It’s not uncommon to hear tales of people claiming to have encountered poisonous snakes in Western New York, specifically water moccasins and copperheads. In all cases, the person is dead wrong in the identification of the snakes. Neither of those species can be found here. There are no copperheads in New York outside of the Catskills and there are no water moccasins north of Virginia. What happens is this: Our resident northern water snakes are confused with water moccasins (also known as cottonmouths) while eastern milk snakes are misidentified as copperheads. In a future column we’ll look at water snakes. This week we’ll look at milk snakes. Milk snakes do have, to the uninitiated, a copperhead-like appearance. Copperheads have brown bands contrasting a lighter brown base. Adult milk snakes have brown blotches (versus bands) on a lighter base, but their base tends to be more steely grey. Young milk snakes will sport reddish-chestnut blotches on a brighter, silvery, almost ...

  Our springs are too fleeting. They pass quickly, and amidst the hustle and bustle of our day-to-day lives it is often difficult to stop and enjoy the beauty before it’s gone. Sometimes you just have to stop, relax, and take it all in. A flower that deserves this sort of vernal admiration will bloom soon and adorn many lawns in the region with bright color. Glory of the snow is one of my favorite flowers. For a brief period of time they pop out of the muddy landscape to create a carpet of blue while the rest of the plant kingdom has yet to green. These wonderful flowers are not native to Western New York; they came from Turkey. They aren’t what you would consider an invasive species, either. But, they have made a home for themselves throughout the oldest communities in the region. European immigrants planted the delightful flowers around their homes, so you will see vast colonies of them around many houses that were built in the 1800s. I am confident that those in my yard in Nia...

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a scarlet elf cup. While hiking one March day some years ago, I noticed some red on the forest floor that caught my eye from some distance away. When walking in the woods during this month, which you could consider our “mud season”, one doesn’t expect to see a splash of color, especially with the beauty of the understory’s ephemeral flowers being weeks away. So, I had to check it out. As I approached it, I thought it was a piece of plastic, maybe a chunk of a kid’s rubber ball. It was certainly bright enough. As I went to pick it up to properly dispose of it I stopped as I quickly realized it was not of Man’s creation, but of Nature’s – a brilliantly hued fungus. The scarlet elf cup is unusual as its fruiting bodies appear in late-winter and early-spring. Most other mushrooms and fungi of brilliant appearance are seen during August and early-September. It is believed its color is so intense because that pigment protects the fungus from dam...