What’s New at Wildlands

Mya Cusson 10/13/26 Mya Cusson 10/13/26

A Leaf Peeping Guide to Wildlands

*Hikers at Hoyt-Hall Preserve in Marshfield*

By Mya Cusson, Communications Coordinator

While we may be biased, we believe that New England, and more specifically Massachusetts, is the best place to enjoy the fall season. From apple and pumpkin picking to trips to Salem and other spooky sites, there is so much to love about a Massachusetts autumn. At Wildlands, getting outside and appreciating nature in this time of transition is our favorite part of the season. In celebration of the changing leaves that will soon reach peak color, we wanted to give you a leaf peeper's guide to Southeastern Massachusetts.

First, a bit of biology: why do the leaves change color in the fall? Leaves get their green hue from chlorophyll, a molecule that allows plants to complete photosynthesis; turning sunlight into food. Chlorophyll is depleted consistently throughout the growing season, and in the fall, before a tree drops its leaves, almost all of its chlorophyll will be gone. When the green pigment from chlorophyll fades, other pigments in the leaf become visible, including carotenoid (yellow) and anthocyanin (red). The result of this chemical process? Forests full of vibrant, warm colors that draw visitors from all over the country. [1]

According to predictive maps, Southeastern Massachusetts will see its peak foliage colors between late October and early November, with inland towns reaching their peak before coastal areas. This means there's still ample time to plan and execute the perfect leaf peeping excursion at your local Wildlands preserve. [2]

To help you get started, here are some of our favorite spots to take in the foliage:

Hoyt-Hall Preserve, Marshfield

With an assortment of deciduous trees and a scenic loop around Long Tom Pond with plenty of lookout spots, Hoyt-Hall Preserve is the perfect place for a leaf peeping hike. While enjoying the fall colors, appreciate the history of the preserve as you walk a section of the original Pilgrim Trail.

Halfway Pond Conservation Area, Plymouth

While Halfway Pond serves as a perfect outdoor haven year-round, it shines in the fall. Its beautiful oak and beech trees are already beginning to turn color, so now is the perfect time to visit. Keep an eye out for bald eagles during your hike, as they can often be spotted from the shores of the pond.

Great River Preserve, Bridgewater

Great River Preserve’s variety of habitats make it a great destination for viewing nature at every scale and in every season. In the fall, its river access and sweeping fields allow for picturesque views of fall colors. Because hunting is permitted at Great River Preserve, visitors should stay safe by wearing bright orange or red and follow MassWildlife guidelines.

[1] The Science of Leaf Color Change - Harvard Forest

[2] Plymouth County, MA Fall Foliage Forecast 2026 | Peak Color Dates

Mya Cusson 10/13/26 Mya Cusson 10/13/26

Welcome, Mya!

Wildlands is excited to welcome Mya Cusson to our team! Get to know Mya in her bio below.

Mya Cusson, Communications Coordinator

For Mya Cusson, Wildlands Trust provides the unique opportunity to blend her long-standing values, new passions, and love for her home into one role.

A Duxbury native, Mya grew up outdoors, whether it was on the beach, gardening with her mom, or exploring Wildlands trails with her friends. After taking an environmental studies course in high school, she was inspired to pursue a career that would allow her to help protect the natural spaces she loved. Mya pursued her bachelor's degree in environmental studies at Denison University in Ohio, where she also discovered a new passion for journalistic writing and storytelling. During the summers, she was at home working as a seasonal assistant for the Plymouth Harbormaster Department, a role that deepened her love for the water and solidified her need to give back to her community and the environment. After graduating, she returned home to be near her family (and the ocean) and joined the Wildlands Trust team in September 2026 for her first post-graduate position.

Mya looks forward to blending her creativity and love of writing with her commitment to the environment in her role as Communications Coordinator, where you will see her work on our e-news, social media, print newsletters, and many more exciting projects in the future. As a Southeastern Massachusetts native, she is also very excited to work with an organization committed to supporting the places that raised her, alongside people who care as much about protecting land as she does.

In her free time, Mya enjoys biking, spending time outdoors, cooking, and listening to live music. You can often find her exploring local restaurants and searching for the best nearby scoop of ice cream.

Mya Cusson 10/13/26 Mya Cusson 10/13/26

Adopt-A-Birdhouse: Using Citizen Science to Protect Local Bird Species

*An Eastern Bluebird brings a meal back to its nesting box at Halfway Pond Conservation Area in Plymouth. Photo by Ken Grille.*

By Rebecca Cushing, Stewardship & Volunteer Coordinator

Wildlands Trust works hard to protect and maintain meadow habitats where native birds, pollinators, and other wildlife thrive. Across several preserves with meadows, including Davis-Douglas Farm, Willow Brook Farm, Sylvester Field Conservation Area, Phillips Farm Preserve, Eel River Preserve, and Cushman Preserve, we have placed nesting boxes designed for Eastern Bluebirds and Tree Swallows. A small group of dedicated volunteers have monitored, cleaned, and maintained some of these boxes for years—but until this year, we have lacked a consistent way of collecting data and managing all of the boxes to best support our bird populations.

In March of 2026, our Stewardship & Volunteer Coordinator, Rebecca Cushing, worked with staff and volunteers to create a structured nesting box monitoring program. The Adopt-A-Birdhouse program will guide us in better management of our nest boxes, including weekly monitoring to collect and report meaningful ecological data and engage our volunteers in citizen science. During this nesting season from March through August, volunteers visited nest boxes and used NestWatch, an online database created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. NestWatch is a global citizen science effort, and data from the project has been used by scientists for long-term monitoring of nesting birds and can be used to document the effects of climate change, noise and light pollution, and other factors affecting breeding birds.

*A Tree Swallow pair settles into a Wildlands nesting box*

This year, our volunteers monitored 46 nest boxes across 6 preserves. These trained volunteers made an average of 15 visits to each box throughout the season, carefully performing nest checks. It was a rewarding season—with at least 185 eggs laid, 109 young observed, and at least 66 young observed having fledged their nests. We will continue to grow this program in 2027, furthering our work in our commitment to protect and support the wildlife we love.

If you are interested in joining the Adopt-A-Birdhouse program, or to discover other ways you can volunteer with Wildlands Trust, reach out at volunteer@wildlandstrust.org.

Eastern Bluebird nest progression, from egg to fledgeling. Photos by volunteer Lenna Matthews.

May 5, 2026

May 19, 2026

May 27, 2026

June 1, 2026

Mya Cusson 10/13/26 Mya Cusson 10/13/26

Fall Fest Brings Community Together to Celebrate the New Season

*Fall Fest visitors enjoy music from Stephen Lindsay and his band*

By Mya Cusson, Communications Coordinator

With the weather getting colder here in Massachusetts, Fall Fest was just what we needed to warm our spirits.

On October 3, Wildlands Trust hosted our Fall Fest, where we invited our community to Davis-Douglas Farm for a festive day of music, food, and fun. We began the event with a hike led by our volunteer hike leaders, who brought a group of 30 hikers on a 2-mile tour of our Emery Preserve. We spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying live Irish music by Stephen Lindsay and his band, and local food and drink courtesy of Alden Park-ed, Moon Gate Garden, and IndieFerm. At our Craft Zone, our youngest Wildlands supporters learned how to use the world around them to create art, making cyanotype prints and fairy homes using found objects. To wrap up Fall Fest, we announced the winners of our eleven raffle prizes, the contents of which were generously donated by local businesses across our region.

This event was a major success, for Wildlands Trust, attracting an estimated 600 visitors, a record high for us, and raising over $3,600 to help us continue our mission of saving land for everyone, forever. We want to extend our gratitude to everyone who participated in Fall Fest, including our visitors, donors, volunteers, staff, and all of the vendors who made this event possible. We are so proud of this event, and cannot wait to host more events with our community in the future.

Interested in becoming a member and supporting our work? Learn more here.

Hikers pose in front of the Beech Tree during the pre-Fall Fest hike

Visitors indulged in our food and drink offerings during the Stephen Lindsay performance

Little hands get busy at the craft zone building cyanotype prints

IndieFerm served up locally made beer, wine, and kombucha

Moon Gate Garden brought a beautiful selection of flowers to share with visitors

Our raffle was a huge hit this year, with over $2,500 in ticket sales

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Giving Up the Sun: Parasitic and Mycoheterotrophic Plants

*Dodder, Cuscuta sp., sprawling across a pond shore. Its entirely yellow growth and lack of leaves are hallmarks of holoparasites*

By Justin Cifello

“Plants are green and get energy from the sun.” Elementary school truisms like this stick with us, but reality is far more complicated. Nature, in its profligate experimentation, produces exceptions to almost every category with which we try to describe it. It is true that most plants are autotrophs, collecting energy directly from the sun, while heterotrophic animals and fungi get their energy second-hand from plants or bacteria. However, there are always outliers. Carnivorous plants, famously supplement their diets by catching and eating animals. As strange as these plants are, they still have green leaves and their metabolism is still solar powered through photosynthesis. There is another group of plants that use an even more unconventional strategy: parasitic plants. Parasitism reasonably makes us uncomfortable. It seems like an ignoble, sneaky form of sustenance, more akin to disease than the hunting prowess of a bald eagle, but it is an incredibly complex form of predation.

Interdependency between species is known as symbiosis, and it comes in three main forms. The term is popularly—but incorrectly—understood to mean a relationship that benefits both parties, such as the relationship between flowers and bees. However, that is just one form of symbiosis, known as mutualism. Commensal symbiosis benefits only one party without harming the other; while parasitic relationships benefit one species to the detriment of the host. There is some gray area between these three groups, and the boundaries are limited by our understanding. It may well be that relationships believed to be parasitic do confer a benefit on the host that we just don’t know about yet. [1-Symbiosis]

An astounding amount of animals—over 40%—are parasitic; the strategy is thought to have independently evolved over 200 times. Since plants are generally incapable of rapid movement and have limited sensory input, it makes sense that they would have a harder time finding and catching a host. Besides, the sun is readily available. Despite this, about 4,500 species of plants are known to be parasitic. While this sounds like a lot, it only equates to 1% of all plants. [2-Parasites]

Luckily for us, parasitic plants do not target animals— with the exception of some marine algae that parasitize crustaceans. Algae isn’t really even a plant, so we’ll leave them be for today. Parasitic plants target slower hosts: other plants, and occasionally, fungi. Plants that derive all of their sustenance from other plants are called holoparasites; these plants do not photosynthesize at all, have no leaves, and come in a variety of non-green colors. Hemiparasites, by contrast, don’t fully commit to the lifestyle. They derive partial sustenance from their hosts and may have green, photosynthetic leaves or roots drawing water and/or nutrients from the soil. Often, these look like your average plant.

Though plant parasitism independently evolved numerous times and occurs across 20 different families, they all invented the same organ: the haustoria. These structures, believed to be modified roots, splice into the host’s vascular system, fusing the two plants together. This is similar to grafting, where farmers will, for example, fuse one variety of apple to another. This isn’t an uncommon practice; most tree fruit is grafted and is generally limited to within a species or genus. Parasitic plants fuse themselves to all manners of plants and fungi, far beyond humanity’s current technology. By producing a variety of compounds, these plants evade their host’s defenses. Some even hack into the host plant’s genome and steal parts of it for themselves through horizontal gene transfer, which is exceedingly rare in multicellular organisms. Some species of dodder have genetic material from over 100 other plant species embedded in their genome, like a thief copying house keys. [3-Gene Hacking]

Though rare from a numbers perspective, these plants aren’t too hard to find. Dodder, for example, can be found in many wetlands. This member of the morning glory family is fully parasitic and has lost all leaves and chlorophyll; it looks a bit like yellow silly-string. Dodder lacks the hormones that trigger flowering and steals that ability; look for its small flowers attached to the stems of its host plants. There are many species of dodder, and most are generalists, targeting numerous host species.

*False Foxgloves, Agalinis spp., can be found in fresh and saltwater wetlands, where it is hemiparasitic on a variety of hosts.*

Our other local holoparasites are more specific. Beechdrops only grow on their namesake beech. These striking red and yellow plants can be found in most beech forests. Unlike dodder, they are not thought to harm their much larger hosts. Our other two native holoparasites are less common. I have yet to encounter bearcorn or one-flowered cancer root, though they are documented in our area. We are just south from dwarf mistletoe’s range, but keep an eye out for it on conifers on trips north. This holoparasite grows in the canopy, and has explosive seedpods that can launch its seeds at speeds up to 60 mph. [4-Mistletoe]

Hemiparasites aren’t uncommon, but are harder to notice, since they still have green leaves and appear as normal plants. These include toadflax, false foxglove, cow-wheat, and wood betony. These can be found in a variety of habitats utilizing a variety of hosts. One, the American chaffseed, is incredibly rare, with only one known population in Massachusetts, located in Barnstable. Some hemiparasites are only facultative parasites, meaning they are capable of living fully on their own. [5-Native Species]

Plants that are parasitic upon fungi are called myco-heterotrophs, which can look quite like mushrooms themselves. The most well-known of these are ghost-pipes, whose white flowers can be found blooming in deep shade. Pinesaps, with red and yellow stems, are less common. A great many plants have relationships with soil fungi, and some, like lady-slipper orchids, are fairly dependent on them. Most of these relationships are believed to be mutualistic. However, since these occur underground and can involve multiple species, they are poorly understood. It is likely some of these relationships are indeed parasitic. [6-Myco-Heterotrophs]

Some parasitic plants are serious agricultural pests, though they aren’t a major issue in our area. With the exception of some dodder species, all of the plants discussed here are native. Parasites, as squeamish as they may make us, offer a variety of ecosystem services. By offering nectar and pollen and creating unique structures and habitats, they help diversify our forests. Their strange habits create novel channels for nutrient cycling. Even seemingly destructive ones, like the dodders, create openings in dense vegetation, giving other species room to grow. By connecting various host plants, some parasites serve as “signal highways,” allowing hosts to communicate with one another and better respond to environmental stress. The sophisticated mechanisms found in these plants can also help our understanding of genetics and chemistry. For us as hikers and land stewards, they offer yet another glimpse into nature’s endless complexity. One never knows what drama is unfolding in the small plants in the leaf-litter, or that mess of silly-string tangled in a bog. [7-Signal highways] [8-Ecosystem Services]

A close-up of dodder, Cuscuta sp., showing off its spaghetti-like qualities

The white flowers of dodder, Cuscuta sp., bloom on its host goldenrod, Solidago sp. Dodder relies on the host for its flowering instructions, and blooms at the same time as its host.

Cow-wheat, Melampyrum lineare, can photosynthesize with its green leaves, but is also hemiparasitic on oaks, pines, maples, and blueberries.

The hemiparasitic Bastard Toadflax, Comandra umbellata, is a member of the Sandalwood family, the largest group of parasitic plants.

A very healthy population of ghost pipes, Monotropa uniflora. This relative of blueberries and wintergreen is a mycoheterotroph, parasitic upon Russula fungi

Red Pinesap, Hypopytis lanuginosa, is another mycoheterotroph, parasitizing fungi underneath oak trees.

Yellow pinesap, Hypopytis monotropa, a mycoheterotroph blooms among evergreen bearberry. Note the hemiparasitic cow-wheat with its white flowers.