Cool! It’s illegal in Michigan to disturb them. I’ve never seen them in the yard since. : (
Neat. I recall from botany that some mushrooms grow in small “forests” like a bumpy blanket over the ground and the reduce the soil temperature. Too bad there aren’t any mushrooms that will grow in dry sand – that would really help my conservation work! (which needs help; from sixty trees planted back in the rainy season I’ down to fourteen survivors)
Back when my son was in the Boy Scouts I did a fair bit of winter camping but I never camped on a frozen lake. On the other hand, I did camp on snow(*) and then go ice fishing on a frozen lake. Here’s one of the other dad’s on the lake:
(*) Or maybe I camped in snow. There was one trip on which I made a snow shelter (a quinzhee) and slept in it.
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I recall an outcry back when I was first in college when a certain zoo acquired a large piece of land nextdoor to it (abandoned light industrial IIRC) what more than tripled its area. The complaint wasn’t the increased land, it was that people expected the zoo to get a lot more awesome animals but what happened was that most of the land wen to giving the animals they had a lot more room. I had visited it before the expansion and went back once it was completed, and to my eye the animals looked a lot more content and alert – definitely they did the right thing.
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I’ve done the same when I could get away with it, though my tool of choice is a set of hand clippers and small folding saw.
There’s a family I’ve done some work for over by the beach who cut ivy and pull it down and then just toss the stuff into the inter-dune canyon, where inevitably some it it survives and contributes to the problem.
Here, morning glory is a nasty invasive while bindweed is just annoying.
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Of course what you see there isn’t subducting, it’s what got scraped off as the main part of the plate goes downward.
That describes about 90% of the geology of Oregon’s coast range.
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How about 6 meters without being bumped? 
Leafy spurge spreads by seeds and roots. As the chambers of the seed capsule ripen, unequal pressures cause the capsule to explode, throwing the seeds as far as 20 feet. Mature plants have extensive root systems that may extend 15 or more feet into the soil and many [essentially all] have horizontal roots that enable the colony to enlarge by underground growth.
Leafy spurge
With roots that deep it doesn’t winter kill even in really cold winters and it’s toxic except to sheep and goats. Guess why it’s the bane of farmers and one of the nastiest of noxious weeds.
There are native morning glories to the NW USA as well. Morning glories are in Cali and Oregon. I’m sure there has been introduced ones as well.
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Grape is pretty aggressive here, but last summer I had some that grew up some of the sassafrass trees that grow by the ditch, and produced a tastey little crop of fruit. I love scrubby, irrepressible sassafrass. Since they seem resistant to death, I went ahead this summer and trained new grape vines up more of them. It’d be fun to get more grapes. The juice was delicious.
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My son made some tart wild grape jelly when he was a kid, and it was wonderful on a bagel with cream cheese! The seed to flesh volume ratio is pretty high however – it takes a lot of them!
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I recall a botany field trip on which we did a mad hike, practically jogging, to reach a certain spot before the rising sun did. The goal was a species in the family umbelliferae that by the professor’s projection would have had its seed pods reached maturity on or about that day. We got there, notepads ready plus a few cameras, and watched as the morning sun crept towards the stand of relatives of Queen Anne’s Lace. Not all the plants had their seeds quite ripe, but from those who did . . .
The flower heads began tightly clustered, and as the sunshine approached they started to unfold, the little stems tilting downwards; before they were fully extended the sun hit and cellulose ballistic launches went to work, pop-pop-pop-pop in all directions like minuscule mortars, launching seeds that from the pops who stems were near 45° up over our heads and into the lower parts of the canopy. The seeds that sailed just under the canopy struck understory plants anywhere from six to ten meters away, while those with clear paths could reach twelve to fifteen meters.
So where wild cress will launch from physical prompts, this species was triggered by sunlight once the seeds were ripe. But what, you may ask, if it’s an overcast spring? In that case, the flower clusters fall off and get tangled in lower growth were they can stick to passing animals, and ultimately when they contact the ground the tension that held the seeds in place lets go and the seeds just roll out.
Those plants don’t have deep roots, but they don’t need to; each actual individual flower will launch about a dozen seeds, there are three dozen flowers in a cluster, and each plants will have one to two dozen clusters, so one plant will throw out about ten thousand seeds that can remain viable for a few years so that if they do reach conditions for sprouting they will.
BTW, there were thirty or forty plants in that little ‘grove’, so just from it better than a quarter million seeds got produced.
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‘Like’ quota still impeding, so a simple workaround: 
(Wow, 12-15 m!)
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That would be Calystegia occidentalis which is distinct from the invasive stuff, plus its range tends to be up in the mountains.
The invasive stuff has smoother blossoms; it apparently also goes by the name of “field bindweed”. There is also an invasive bindweed but the leaves are different.
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(The bindweed we have here has considerably smaller blossoms than morning glory. In those photos are also some smallish dandelions plus some grass and gravel for scale comparison.)
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Craziness is only authorized businesses can sell them here, unless you’re a not-for-profit. So I’m sort of eagerly awaiting our not-for-profit papers from the state – a trillium can go for $20 and we’ve easily got forty of them just by that porch (I transplanted six four years ago to over by the other porch and I think there are twenty there now). Get money for the not-for-profit for my conservation work and I can reimburse me for some expenses including gas.
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Not to criticise or claim anything but I haven’t posted for a while.I was at Newquay Zoo last week and the Red Pandas came out to play.
Richard
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They were on the news here just late last week, about some new cubs. They’re just a little cute, not that the adults aren’t too!
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Well this a part of creation that I’m super annoyed about. Y’all remember when I said I let those kids go to my creek a while back. Well I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure it was them. Got my bills in and saw that my water bill was close to a grand. Called them, it’s correct as far as they can tell. So I begin checking for leaks. Don’t find any. Then realize I think I hear the sound of water. So I move around to the far side of my house I never go to and I can start to really hear it. So I begin walking towards the sound, and then I fall dove deep down through the ground and roots and they ended up flipping me over backwards and I find myself in a hole with a water hose running full blast. It’s became a hole about 5 feet deep, 2 feet wide and 16 feet long going underground. I climb out. Pull out the hose. Turn it off.
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It scared the hell out of me. When I fell down and felt the roots pull my legs from underneath to behind me and flipped landing on my knees and then falling to my stomach underground. Seeing dirt on all sides. The hose has somehow drifted over and so it was dry where I was at. But muddy all around me. As I was climbing up out I just happened to be climbing over top of the extended sink and my arms and feet kept crushing back through into the hollow. For like 10 feet until I finally got away from thin ground above it.
I think it’s the kids because they kept turning on the water hose in the back playing with it. I told them to stop. I think they must have turned on the one on the side thinking I would not know and they forgot to turn it off. Was about to go to their house. But decided it’s better i pay it off, then wait a few days and go there so I don’t just snap on them and their parents.
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