Nature can look a bit quirky during hot weather, even through a clear, clean pair of eye glasses or windshield.

Sometimes there are oddities because we’ve not seen these bedfellows in 10 months. Or, too, it is organisms fighting to occupy the same space, even eat one another as food and energy.

Parasites may partially hide by getting inside their host and impressively deforming its appearance.

Consider, and eat if you care, corn smut. This fungus invades a corn fruit (kernel) and has this great urge to produce billions of black spores, all the while the kernel enlaarges by ten. Ustilago maydis mycologists call it.

Latin names of parasites may parasitize the host’s name, too, such as Ustilago maydis does to corn, Zea maize. The fungus takes part of that name as its own just as it steals corn’s food and energy.

Elderberry and sumac rust are also fungal parasite diseases, with elderberry being most spectacular when infected leaves and stems enlarge to the size and shape of ripe bananas. Sumac’s rust in more hidden but large tumors are noticeable on the underside of the plant’s leaflets.  

Nothing edible here, and nothing poisonous, either.

Dog vomit slime mold needs no description beyond the name. In the dark of night, it creeps over mulch, sucking up microorganisms into its increasing yellow vomit. By morning it matures and its spores begin producing new slime colonies.

Just as uncultured are various stinkhorn fungi. Their name and description are one, too. The horns may be edible, but no one has tried.

The list continues as long at the warmth persists. A drink of fresh rain brings a new batch of red, yellow, blue, but never green, fungi. Some commercial fruits specialize in gigantism and common blue-flowered plants surprise us with an occasional red or white bee balm bloom.

As black raspberry season wanes, along comes a plant or two with blond berries. Resin drips like freezing water from coniferous cones.

A few plants need no help from weather or parasites because they come in odd forms, colors and shapes. Ghost plants appear in the heat of late summer, white as albino, one flower, white, too, and then dry to a black stem persisting alongside a November stand, when a few animals drift past, some with drop tines on their antlers.

Summer’s windstorms turned plants sideways and now they grow like a bent down sapling pinned there by a Native American as a direction sentinel.

In spite of less-than-ideal, trouters pulled in some trout between gnat swats. Japanese beetle populations seem to have crashed, but gardeners continue to be ready with collecting cups of water, bleach and soap.

Growing and maturing animals and plants sometimes seem unrecognizable, as with the immature red-headed woodpeckers whose heads are still brown, but those of pileated birds beam crimson.

Young rooster pheasants are only a bit rooster-like, more hen-like though. Upland game bird poults, immature grouse, quail, pheasants and turkeys, sometimes are blurred.

Several birds perch atop other animals, as red-winged blackbirds find bald eagles and sandhill cranes as durable as a fence, power line or limb. Cowbirds find a morsel of food atop an Angus or Holstein.

Flowers of hitchhiking plants show little resemblance to autumn’s stick tights. Burdocks fool no one. Hazelnuts are another matter.

Fruits of wild apples, bitternut hickories and the white oak group—bur, swamp white, and white—show more promise than walnuts and shagbark hickories. A few butternuts fruit, too.

Come October, many deformities will have abscised, matured or died, including tar spot on maple leaves; autumn’s colors will be a new coat of paint. Young animals will be more parent-like.

Cooler times, lower humidity, and fuller skies will harvest calmer excitement.

— Jerry Davis is a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.