Pinesap I was scheduled to co-lead a natural history hike through a rocky woodland, and with the heat wave persisting, I was having second thoughts about the wisdom of slogging through a humid forest filled with hungry mosquitoes and deer flies. However, the walking, the temperature, and the bloodletting was not as bad as I'd feared, and though the birds, save for the always-calling Red-eyed Vireos, were largely silent and the vernal pools had dried to dust, there was one especially noteworthy sighting: a newly emerging Pinesap plant. Also known as Dutchman's Pipe and Yellow Bird's Nest, this odd parasite lacks the green pigment chlorophyll. Instead of making its own food, Monotropa hypopitys ekes out a living by relying on the goodness of fungi and their mycorrhizal partnership with nearby trees, most often pines, to feed it.