camera shy? Nope

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Working with live animals on live TV is like a trapeze act without a net. You never know what's going to happen.

This afternoon for me it was a live interview with WBIR reporter Emily Stroud for their Live@5@4 hour from Ijams. The last time Emily and I worked together we were looking for a groundhog on Groundhog Day, easier said than done. This time we were talking about snakes and my Snake-ology class scheduled for Sunday, June 4 at 2 at the nature center. (I also host Duck-ology, Butterfly-ology, Spider-ology, Turtle-ology, Dragonfly-ology, Owl-ology, Lizard-ology, etc.)

Our plan: Emily and I were to start out holding the snake together then during the interview switch it all over to her. In this case, it was a captive-bred corn snake which was bred to have bright colors. A wild corn snake (Pantherophis guttatus) is much darker, more red-brown than orange.

Most snakes are wary of people. But this snake has been held all of its life, so it is friendly, even inquisitive. My only concern was keeping it relatively contained in the shot and somewhat facing the camera. Snakes often disappear into my shirt. It was a warm day and reptiles are more active when they heat up. But much to our surprise, and even glee, it was not camera shy but took a real interest in the camera lens. Longtime WBIR videographer Brian Holt got a great close-up.

- Photos by Ijams Education Director Jennifer Roder and Live@4@5 producer Lee Ann Bowman

- To see the complete WBIR interview, click: Emily talks snake.

- And last year's interview about Snake-ology, click: Black rat snake.

WBIR Live@5@4 reporter Emily Stroud with corn snake

 

Emily, it looks like our snake is disappearing into the camera.

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big bug news

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Photo by Sofia Tomov

It's been a big bug news week at the nature center. Brood X of 17-year cicadas are emerging from the ground four years early. They are not due until 2021. Is it a sign the end of days is near or simply that the red-eyed, gold-winged hemipterans are confused.

Has anything else confusing happened in the past year?

For more of the Ijams story, click: Geeky Nature Nerd News. 

Thank you, Sofia for the wonderful photo!

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Ijams Cicada news got bigger

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Ijams Education Director Jen Roder examines the specimens collected 
in May 2004

It's a male, but is it M. cassini
or M. septendecula?

Our Big Bug news just got bigger. It got national. But the mystery deepens.

You do not want to miss this program. We are scrambling to pull it together. Because it's late, call me to register. The national cicada people are going to fly here next week to help us figure out what's going on at Ijams.

The 17-year cicadas that are climbing out of the ground are four years early. They are not due until 2021. Jen located the handful I collected in May 2004 and discovered that 13 years ago we had two different species emerging at the same time. News to me.

"In 2004, there was definitely Magicicada septendecium. It's the big one. The little one is either Magicicada cassini or Magicicada septendecula. I'm leaning toward cassini, but it's hard to tell. The two species are significantly smaller," writes Jen. Their call is the defining identifier and the 2004 specimens are mute.

So what is happening at Ijams now, four years early? Is it one species or two like in 2004? So far it is mostly males emerging. Jen has heard one calling, by Sunday there should be a lot more out and calling.

Sign up for our Cicada-ology Pop-up Program and learn all about our annual cicadas and these 17 year ones in particular. After a short indoor program we will go on a great cicada hunt.

(865) 577-4717, ext. 119

Call and leave me a voicemail. Leave your name and the number of people with you. You can pay (Members $5, non-members $8) at the Ijams front desk on Sunday afternoon. Be a part of the cicada fun!

Help us solve the mystery. This is nature nerd cool stuff.

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cicadas appear when none should be

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Fresh from the ground this morning. Photo by Jen Roder

Stop the presses! Nature is amazing!

Brood X emerging at Ijams...four years early!

Recently we have noticed a few small, black cicadas around Ijams. For those of you that know anything about cicadas, this might seem strange. Why, you ask? Because the small black cicadas are periodical cicadas that only emerge every 17 years here in Knoxville. We are in the range of Brood X, a population of cicadas that isn't due to emerge until 2021. 

But there is a known phenomenon of "straggler" populations that emerge early, depending on the weather and soil conditions. And that is happening now! As Ijams' favorite senior naturalist and self-confessed ten-year-old (c'est moi) just quipped, "this is so dang cool!"

I wrote an entire chapter about periodical cicadas and Brood X in Natural Histories, my first book published by the University of Tennessee Press. It's a topic I am pretty passionate about.

If you want to learn more, join me this Sunday, May 14 at 2 p.m. for a pop-up program that will teach you about cicadas and even take a walk to observe the periodical cicadas in action! I'm even going to serve ice-cold cicada-ade (made from limes) to refresh us. You won't want to miss this program...it only happens once every 13-17 years and who knows if I will be around that much longer?

For program information and registration, click here: http://ijams.org/…/ijams-pop-up-program-brood-x-cicadas-at…/

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Yakima Valley exit

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I saw little on my drive into Yakima after leaving the Cascade Mountains. It was after dark. My return to Seattle was more dramatic. And more basaltic. 

Quoting from the interpretive sign, "Twenty-five million years ago, this was a land of meandering streams and lush, rolling hills. Then came the first lava flow. Long cracks and vents opened in the earth and lava flooded the land spreading like water. The lava cooled into basalt. Lakes, ponds and streams reformed on the new relatively flat surface. Then lava again flooded the area.

The time between lava flows was sometimes only months; sometimes hundreds, even thousands of years. Each eruption reset the clock in a cycle that continued for 15 to 20 million years.

The layers of basalt visible in the valley walls are part of one of the largest lava fields in the world. It covers over 200,000 square miles in Washington, Oregon and Idaho and is reported to be over 10,000 (some sources say 17,000) feet thick in places."

Then everything settled down and the Yakima River took over slowly carving out the wide valley on its way to merge into the Columbia River. 

Indeed, this Smoky Mountain hillbilly was in a strange new land. 

A stranger in strange land

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Cowiche Canyon

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I felt like a “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a hospitable land but still foreign to me. In this case, I borrow the analogy from the 1961 sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein.

The protagonist in that story was Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians.

There is perhaps only a few times in your life when you are plopped down in a place as alien as Valentine was. My sensibilities of Mother Earth were shaped by the 400-plus million year old Ordovician limestone, sandstone and shale that serves as the bedrock of my East Tennessee home. All are sedimentary rocks formed at the bottom of a shallow antediluvian sea. That's old Earth, the Age of Crinoids. So I have an ancient mooring.

But here I walked through Cowiche Canyon north of Yakima, Washington, a stranger in a sunny strange land. My gracious hosts and guides were Eric and Chandra Anderson and all around us were the sagebrush slopes of a high plateau made almost exclusively of basalt and andesite; two forms of igneous rock spewed from deep within the earth only 14 to 17 million years ago; babies really in geologic time. So comparatively speaking, it’s new Earth, post Jurassic, indeed Miocene, the Age of Horses. 

Here’s the interesting closure to my Heinlein opening. That mix of basalt and andesite is very close to the composition of the Martian surface, Valentine's home. It was perhaps as close to walking on Mars-like terrain as I well ever journey except here the sky was not pink, it was azure. And there was life everywhere around us. The first blush of spring was just beginning to present itself.

Cowiche Canyon was craved by the erosive action of Cowiche Creek and the morning we were there it was carving still, heavy flow with the melting snows of last winter in that part of the “Evergreen State.” In this section of Washington the towering firs and pines of the Cascade Mountains and Gifford Pinchot National Forest to the west give away to stubborn shrub-steppe, sagebrush slopes and jagged cliffs of weathering basalt columns.

There’s a stark beauty to this part of the country; a vastness to the Western landscape. You get a sense of the enormity of it all, a large snapshot of the planet itself revealed. There is really no other way to describe it. You look out, far and wide. 

To look out in the Appalachians you need to climb to the top of a mountain and if the Smokies are not smokey you can look out. But most of the time you are in a hollow between two ridges and you can only look up. The Smokies are more insular, to some even claustrophobic.

Cowiche also had a subtle nuance of color, earth tones because the new earth lies naked and exposed. From the gold lichen that adorns the rock to the sprinkle of yellow vernal wildflowers just beginning to sally forth, all seemed golden as such moments often do. The gnarled shrubs that cling to the land are probably as old as the towering Douglas firs I drove through on my way into Yakima Valley.

Memories are made from such sojourns. A network of synapses formed in my brain labeled—if they had labels—"Morning walk in Cowiche Canyon, 22 April 2017."

Thank you for the memory, Eric and Chandra


For another post from my trip, click: Yakima Valley College.

YVC anthropology professor Eric Anderson

Chandra and Eric Anderson

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dented box turtle report

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Dented box turtle was last seen hightailing it into these woods

“Nature seemed to be doing a pretty good job on her own,” said Ijams staff veterinarian Dr. Louise Conrad. 

As it turns out, the rescued injured box turtle I reported on a few days ago did NOT need to be rescued.

Visitors at the nature center found him on one of our trails with a dent in his carapace. That was alarming. Dr. Louise promptly took him to the University of Tennessee Veterinary Hospital for x-rays, blood work and observation. 

The blood tests turned up no infection or parasites; in fact, the results were that of a totally healthy box turtle. X-rays determined that the injury was an old one and the shell was well on the way to knitting itself back together. And there was no apparent penetration of the internal body cavity at the time of the injury.

The turtle will always have a dented shell, just like you if you broke your leg and did not go to a doctor to have it set properly, it would grow back crooked. That’s the way nature works.

Often animals that appear to be injured or orphaned simply do not need human interference. Baby birds that fall out of nests are found and fed by their parents, even on the ground. And a clutch of baby bunnies found in the tall grass simply needs to be left alone, mom is just away but she’ll be back. 

On the other hand, any obviously injured animal should to be taken directly to UT Vet Hospital on Neyland Drive. There are veterinarians there 24-hours a day, seven days a week. UT’s Wild Animal Rescue program is a free service, but it is costly. If you would like to donate money to help them defray costs, click: Wild Animal Medical Treatment

Ijams is not permitted to treat injured animals, but we are permitted by TWRA to adopt an animal that cannot heal well enough to be returned to the wild. We currently are caring for an opossum with a lame front leg, two half-blind owls, four other birds with wing injuries including a turkey vulture that was hit by a truck in North Carolina, plus many others including three box turtles. Their care is also expensive. If you would like to donate to our Animal Care Fund, click Ijams Donation and choose the “Donate Online” option. In the comment box write “Animal Care.”

Ijams has complete faith in the goodness of humanity. And the concern over this poor turtle underscores that faith. Our original post has garnered over 55,000 views and over 160 comments. Yes, some unknown person probably caused the turtle’s injury; but he/she represents a tiny minority. 

So, what about the dented box turtle? He has been returned to the woods, his home. Being in the hospital must have been scary. The last time we saw him he was “high-tailing” it—awkward for a critter whose tail is less than an inch off the ground—into the woods. (See above photo.)

Thank you for all your well wishes!

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