I hope that everyone was thankful yesterday for friends, family and good food.

There is one thing that you may have neglected to give thanks for at your Thanksgiving table; it is an organism small and easily overlooked, but likely an important part of yesterday’s (and maybe everyday’s) meals: don’t forget the yeast that makes an important part of the feast!

Last week I got an earful.

It was not for any wrongdoing on my part; rather, it was an earful of wax (not to be gross) wings. A group or flock of these birds is called an earful or a museum of waxwings. It is now common to see groups as large as 100 of these birds in the fields and forests of the Island.

It is a killer.

Not a lady killer, but a livestock killer. The common names of Kalma angustifolia say it all; sheepkill, lambkill and calfkill. With aliases like that, you’d think that this plant definitely has a public relations problem on its hands.

Its common names speak to a characteristic that is worrisome (to say the least) for the shepherd. This plant is a mean, green poisoning machine!

“One could do worse that be a swinger of birches.”

So said Robert Frost, who also insisted that he’d “like to go by climbing a birch tree/And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk toward heaven/Till the tree could bear no more, but dipped its top and set me down again/ That would be good both going and coming back.”

Don’t come knocking, cause there’s nobody home in a brown oak apple gall.

Oak apple galls are those fragile looking, paper-like round things on the ground or attached to branches. These ping-pong ball sized orbs are readily seen in the woods now that the leaves are coming down. They were home base for an insect, but by this late in the season, these domiciles are empty. Their summer residents left even before Memorial Day!

Morton is a mystery man, a gentleman whose identity has been lost in the annals of history and the forgetfulness of an eclectic scientist. Unfortunately, neither I nor you, my good reader, are destined to unravel the mystery of who he was.

The Morton in question is the namesake of a small clam, Morton’s egg cockle. This bivalve has washed up in large numbers on the shores of Sengekontacket Pond.