Paul Nordberg
My activities & loves
Paul Nordberg
My activities & loves
I am not ready, for now at least, to give a name to the lichen shown here. It has a striking appearance, with a dark green border surrounding concentric gray rings, so it would seem to lend itself to visual identification. It has a number of the characteristics of bitter wart lichen, but notably not the bitter taste.
There are various technical tests that could be made, beginning with simple chemical assays. I am holding off on moving to that level, however. I am feeling like a beginning bird-watcher who has learned to tell a crow from a robin from a turkey, but doesn't feel that his abilities merit an extravagent set of binoculars.
But it is bugging me that I can't put together at least a reasonable guess, so I will keep scratching my head about it.
An earlier version of this website had a lot of material on cooking. I won't start time travel backwards, but I will report one variant on a very common dish that is worthy of note: chicken soup.
Nearly all of the chicken soup recipes I find today include an onion and carrots. The recipe here has neither. It is for a hearty dish that might be considered closer to a stew than a soup. It is a chicken-focused recipe, not a vegetable soup with a broth base.
The key ingredients are a couple of chicken thighs, diced (or less good, a breast), a quarter cup of peeled garlic cloves, some parsley, and a quarter cup of mirin – a rice wine used in Japanese cooking. The mirin adds savoriness, one of five basic tastes.
I agree with the common inclusion of noodles of some sort, or rice.
As the Consortium of Lichen Herbaria notes, "Candelariella vitellina is a common and widespread species."
The example shown here – the light green growth – is one of a number on granite and other hard stones in the center of Ipswich. Their age might be measured in decades, certainly not in centuries.
This specimen is of an irregular shape perhaps 5 cm x 20 cm, on stone. The lighter growths are rock greenshield lichen, the dark green an unidentified moss.
My identification of this lichen – the dark olive growth, about 4 cm in diameter – is soft, without the benefit of expert knowledge or common chemical tests. The genus Melanelixia, to which I am tentatively assigning it, is a relatively recent one, the subject of ongoing research by specialists.
The visual match is an excellent one, however, for images from the Consortium of Lichen Herbaria. Its location fits neatly within the range cited by the Consortium. (I wish I could triangulate to the authoritative Lichens of North America by Brodo et al., but since the experts are painting evolving nonidentical pictures of the taxonomy, it is hard to match both simultaneously. The teams have overlapping membership, and the variants have much in common.)
This specimen is about 4 cm in diameter. The surrounding pale green blotches are common greenshield lichens, all on a scrub oak.
My discovery of new lichens seems to be proceeding apace, facilitated by breaking weather, learning what to look for, and encouragement from a bit of recent success.
Xanthoria parietina was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753. In North America, it shows a strong preference for coastal habitats, rarely appearing further inland.
As always with things lichen, my beginner's state of knowledge is very modest, in an area where experts may be unsure or disagree. I am relying in my identification on the fact that Xanthoria is well known, and multiple reports that it is common along the seashore of New England.
Now that the stubborn ice of the last months has melted, I have been looking again for lichens during my daily run through the dunes of Crane Beach. There are two that are extremely widespread, common greenshield lichen and reindeer lichen. I had nearly decided that that was it: the sandy soil is almost devoid of nutrients, and whatever grows needs to be salt-tolerant. It is a very specialized ecosystem of a small number of species. Better look in a diffent place if I want to find something different!
But I was mistaken. Today I came across a new one. I have learned that appearances may be deceiving, but the looks of this one fits classic lichen characteristics very well, on the surface of things. Lichens are made mostly of a fungus, of filamentary composition and usually very light in color, and a lesser bulk of an alga, usually green or less often blue. This growth is a thready, light-green structure, about 2 cm x 4 cm. (The "bloody" in the name refers to color below the exposed surface.)
It is clearly of the genus Usnea, less certainly of the species mutabilis. But mutabilis ("changing") is well-established and documented along nearby Cape Cod, and it would be entirely unsurprising for it to be present here. Conceivably it is something else. But as the saying goes, if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
I am excited.
I enjoy a game of solitaire as part of my evening ritual, just as at other times I enjoy a crossword puzzle (of the British cryptic variety, rewarding cleverness, not the American style, measuring knowledge of trivia from the mass entertainment media). It is a fifteen-minute interlude in a life filled with tasks whose duration is measured in months.
I play a game called Freecell, as did my mother. Heaven knows where she learned it. It was popularized by Microsoft, but I'm sure she didn't get it there. She used a deck of traditional playing cards, as do I. I find it's as useful to keep my hands busy as my mind! – The one in the picture is six years old, two or three times the expected lifetime of an electronic device.
Freecell, unlike the much more popular solitaire games of Klondike and Pyramid, is almost always winnable, and calls for some skill and attention. In fact, it calls for enough of one's attention that other thoughts must be set aside. That is not a bad pre-bedtime condition.
Recently, I looked around to see if there were other solitaire games winnable with skill. I came across Accordion, which comes in different varieties. For a long time, it was considered nearly unwinnable, until somebody figured out an approach that almost always works. It does call for much concentration, so is still widely considered very difficult.
Accordion, unlike most other solitaire games, is not an exercise in sorting, but of matching and collapsing – hence the name. As such, it calls for different skills.
Unfortunately, I found little of value on strategy for the game. There is not even an accepted system of notation for recounting it, as there is for chess or bridge. So, I have created my own brief guide 
and notation system.
The sample game I describe is a relatively easy one. I invite comment.
Accordion does take some space, which is a challenge for someone who tends to build up clutter on the kitchen table. But adjusting that habit would not be a bad thing, either.
Last winter was very mild. The ground barely froze. I was able to get a jump, months early, on a pile of spring chores that is usually overwhelming.
This winter has offered unrelenting cold. The amount of snow has not been great, nor have there been extremely low temperatures. But the days when the thermometer cracks freezing have been few, and when they've come, often with gusty winds. My last monthly gas bill was over $500, far above the norm.
It's January. One should expect such things. I do have more than enough indoor activities, and have been getting better at having a balance of things that require thinking and things that don't. (A warm day, or even a warm afternoon, would be nice for a couple of pending tasks… one will come.)
The snows have been pretty ones.
Though early January morning weather has been offering a wind chill factor of 0° F, it turns out that there have been good opportunities for field observation, prompted by my new lichen book.
The growth here is a hammered shield lichen, one of the most prevalent varieties globally and locally. It is a symbiotic combination of a fungus (Parmelia sulcata) and a green microalga (Trebouxia).
The microalga component has the capability of photosynthesis, deriving nutrient energy from the air and sunlight. It is notable here that the lichen displays a greenish tint even in mid-winter, in contrast to most of the deciduous plant life around it, now dead, brown and yellow.
The cells of the fungus are filamentary. As my reference notes, these threadlike structures weave into and around the alga, providing a firm base and skin. The durability of the composite is evident in the photograph. The lichen is still present and evidently alive, hanging loosely around the branch, long after the tree itself has died, the bark has dropped, and the wood itself is in marked decay.
© 2025 Paul Nordberg