leaf and cloud

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"It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else."

- From "The Leaf and the Cloud" by poet Mary Oliver

This begs the question: Are you made of stone or water?


-Photo taken in the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River in the Sugarlands. Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

-Thanks Karen Sue.

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thanks

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It's Thanksgiving. You've got your family and friends around you, and before you is a feast with more food than you can possibly eat at one sitting. In fact, it may take several. You've got turkey, dressing, cranberries, mashed potatoes, gravy, bread, yams and your Aunt Lena's pumpkin pie.

Pumpkins have always been a part of our Thanksgiving holiday. The first festival in 1621 brought together the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, the Indian tribe who helped the Plymouth Colonists adapt to their harsh new land. The first feast was composed of fish, duck, geese, wild turkey, venison, cornbread with nuts, succotash—an Algonquian dish of shelled beans and green corn—and for dessert, pumpkin stewed in maple sap.

I once made this last dish, and it’s actually pretty good.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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lost species

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Yesterday Kathleen asked about a "beautiful book with paintings of extinct birds."

My favorite is A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World's Extinct Animals by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten. It really has more in it than birds, there are a few mammals and reptiles, but the lost feathered ones are well represented, the dodo on the cover is a fine example. Flannery wrote the tragic story of each extinct species and Schouten did the wonderful illustrations.

The book was published in 2001, so it might be a little hard to find but we still have a few copies in the Ijams gift shop.

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fading colors

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Skewered like a loggerhead shrike's grasshopper, this sweet gum leaf is impaled on a rose's thorn.

The sweet gums are some of the few trees that are still hanging onto their leaves, their colors. But that will soon change.

After Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase that, in effect, doubled the size of the United States, the new territory had to be surveyed. All of the territory east of the Mississippi River had been plotted and four meridians established. Surveyors Prospect K. Robbins and Joseph C. Brown were sent to establish the Fifth Meridian. At a site located in a black water swamp that was ninety-one degrees, three minutes and forty-two seconds West of Greenwich at a latitude of thirty-four degrees they established a starting point. This spot originally marked by two sweet gums is the beginning for all lands in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and most of Kansas, Colorado, Montana and Minnesota.

Today the location is marked by a rock in Louisiana Purchase State Park near Blackton, Arkansas.

-Photo at Ijams Nature Center.

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knock out

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I have owned a copy of “The Song of the Dodo” for several years but at 625 pages, 178 chapters it seemed a bit daunting to dive into. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day. But after reading Quammen’s ”The Reluctant Mr. Darwin,” I felt it was time to give it a go. And go I did.

I think a good editor could have probably cut this tome down to 623 pages, which is my backhanded way of saying that "TSOTD" is a monumental book on natural history, well worth the time you need to invest into all 178 chapters. You'll never look at the natural world in the same way again.

Quammen does a skillful job of balancing scientific chapters with his worldly travels and adventures, taking us to exotic places around the globe with historical or environmental significance. But the real power in the book is his exploration into the development of ecology, basically beginning when the science found its chops, i.e. the data it had been collecting was actually put to use.

After finishing “The Song of the Dodo,” I feel that I have earned the equivalent of a PhD in island biogeography. (I wonder if I can use this on my résumé?) If I had read this book 25 years ago, I would have found my way to an ecology department at some university.

Early in the book the author describes the stack of photocopies of scientific papers “weighing eighteen pounds including the staples,” he has on his desk. By his own admission, he could have used the assemblage in the back of his truck to provide extra weight on icy roads in winter but instead, Quammen chose to read them and synthesize the information for us; presenting them in layman’s terms, explaining the jargon: minimum viable population, area-species relationships, equilibrium theory, inbreeding depression, et cetera. Lucky for us he did.

By the end of the book we have a real sense of just how endangered endangered species really are. The dodo was only one of the first to go.

Powerful book. David Quammen can write compelling science with a sense of humor.

In a five star world, this is a six star book.

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red white oak

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Yikes. It comes down to this. Most of the fall color has come and gone. The golds and yellows of October have given way to deep crimsons, maroons and scarlets.

This white oak--note the rounded lobes--with red leaves has become the focal point of the parking lot at the nature center.

One of the most famous white oaks in the country was the old Charter Oak that grew in Hartford, Connecticut until 1856. The name “Charter” comes from the local legend that a cavity within the tree was used in late 1687 as a hiding place for the Constitution charter.





Historic Charter Oak in Connecticut.






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festive silk

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Most adult spiders die before winter, leaving behind their egg cases for next year. Yet, this one silk-spinner at Ijams seemed festive in its dying days, decorating a tall native grass for the holidays.

Spider silk is stronger than steel, yet flexible. Scientists have been trying to create fabric from the strands of silk but have largely failed until this year. "Time" magazine reports that British textiles expert Simon Peers and American fashion designer Nicholas Godley have succeeded in weaving a 11-feet long stretch of remarkably strong cloth.

The down-side: it took 7o people in Madagascar collecting the silk from more than a million golden orb spiders. They worked for four years at a ultimate cost of half a million dollars, so the cloth is probably not for everyday use.

-Photo at Ijams Nature Center

-Thanks Karen Sue

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