It Just Comes Naturally

Council Rock

2012-02-01T10:03:00.001-05:00

Council Rock

I featured Council Rock in a post a while ago, but Kali and I stopped by again late last Sunday afternoon. The huge gneiss outcrop stands like a sentinel on the banks of the creek in the county park downstream of my natural area. Local lore holds that Native American Lenni Lenape bands confabbed on or near the rock, hence its name.

Canada hemlocks cling to fractures in the tortured rock

A pair of Canada geese cruising upstream past the rock

Upstream view, late afternoon

Roots

2012-01-24T15:51:00.001-05:00

Scarred for life

A mile north of the railroad cut that I featured in my "Crystalline Wall" (January 17) post, the railroad right-of-way becomes broader, but is still characterized by steep, though not precipitous, banks. Here, trees established themselves many, many years ago on the lip of the cut. Over the years, they've developed some pretty impressive buttresses to anchor themselves at the rocky edge.

My new camera allows me to create monochromatic images so, when I took the time to really examine these trees, I thought they might make good subjects rendered in black-and-white.

Slowly engulfing a stone

And, to finish up, some splashes of color...

Low sun enflaming American beech leaves on a darkening afternoon

Moss- and fungus-encrusted log

One Trail Twelve Times - January

2012-01-23T12:37:00.000-05:00

Hikers on a newly installed bridge. Kali stands third from left.

Yesterday was the first installment of a year-long series of hikes I'm going to lead called "One Trail Twelve Times." I shamelessly stole this concept from a Cleveland (Ohio) Metroparks naturalist who led hikers on the same trail once a month for 12 months to experience the natural world throughout the seasons.

My group is walking a 0.6-mile trail called the Beech Springs Trail, which features venerable old woodlands, expansive goldenrod meadows, and voluminous springs bubbling up from the ground in a grove of American beeches (hence the trail name).

The trail begins in a beatuiful, mature mixed woodland

Lichens encrusting a white oak trunk

From the woods into the meadows

Goldenrod fly gall produced by the maggot of a peacock fly (Eurosta solidginis [Tephritidae])

Goldenrod moth gall produced by the caterpillar of Epiblema scudderiana

Preying mantis egg case awaiting spring warmth

One of the eponymous beech springs

Water was flowing beneath the ice

A Pileated Woodpecker had been at work on a non-native bird cherry tree trunk, leaving its characteristic rectangular calling card.

We also encountered a Hermit Thrush at the edge of the woods--a rare, but not completely unexpected winter visitor.

Back out into the meadows to complete the circuit.

Chistina River Marshes

2012-01-21T08:53:00.001-05:00

Looking over the Christina River and its fringing marshes.

Wilmington, Delaware is in the background.

Every other month or so on a Friday morning, 10 of my colleagues and I gather for two hours of professional development, camaraderie, bitch sessions, and a sub sandwich lunch. The venue circulates amongst our various organizations. Yesterday, we met (for the first time) at the nearly new DuPont Environmental Education Center built in the marshlands on the banks of the freshwater tidal Christina River in Wilmington, Delaware

Like all tidal marshes on the East Coast, the marshes of the Christina River have been abused during the centuries of European settlement. The location selected for the environmental education center had actually been filled with fly ash generated by coal-fired power plants. To erect the building, the ash was excavated, and 212 acres of marshes were restored.

After tidal flow was re-established, though, a monoculture of Phragmites (common reed) quickly took over, limiting the ecological value of the new marsh. So, the caretakers worked to control the Phragmites, and did a pretty good job. Then, the marshes were overwhelmed by narrow-leaf cattail, another invasive species. which is where the situation currently stands. Fortunately, there are clones of native broad-leaf cattail among the non-native cattailsin the marsh, and there are extensive and spreading stands of wild rice, which the land stewards safeguard and encourage.

The environmental education building was actually built and is owned by a municipal authority charged with trying to re-develop and re-energize the Christina riverfront. The redevelopment authority leases the building to the Delaware Nature Society for environmental education, but it also hosts parties on the upper floor for well-heeled clients. The building, which is not LEED certified (i.e., is not especially environmentally friendly), and the extensive new boardwalk through the marshes cost $11.3 million. Yikes! That's a lot of parties to host to pay back that investment. But the building is shiny, new and has a lot of "wow" factor, and the view from the upper floor over the river and marshes is breathtaking.

Artwork gracing the entranceway

Unfortunately, an active railroad line separates the building from the main commercial part of the Christina riverfront, so the site is somewhat isolated. For birders and nature lovers, that's a plus, but for casual visitors and the general public, visiting requires making a real effort. The railroad would not allow an at-grade publicly-accessible crossing, so the redevelopment authority was forced to build a long, 3-story-high pedestrian bridge to span the tracks (visible on the right in the image above the owl sculpture). It's an impressive entrance experience, but the Delaware Nature Society feels that it puts off some potential visitors.

Crystalline Wall

2012-01-17T09:29:00.000-05:00

The county park that Kali and I frequent when it's too muddy to walk in our own backyard features a long, deep railroad cut through metamorphic gneiss. The cut is about twenty feet deep and about two hundred feet long - the longest and deepest cut on the entire line, which was built in 1876.

Perennial springs seep from the northern face of the cut, and the moist, rocky niches support hanging gardens of mosses and ferns. The recent cold weather utterly transformed the vertical landscape.

Heller's Bend

2012-01-10T09:45:00.002-05:00

A gall on a California live oak in Heller's Bend Preserve

Following up on my previous post...

The second day I visited with my ailing father in northern San Diego County, we repeated a morning stroll along the San Luis Rey River Trail, then he snoozed in the afternoon. I took the opportunity to visit the Fallbrook Land Conservancy's 50-acre Heller's Bend Preserve.

Ferns sprouting from a horizontally rent granite boulder

None of the few walkers I encountered at the preserve knew its history, but it seemed to me that the land had been a private estate on which a house had never been built or on which a house had been demolished. The preserve entrance is located in the floodplain of Tamarack Creek, a perennial rarity in arid southern California. The paved entrance drive crosses the creek, then ascends steeply several hundred feet to a bench of land that provides fine views eastward over the suburban development of Fallbrook to the mountains beyond.

Much of the land in the preserve looks like it needs to be rehabilitated--that it had been damaged by human manipulation as it was forced to be an estate showplace but had been neglected and was trying to recover. There were numerous dead and dying trees, and groves of ornamental shrubs peppered the landscape.

Along Tamarack Creek

Root of California sycamore along the bank of Tamarack Creek

Montserate Mountain

2012-01-09T16:58:00.010-05:00

The trail to the top of Montserate Mountain

From Wednesday to Saturday last week (January 4-7, 2012), I was in San Diego visiting my father, who is dying of congestive heart failure. My stepmother told me that my father's condition improved markedly when she told him that I was coming to visit, and we had a great few days together. On both Thursday and Friday mornings, I pushed him in his wheelchair for 5 miles along the sunny, breezy San Luis Rey River Trail in Oceanside, California, where we enjoyed watching birds in the riparian trees and other people using the popular trail.

The walks left him tired in the afternoon (even though I was doing all the work). So, on Thursday afternoon, while he napped, I explored the Fallbrook Land Conservancy's Montserate Mountain Preserve. The trail to the top of 1,269-foot Montserate Mountain is a 1,200-foot climb over a distance of a little less than two miles, so this flat lander had to rest frequently on the ascent.

Along the trail to the top of Montserate Mountain.

Boulders along the trail; the saddle between the two crests is in the upper left.

The image above is a view to the northwest. The terraced hills visible in the midground are used for avocado orchards (Fallbrook is the avocado capital of the United States), but they are quickly being converted to residential subdivisions because Fallbrook is a high-end community with a lot of development pressure. The mountains on the horizon are the Santa Ana Mountains just outside Los Angeles.

Flowers along the trail. Because it's winter, there weren't many flowers blooming. I can't identify the blue flower, but I believe the orange flower is called Mexican honeysuckle.

The cairn on the crest of Montserate Mountain. This view is eastward. The mountains in the distance are the Aqua Tibia Mountains, which are protected in the Aqua Tibia Wilderness. The Aqua Tibia range is a northwestward extension of Palomar Mountain, the site of a famous astronomical observatory.

Although I didn't notice any insects on my way to the top of the mountain, at the crest I was greeted by a fluttering aggregation of about three dozen butterflies. Strange and unexpected.

The moon rose while I caught my breath and enjoyed the scenery at the top.

New Year's Birdin' Eve

2012-01-01T12:58:00.000-05:00

At a friend's suggestion, Kali and I visited the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge's Brigantine Unit just north of Atlantic City, New Jersey, on New Year's Eve. The day was perfect for a tour of the 8-mile Wildlife Drive: mostly sunny, with temperatures in the balmy (for New Year's Eve) upper 50's F.

Atlantic City across the marshes

This unit of the refuge consists of a series of shallow impoundments whose water levels are manipulated by the refuge managers to provide habitat primarily for waterfowl. Outside the impoundments, the remainder of the refuge offers upland pine forest habitat, grasslands, and large expenses of unmanaged salt marsh. It's the impoundments that attract the waterfowl (and the human observers), though.

A male Pintail leaving a wake

We added two birds to our life lists while we slowly cruised the Wildlife Drive, making frequent stops to get better look at the birds: a Peregrine Falcon perched on an Osprey nesting platform enjoying lunch, and many Brants (a species of goose). In fact, we didn't realize that we had added Brants to our lists until we got home and looked at some of the images I took; birds that we had tentatively identified as Canada Geese in the field (tentatively, because they were darker than the Canada Geese with which we are familiar, and because we didn't give them much additional notice after we "identified" them) turned out to be Brants, and there were lots of them.

The refuge also hosted thousands of Snow Geese--I believe the register at the Visitor Center said there were 4,000 on the ponds. We also observed an adult Bald Eagle that caused a flurry of crazed activity among the waterfowl when it swooped over the ponds and then landed on another Osprey breeding platform.

A few of the thousands of Snow Geese overwintering in the refuge

Kali and I agreed that it was great to get away for the day, even though the trip to the shore took two hours each way. Plus, it gave us an excuse to try a new pair of binoculars that we were given for Christmas: a pair of Canon 10X binoculars with an image stabilizer. I would have been skeptical about the value of the stabilizer if I'd been considering new binoculars, but it was truly wonderful. After Kali reluctantly tried the binoculars for the first time, I couldn't get them back from her for the rest of the day.

Year-end Red-tail

2011-12-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

Imitating a griffon

Just before lunchtime, a visitor stopped by with a Red-tailed Hawk in a birdcage. He'd passed the bird sitting on the side of the road, drove home to get a cage, drove back, caught the bird (!) getting only a few scratches on his hands in the process, and placed the bird into the cage. He's a braver man than I! The visitor reported that the bird flew about 25 feet when he initially approached it, but it didn't fly a second time, allowing him to effect the capture.

Though we don't rehabilitate injured animals, we still get a fair number of people dropping by asking us to take care of the injured or orphaned wildlife they've brought us. If we can't get the visitor to take the injured animal to one of two rehab centers (each about a half-hour's drive away) him/herself, one of the staff members or I will grudgingly take the animal.

We got lucky today. We called Victor Calozza of SkyKing Raptors who has done educational raptor shows for us in the past. He said that he wasn't busy and would take the bird to one of the rehab facilities, sparing our staff (or me) an hour's drive. Victor declared the bird to be an adult female Red-tail, and his cursory examination in our kitchen suggested to him that the bird might have a broken wing.

A little mid-day excitement!

Chilly Sunday Walk

2011-12-19T10:03:00.000-05:00

Kali and I took a 5-mile walk on Sunday afternoon in the city park downstream of the preserve. The park embraces the same creek that flows through the preserve, but the stream is larger in the city, having been augmented by the flow of several sizable tributaries en route. The day was cold (in the mid-30s F), but the sky was perfectly clear and the park was uncharacteristically deserted. We had a fine walk.

Cooper's Hawk perched on a beech limb over the creek

We bought a digital SLR two few weeks ago--a Canon T3i body fitted with a versatile Tamron 18-270 lens. Kali simply could not see what she was photographing on the screen of our Nikon S10 point-and-shoot, so she desperately wanted a camera with a viewfinder and an all-purpose lens. I want to take close-up images that can rival those of some of my fellow Bloggers, so I wanted a camera on which I could fit a closeup lens. I'll have to wait to get the closeup lens for a while, though. The two images included in this post were taken with the new camera setup. I was at least 200 feet from the hawk, so I'm not surprised that the image isn't great, but it was an experiment.

_____

My holidays this year promise to be not very merry. Most immediately, one of my cats is on death's door. She had a good life with us, but arrived as a stray and remained nearly feral despite sharing the house with us for over 10 years. It has only been in the last two years that I've been able to touch her (and Kali has never been able touch her). Because she is so skittish, we've never been able to take her to the vet; if we were to try to corner her or put her in a cat carrier, she would go berserk--we've tried. So, once it became clear last week that she was in very serious decline, we figured we were just going to have to wait it out. She's clearly miserable.

Then, last week, I learned that my 86-year-old father, who lives in San Diego, is receiving hospice care. He'd had heart surgery in August 2010, never recovered adequately, and has been in and out of the hospital ever since. I'm going to California right after the New Year to bid him adieu. Needless to say, I'm a little subdued.

Two Decades Plus of Counting Christmas Birds

2011-12-19T09:57:00.002-05:00

I participated in my twenty-second Audubon Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, and it was mediocre by all accounts. Our group of 10 birders, most of whom wandered the fields and forests for four hours from 8 a.m. until noon, recorded only 38 species. (One intrepid birder went out for three hours beginning at 3 a.m. to log owls, and came up with six Eastern Screech Owls but no Great Horned Owls, which were spotted here in two locations earlier in the week.) On "good" count days in the past, we've recorded 50 or more overwintering species.

I've participated in this annual event every year since 1998, with the exception of 2009 when the region was in the early throes of one of the largest blizzards on record. Most of the regular participants couldn't have counted even if they had been so inclined because they couldn't get out of their driveways let alone negotiate the impassible roads. Nevertheless, the count must go on; our group adds our results to those of a second group that counts in the southern part of our watershed, and we report the combined results to Audubon as the count for the entire valley. The other group somehow went out during the 2009 blizzard and reported--not unexpectedly--very poor results. The other group is Audubon's "official" contact for the valley and so "calls the shots"; and they are very inflexible with their scheduling. The count can be conducted any time over a two week period centered on Christmas, so I don't understand why they didn't reschedule the count in 2009.

Our "best" birds yesterday? Six American Coots, 15 Eastern Bluebirds, and 26 Chipping Sparrows. Such a large aggregation of Chipping Sparrows is very unusual this far north in the winter.

Why the Northern Mockingbirds hang around

The first half of the count, from 8 until 10 a.m., was so beautiful I was glad that I got out of bed early on a weekend to go outdoors. The very low, very late autumn sun burnished the native grasslands a rich, deep golden hue. And the sun provided enough warmth to allow us to occasionally remove our gloves to record the birds (or take photographs) with bare hands. (During most counts, the weather is so cold that it would be foolhardy to remove gloves. I vividly recall the 1990 count during which we had to retreat to the warmth of one of the count participant's kitchen for hot chocolate or risk serious frostbite.) By 10 a.m., though, thick clouds rolled in from the northwest, the sun disappeared, and the day got cold. We even had brief snow flurries in mid-afternoon.

Goodbye, Ohio

2011-11-29T13:55:00.000-05:00

On the brink, Bridal Veil Falls

Kali's mom (my mother-in-law) is developing dementia and can't live alone any longer. A year ago, after a plumbing accident in her house which simply overwhelmed Mom, Kali's brother flew to northeastern Ohio to gather-up Mom and a few of her things to take back to San Diego with him. She's been there ever since, and her house has sat empty.

Because Mom can't move back to northeastern Ohio, we're getting ready to sell her house. Over the week preceding and including Thanksgiving, Kali, her brother, and I gathered in the house to get things organized and sort through a lifetime of possessions and memories. It was a physically and psychically challenging seven days we spent together.

On the last day we were together, we finished up our work in early afternoon and had a few hours before we had to take Kali's brother to the airport. I suggested a walk at my favorite natural area, Bridal Veil Falls on Deerlick Run in the Bedford Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks system. Though it had rained in the morning, by late afternoon the wan autumn sun was shining.

I've posted images of the falls before. When I was growing up, the falls and the tight gorge below them were my favorite summer hangout. Back then, the Metroparks system had not yet built the elaborate boardwalk that now lets just about anyone who is ambulatory to view the falls. Decades ago, I entered the stream above the falls and waded, slid and scrambled all the way down to Deerlick Run's confluence with Tinker's Creek. A few hundred feet downstream of Bridal Veil Falls, Deerlick Run and another unnamed Tinker's Creek tributary each plunge over a shelf of resistant sandstone to create twin falls in an isolated hemlock-shaded glen, then course together with their waters conjoined. It was a sacred place for me.

Bridal Veil Falls after morning rain

Northern half of Twin Falls on an unnamed tributary of Tinker's Creek

Because Kali, her brother and I were content to just explore the falls' environs and not take a long hike, we got off the formal trail (which, incidentally, is part of the state-looping Buckeye Trail) and wandered through the woods along the lip of the gorge. To my utter disappointment, I found that my sacred place has been desecrated--not terribly, but enough to cause me great sadness. Many of the birches bore carvings in their bark, and a well-worn path traced the cliff edge. The woodland understory was virtually non-existent, and all of the very few saplings and root-sprouts had been nibbled by deer.

Fungus-encrusted snag in the woods

There's a very good chance that this will have been my last visit to Bridal Veil Falls. While my brother and his family and my sister and her family still live in northeastern Ohio, we are none of us particularly close and I have never returned to Ohio just to visit with my younger siblings. (Nor have they ever come to visit me in 23 years, either.)

Hemlocks and sycamore

And it's not just Bridal Veil Falls; this may have been my last bittersweet visit to Ohio, too, since we have professionals dealing with the sale of the house and the transaction can probably be completed by attorneys via mail or email. Though there are still tethers that can probably never be completely severed, I think it's time to move on.

Golden November

2011-11-08T10:48:00.001-05:00

American beech now have their time to shine

The steep trail to The Peak

Eighth Floor: Green Roof

2011-11-07T10:21:00.000-05:00

I had a chance to look over the 45,000-sq-foot (4,050-sq-meter) green roof that PECO Energy (the local utility) installed on its headquarters building in central Philadelphia last week. Frankly, I thought that green roofs were mostly "tree hugger" hype, but this visit made me a believer. The roof receives 1.5 million gallons (5.7 million liters) of precipitation during the year, only sheds 0.5 million gallons (1.9 million liters), and it sheds those half-million gallons over a protracted period that doesn't tax the city's stormwater system with excess runoff following heavy rainfall events.

The Cira Center, Philadelphia's most unusual skyscraper, a half-mile away

The roof has many other advantages. It will last 2-3 times longer than a conventional roof, it is far cooler than a conventional flat tar roof, it absorbs air pollutants, and it actually provides some habitat for birds and insects; we watched honeybees gathering pollen. The water management angle really captured my interest, though.

Philadelphia Museum of Art across the green roof

The major part of the roof is planted with 12 species of orpines or stonecrops (Sedum spp.) (alas, no native species). At this time of year, they are coloring-up beautifully. The roof is three years old, and the designer knows and expects that some of the stonecrops will be better competitors than others, so the species diversity will decline over time, but right now they make an especially appealing mosaic.

The company also included deeper planting boxes along the edge of the roof where the building's structure could support heavier soil. The boxes were planted with a mixture of attractive native perennials and native grasses. Little bluestem grass (Schizachyrium scoparium) has "escaped" the confines of its boxes, and spread its seed into the main part of the roof. It will be interesting to see if it persists over time in the shallow, droughty, low-density "soil" in which the Sedums are growing.

Tribulations of Restoring a Muncipal Grassland

2011-11-04T09:46:00.000-04:00

The grassland to be restored delimited by fencing

Earlier this year, I was asked by a colleague to serve on an advisory committee that was making recommendations for the restoration of a meadow on parkland in a neighboring municipality. The 10-acre park was created when the municipality's old stone-and-brick high school was demolished, leaving an open field of rubble buried under a thin veneer of imported topsoil.

Soon after the building was demolished, the municipality engaged the services of a well-respected, ecologically sensitive landscape design firm to create the meadow. The design specified planting native warm-season prairie grasses on the two-acre meadow site.

View across meadow toward existing woodland

For several years, the meadow performance was satisfactory (never spectacular), but inevitably the grassland was doomed to fail because the demolition debris had so sweetened the soil that the acidophilous grasses languished and were overrun with non-native grasses and weeds.

The new consultant who was chosen to re-establish the meadow did it "right" this time--she took soil samples and developed a seed mixture compatible with the shallow, rocky and lime-rich soil. In preparation for re-establishing the grassland, the contractor fenced-off the area, and then herbicided the existing weedy patch in early-summer. Unfortunately, the contractor used the "newest and best" herbicide, Streamline, which is formulated to kill broadleaved plants but to spare the grasses already present. Only after the application of Streamline did an article appear in the New York Times that suggested that Streamline could be extremely toxic to conifers. Sure enough, a huge and beloved ancient Norway spruce that had been near the old school and remained in the center of the new grassland died within two weeks of the herbicide application.

I'm so fortunate to be managing a private preserve (cf. public parkland). At a meeting of the grassland restoration steering committee earlier this week, a quarter of the meeting was wasted discussing whose logos needed to appear on the sign describing the restoration, and which municipal bureau was responsible for giving final approval for the sign design.

Committee members reviewing plans for a native butterfly garden at the edge of the grassland

So Bizarre As To Be Nearly Unbelievable

2011-10-27T15:35:00.000-04:00

A white-tailed buck in the natural area fitted with a radio collar

For the last three years, we have been working cooperatively with a wildlife biologist at a local college to track the movement of radio-collared white-tailed deer inhabiting the natural area preserve. We provide the land and part of the financial support, and the college provides the know-how and labor (in the form of students). It's a nice synergistic relationship because we get to learn about the movement and population size of the herd, the biologist gets publishable research data, and the students get some exciting hands-on experience tackling deer (in a trap) and fitting them with the collars.

Over the three years, the college has trapped and monitored 33 deer. Each collar transmits data for about three months until its battery is nearly exhausted, and then the researcher drops the collar off electronically. Once retrieved and fitted with a new battery, the collar can then be placed on a new deer.

Yesterday morning, I came to work and found one of my employees gutting a newly-killed doe in preparation for taking the deer to a butcher for processing. Though a little disconcerting first thing in the morning, such a scene is not at all unusual here. What was unusual was that my employee told me that the deer had been found dead in the parking lot that morning, and that it had been shot with a 22-calibre handgun. Although we're in the midst of hunting season, it's not legal to hunt with a handgun.

Later in the day, the wildlife biologist telephoned to fill me in on details. It seems that around midnight, the biologist and his students captured a deer. After fitting the animal with a collar, they released it and it sprang away into the woods (as they all typically do upon being released). Then, before the biologist and students could even clean up and get ready to go home for the night, they head a shot that came from the direction of one of the roads adjacent to the woods. The group turned on its collar-locating electronic device and soon found the just-collared deer, dead in the parking lot. The unfortunate animal, traumatized by the capture and collar fitting, had been shot dead minutes later by some yahoo (a kind term) with a handgun cruising along the road after midnight.

On a personal note: I used to run along some of these same roads, and my runs were often after dark. This incident made me realize that some yahoo could just as easily have shot me, left me to die alongside the road like this deer, and no one would ever have apprehend the perpetrator. It gave me pause.

The Creek (for Grizz)

2011-10-26T16:12:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the quintessential perfect autumn day here. I had a chance to spend the afternoon assessing the survival rate of 1,000 white ash trees planted 21 years ago, and I didn't have to pushed out the door to do the survey work. (I did end up with four black-legged [i.e., "deer"] tick bites, though, which itch like a son of a gun today.) During the survey, I chatted with three good friends who were walking the trails, taking advantage of one of the last good days left this season; it might snow on Saturday! One friend had just returned from a week's trip to western and central New Mexico, which is "Mecca" for me, so I especially enjoyed seeing him.

The afternoon was so spectacular that, upon her arrival at home from work, I immediately told Kali to put on her walking shoes because we were going for a stroll before dinner. I guess I was a bit too forceful in my proclamation because she became a bit put off and cranky. Once we were among the golden prairie grasses, though, all her gruffness evaporated. By the time we got down to the creek, the light was going out of the world, but I managed to make this image, which I'm dedicating to Grizz because I know that all this image would need to make him happy would be to PhotoShop himself sanding in the water casting for trout.

By the way, though the survival rate of the white ashes I was assessing was high, I know that they're all doomed once the emerald ash borer gets here to the Mid-Atlantic Piedmont. Their only hope would be if we treated them perpetually with a systemic insecticide--something we just can't afford.

Along Harper's Run

2011-10-18T09:46:00.000-04:00

Kali didn't have to go to work yesterday, and I took left work1-1/2 hours early (hey, I had to work three hours on Saturday) in order to enjoy a late afternoon walk on a beautiful autumn day with bright sunshine and temperatures in the upper 60s. We decided to walk at the county park downstream of the preserve for a change of scene.

Part of the walk in the park takes us alongside a modest but picturesque stream called Harper's Run. Just after we parked and started upstream along the creek, a hawk flew in from the surrounding woods and landed smack dab in the middle of the creek, and then just sat there, tail fanned out, watching us. We approached slowly and cautiously, and the hawk flew up out of the creek and onto the rocks alongside. At that point, I could see that it was carrying something in its talons, but I couldn't tell what. I pulled out the camera and cranked up the telephoto into the "digital telephoto" range, hoping to get a decent shot despite heavy shade. I present the best of the five images I captured. The hawk is a Cooper's Hawk (I couldn't tell in the field), and it appears to have captured a young squirrel (soggy from sitting in the creek). As we got closer, the hawk carried its meal off to a tree and disappeared.

Green Lane

2011-10-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

The best color we saw along the shore of the Green Lane Reservoir

Kali and I did a 6-mile hike at Green Lane County Park in the northwest part of our county. Though we've lived in this county for 23 years, we'd never visited this 2,300-acre park. The parkland surrounds a large drinking water impoundment called Green Lane Reservoir, and most of the parkland hugs the shore of the lake fairly closely, so the trail system is basically a walk along the lake shore, much of which is very steep.

The parkland is located in an interesting geological area where igneous sills had intruded into sedimentary sandstones and shales. So, it's easy to see the juxtaposition of soft, red sandstones and shales right up against very hard, erosion-resistant black igneous diabase rock.

The Blue Trail; despite appearances, it was very muddy, even here

Fall color was not spectacular around the reservoir, the trail was frequently muddy, the guidebook did not give comprehensive directions for the hike, and the trails climbed up and down hills a lot. Kali and I decided that (1) the experience was 25% positive and 75% a slogging trudge, and (2) we wouldn't repeat the hike. Nevertheless, there were some pleasant spots, especially a side trail that traversed two hemlock ravines with nice, small waterfalls. Unfortunately, my camera battery was exhausted mid-hike and I didn't get images of the best parts of the hike.

Autumn in Miniature

2011-10-11T08:55:00.001-04:00

The ripening Northern sea-oat seeds in my garden are a reflection of autumn, with green gradually giving way to yellows and browns.

The Colors of Autumn

2011-10-10T11:17:00.000-04:00

Canoes brought to shore at Lake Galena

Still mostly green here on the Pennsylvania Piedmont. I heard on the radio this morning that local prognosticators still aren't sure how brilliant our fall will be because the extreme heat of July and the endless, record-setting deluges of August and September stressed the trees. Foliage color ought to peak in late October.

Walkers on the lake trail

Kali and I did a 6-mile circumambulation of Lake Galena in Peace Valley County Park on Saturday. The most brilliant colors were from the canoes lining the shore, but some leaves were beginning to color-up on the hillsides above the lake.

Canada Geese enjoying a beautiful autumn afternoon on Lake Galena

Diminished Expectations

2011-10-03T12:15:00.000-04:00

Unless there are some unexpected surprises, I expect to retire in six years and seven months. Because Kali and I live in a house provided by my employer, we will have to move when I retire--an opportunity to relocate to the mountainous West, we hope. We've got many friends who are getting older and downsizing, so it's not unreasonable to begin to downsize ourselves right now in anticipation of our move; six years pass amazingly quickly.

Over the weekend, I was in the basement cleaning out files and came across a paper bag full of vegetable and flower seed packets that I had accumulated over the years. I'm dumping the unplanted seeds into a collective paper bag, which I'll take to the compost heap when I've finished the task. I'm recycling the paper seed packets.

I know, I know--some of the seeds may be viable, but in my experience, seed viability diminishes quickly for garden seeds, so I'm not going to bother to pot-up the seeds and then be disappointed when germination is spotty or nonexistent. And, In fact, that's part of my point in posting this blog entry.

Some of the seed packets date back as far as 1997. Back then, I planted lots and lots of annuals with the garden vegetables every year. My garden was half vegetables and half annuals, and it was beatuiful, but labor intensive.

Now, I have a sad perennial garden that's overrun with weeds, into which I fit a few tomato plants each spring. How did I ever find the time to create this extravagant annual flower garden 14 years ago--at a time when I was also still running at least three evenings a week? I'm 14 years older, discouraged by the incessant press of weeds, groundhogs and deer, and I have a lot less physical energy (I naively never imagined this would happen to me). It all contributes to diminished expectations in my life in general.

Harbinger?

2011-09-30T11:37:00.000-04:00

It's still too early in autumn to grade the season's foliage display, but this flowering dogwood is already in fine form. Dogwoods are always the first trees to "color up" here in the Mid-Atlantic Piedmont.

The dogwoods are heavily laden with drupes this year, which will be a boon for the migratory birds that fatten up on the lipid-rich fruit.

The first Northern Harrier appeared over our grasslands earlier this week. At least one harrier usually overwinters here, but the early arriver may move on, to be replaced by another bird as the season progresses.

The Fabric of Nature

2011-09-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

Return of the Grackle by Diane Rusin Doran

Kali and I attended the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza XVIII show over the weekend. I made images of some of the best of the nature-themed quilts. As Kali said, "If these pieces were made by men, they'd be hanging in museums." Return of the Grackle, above, may have been my favorite.

In some cases, I jotted down a note about the quilter and the title of the work. If I did so, I have added the information to the caption. Otherwise, you'll have to use your imagination.

Autumn Leaves by Israeli artist Eti David

Alberta Rockies #2 by Patti Morris

(Winner: First Place in World Quilt Competition XV, Innovative Category)

Earthquake Faults by Marcia DeCamp

Detail from Celtic Cranes by Leslie Davis

(Winner: Best Use of Color in the Traditional Category, World Quilt Competition XV)

The one above is for Grizz.

On Summit Trail by Deb Brockway

And, last but not least, this one's for Desert Packrat, because it reminded me of a picture he took recently during a hike on the Switchback Trail in the Sacramento Mountains.

Restoration Setback Courtesy of Hurricane Irene

2011-08-29T10:26:00.002-04:00

The creek at 8:30 a.m. Sunday. Though it had only been about three hours
after the crest of the flooding,the creek had already subsided significantly--
a typical "flashy" urban stream.

In our heavily urbanized watershed, restoration is always going to be a challenge. There are non-native invasive plants lurking in backyards and untended corners of commercial properties. White-tailed deer find refuge from hunters in those same pockets of green, and then make their way under cover of darkness into the preserve to eat the trees. Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that every storm brings a new wave of flooding, and hurricanes like Irene create so much havoc on the floodplain that it's difficult to get trees firmly enough established to withstand the onslaught of the next big flood.

Floodwaters toppled trees protected in plastic shelters on the creek floodplain.

Our last hurricane was Floyd in 1999, so our trees have had 12 years to put down roots deep enough to remain in place. Unfortunately, between the highly competitive non-native porcelain-berry vines (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) and the fact that many of the planted trees are growing in broken shade (cf., out in full sunlight), they tend to grow slowly. Few had achieved a stature to allow them to stand up to floodwaters that nearly rivaled Floyd's. So, more planting is in order over the next few years. The pattern has become discouraging and more than a little bit disheartening.

The approach to the second-oldest stone arch bridge in the county, built in 1817.

Formerly a municipal road along the creek and now closed and incorporated into the preserve trail system.

I don't think the municipality wept any tears about giving up the rights to this perennially flood-prone road.

For a time, the wetland (pond on the right of image) and the creek were one.

At normal flows, the wetland is 10 feet above the level of the creek.

After filling the wetland basin (left side, out of image), the creek washed away the split rail fence

and moved debris against this bench cemented deeply in the ground.

Bench and flood debris from a different angle. Historical note: the log jammed against the bench is hollowed out. It is a wooden water pipe used by mill workers in the mid-1800's to bring sweet water from a spring on the the hillside above the creek to one of the many water-powered mills on the banks of the creek. Even in the mid-19th century, the creek's water had become so fouled that the mill workers needed a source of clean water. The wooden pipe was excavated from the mucky bottom of the wetland when we restored the wetland pond a few years ago.

Part of a bird blind formerly located on the edge of the wetland.

Flood debris lodged against an access gate.

Nature in Black and White

2011-08-18T11:52:00.002-04:00

Joe Burochow's Volcano

Kali and I drove to West Philadelphia last evening for a one-night-only show by Philadelphia graphic artist Joe Boruchow. Boruchow produces striking and dramatic cut-paper artwork, some with natural themes and some with an ironic or humorous bent.

Whitewater

Boruchow's exquisite originals are small (12" x 12", or 7" x 16"), but he enlarges them to super-poster size and affixes them to the sides of buildings throughout the city. Last night's show was hosted by an artists' cooperative space housed in an old streetcar barn and featured posters on the boarded-up windows on the outside of the building and the originals displayed for sale inside.

Secret

The place was hopping, and we had a really good evening--one of the advantages of living in a big urban area.

Chanticleer

2011-08-13T16:28:00.002-04:00

Kali and I made our annual pilgrimage to Chanticleer on Friday, August 12, a rare late-summer day of low humidity and blue skies. We agreed that Chanticleer is our favorite public garden anywhere, and we're fortunate to live only 45 minutes away.

I made and posted general images from the garden after our visit last year. This year, I decided to concentrate on texture and pattern for my images. The garden's ablaze in color, but most of these images are a bit more muted. Enjoy.

Lord High Executioner

2011-08-11T16:14:00.000-04:00

Flood detention basin BMP

Several years ago, I joined a group of investigators who were establishing and testing five different stormwater best management practices (known as BMPs). These installations included a porous pavement parking lot underlain with huge voids that could retain a significant amount of stormwater; a set of infiltration beds filled with sand and/or gravel that allowed water running off a driveway to percolate slowly into the ground; two ponds that collected and detained stormwater draining overland from a 60-acre meadow during periods of heavy, prolonged rainfall; a riparian forest planting; and a basin connected to a small stream that was designed to fill when the stream overflowed with floodwater and then to gradually discharge back into the stream as flood levels subsided.

With my background in aquatic entomology, my responsibility in this group has been to sample the aquatic invertebrate community that has established itself in the vegetation ringing the fifth of the BMPs (i.e., the basin connected to the stream during periods of flooding) to show that the BMP provides valuable aquatic habitat in addition to hydrologic benefits in the watershed. So, for the last three years I've ventured to the basin in the summer and sampled aquatic invertebrates like dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, beetles, and anything else that gets trapped in the dip nets.

My assistant and I spent about an hour running our dip nets through the the cattails, bulrushes, and nut sedges at the margin of the basin this morning. We emptied our "catches" into gallon-size ziplock bags, then poured in a healthy dollop of 70% denatured ethyl alcohol to preserve the samples until we get a chance to clean, sort and process them. And there's the rub.

In graduate school and during my early professional years, I collected and killed many thousands of aquatic insects. But I just hate doing this work any more. Three days ago, as I was making preparations for our foray this morning, I had already begun thinking about the insects in this pond, and that some of them--even three days ago--were the living dead. Their halcyon summer would be invaded by this monstrous creature who would scoop them up, dump them unceremoniously into a plastic bag, and then immerse them in a fluid so noxious that it's offensive just to smell it. Some of the larger and better armored organisms like the dragonfly nymphs and beetles don't die immediately, either.

Lord High Executioner

I vaguely remember seeing a movie about Roman slaves many, many years ago. I think it was Spartacus, but I'm not sure, and I haven't seen the movie I have in mind (or Spartacus) again since. At the beginning of the movie, some slaves are encased in a translucent tent lit luridly purple. The slaves are writing in agony as they expire slowly for the schadenfreude of their captors. Collecting these insects makes me feel like I'm in the film.

I'm not so naive to think that these insects live an idyllic life, that they don't face daily peril. Many are relentless predators, and many more are prey. In addition, most will die from the cold within the next few months. Nevertheless, I have a hard time reconciling myself to what I'm inflicting on them.

Golden August Prairie

2011-08-09T13:36:00.002-04:00

We've established native grasslands on 160 acres of old hayfields in the preserve. Most of the grasslands are just that--grasslands--dominated by big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) and Indian-grass (Sorghastrum nutans). But we also incorporated wildflowers into 60 acres of the grasslands, and right now these meadows are in their late-summer glory.

Because our fields are subject to intense invasive plant pressure, we decided to concentrate on planting grasses only on most of the land. We restricted our planting to grasses because we could use the selective herbicide Plateau on these grasslands. Plateau controls broadleaved invasive species like non-native porcelain-berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata), Asian bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) and Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) plus aggressive natives like brambles (Rubus spp.), but won't damage the native grasses.

However, our grassland manager determined that there are a few native broadleaved wildflower species that aren't harmed by an application of Plateau. So, we incorporated seeds of some of these species into 60 of the the most recently established acres. These meadows now offer a mixture of grasses and forbs not present elsewhere in the prairies. And, the wildflowers enliven the the grasslands with big swaths of color, making a walk on the trail winding through the meadows a real delight this time of year. Bright yellow partridge-pea (Chamaecrista fasiculata) is blooming profusely now, along with a few remaining black-eyed-susans (Rudbeckia hirta) and a delicate white-flowered aster (Aster sp.) that I haven't tried to identify yet. Of course, the fields are literally abuzz and achirp with every sort of hymenopteran, lepidopteran and orthopteran imaginable.

Purpletop (in foreground) growing mixed with partridge-pea and little and big bluestem

We're also enjoying a real unanticipated surprise in these meadows, too. Though we didn't plant it, purpletop (Tridens flavus) has become a very common grass throughout these fields. Where it grows densely, purpletop's delicate flowers spread an enchanting mauve gauze over the landscape.

Firsts

2011-08-02T15:54:00.001-04:00

It's been a week now since I returned from an absolutely wonderful vacation full of "firsts." The vacation afforded me an opportunity to visit Idaho for the first time in my life. I also visited Minnesota for the first time. Now, there's only one state west of the Mississippi that I have yet to visit: North Dakota (where Theodore Roosevelt National Park is located, so it may be worth a stop in the future).

We went west to raft the Middle Fork of the Salmon River through the 3.2 million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the largest roadless area in the contiguous United States. I can't begin to describe how wonderful the trip was, so I won't try, but I definitely would encourage you to experience it yourself. A rafting trip on the Middle Fork is one of the items in the 1,000 Things To Do Before You Die book, and I can definitely lend my support to that recommendation. Six days of fun in heaven.

One evening's camp along the Middle Fork. We had to evict three rattlesnakes from the campsite before setting up the tents.

I recorded 24 species of birds along the river, but none was a "first" for me. American Robins, Western Tanagers, and Yellow-rumped Warblers were the most common species, but I also spotted Sandhill Cranes, Bald Eagles, and Golden Eagles. I also observed at least five mammals (elk, mule deer, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and several species of ground squirrels). In several reaches of the river, aquatic insect "hatches" filled the air like dust motes, and huge, 3-inch-long Pteronarcid stonefly adults were so abundant in places that we had to evict them from our tent before we went to bed.

A mayfly imago either ovipositing or fatally stuck to the surface tension of the river.

The Middle Fork has never been stocked, so it harbors a native population of Western Slope Cutthroat Trout. Several members of our party flyfished successfully, but we were never treated to a fish dinner because fishing is limited to catch-and-release using barbless hooks. We also saw a few Chinook Salmon returning to their natal streams to spawn 700 miles and 6,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean.

Seven hundred feet above the Middle Fork at Arapahoe Point.

The Sawtooth Mountains from a point about 20 miles west of Stanley, Idaho, where we turned off the paved road to begin our journey.

Midsummer Miscellany

2011-07-14T11:27:00.001-04:00

Katydid (Image from InImage.com, not one of mine)

No theme to today's post, just a few random notes.

First, last night (Wednesday, July 13), the annual katydid chorus began. Only Tuesday, I had mentioned to Kali that I'd been hearing cicadas for the last week or so but hadn't yet heard a katydid. But on our quotidian evening stroll to close the gate after sunset, three or four katydids were serenading from the trees. Nothing says mid- to late-summer than katydids at night. Fortunately, it got cool last night and I could leave the windows open to hear them.

Second, the flock of three hen turkeys and their combined 15 poults have gotten up enough courage to eat the seed spilled under my bird feeder. Prior to yesterday, they'd been too skittish to allow me to sprinkle seed under the feeder for them, but now they've gotten used to me. The poults still scuttle away a short distance when I appear, but the hungry females rush for the seed, and the young are not far behind. By autumn, they'll all be demanding seed.

Third, deer have gotten into my garden. Either I left the gate open, or they pushed it open, but when I went down to cut basil for spaghetti sauce on Monday evening, the gate hung ajar and the tomato plants had been partially ravaged. Nearly all of the fruits were gone, and much of the plant material had been damaged. Fortunately, there were still some fruits left, and some of the plants have flowers on them, but it will be a lean and late harvest this year. I secured the gate and strung deer netting higher up on the fence posts; I hope it keeps them out.

Finally, Kali and I are heading West tomorrow to cross off one of the items on my "bucket list." Notice I said my list, not our list. She's a good sport and, if everything goes well, she'll have a great time, too. Update during the last week of July when I return.

An Embarrassment of Ruby Riches

2011-07-11T14:50:00.000-04:00

Wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) are extraordinarily abundant this year, and last weekend they were fully ripe. A very short stop during a walk in the preserve produced many a handful. Because they're sweet but don't have much flavor, they're best by the juicy handful.

Wineberries were intentionally introduced into the United States from (where else?) eastern Asia in 1890 as breeding stock for new Rubus cultivars. The plant is still used today by berry breeders to add specific genes to berry varieties. Wineberries have become naturalized in the Northeast and much of the Mid-Atlantic, where they prefer light shade at the edges of woodlands and along trails, though the plant will readily invade intact woods but may not produce fruits under deep shade. The plant reproduces by seeds and by layering (when a long cane tip bends over and touches the ground, it develops roots).

The fruits (technically drupes) are sought after and dispersed by birds and mammals.

Other than the sweet fruit, perhaps the best attribute of the wineberry is its musical species name (i.e., phoenicolasius), which means "bearing purple hairs," a reference to the distinctive glandular red hairs and small spines on the canes that impart a deep magenta color when seen from a distance.

A Plethora of Poults

2011-06-29T10:35:00.001-04:00

A Wild Turkey hen and poults foraging along a gravel trail.

They really seem to like the ripening wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius), and so do I!

Our large population of "Wild" Turkeys has produced a bumper crop of chicks this year, even in spite of the Cooper Hawks that patrol the airways and the coyotes that prowl the meadows. The successful veteran hens have learned that there's safety in numbers, and group their individual families together. It's not unusual to see three hens accompanied by 15 poults strolling the preserve.

I've had a difficult time getting a good image of the aggregated groups so far. If I take out my camera to take a shot, they warily move into tall vegetation. However, once the hens get hungry and come to the birdseed that I put out for them, the poults will soon follow and become more comfortable in my presence. If tradition holds, by autumn the adolescent poults will practically knock on the back door for food.

Final Breeding Bird Census for 2011

2011-06-27T13:17:00.001-04:00

Sunrise, crossing a meadow en route to the census tract

This morning I completed the last of eight censuses of the birds breeding in the largest woodland in my preserve. This marks the end of the 17th season I've walked through the woods, stopping for ten minutes at each of 19 stations, watching and (mostly) listening for birds. As the breeding season progresses, the birds generally become increasingly subdued, and that was certainly the case today--except for the ever-raucous Gray Catbirds.

Overnight haze yet to burn off the pond at Crossroads Marsh, en route to census tract

Dawn's haze lingers over the creek as well

Black cohosh, or bugbane (Cimicifuga racemosa) blooming in a woodland gap

A tuliptree embraces a boulder of gneiss...

...and sends its branches into the canopy

The breeding bird census trail, opened by yours truly with hand clippers,

and kept open by the passage of countless deer hooves

The breeding bird census woods, mostly mature tuliptrees and white ashes

Three stately tuliptrees; despite appearances, the furthest in the distance is actually the largest

A red maple barely hanging on; the right side is still alive,

while the left provides haven for woodpeckers

Breeding bird census gridpoint B-13

Trail blocked by a fallen tuliptree

Each spring when I return to complete another year's census,

I'm surprised to find that new trees have fallen across the trail over the winter

Bark of a mature tuliptree

Widowmaker at gridpoint B-9

Bright yellow fungus on a rotting log

Mossy tuliptree buttress at gridpoint B-7

A cadre of volunteers or sprouts hoping to take the place of a fallen comrade

A spring run naturally blocked by woody debris

Based on footprints in mud, the pool provides water for birds, deer, racoons and,

today, for a frog, who squeaked as it sought cover

The trail and woods uphill from the spring run pool

Spicebushes are loaded with berries this year

Migratory (and resident) birds will eat well come autumn

A robin's nest in a multiflora rosebush immediately above the census trail

The nest was occupied when I began the census in May, but the mother abandoned it
(with one egg) after I repeatedly walked through her territory.
By today, even the egg was gone.

A Morning of Small Observations

2011-06-14T13:26:00.000-04:00

I'm nearing the end of my annual series of censuses of the songbirds breeding in the deep woodlands of my preserve. Using a protocol developed by the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University, I spend three hours just after sunrise in the woods looking and listening for birds that have established territories. I do this eight times each year, and have been doing it for 17 years now. May's censuses are usually most interesting because the birds are active as they duke it out for the best nesting sites, but as the season progresses the territories are set and the woods become increasingly quiet. The last two censuses are usually the least interesting.

This morning, the sun rising over a low ridge caught my attention. There was a tree perfectly positioned between me and the low sun. The tree diffused the light and illuminated the woods without blinding me--sort of a miniature solar eclipse. The morning was calm; not a leaf rustled. Nevertheless, there must have been an imperceptibly gentle north breeze perfusing the forest because, in the diffuse sunlight, I watched uncountable motes moving along through the air. Some were animate, like insects and spiders, and a few insects flew counter to the tide, but generally a seemingly endless drift of dust, pollen, seeds and who knows what else wafted along through the forest with the current. To be honest, my first thought was, "I'm breathing this!" My second thought was, "This is a perfect example of what I tell my restoration ecology students about woodlands receiving allochtononous inputs from the surrounding countryside." But, in the end, I mostly just marveled at the show.

Further along, I came upon a tiny opening in the forest patrolled by three hoverflies (Family Syrphidae). Hoverflies are always a welcome bonus on bird census days, especially on slow, late-season days, because they can be endlessly fascinating--and distracting. For the most part, the flies maintain their relative and absolute positions, getting out of formation only to make darting forays in pursuit of aerial prey and then returning to exactly the same spot. Today, for the first time, with the woods so still, I noticed that the hoverflies' wings generated enough of an air current to cause the leaves of the spicebush shrub above which they were located to flutter. Amazing.

Mianus River Gorge

2011-06-07T14:08:00.001-04:00

Along the Rim Trail at the Mianus River Gorge Preserve

On the last day of our Hudson River valley vacation last month, Kali and I hiked the 2.5-mile Rim Trail at the Mianus River Gorge Preserve in Bedford, Westchester County, New York. Protecting the Mianus River Gorge was the fledgling Nature Conservancy's very first project. Today, the gorge preserve is managed by an independent non-profit organization.

The Minus River in the narrowest part of its gorge.

The Minus River is a modest stream that rises in northeast Westchester County and flows southward into Connecticut. Continental ice sheet meltwaters carved the dramatic gorge, whose sides are lined with old-growth Canada hemlock stands.

These millipedes, much larger and more colorful than those around my preserve,

were abundant in the preserve

Because it precipitated at least part of every day of our vacation, I expected the preserve to be very wet, and that Kali would upbraid me for bringing her into a rain forest. But the trails for the most part were in excellent condition, and Kali told me that she enjoyed the 5-mile round-trip walk very much--except for the abundant mosquitoes which bred in the vernal pools near the southern end of the trail that hurried us on our way.

Despite the fact that the preserve protects old-growth forest, it's had its share of human use, too. In fact, it's amazing that the hemlock groves were left untouched, given the preserve's proximity (about 35 miles) to New York City.

Stone walls divide large sections of the preserve away from the gorge edge

Small quantities of mica, quartz, and feldspar were removed from this quarry face

I don't know how many folks are familiar with the Time-Life book series on American Wilderness that was published in the 1970s. My complete collection is one of my prized possessions. One volume of the series is called Urban Wilds and explores natural areas in the metropolitan New York City area. In that volume, the Mianus River gorge is profiled through a collection of images and an essay entitled "Nature Walk."

Havemeyer Falls, about 8 feet high, on a Mianus tributary near the southern end of the preserve

A natural rock garden with Canada mayflowers (Maianthemum canadense) on a boulder above Havemeyer Falls.

Don't you just love to pronounce that genus?

The Mianus River ends ignominiously just below the gorge in a reservoir, backed up to provide drinking water for Greenwich, Connecticut. At this point, hikers must retrace their steps back to the parking lot.

_____

This is my 200th post; is that a milestone?

Even an Entomophobe's Delight

2011-06-06T15:38:00.003-04:00

Luna Moth (Actias luna)

Observed and photographed this afternoon a sweetgum tree, one of the caterpillar's food preferences. Alas, my point-and-shoot Nikon wouldn't let me capture an image any closer or more detailed.

Mink River, and Your River

2011-06-03T14:18:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Mink River, a strange, enchanted, and enchanting first novel by poet and essayist Brian Doyle from Oregon. I was captivated by this (longish) passage about the fictional Mink River in the Pacific Northwest, but it's applicable to your river, too; just change the players.

The river thinks too, you know. Did you think rivers did not think? The Mink is thinking. Salmon and steelhead and cutthroat trout, it thinks. Fir needles. Salmonberries dropping suddenly and being snapped up by a trout who thinks them orange insects. Alder and spruce roots drinking me always their eager thin little rude roots poking at me. Rocks and pebbles and grains of stone and splinters of stone and huge stones and slabs and beaver and mink and crawdads and feces from the effluent treatment plant upriver. Rain and mist and fog and gale and drizzle and howl and owl. Asters and arrow-grass. Finger creeks feeder creeks streams ditches seeps and springs. Rowboats and rafts. Canoes and chicory. Men and women and children. Dead and alive. Willows and beer bottles and blackberry and ducklings and wood sorrel and rubber boots and foxglove and buttercup and rushes and slugs and snails and velvetgrass and wild cucumber and orbweaver spiders and that woman singing with her feet in me singing. Baneberry and beargrass. Thrush and hemlocks and coffee grounds. Thimbleberry and heron. Smelt and moss and water ouzels and bears and bear scat. Bramble and bracken. Elk drinking me cougar drinking me. Ground-cedar and ground-ivy and eelgrass. Vultures and voles. Water striders mosquitoes mosquito-hawks. Dock and dewberry. Moths and mergansers. Huckleberry and snowberry. Hawks and osprey. Water wheels and beaver dams. Deer and lupine. Red currant. Trees and logs and trunks and branches and bark and duff. I eat everything. Elderberry and evening primrose. Bulrush and burdock. I know them all. They yearn for me. Caddis fly and coralroot. I do not begin nor do I cease. Foamflower fleeceflower fireweed. I always am always will be. Lily and lotus. Swell and surge and ripple and roar and roil and boil. I go to the Mother. Madrone and mistmaiden. The Mother takes me in. Nettle and ninebark. Pelt and peppergrass. She waits for me. Pine-sap and poppy. I bring her all small waters. Raspberry and rockcress. I draw them I lure them I accept them. Salal and satin-flower. She is all waters. Tansy and trillium. She drinks me. Velvetgrass and vernalgrass. I begin as a sheen on leaves high in the hills, a wet idea, a motion, a dream, a rune, and then I am a ripple, and I gather the small waters to me, the little wet children, the rills of the hills, and we are me and run to Her muscling through wood and stone cutting through everything singing and shouting roiling and rippling and there She is waiting and whispering her salty arms always opening always open always o.

Bard Rock on the Hudson River at Hyde Park, New York

Manitoga

2011-06-02T16:27:00.016-04:00

During our recent Hudson River valley vacation, we visited Manitoga, a site in Garrison, New York, with which I was vaguely familiar because some of my colleagues had developed a master plan for the property.

Orange Jelly (Dacrymyces palmatus)

Probably Ling Shih, or Varnished Polypore (Ganoderma lucidum)

Natural woodland garden with Bristly Parchment (Lopharia cinerascens)

Manitoga's mission is to preserve the legacy of pioneer designer Russel Wright — his home, landscape, products, archives and philosophy — and share them with professionals and the public. The stated mission of the Russel Wright Design Center is to preserve and protect Russel Wright's home, studio and woodland garden at Manitoga "as a learning laboratory about the importance of living in harmony with nature and the value of good design in everything and for everyone."

Sensuous mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) embrace)

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Wright was one of the best known designers in the United States. At the apex of his career, Wright left New York City and moved his base of operations fifty miles north to Garrison, New York. It was here that he created a home, studio and designed landscape. He named it Manitoga, meaning Place of the Great Spirit in Algonquin. Wright shared the Native Americans' respect for the earth.

When Wright first found the property in 1942, it had been damaged by a century of quarrying and lumbering. Over the next three decades, until his death in 1976, he carefully redesigned and re-sculpted Manitoga's 75 acres using native plants, his training as a theater designer and sculptor, and his innovative design ideas. Though the landscape appears "natural," it is apparently a careful composition of woodland trees, rocks, ferns, mosses, and wildflowers. Wright created over four miles of paths that wind over creeks, into woods, among boulders, and through ferns and mountain laurel to focus visitors' attention on the importance of living in harmony with nature. In 2006, Manitoga was named a National Historic Landmark.

Wright's house and studio perched on the edge of a quarry. Wright rerouted the stream on the lower right to fill the quarry.

Tours of Wright's house and studio are offered infrequently and by reservation only, so we weren't able to visit the house and environs, which are completely off limits to casual visitors. But we did walk much of the grounds. Despite the organization's hype about a designed landscape, our visit was really just a walk in the woods. The woodlands at Manitoga are pleasant, but they're not that much different from any other woodland walk you might take in the lower Hudson Valley.

Constitution Marsh on the Hudson River

2011-05-26T17:06:00.002-04:00

Kali and I spent eight days on vacation in the Hudson River valley last week. Despite precipitation every single day (and sometimes all day), we had a good trip overall.

One of our stops was Constitution Marsh, an Audubon Important Bird Area on the east bank of the Hudson just south of the town of Cold Spring in Putnam County, about 35 miles north of New York City.

Constitution Marsh is a haven for waterfowl and shorebirds. The marsh developed naturally in a shallow oxbow-like channel of the Hudson between Constitution Island (just off West Point, and actually part of the West Point military academy's landholdings) and the eastern bank of the river. In the early 1800s, an agricultural entrepreneur developed ill-fated plans to grow wild rice commercially in the marsh, and later in the century the New York Central Railroad routed a rail line along the western side of the marsh, connecting Constitution Island to the mainland and, in so doing, cutting off much of the tidal flow to the marsh. Nevertheless, the marsh has survived and even thrived, providing much needed habitat.

The Audubon Society maintains a visitor center on the mainland, but the real attraction of the site is a boardwalk extending out into the marsh (and guided canoe trips offered in the summer). Unfortunately when we visited, we arrived at high tide, a time when most shore birds retreat to the wooded uplands surrounding the marsh and we saw nothing more than a few Red-winged Blackbirds, which I can see in my back yard. In addition, the boardwalk is so close to high tide level that we couldn't access all parts of the boardwalk complex because parts were inundated.

The naturalist at the visitor center directed us to look for a pair of Bald Eagles nesting a half-mile downriver, and we did see the pair circling above and then entering their nest. In addition, I photographed a tuliptree snag whose ancient roots had grown up around a boulder on the trail leading out to the boardwalk.

Baldpate Spring

2011-05-09T14:06:00.002-04:00

Wolf tree (a locust) on the summit of Baldpate Mountain

Kali and I hiked six miles at the Ted Stiles Preserve at Baldpate Mountain, a Mercer County natural area just north of Trenton, New Jersey yesterday. A mountain in New Jersey? Well, Kittatinny Ridge (a real mountain, for those of us in the East) which embraces the Appalachian Trail, crosses the northwest corner of New Jersey. Further south, though, erosion-resistant diabase ridges rise a few hundred feet above the surrounding landscape and create "mountains" like Baldpate.

Because of the steep topography and the stony soil that develops from diabase (an igneous rock that cooled and solidified in fissures below the surface of the earth), these ridges were often left forested or only lightly farmed. Despite the forest cover, though, there was plenty of evidence of farming and disturbance on Baldpate. Stone walls ran through the woods, and we came upon the ruins of stone cottages and woods roads buttressed with stone. In addition, the air was perfumed throughout the hike by countless invasive non-native autumn olive trees in bloom. In fact, the understory there consisted of nothing much more than mutiflora rosebushes and garlic mustard, though some spring ephemerals managed to persist. Nevertheless, the tree canopies were alive with the songs of wood warblers and thrushes.

View over southern New Jersey (including Delaware River)

When we finally reached the crest of the ridge, we were rewarded with long views of southern New Jersey and the Delaware River below. You'd almost never guess that we were in the most densely settled state in the union.

Planting Trees and Spring Birds

2011-04-18T15:37:00.001-04:00

Despite torrential rains Saturday night that totaled more than three inches, volunteers showed up to plant trees on the creek floodplain in my natural area the following morning. A dozen hardy souls tromped through the mud to dig holes that, more often than not, filled with water before the tree could even be planted. We'd selected trees that could withstand wet feet, though: swamp white oaks, sycamores, red and silver maples, river birches, black gums, and my favorite, hornbeams.

The riparian area had been part of a landscaped estate through the 1960s when it featured non-native specimen trees and lots of naturalized spring bulbs in a lawn sloping down to the creek. But, with the passing of the estate into the hands of a church, the challenging riparian area was all but abandoned. Parts of it developed naturally into a nice stand of native swamp rose, but for the most part, it was overrun by non-native multiflora roses. When we acquired the floodplain and created a trail alongside the creek, we also began planting trees to close up the sunny, invasive-dominated meadow and to return forest to the floodplain and adjacent slopes.

The volunteers who showed up to help were members of three families plus two college students. One of the families brought their young children, who had a great time helping out and getting as muddy as possible. The group managed to plant 40 trees and surround them with deer-proof wire cages in less than two hours.

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Image by dpughphoto.com

For the last few days, I've noticed a Pine Warbler coming to the feeder outside my kitchen window to eat suet. At first, not observing carefully, I casually wrote it off as an American Goldfinch that hadn't fully molted into its glorious breeding plumage. Then I realized that, if it hadn't molted by now - prime breeding season - it wasn't going to to molt and it must be some other species. On more careful observation, I realized it was a Pine Warbler. But, a Pine Warbler coming to a feeder? Unheard of! Nonetheless, there it was, and there was no doubt about its identity. Then, as I searched the Internet for an image of a Pine Warbler to accompany this post, what did I find but an image of the bird taken at - you guessed it - a suet feeder?!

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Saturday night's torrential rains that made tree planting so muddy on Sunday morning also flooded the old farm pond down the hill behind my house. The pond contained a small island commandeered for the last several years by the same pair of Canada geese. Last year, the geese's nest was inundated by heavy April rains, and it happened again this year. Certainly, we don't need any more Canada geese around, so I don't regret their loss for that reason. But, clearly the female was distraught. Last evening, I watched her just standing in the two inches of water above her former nest. Perhaps this personal disaster is for the better, though; the pond harbors several snapping turtles, and the geese usually fail to raise a brood to adulthood anyway. Is it better to lose a nest of eggs, or to watch your brood get smaller each day as a hungry turtle pulls your goslings, one by one, under water?

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Dark-eyed Juncos have forsaken my feeder for breeding grounds further north, but White-throated Sparrows are still here in force and stridently practicing their mating calls. They always stick around a little longer than the Juncos, but they, too, will be gone in a few days.

Ohio and Erie Canal

2011-03-15T12:27:00.004-04:00

Cleveland Metropark's Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation

View northward along Towpath Trail flanked by the

Cuyahoga River (left) and Ohio and Erie Canal (right)

During our visit to northeast Ohio last week, we took a late afternoon walk in the Cleveland Metroparks' Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation, which is a northern extension of Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Eventually, the reservation will extend from the northern boundary of the national park to Cleveland's Lake Erie lakefront, but today it only extends to the southern edge of Cleveland's most heavily industrialized neighborhoods along the Cuyahoga River.

Nevertheless, the park district has done its best to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The canal, for example, is still watered and flowing through the reservation because it formerly served as a source of water for Jones and Laughlin's steel mill; other sections of the canal further south in the national park are dry.

In addition, the park district has embraced the area's industrial heritage, and has bestowed upon it the moniker "Hidden Valley" because the heavily industrialized section of the Cuyahoga and canal formerly was off limits to the public and accessible only to the workers in the heavy industries lining the river.

The scenery's not all pretty. In the image above, photographed in low, late-afternoon sunlight at a bad angle for photography, a building material recycling facility presses up against the riverbank, and the lone surviving tree is shrouded in non-native vines. Kali remarked, "Doesn't that just say it all?"

Yours truly

But other sections have been reclaimed and the park district has created series of nice viewing decks overlooking the Cuyahoga River.

And, perhaps most exciting of all--wildlife has returned. Or maybe it's been hanging on there all along, but now it's just more visible. We were fortunate to spot this beaver swimming in the canal just before we left. The naturalist at the Visitor Center was surprised that we'd seen the beaver, which had only been reported sporadically earlier in the year. This is within the city limits of Cleveland!

Ohio and Erie Canal Visitor Center,

a beautiful new facility

Snow Falls

2011-03-14T12:31:00.002-04:00

Wolf Creek Falls after March snow

Garfield Park Reservation

Cleveland Metroparks

Ahhh, Spring Break in northeast Ohio. Kali was able to get away from work during her university's Spring Break last week, so instead of flying to San Diego to visit my Dad, we drove to northeast Ohio to deal with Kali's mom's house and affairs. I was in the Cleveland suburbs for a full four days, but was extraordinarily busy during the whole period except for one movie (The Adjustment Bureau; it was vacation time, after all), one walk at the Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks, and one nice dinner to reconnect with my best friend from high school, who just happened to be in town from Los Angeles, also dealing with an ailing parent.

Oh, and I did sneak out to photograph two waterfalls in the neighborhood (sorry, Jain) on Sunday morning, March 6, after an inch of snow.

Wolf Creek above the falls

The circulation system in the Garfield Park Reservation was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted's firm, and contains carriage roads borne over the small streams on beautiful native Euclid bluestone bridges.

A few hundred feet downstream of the falls, Wolf Creek joins the much larger Mill Creek. Mill Creek is one of the major tributaries of the Cuyahoga River--and probably one of its dirtiest, too. The Mill Creek watershed has been used and abused for years, with suburban development encroaching up to the very edge of the creek and combined sewer overflows adding nutrients and Lord knows what else to the stream.

Several thousand feet upstream of its confluence with the Cuyahoga River, Mill Creek plunges over the tallest waterfall (48 feet) in Cuyahoga County. Until the Cleveland Metroparks resurrected the area immediately surrounding the falls a few years ago, it had been hidden away in the back of an industrial park, known only to local residents (and kids who were inclined to trespass to find any hint of natural excitement). Now, it's been outfitted with observation platforms and a landscaped park.

Mill Creek Falls

Garfield Park Reservation (extension)

Cleveland Metroparks

Ever since the region was settled, the area around the falls has been industrialized because the falls were used a source of water power. In fact, the falls is not even in its original location. Early in the 20th century, the falls was moved 300 feet to provide space for a railroad right-of-way. The neighborhood around the falls is depressed and post-industrial, with several large roads criss-crossing just upstream.

The gorge downstream of Mill Creek Falls

Railing at observation platform

Mill Creek Falls

To reflect the long relationship between people and the falls, Cleveland Metroparks developed an observation area with a decorative railing depicting the human history of the region. On the right side of the railing, you may be able to discern the outline of a mule's head, a tribute to the mules that pulled canal boats on the Ohio and Erie Canal less than a mile away.

Pilobolus

2011-03-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Pilobolus sp.

You may have seen Pilobolus featured in an automobile commercial on television. The troupe of artists, having fashioned themselves into the shape of a car (A Honda or Accura, if I recall), slowly uncoil their expertly intertwined bodies and reveal the construct to have been human origami.

The company, beginning it's 40th anniversary season, was named by one of its co-founders after a fungus (genus Pilobolus) being researched in his father's biophysics laboratory at Dartmouth College, where the group started.

Pilobolus was in town last evening beginning a four-day run, and Kali and I went to see them as part of our contemporary dance series. I’m giving the performance a mixed review. There were five pieces, and I think that the first and last were the best. I fell asleep during the third piece, “Duet,” between two women who intimately juxtaposed their bodies for what seemed to be forever, but Kali liked it and my sleepiness may have been partially attributable to the warm auditorium and the fact that I had taken an antihistamine late in the afternoon.

There were two “shadow” pieces in which a translucent screen separated the audience from the backlit performers. The first was short and fun. My initial reaction to the second was, “Oh, no! Not another one!” But the piece, a sort of animated comic strip, grew on me, especially because the dancers occasionally came from behind the screen and performed in view of the audience.

The last piece, “Redline,” was classic Pilobolus and incredibly intense, energetic dance. it blew the audience away.

Unfortunately, Pilobolus doesn't always know when to stop. Too often, once they've made their point with a dance, they expand it until it becomes wearing. That was cetainly the case with the three longer pieces last evening. Nevertheless, Pilobolus continues to explore new movement paradigms and their programs are never boring.

A Scourge or a Close Scrape?

2011-03-03T11:24:00.000-05:00

Because I feed the birds, I have a surfeit of Gray Squirrels in my yard. Sometimes, there are half a dozen under my feeder, picking through the seed that drops from the platform above when the birds are being especially picky; Blue Jays bring a feast, with their careless, powerful flings.

The squirrels can be a costly headache, too. They have crawled up in the undercarriage of my car and chewed gasoline lines and electrical wires on more than one occasion. Can such things actually be tasty?

I used to have fewer squirrels when feral cats patrolled the property, but the arrival of Eastern Coyotes about three years ago decimated the feral cat population. It's very rare to see a cat any longer. In response, the squirrel population has skyrocketed.

A few days ago, I noticed the squirrel in the (unsatisfactorily blurry) image above, under the feeder. I could see that the fur was missing from the squirrel's tail, and I attributed it to an infestation of mange. But last evening, when I went out to get a picture, I saw that the tail was in really bad shape and, even worse, the side of the squirrel away from the camera was horribly disfigured and partially hairless. It also looked like the animal had lost its eye on that side. Now, I'm questioning my mange diagnosis and wondering if the squirrel got in some kind of fight or escaped from a predator.

Many of the coyotes I see in the neighborhood are afflicted with mange; it's a horrible disease, but I think that it comes from too many animals sharing too small a habitat. It's a natural (but terrible) population regulator. In contrast, I've seen quite a few Red Foxes lately, but their coats are beautiful, sleek, and bushy. I've seen my share of mangy foxes in the past, so it's possible that they could suffer in the future, too.

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'Off to suburban northeast Ohio this weekend for six days.

Best of Both Worlds

2011-02-22T17:00:00.233-05:00

The 250-year-old sycamore behind my house

in last evening's light

I live a very fortunate life, and that fact came home to me strongly last Friday evening. Kali and I had tickets for Gounod's opera, Romeo et Juliet, in central Philadelphia, and we decided to make a "night" of it. I took off work about an hour early and drove to pick up Kali when she finished working at 4:30. Then, we drove to the terminus of the subway line near Kali's place of employment and got ready to go into town; we were both in a great mood and excited about the prospects for the evening.

Two trains were waiting for passengers - the local (that stops at every station) and the express that stops at selected stations. The local was scheduled to leave earlier, but would undoubtedly be overtaken en route by the express. I opted for the express, but Kali said, "We've got plenty of time; let's chill out on the local." We did (and we were eventually overtaken en route), but I was relaxed and enjoying the anticipation.

Once in town, we had identified four new restaurants to consider for dinner, all in a relatively circumscribed part of downtown dubbed Midtown Village. Until recently, Midtown Village had been down-at-the-heels, seedy, and all but deserted after business hours, but now it's hip with countless new restaurants and shops. Since Friday was the warmest day of the winter so far (temperatures got up to near 70), Midtown Village was hopping on Friday night. The energy of the nightlife was palpable, and it was exhilarating to be part of it.

We decided on dinner in a well-reviewed pizza restaurant and wine bar. It was packed - even at 5:45 - so we had to settle for seats at the "communal table," which was fine with us. One outside "wall" of the place was composed completely of doors, and all were open to the evening's warmth and the crowded street. We ordered a roasted beet and goat cheese appetizer and a gourmet pizza, and then sat back to enjoy the ambiance with glasses of happy hour Carménère. We had a fine meal.

We turned down dessert at the restaurant in favor of going across the street to enjoy generous cups of gelato (one scoop of pomelo and one scoop of kiwi for me, and one scoop of hazelnut and one of cappuccino for Kali).

After dessert, it was still a bit early to go to the theater, so we enjoyed the warm evening and strolled down the high-end shopping street. I was also interested in finding the location of the newest dance club in town in case we were motivated to go dancing after the opera. (Finding the place proved a challenge because it's just one doorway between two retail stores; the entrance-way reportedly opens up into a cavernous space inside.)

Near 8:00, we went to the theater, staged in the opulent Academy of Music. We've been to the Academy on several occasions, but tickets in the Orchestra are too rich for our blood, so we buy seats in one of the numerous balconies, all of which are, to a greater or lesser extent, challenging (to be kind). The building is old, so there are supporting columns throughout that obscure views of the stage. The seats were clearly installed when people were shorter because our knees inevitably push up against the back of the seats in front of ours. And, perhaps worst of all, the seats on the sides of the auditorium face the seats on the opposite side, not the stage, so viewers have to contort their bodies sideways to see the performance. The Academy must have been built to present orchestra concerts where watching the stage is not critical; the venue is terrible for stage productions.

Despite the physical discomfort, we enjoyed the opera - after a while. The work is divided into five acts, but the cast really didn't hit their stride until the third act. Furthermore, the director re-imagined the story of the feuding Capulet and Montague clans as rival haute couture houses; it was a potentially interesting conceit, but the director didn't carry it through with comprehensive vision, so the production vacillated between New York's runways and Verona's back alleys and gardens. The show ended at 11:15 and, despite my entreaties, Kali claimed she was exhausted and couldn't possibly go dancing, so we hopped the subway and headed home.

My point (at last)? I've got 800 natural acres outside my door with not a neighbor in sight. I can walk down to "my" creek in 10 minutes, wander through native prairie grasses, and get lost in 250-year-old woods practically at will. On the other hand, I can be in central Philadelphia in an hour or less and get plugged into some high energy culture, dining, nightlife that nearly rivals that of New York City (which I can also access in two hours, if I want). I've got it good in lots of ways.

Kali and I will be retiring (if the stars align) in six (for her) and 6-1/2 (for me) years. We can't stay in the house where we currently live because the residence is part of my employment package, so once I retire we're going to have to move. We're giving really serious consideration to moving to small-town New Mexico, but I wonder how we're going to adjust to a life that offers a lot of natural amenities, but fewer cultural ones. Kali says it's just another phase in our lives and, honestly, it would be nice to get away from some of the hubbub and heavy traffic with which we have to contend now. But I can't help wondering if we'll make the transition smoothly.

A Mixed Bag of Dance

2011-02-14T11:42:00.001-05:00

Kate Weare's Bright Land

Kali and I attended a contemporary dance performance on Saturday evening featuring two new and relatively small dance companies, Kate Weare and Monica Bill Barnes. Each company performed one 40-minute-long piece, and each company consisted of four dancers, two women and two men in Weare's company and four women in Barnes'. Weare's company performed first, offering a composition entitled Bright Land set to a medley of bluegrass revival music.

For the first two-thirds of Bright Land, I was absolutely transfixed, and I imagine that most of the relatively modest audience was, too, because you could have heard a pin drop in silences between the musical pieces. During this section of Bright Land, all four dancers were on stage at all times, usually dancing ensemble, but sometimes pairing off. Some of the best parts of the piece showcased the dancers in partnerships marked by surprising, elegant lifts and circlings in service to taut, tango-like dance dynamics. I found myself thinking, "I could watch these people dance for the rest of the night."

However, as the end of the piece approached, the stage was occupied alternately by only one or the other of the couples, not by all four dancers. The mysterious electricity generated by the group quickly dissipated for me, so that by the end of the piece I had largely lost interest in what was going on.

Bright Land

Following an intermission, Monica Bill Barnes' company took the stage offering the audience Another Parade. The dancers all wore turtlenecks and A-line skirts, and used the loose-fitting turtlenecks to tease the audience with reveals of navels and shoulders. It was all witty, good-natured, tongue-in-cheek fun, but it just didn't hold my attention or interest. The moves finally became too repetitive and predictable. The evening culminated with the dancers impressing four hapless audience members to join them onstage, and all gave it a go, but what's the point of such silliness?

Monica Bill Barnes' Another Parade

In terms of full and honest disclosure, I have to report that Kali found the entire evening extremely compelling, and she couldn't understand why I didn't agree. I told her that the evening was hardly a waste of time - I intensely enjoyed a quarter of the performance - but she took that to mean that I didn't appreciate the show, and that I'm too uptight. Our local newspaper also gave the performance a glowing review. I guess I am just too uptight.

Another Parade

The Big Burn

2011-02-08T11:01:00.000-05:00

The Big Burn is Timothy Egan's account of the largest wildfire to occur during historic times in North America. The fire devastated a large swath of the northern Rocky Mountains and adjacent areas of Canada in August 1910. It is also the story of the creation of the national forest system by Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt. Egan claims (in his subtitle) that it was the fire that saved America - a claim as overblown as his prose recounting the fire.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I, "In on the Creation," is the story of the progressive movement's attempt to wrest control of the Western forests from the industrial privateers of the Gilded Age who were abetted by the United States Congress. Part II, "What They Lost," describes the horrific fires that coalesced in August 1910 into a cataclysmic conflagration that took over a hundred lives. Part III, "What They Saved," explores the aftermath of the fire and its effect on national politics. The book begins with a Prologue, "A Fire at the End of the World," that sets up the story to follow.

Oddly, I found the middle section of the book - the account of the fire - to be least compelling part of the book. It is too long, too repetitive, and too redundant of the prologue. Egan never found a simile, metaphor, adjective, or adverb related to fire that he didn't love, and he throws in every one he can find. My comment above about "cataclysmic conflagration" is tame in comparison with some of his overheated prose.

I very much more enjoyed his examination of the important players, especially Roosevelt, Pinchot, and President Taft, and the newly-minted Forest Service rangers. Egan also paints a compelling portrait of the lawless towns that sprouted on the frontier in the early 19th century, though even here he can carry-on and I wondered sometimes if he was exaggerating. The last section of the book begins to rebuild on some of the strengths of the first section, but Egan makes claims that are a bit of a stretch about the long-term impact of the fire on American politics.

Depair in a Glass Coffin

2011-02-07T15:22:00.000-05:00

Brown Marmorated Stink Bug

For the last few winters, homeowners all over southeastern Pennsylvania have endured "infestations" of Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs (Halyomorpha halys), a non-native species believed to have been introduced into the eastern United States in packing crates from China. They were first collected near Allentown, Pennsylvania in September 1998. (Incidentally, don't you love the name "marmorated," which means "marbled.")

My house has a bumper crop this year, as always. The bugs seek refuge from winter by squeezing into any available crevice in the autumn. Then, in mid-winter for some reason, those that chose to escape the cold in buildings emerge into the interior of the structures, where they can be seen flying and crawling everywhere. Fastidious homemakers freak out, but I have an altogether different reaction.

These bugs, admittedly, are non-native and they are plant pests. When I go to harvest the last few tomatoes in my garden in October and I find that each one has been damaged by the proboscis of a stink bug, I curse the bugs and am inclined to sympathize with those homeowners who won't tolerate the natural world crossing the threshold of their abode.

However, I can't really bring myself to loathe them and, in winter, I actually sympathize with them. Last week, in the midst of an ice storm, I came across one of the bugs clinging to the window pane above my kitchen sink. Surely, in this bug's mind, there was an invisible force field inexplicably preventing it from fulfilling its destiny in the light. Undoubtedly it was starving and it probably felt the mating imperative, but it just couldn't see its way clear or even to simply survive, since the bugs don't last long once they emerge into the warm, dry, foodless house.

Did it know that it only had a few hours left? Did it experience yearning? Was its mesenteron growling for lack of food?

If it had been any season other than winter, I would have captured the bug (as I do all arthropods that show up in the house) and released it outside. But this bug had only two options: starve to death in the house or freeze to death outside. Life's neither pretty nor fair - we all know this - but the complete lack of choice for this doomed insect seemed particularly cruel.

Snow on Terwood Run

2011-01-31T13:52:00.001-05:00

A professional photographer friend of mine, Mark Schmerling, shared these images of Terwood Run, a small tributary to "my" creek, taken just after the latest snow fell on January 27, 2011. Mark specializes in taking pictures of rocky streams from a water-level perspective.

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I developed Reynaud's syndrome in my right index finger this morning. The last time this happened, Kali (and I) freaked out and got me to the doctor's office as quickly as we could. It is disconcerting - my finger turned purple and got cold and stiff - I was sure gangrene was imminent! The doctor calmly diagnosed the problem and told me to keep my finger warm by immersing it in warm water. Sure enough, the symptoms disappeared. I'm repeating the treatment today by wrapping my fingers around generous mugs of hot cocoa.

Enough Already!

2011-01-28T11:22:00.001-05:00

January 26-27 brought our fifth winter storm so far this season, and this one delivered the most snow (15 inches in two bouts, one with four inches during the day on January 26, and then a "snow burst" that dropped 11 inches between 8 p.m. on Wednesday and 1 a.m. on Thursday that included snowthunder and lightning). Snow from the previous storms hadn't even melted!

There's a Junco just below the seed tray

It was beautiful, but I've had enough. We're well over our annual average snowfall already, and we're still in January. My back and arms ache today from all the shoveling I did yesterday - good thing it was aerobic exercise, since I certainly can't go for a walk.

Sunrise

Movement Weekend

2011-01-24T09:44:00.000-05:00

Great dance weekend. Saturday night, a new contemporary dance company, Keigwin + Company, was in town performing their Elements cycle of dances related to water, fire, earth and wind. Larry Keigwin choreographed 15 pieces with new moves, imaginative costuming, interesting music, and lots of humor and O'Henry-esque surprises. The dancers gave it their all, and the audience (and I) clearly appreciated their efforts. You know a company's done a great job if you leave the theater energized and motivated to move more and get into better shape yourself.

Brian Sanders / "Urban Scuba"

Then, Sunday afternoon, it was back downtown for a matinee of contemporary dance and physical theater created by Philadelphian Brian Sanders in his 18-3/4 Anniversary Season of JUNK. Sander's company uses found objects - ladders, bicycles, and trash cans - as well as carefully fabricated objects incorporated into dances and movement pieces. JUNK was a retrospective of 18 pieces gleaned from Sanders' 18-3/4 years of producing dance, and nearly all were spectacular. The dancers were in perfect physical condition and incredibly strong: I'm heading to the gym!

"Urban Scuba"

New Mexico: Solitude Canyon, Bosque del Apache

2011-01-21T13:46:00.001-05:00

Approach to Solitude Canyon

The "action" at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is focused on the heavily managed and manipulated marshes and wetlands on the Rio Grande floodplain. But large sections of the refuge are Chihuahuan desert uplands well away from the river bottoms. Three portions of the refuge have been protected in wilderness areas, and we chose to explore the periphery of one of those areas before we headed back to the airport.

A mile south of the refuge's main entrance there's a turnout and parking area off NM Rte. 1 that provides access to the Solitude Canyon trailhead. The developed trail is a 2.2-mile lasso-shaped introduction to the desert.

View from within Solitude Canyon

The first half-mile of the trail gradually ascends the very sandy alluvial outwash from Solitude Canyon. But, once the trail enters the canyon proper, it crosses over into the Indian Well Wilderness Area and the entire landscape changes. Instead of traversing open ground, the trail follows the course of the Solitude Canyon arroyo, bringing walkers into close contact with the poorly cemented sandstones and unconsolidated gravels that make up the canyon walls. As Kali said, "It finally got interesting." Once the trail climbs out of the canyon, it loops northward and then delivers walkers back to the mouth of the ravine.

It was cold and windy on our walk. As a result, we saw but one unidentifiable sparrow flit across our path during the entire walk. Within the canyon, though, there were many eroded cavities and niches high up on the sandstone walls where Common Ravens had raised broods. Some of the holes looked like they had been used for many, many breeding seasons.

The sandstone and gravel walls of Solitude Canyon

New Mexico: Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese at Bosque del Apache

2011-01-21T10:38:00.002-05:00

In 2003, I visited Austin, Texas, for a conference. On my first night in town, I walked downtown just before dusk and gathered with hundreds of other people at a park below the Congress Street Bridge over the Colorado River and waited. As the light waned and darkness increased, first a few, and then a thousands of Mexican Free-tailed Bats emerged from their diurnal roosts under the bridge to head out into the surrounding farms and ranches to feed. There were so many bats that they looked like dense smoke billowing skyward. I have to admit that I was overcome with emotion at this natural spectacle - tears welled in my eyes and my throat choked up. I'm glad that it was dark so that no one could see macho man reduced to blubbering.

Though it didn't get that far in New Mexico, seeing countless thousands of Snow Geese suddenly explode from the surface of a marsh, wheel around in the air for a minute or so, and then settle back onto the pond nearly invoked the same reaction.

Our third natural history stop in New Mexico was Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge just south of Socorro. One of the main reasons we planned to visit southern New Mexico in January was to stop at Bosque del Apache, where thousands of Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) and Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens) overwinter.

We were not disappointed. We first spotted cranes in three "outlier" ponds as we drove along the access road (NM Rte. 1)to the refuge, and then saw thousands more foraging in the corn fields that are planted for the cranes and the Snow Geese within the the refuge proper.

We spent a full, glorious sunny and warm day at the refuge - our warmest in New Mexico. We tallied about 25 species of birds (plus two handsome coyotes and three mule deer) on our 12-mile drive around the marshes and farm fields in the refuge - far fewer than we had seen on our March visit a few years ago, but a respectable number for the winter according to one of the refuge naturalists. None of the birds we spotted was new for us, but we really came for the astounding numbers of cranes gathered there.

Bald Eagle on a snag

One of three Bald Eagles Eagles we observed. Image captured with the optical zoom of my point-and-shoot Nikon.

As sundown approached, we positioned ourselves along NM 1 once again for one of the refuge's daily winter highlights: the "fly in." As the sun goes down, cranes and geese fly back to the safety of the refuge's marshes and ponds for the evening from their day's foraging in the surrounding landscape. Hundreds and hundreds of birds approach in squadrons and land in the wetlands. (The reverse half of the spectacle, the "fly out" at dawn, has not been impressive this year according to refuge volunteers because the traditional gathering wetland has been frozen over and, instead of congregating in one gigantic flock that takes off at sunrise a la Austin's bats, the cranes and geese have divided themselves into smaller groups at ponds scattered throughout the refuge where the water remains open.

We returned to the refuge two days later before we headed back to the airport for a final look at the cranes and to try to spot an Aplomado Falcon that had been seen frequenting a grove of cottonwoods, but the day was very cold and windy, the ponds where we had seen the cranes two days earlier were frozen, and there was no sign of the falcon.

A Great Blue Heron for Grizz

New Mexico: Hike to Dripping Springs, Organ Mountains

2011-01-18T15:29:00.001-05:00

Approach to Dripping Springs Canyon

On the afternoon of our last day in Las Cruces, we took the one-mile walk to Dripping Springs on the western flank of the lava-derived (southern) portion of the Organ Mountains (see previous post for more about the geology of the region).

The Chihuahuan desert is very dry, and these dependable springs have been known for centuries. Just down slope of the actual springs, archeologists excavated the floor of a rock shelter (La Cueva, The Cave) that contained evidence that the canyon containing the springs has been occupied by people for millennia.

Between the end of the 19th century and the 1930's, the Dripping Springs canyon was the site of mountain resorts and a sanatorium. When the first, wood-framed resort failed, it was turned into a tuberculosis sanatorium. Eventually, that site was abandoned, but a new, larger resort with stone buildings was built further up the canyon. The remains of the wood-framed and stone buildings are scattered throughout, as are two silted-up reservoirs that were built to contain and store the water from the springs.

A coup used to house chickens for the resort

Remains of the sanatorium

The stone hotel at the mountain camp

When we visited, the spring flow was unimpressive - either the springs are very modest affairs, or they flow more generously in other times of the year. In fact, it was difficult to see the water dripping out of the canyon above. Nevertheless, it obviously provided enough water to operate the resorts successfully.

The Dripping Springs (bottom center)

The canyon and the springs were saved by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which bought the property and then sold it to the Bureau of Land Management for a protected natural area. Because of the presence of the water, the canyon supports rare and endangered plants, prompting TNC's interest. The hike up to the springs from the visitor center was a relatively easy one-mile uphill trek on a gravel road that had previously been used to service the resorts.

View westward toward Las Cruces and the Rio Grande valley

New Mexico: Hike to Baylor Pass, Organ Mountains

2011-01-17T14:26:00.000-05:00

Our fifth trip to New Mexico. If everything works out (a big "if," of course), we'll almost certainly retire there. The question is: where? This trip to the south-central part of the fourth largest state in the union confirmed our love for wide open spaces and the Chihuahuan desert. We can think of far worse places to land than Las Cruces, for example, the second-largest metropolis in the state.

Our first hike during this New Mexican trip took us to the Baylor Pass Trail in the Organ Mountains about 20 miles east of Las Cruces. As a mountain range, the Organs are relatively small. They don't even show up on my Rand McNally road atlas of New Mexico. Nevertheless, they are dramatic because they are so craggy. Though I beg to differ, I read several comparisons to Wyoming's Grand Tetons in Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce promotional material.

Chihuahuan desert vegetation along the trail

The mountain range has two origins. The northern half - the dramatic, craggy half - is the eroded remnant of a batholith. Magma pooled under the earth's surface but never broke through, cooling and solidifying underground. The southern end of the mountains is the remnant of magma that did breach the earth's surface in a typical volcanic eruption. The suture between the two is plain and stark: the northern batholith is light pink-gray granite, while the southern is dark brown lava.

View southward along the eastern flank of the lava-derived portion of the Organ Mountains

The Organs are also one of the numerous "sky islands" that dot the southwest all along the Mexican border. Unlike oceanic islands surrounded by water, the sky island mountain ranges are separated from one another by desert "seas," making them hotbeds for speciation and endemism.

Snow along the trail from a storm one week earlier. The divided peaks are called the Rabbit Ears.

We chose to walk the Baylor Pass National Recreation Trail. The 6-mile trail traverses the mountains, crossing at Baylor Pass. The approach from the east reaches the pass in 2 miles, while the approach from the west requires a 4-mile hike to reach the pass. We selected the shorter hike, climbing about 900 feet from the trailhead to the pass and then returning on the same route. With leisurely breaks for birdwatching, photography, and lunch, the trek took us about four hours. Temperatures were in low 50s - perfect for hiking, especially when the sun is out. I even got a bit of a sunburn!

View eastward from Baylor Pass over the Tularosa Basin

Along the trail

Ice Rings

2011-01-14T12:53:00.002-05:00

Kali and I just returned from a week in southern New Mexico, so I'll post about our exploration of the Chihuahuan desert natural world over the next few days.

In the meantime, some images of ice rings that formed in a pool alongside my creek. These images were taken by a colleague from New York City when she and I went for a walk in my natural area on December 14--before we were buried by two snowstorms.

Boxing Day Snowstorm

2010-12-28T14:22:00.001-05:00

The back yard at first light

It started soon after Kali and I returned from bargain-hunting on the morning after Christmas and didn't let up until the wee hours of Monday morning. When it was all over, we had a foot of snow--our portion of the Boxing Day East Coast 2010 snowstorm. It was enough to keep me from going to work yesterday for business as usual, but I still had to spend several hours shoveling to make the place ready for opening today.


Sunrise through broken clouds

Sunrise across the frozen, snow-covered pond

The sycamore behind the house after the storm cleared

Christmas Eve Visits

2010-12-28T13:54:00.000-05:00

Harper's Run

Our friends Jean and Joel, two Philadelphia-suburb expats now exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, came to visit on Christmas Eve, as they do nearly every year. They still have lots of friends and family in southeastern Pennsylvania, so it's not just us they're in town to see. Nevertheless, if the weather's nice and the trail conditions appropriate, we try to take long walk with them and to catch up on a year's news.

We decided to walk in the county park where a two-mile rails-to-trails project had been completed 1-1/2 years ago. A portion of the trail runs alongside Harper's Run, one of my favorite photographic subjects. Because of the persistent cold weather, rocky parts of the shallow stream had iced-up.

After we bid our friends adieu in mid-afternoon, we returned to the house, where I spent the rest of the daylight hours grading final exams from the graduate course I had just finished teaching. Those exams, while generally good, certainly did not put me in a Christmas mood (which was already at low ebb, anyway, thank you very much Mr. Grinch). However, as the sun set, we got ourselves ready to attend the annual Christmas Eve gala organized by one of our neighbors--a couple so preternaturally gregarious, generous, and welcoming and that you'd almost claim they'd been raised in Stepford. Great food in prodigious quantities, a beautifully decorated house jammed with interesting people, and 56 varieties of red wine. I challenge you not to have a good time!

Parsons Dance / Remember Me

2010-12-07T14:09:00.000-05:00

David Parson's dance company, Parsons Dance, was in town for four performances last weekend. The program consisted of two works. The first was one of Parsons's signature dances, Caught, which never fails to elicit a gasp out of newcomers and heartfelt admiration from those of us who have seen the work performed several times. The dance, a solo, involves a dancer moving around a blackened stage fleetingly illuminated by stobe lights so that the dancer appears to be flying. It's magic.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the second piece, Remember Me. Critics have savaged this piece, but audiences generally love it. I went into the performance with an open mind, ready to prove the snobby New York dance establishment wrong. Unfortunately, the critics did get it right (in the opinion of Kali, several other aficionados, and me who talked after the performance).

Remember Me is a collaboration between Parsons Dance and the East Village Opera Company, which supplied two singers for the endeavor. The work consists of a simple romantic love triangle played out to the tune of thirteen of the most famous operatic arias performed live on stage. But, did the producers use the arias as written? Oh, no; instead, they pumped them up with near-ear splitting rock guitar background music. Then Parsons's dancers performed the story, which was insultingly shallow and maudlin. Woman wooded by two men rebuffs Man A, who then proceeds to rape her. When Man B finds out about the woman's soiled past he, in turn, rebuffs her, and she proceeds to die of a broken heart. Then, she is resurrected and lives happily ever after with Man B. Maybe this kind of thing would have worked in the Middle Ages or at the hands of a master like Shakespeare, but contemporary audiences are just a little bit too cynical to buy this. Or, maybe not, since it's a popular hit. DVDs of the performance were completely sold out, and a quick trip to NYC to restock resulted in another sellout.

The dancers certainly couldn't be faulted. They were expert and performed flawlessly and tirelessly, as they always do. Parson Dance is among the best companies on the contemporary dance scene. That's why a piece like Remember Me was so disappointing.

Rancocas

2010-12-06T14:53:00.000-05:00

New Jersey, south and east of the state capital, Trenton, is the Coastal Plain--an area of unconsolidated sand, gravel, and clay washed off the Appalachian Mountains and the Piedmont and deposited on the shallow continental shelf.

In New Jersey, the Coastal Plain is divided into two zones, the Inner Coastal Plain and (naturally) the Outer Coastal Plain. The two zones are separated from one another by a series of low, sandy hills called cuesatas, which form a regional watershed divide. Streams rising on the northwest side of the divide flow westward toward the Delaware River. Streams rising on the southeast side of the divide flow eastward toward the Atlantic Ocean with one exception--Rancocas Creek--which rises on the Outer Coastal Plain, flows westward through a valley, and empties into the Delaware River like its Inner Coastal Plain brethren.

Kali and I visited Rancocas Creek State Park last Saturday afternoon. The day was cool and overcast, but pleasant for walking. New Jersey Audubon maintains a nature center with well-marked trails on 125 acres in the park, but the rest of the preserved land seems nearly abandoned by the state. Foot trails are not marked and difficult to follow. In addition, they are regularly interrupted by deer trails, making hiking especially challenging. In addition, the state allowed a local chapter of the Lenni Lenape Indians to use a significant section in the center of the park for tribal activities, but the chapter has been split by internal rifts and the Indians have abandoned their facilities.

Nevertheless, we walked about four miles, enjoying the gently undulating landscape and the woodlands that feature oaks, sweet gums, beeches, and American hollies. Most people have hollies in the foundation plantings around their houses; here (and throughout the Coastal Plain), they are evergreen components of the forest. In addition, the streams are sand bottomed and stained with tannins. All in all, a nice break from the Piedmont.

Night Vision

2010-12-02T09:57:00.001-05:00

Another in the occasional series of "The Rural Life" short essays by Verlyn Klinkenborg from the New York Times' editorial page (November 30, 2010). That we could all write as evocatively as he...

I pull into the farm from the city. It is early in the evening but well after nightfall, and the moon hangs over the hills like a hypnotist's watch. I drop a few things in the house and then wander out to check on the animals.

I used to take a flashlight when I was new to this place. I no longer do. My eyes adjust slowly, but part of the pleasure of walking out in the night is watching the flat opacity resolve into the three dimensions of this farm. All the nocturnal creatures are out and about--somewhere--and I will never be one of them. Even the horses are more nocturnal than I am. They live in natural light year-round, and by the time I get home they're a couple of hours into watching the night.

In summer, you can pretend the night is translucent and that even the Milky Way is emanating warmth. By late November, those illusions are past. The sun feels benevolent, but when it vanishes, after 4 p.m., the rising darkness becomes continuous with the deepest, coldest reaches of space.
The chickens pretend not to notice when I look in. The horses stand impassive in their pasture, though if I opened the gate and walked in, they would drift over to share their heat. I have no idea where the barn cat is, but he is so black that he would stand out in a night like this. I complete my rounds and still my eyes haven't opened fully to the night.

I light a fire in the wood stove and settle in to read in the kitchen. Light spills onto the deck, and I see a movement. It's an opossum, come up to investigate the cat-food dish. It walks up to the glass door and peers in, surely blinded by so much brightness. Perhaps this is the one I met--to both our surprise--on the ladder to the hayloft a few months ago. Now it stands in the light looking hopelessly disorganized, as opossums do, and then it wanders off into the darkness, where the seeing is much better.

Sourland Mountain Preserve

2010-11-30T14:17:00.000-05:00

"Sourlands"

What a wonderful, evocative name for a landscape. The Sourlands are a narrow band of elevated, rocky land running generally southwest-to-northeast through the west-central part of New Jersey from the Delaware River (on the west) to just north of Princeton (on the east).

The terrain is characterized by a stony ridge rising about 400 feet above the surrounding land. The ridge is there because of an igneous rock called diabase. Sixty-five million years ago, as Africa and North America began to tear away from one another along their mutual suture, the land on either side of both continents stretched and fractured. In some places, the fractures became faults, while in others, magma welled up into the fractures from below but never made it to the surface. Instead, it solidified deep underground into diabase, a rock that is much more resistant to erosion than the surrounding sedimentary layers. Over the intervening millions of years, the sedimentary shale layers entombing the diabase have worn away, leaving an exposed ridge of resistant rock. The exposed diabase weathers into huge block and boulders that tumble down the slopes from the top of the ridge.


A refugium. The forest has no understory vegetation, undoubtedly because of the dense white-tailed deer population. These ferns escaped atop this rock.

The origin of the name Sourlands is disputed. Some sources claim that the rocky landscape was not arable and thus useless, or "sour." Other sources claim that the name is a corruption of the word "sorrel" meaning "reddish," but I wonder about that interpretation because, while the sedimentary shales surrounding the Sourlands do weather into reddish clay soil, the Sourlands soils themselves are brown loams. Surely someone has tested the pH; the most logical explanation is that the soils are very acidic.

Somerset County (NJ) has preserved 3,197 acres at the eastern end of the ridge as the Sourland Mountain Preserve, and has built a trail network throughout. Kali and I visited on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a beautiful late autumn day with temperatures near 50 degrees and sunny skies.

The biggest draw in the preserve is a particularly distinctive boulder field perched on the eastern shoulder of the ridge. It's a ridge-top amusement park with rock outcrops, crevices, overpasses, and underpasses. The 5-mile Ridge Trail loop, which we walked, also includes extensive boardwalks crossing poorly drained portions of the landscape and a walk along Roaring Brook, which emerges from a valley filled by a truly Brobdingnagian tumult of room-sized boulders.

Roaring Brook

Arborglow

2010-11-29T11:38:00.000-05:00

I was cleaning up my vegetable garden and raking leaves late Friday afternoon following Thanksgiving, and looked up just as the sun was setting to see the tops of the trees ablaze. The effect reminded me of alpen glow, but translated to the Piedmont foothills rather than snow capped peaks.

A Rafter of Turkeys, and a November Bat

2010-11-22T10:05:00.001-05:00

Wild Turkeys

Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were reintroduced into our heavily suburbanized watershed 15 or so years ago. I know the individual who released the farm-raised wild stock in a county park downstream of my natural area. The turkeys have securely established themselves, though their population density fluctuates annually. The immigration of a healthy coyote (Canis laterans) population three years ago, which I thought at the time might doom the flocks, doesn't seem to have had a significant impact.

This year has been a banner year.

Three hens coalesced their broods at the end of the summer and now there are at least 30 yearlings in my yard most of the time. It doesn't help that I feed them, of course, but I like to enjoy their beautiful colors and their distinctly prehistoric gestalt. Though they will eat whole corn, they prefer oil sunflower (naturally), and it gets expensive feeding 30 turkeys after a while. People ask me if they're wild, and I tell them the flock's history and explain that feeding them has made them almost like pets.

I learned over the weekend, by the way, that a group of turkeys is called a "rafter."

Saturday afternoon, Kali and I went for a walk (at the county park where the turkeys were introduced, incidentally). There, flying over an open field, was a bat gleaning insects. It was 55 degrees, and November 20, and there was a bat in mid-afternoon. We watched for several minutes while it cruised the air in search of prey. We didn't know whether to be amazed or saddened, since the sighting was so strange, unexpected, and out of character for a bat.

Piedmont

2010-11-15T16:44:00.001-05:00

Council Rock in Montgomery County's Lorimer
Park, rising above Pennypack Creek

For 60% of my life, I lived on sedimentary landscapes. I was raised in northeastern Ohio on the Glaciated Appalachian Plateau. I earned my undergraduate degree at Ohio University on the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, then sidled eastward to Pittsburgh, also on the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, to earn my graduate degree. From there, I traveled south to Florida, taking up residence for seven years on sand-veneered limestone terrain that has repeatedly bobbed above and below the ocean over the eons.

Kali brought to my attention this morning, out of the blue, that I have now lived in one place for the longest span of time in my life: 22-1/2 years. And, that time has been spent on the Piedmont. I finally have some rock, some real rock, under my feet--not friable shale and slimy mudstone that weathers into clay, or sandstone that turns into grit, or limestone that can drop out from under you without warning. Nope, solid metamorphic schist that's been here for nearly a billion years--some of the oldest rock on the planet. And rock that produces some of the best garden loam on the planet.

Metamorphic rock does have one downside: it doesn't produce wonderful intimate waterfalls, the staircase cascades that defined my childhood. Although the northern Piedmont is full of places with "fall" in their names, most are really just rapids. The only two real waterfalls that I know in the northern Piedmont--falls where water plunges straight down over a vertical cliff--are in Paterson, New Jersey (which has an incredibly impressive state- [if not national-] park-worthy waterfall in the very middle of its gritty post-industrial downtown) and in Ringing Rocks County Park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And, even at Ringing Rocks, the falls has developed on an unusual and spatially-delimited metamorphic rock called diabase. Rapids are common; real falls are rare.

Council Rock, Lorimer Park

One of the most impressive outcrops of metamorphic schist in my neighborhood occurs in a Montgomery County (Pennsylvania) county park called Lorimer Park. There, rising dozens of feet straight up from the bank of Pennypack Creek, sits Council Rock, so named because the local Leni Lenape Indians reputedly held important meetings near this geological landmark. Today, it's used as a backdrop for wedding photographs and as a place for kids to climb and explore.

Eastern hemlocks clinging to Council Rock

It still retains a green mantle of Eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) despite the foot traffic and the white-tailed deer, which consider hemlocks dessert. But, for me, it's a symbol of the first real firm foundation in my life.

November's late afternoon sun illuminating Council Rock

November Paean

2010-11-11T12:11:00.000-05:00

This short article appeared in the New York Times on Tuesday, November 9, 2010, on the editorial page. It was entitled "The Rural Life: Seasonal Slippage," and was written by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It really captured my feelings about November; maybe it will do the same for you.

Just about now, I remember that the trees on this farm will be bare for the next six months. It always comes as a surprise. The maples and hickories have mulched themselves with their own leaves, and they seem to have gone rigid now that they carry so much less sail in the wind. Everything that can die back has done so. The last of the woodchucks have gone down their burrows. The tide of dormancy is rising all around me, and on a rainy day with the woodstove going, I wonder whether I'll sink or swim.

Even as the temperature hovers in the 40s, I can feel January in the back of my mind. I try hard to keep it out, as if that might guarantee a mild winter. By the time the hard cold gets here, I'll be inured to it. But, truthfully, I'm still back in mid-August, before the Barn Swallows vanished, before the pokeweed berries were ripe enough for the Cedar Waxwings, before the chipmunks gorged on the dogwood drupes.

This month, more than any other, I slip in and out of the season, never quite able to coincide with the calendar. Looking southward from my office, the sky above the treetops is more than overcast. It's a squirrel-gray, beech-bark sky...

Soon I'll put on my barn coat and work gloves and muck boots. And the minute I step ouside, I'll step back into proper time. January recedes because it's so purely November, the mud deep in the barnyard, the rain picking up again. I walk down to the barn and stand in the doorway, taking shelter with the tractor and all the implements of summer--the spade, the garden fork, the pig fence and the chicken fences.

I realize that I'm filled, as always, with expectation. It's a look I see in the horses' eyes when they know their grain is coming. On a dark afternoon, rain falling, they stand in the middle of the pasture with no thought of the shelter they could take. They are November horses now, just the way they were June horses not so long ago.

The Value of Tiny Seeds and First Frost

2010-11-02T12:48:00.000-04:00

My kitchen has two windows, one above the sink facing east providing a view of my platform bird feeder, and the other in front of my kitchen table facing west looking out over a small patch of garden that is shaded by a huge flowering cherry tree except during the last few hours of the day in the summer. The garden patch is planted with a variety of native and non-native species including astilbes (Astilbe spp.), hostas (Hosta spp.) (whose flower stalks are routinely removed by the deer), great blue lobelias (Lobelia siphilitica), and wreath (or bluestem) goldenrod (Solidago caesia).

As the garden gets "tired" at the end of the season--as do I--white-snakeroot (Ageratina altissima) volunteers usually overwhelm the intentional plantings and remain in place until I get disgusted looking at their dry, gray, dissipated flower heads and I pull them up and toss them onto the compost pile. In the process of removing the plants, their fluffy seeds billow up into my face and cascade onto the newly created seedbed that I unintentionally prepared for them by uprooting their parents.

A weevil larva makes distinctive tunnels through the leaves when the plant is actively growing, and so I am reluctant to remove the plants. As a result, I'm left with my perennial snakeroot "garden" at the end of the growing season. I'd assumed that the weevils were the only critters that benefited from the ubiquitous plant. But, having breakfast at my window on Sunday morning, I noticed three White-throated Sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis)--winter visitors--clinging to the none-too-sturdy stems of the snakeroot plants and picking off the minuscule seeds. I couldn't believe their dedication and acrobatics to obtain, what seemed to me, a seed far too small to bother about, especially given the relatively mild weather we're still enjoying. But, then, I guess I'm judging from my human perspective, and not the sparrows'.

I'm still going to pull out the plants, but I guess that I'll wait a bit longer.

_____

We had a out first frost last night. I took these images this morning in the native grassland near my house as the sun crept up over a ridge, melting the frost as it rose.

October Afternoon

2010-10-25T11:16:00.001-04:00

Hazy sun and (perhaps?) the peak of fall colors in my natural area yesterday. The first three images were captured at the wetland at the heart of the preserve, and the last two struck me as typical of the trails, the first of which is an abandoned road that has been incorporated into the preserve's trail system. Enjoy.

Grasslands Field Trip/Snowbirds

2010-10-25T10:16:00.002-04:00

Dr. Roger Latham with a sprig of Three-awn grass (Aristida pupurascens)

The Natural Lands Trust, a regional conservancy with headquarters in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, sponsored a day-long tour of grasslands at three of its preserves on Wednesday, October 20. Two of my colleagues and I joined in the tour, which attracted about 25 participants.

Recently established warm-season grassland at the Hildacy Preserve

We began the tour at the Hildacy Preserve where the organization has established new native warm-season grasslands in former weedy meadows. The day ended at the Stroud Preserve, one of the organization's largest, where Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) reliably nest year after year in cool-season grassland pasture. It was the middle part of the day, though, that made the trip so worthwhile; we visited the organization's first preserve, the Willisbrook Preserve, which protects a serpentine barren.

NLT's Drew Gilchrist pointing out features of the cool-season pastures that attract Bobolinks

Roger Latham with a sample of serpentinite at the Willisbrook Preserve

Serpentinite is a metamorphosed igneous rock formed only at the tectonic spreading centers at the bottom of the ocean. Here in the Piedmont, which has been subject to repeated collisions with Africa over the last half-billion years, some of the tortured bedrock contains sections of the oceanic crust that have been welded onto the continent. Serpentinite, a greenish rock, produces soils that are very low in calcium and very high in magnesium, nickle, and chromium.


Serpentine aster

The heavy metals are present in concentrations that are toxic for most plants, but which support a limited palette of highly-adapted species found nowhere else. Three species are particularly showy: Round-leaved fameflower (Talinum teretifolium), Moss-pink (Phlox subulata) [both of which bloom in the spring and summer], and Serpentine aster (Aster depauperatus) [which was blooming when we visited].

We were fortunate to be escorted on the tour by members of the Natural Lands Trust's knowledgeable stewardship staff, including Darrin Groff, the professional most experienced with using prescribed fire as a management tool in Pennsylvania, and by Dr. Roger Latham, the preeminent grassland expert in Pennsylvania.

_____

Snowbirds have arrived at my feeder. Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis) and White-throated Sparrows (Zonotrichia albicolis) appeared on October 15, 2010, and a Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) showed up for the first time yesterday, Sunday, October 24, and has already made the feeder its own. Even though the birds are here, we have yet to have our first frost.

Phantasmagoria and More by Paul Taylor

2010-10-25T07:43:00.000-04:00

One of our favorite contemporary dance ensembles, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, performed on Saturday evening. The evening featured two revivals and a new work, Phantasmagoria, which proved to be a disappointment.

Phantasmagoria, first performed at Wolf Trap this summer, was the second of the three pieces. The music, by "anonymous Renaissance composers," was spiked with modern percussive sounds. Taylor based the fragmented, satirical work on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's earthy peasant painting The Wedding Dance. Then, as if to take us through the history and geography of dance, he introduced an Indian "Adam and Eve" garbed in stereotypical gaudy costuming wielding a cheesy bright green plush snake. An Irish step dancer came clogging out to bagpipes. A nun confiscated the plush snake and found a lewd use for it. And, finally, a leper-like creature infected the other dancers with the plague. This could have been a rollicking piece had the preliminaries been strong enough to support a real send-up with a clear through line but, alas, none of those fell into place.

The last piece, Cloven Kingdom, was the program's most coherent. Although created in 1976, it was not as dated-looking as the as the opener, 1981's Arden Court, a bare-footed contemporary ballet. The women in Cloven Kingdom danced in long, stretchy, elegant gowns which seemed to hearken back to Martha Graham's oeuvre. By this third piece, the troupe had found its footing as the dancing--especially by the men in tuxedos--was superb.

Pretty Poison (Ivy)

2010-10-15T14:59:00.000-04:00

I took a walk before dinner two evenings ago. I've got to go out before dinner now that dusk is coming on so early. The light was already fading by the time I got to an old field near my house, but there was still enough light to photograph a beautiful poison ivy vine scrambling up a white pine trunk.

In the opposite direction, the setting sun illuminated a meadow of goldenrod and big bluestem growing hard by a woodlot showing some autumn hues.