, silicon dioxide.

Really common in the earth's crust.

(Beryl) How do they form here?

(Rudy) What's interesting about this is these things were squirted into the earth, probably pretty deep, as liquid rock a long time ago, and slowly cooled, and as it cooled -- (Beryl) It crystallized.

(Rudy) -- the atoms of silicon and oxygen came together to form a nice six-sided crystal, very hard material, too.

You can scratch glass with this very easily, and these quartz crystals are very exciting to find.

You know if you've ever grown crystals yourself, you have to leave them in a quiet place.

(Beryl) Undisturbed.

(Rudy) You can't jar it.

If this material were injected on the surface of the earth like lava, you wouldn't form nice, pretty crystals.

It had to be injected underneath to give it time for these crystals to form.

Usually they form in spaces in the ground.

(Beryl) Why are we finding them on the surface?

(Rudy) The material that was once covering this area has been eroded away, and forms the coastal plain, some of the coastal plain, and the continental shelf offshore of South Carolina, getting us to the level where we can find crystals, and I found four or five here.

(Beryl) I found a few, too.

They're just little bitties.

(Rudy) When you're on the piedmont there's an unbelievable variety of things to look at.

That's true anywhere in the state.

(Beryl) Is this the only place in the state we'd find crystals?

(Rudy) When you look for quartz crystals and amethyst crystals and emeralds, you should spend your time on the piedmont and in the mountains.

They're not common on the coastal plain because that stuff is very recent down there.

It wasn't squirted in a long time ago.

It's usually bits and pieces of other rock that have ended up there.

It's been a nice day.

It has.

We've looked at all sorts of plants.

And we've gone to a place that's just like where other people who are watching live, just a basic, plain area.

It's a little road, and we've taken the time to look carefully, and look what we've come up with.

The principles of succession.

We've looked at quartz crystals.

I think it's important that we remind ourselves that we ought to go out and see this.

If you've got kids, take them with you and share this experience with them because it's something that doesn't cost a lot of money.

That's for sure.

Yet it's very exciting.

It's a part of South Carolina's nature scene.

Thank you for joining us, and join us again for the next "NatureScene."

I would like some crystals to take home.

Let's look back over here for a minute and see if we can't come up with some more.

Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 ♪