Favoritos de marykrieger

the trail cam video begins with the rabbit feeding on the spilled seed underneath the bird feeders. Next an owl flies into view from beyond the large hanging feeder crossing to the lower left hand corner into the leafless twigs and disappearing. A crashing sound is heard. At the same time, the rabbit dashes away to the right and is not seen again. The owl shuffles back into view in the lower left corner. Bill snaps can be heard faintly. it looks around and up at the camera. After a few moments it flies back through the trees in the direction from which it first came.

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada with the California Academy of Sciences. A fantastic adventure among gathering polar bears who were waiting for the ice to form for the winter. Also saw lots of Arctic Fox and Snowy Owl

Keyed using Kershaw & Allen 2020 which follows the 2014 Flora of N. America treatment that elevated P. hippiana var. effusa to species level, thus P. effusa.

-abundant cottony hairs on both sides of leaves (= a gray-aspect plant)
-side leaflets often unevenly paired, and secondary leaflets can be interspersed
-averages 4-9 teeth/side of leaflet, with a max. distal tooth edge of ~ 4mm
-upper leaflet pair not generally decurrent
-flowering stems tend to have relatively more cauline leaves (2-6+)
-epicalyx bracelets are relatively sparsely hairy and tend to be nearly hairless at the tips, have white cottony hairs towards the bases, generally don't have sericeous hairs, and are slender, linear-shaped and shorter - this all relative to the sepals

This plant had a few departures from the FNA description, but I'm not going to quibble since it's possible the FNA author didn't have a lot of Canadian material to examine:
-styles measured in at ~2.5 mm instead of the max. given of 2.1 mm
-one of the terminal leaflets measured ~4 cm, where the max. length given for leaflets is 3 cm
-the inflorescence looks to have > than 30 flowers
http://floranorthamerica.org/Potentilla_effusa

P. hippiana has these contrasting features:
-upper surface of leaves tend to be green, without cottony white hairs, so the leaves appear bicolor and the plant has a green aspect
-leaflets are generally evenly paired and without secondary leaflets
-average of 7-12 teeth/side (same max. distal edge of 4 mm)
-upper leaflet pair generally decurrent
-cauline leaves generally fewer (1) 2-3
-epicalyx bractlets tend to be more densely hairy throughout, even out to the tips, with abundant sericeous hairs, and relatively fewer or no white cottony hairs; shape a little wider and a little longer relative to P. effusa, but length still < sepals
-overall the plant & its parts tending to be a bit larger than P. effusa (larger leaflets to 6 cm max. for example)
-style max. length 2.5 mm
http://floranorthamerica.org/Potentilla_hippiana

The P. effusa plant in this obs. keys very nicely and to me it just seems a matter of raising awareness that we need to separate them from P. hippiana on iNat, which is actually pretty easy since they look pretty different for Potentillas!

I understand that currently P. effusa has a status of Unknown Track in AB, so I will try to collect and document opportunistically as I go, but obviously we can see from iNat posts that it is quite common, and may be so elsewhere as well. It will take some time to untangle the two on iNat.

Collected by permit.

Very fortunate to have had this amazing encounter! I saw something slink into the roadside brush, so we stopped the car and I got out. I was about 15' from from him at this point, and my presence made him slowly make his way to the forest edge. At that point I started talking to him, and he stopped dead in his tracks. (The four zoomed photos were taken at this point... all other photos are non-zoomed.) He stood there and listened to me for what seemed like a long time (but the whole encounter took less than a minute). Ultimately my wife became skittish and called me back to the car; our friend the lynx was still wanting to continue the conversation, however...