143 



party took the Breezy Point ferry for Sheepshead Bay where 

 they had dinner and so to the subway and home. 



(The survival or return of the hognose viper, Ilekrodon platyrhimis , 

 and the plover on this strand is interesting, considering the intensive building 

 there in recent years, but probably the naval reservation area still maintains 

 a limited preserve for such species.-R.H.T.) 



Zaida Nicholson 



Field Meeting of Sunday August 18 



The party on the field meeting of August 18, in the north- 

 eastern part of the Harriman-Bear Mountain State Park, num- 

 bered twenty-eight, including about a dozen of the nature 

 councillors in the Park camps, and members of the New York 

 Microscopical Society, the New York Mountain Club, the 

 Green Mountain Club, the Brooklyn Entomological Society, 

 and others. The route was from Bear Mountain Inn, through 

 the Nature Museum and trails, across Popolopen Creek, and by 

 road and trail over Crown Ridge to Torne Pond, around the 

 pond, out to the Forest of Dean Road and by Timp-Torne 

 Trail across Popolopen Creek, and by the Popolopen Gorge 

 Road back to Bear Mountain, about nine miles. 



Among a number of interesting species seen, perhaps the 

 most unusual was the Japanese Knotweed, Pleuropterus 

 Zuccarinii, which was found in abundance and evidently well 

 established about the ruins of anold farm, on the old Continental 

 Road, on the west side of Torne Pond. This is an escape from 

 cultivation, rather rare and local, which I have seen in only 

 one other place, on the bank above the greenhouse in Central 

 Park, New York City, east of the Andrew H. Green memorial. 

 Four to eight feet tall, with its stout, reddish stems, ("Bam- 

 booish" said one of the party, and it does suggest a bamboo) 

 with its large, velvety leaves, and handsome sprays of white 

 flowers, it is a striking plant and appeared quite the exotic 

 that it is, in its surroundings of native plants, although there 

 were a few other introduced species, characteristic of these 

 old homesteads in the Highlands of the Hudson, such as lilac, 

 syringa, crab-apple, and comfrey. 



The False Fo.x-gloves, the Downy, Dasystoma flava and the 

 Smooth, D. virginica, were seen along the old woodroads, 

 and a somewhat rarer species was the Lousewort False Foxglove, 



