Photo of the Day

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4:26 A.M. 

Grandma Pearl's Queen of the Night waited to the last minute, just before the weather changed and the cold rushed into the valley, to bloom one more time this season. (More on this later.)

Epiphyllum oxypetalum or queen of the night is a species of cactus and one of the most cultivated species in the genus. The Queen blooms rarely and only at night, and its flowers wilt before dawn. Though it is sometimes referred to as a night-blooming cereus, it is not closely related to any of the species in the tribe Cereeae, such as Selenicereus, that are more commonly known as night-blooming cereus. All Cereus species bloom at night and are terrestrial plants; all Epiphyllum species are usually epiphytic, they grow on trees. (Wiki)

My plants are direct descendents of the plants grown by my Grandmother: Pearl Ogle Bales of Gatlinburg.

Photo taken at 4:26 A.M. October 31.

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poor glued wren

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Glue traps!

Sticky. Fatal. Please do NOT use them. Yuck! 

Yes, they may catch a mouse but it is a horrible way for the small rodent to die. Slow. Agonizing. Scary. GHASTLY! But glue traps also catch other animals including birds. And it is just as gruesome for them.

I have a state education permit issued by TWRA, not a rehabilitator's permit. But from time-to-time I get a call to transport an injured animal from UT Veterinary Hospital to local wildlife rehabilitator Lynne McCoy in Jefferson County. 

This morning, it was a Carolina wren that had been found glued in a trap. UT was able to clean off the goo but the poor songbird lost a lot of feathers, especially its secondary flight feathers on the trailing edge of its wings. For the time being, it cannot fly.  

Lynne will care for it: protect and feed the passerine until it is able to molt and regrow its lost plumage. And then, return it to the wild. Most of her rescues have a happy ending.

Wiki Media

Yet, to add further misery to this miserable story, Carolina wrens tend to mate for life. So somewhere there could be a second wren mourning the loss of its partner.
   
Please do not use glue traps! They are a nasty way to die. A slow death by starvation or panic sets in and they die of a heart attack or they get their nostrils blocked by the glue and then suffocate. 

Think about it!

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a day at reflection

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Thank you to Reflection Riding Arboretum & Nature Center for inviting me to speak at their annual Fall Plant Sale. 

Located in Chattanooga, the environmental education site is as picturesque as the name suggests. My topic came straight out of my third UT Press book Ephemeral by Nature. The here one minute and gone the next behavior of ruby-throated hummingbirds make the 4-ounce dynamos highly ephemeral. And at the time of the festival, they were still humming from one feeder to the next. 

But today they are almost all gone. Risking a migration across the open water of the Gulf of Mexico, a non-stop flight of up to 500 miles that can take roughly 18 to 22 hours. How is that even possible? Each hummingbird flies solo to Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua or one of their other winter homes. And even there they are here and gone. Hummingbirds are the epitome of ephemeral.

If you are looking for a miracle in motion, look no farther. 

Also thank you to festival volunteer and friend Chris Mahoney for working out the details of my visit and to the nature center's Corey Hagen and Taylor Berry for their hospitality.

Hummingbird photo by Wayne Mallenger.

Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center in Chattanooga.

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New Valley Bluebird Chapter

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Everybody loves bluebirds. And because we do we have brought them back from a low ebb in the 1920s with the introduction and widespread use of nest boxes. The creation of "bluebird trails" in 1926 is credited to Thomas E. Musselman of Quincy, Illinois. And from there his idea spread, eventually finding its way to East Tennessee in the 1960s.

And today, a special thank you to Chuck James and Chuck Cruickshank for inviting me to speak about "Monarch Butterflies" at their first fall meeting of the newly revamped Valley Chapter of the Tennessee Bluebird Society.

The new chapter of the Tennessee Bluebird Society will retain their interest in East Tennessee cavity-nesters but expand their focus a bit to include pollinators including butterflies. 

While the new chapter will have a few meetings and presentations, most of their focus will be hands-on activities and field trips. 

Why just talk about nature when you can get out into it?

Best of luck to you all!

Chuck James and Chuck Cruickshank

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Tremont celebrates 50 years

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What is citizen science? It’s everyday people like you and me collecting data for scientific analysis. Just plain folks doing science. You do not have to have a PhD. 

The Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont is celebrating 50 years of connecting people to nature through classes, workshops, hikes and citizen science programs. People of all ages attend Tremont’s offerings. I especially like their monarch outings because of the wide range of ages out in the field looking for butterflies. I am only one of sixteen volunteer facilitators who take turns hosting the monarch activities.   

Originally created by naturalist Wanda DeWaard in 1998, this monarch tagging initiative is one of Tremont’s most popular offerings under the direction of citizen science coordinator Erin Canter.

Monarch butterflies have become perhaps the most recognized butterfly in the world because of their herculean migration in eastern North America. At this time of the year all adult monarchs migrate from as far north as Southern Canada to the mountaintops of Mexico. This remarkable journey was discovered by Fred and Norma Urquhart, the original monarch citizen scientists who dedicated 30 years of their lives in the pursuit of the monarch mystery. Just where do they spend their winters? How was it figured out? By affixing small numbered tags to their wings to track their movements.  

Why is this still being done? To greater delineate their exact migration routes.

Thank you to everyone who attended this session on a very hot day and thank you to my co-facilitators Wanda and Ruth Anne and Erin for keeping us all organized.

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a little good news

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And now for something completely different: a little environmental good news.

If you spend several hours a day monitoring the news, you are surely convinced that human beings have lost their way. We have all become scoundrels, robbers, killers, crooks, racketeers, scammers, hackers, liars, cheats, frauds, corrupt to the core.

But that is just not true. The vast bulk of us are good-hearted people. Good friends. Good neighbors. Good samaritans.    

Case in point. If we hear that a species is in trouble, we rally to do whatever we can to help it. In the 1920s, Eastern bluebirds were in trouble, we built boxes, now they are not. Bald eagles were once in trouble, we outlawed DDT, now they are not. Monarch butterflies were declining so we rallied and planted more milkweed. Even the snail darter, once the poster child for endangered species, is about to be taken off the Endangered Species List. (Read my first UT Press book: Natural Histories for the story of both bald eagles and snail darters.) 

Hurrah for our side!

And yesterday, we heard more good news out of the Wolverine State. The Kirtland's warbler was delisted, i.e. removed from the Endangered Species List. In this case, its decline was caused by habitat loss, or namely the intense reduction of its very limited range: the "young" jack pine tree forests found in Michigan and Canada. The bird was headed towards extinction only 40 years ago, but it has rallied because of efforts to bring back more of its young jack pine habitat. 

I have never seen a Kirtland's warber or a young jack pine or even Michigan, so I messaged a friend who had.

Janet Lee McKnight is the owner of The Home Decor Resale Store in the heart of Greenback. She is also a passionate birder. In 2002, she made the pilgrimage to Grayling, Michigan to see the species before it was gone. 

“I studied recordings of their song ahead of time so I would recognize it once I was amongst the jack pines where they nest," Janet remembered. 

"And sure enough, when I heard that first song, I was able locate the singing male and see him through my binoculars. He was big for a warbler and so stunning in his black and yellow breeding plumage. I felt it worth the 723 miles I had to drive to see him, he was that beautiful.”

Do the math. That's a 1,446 mile round trip to see a bird. I said she was a passionate birder!

Yes. A little good news.

Photos of the Kirtland's warbler from Wiki Media © Jeol Trick 

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writing class takes to the heat of high ground

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Hello and hi, to Dr. Mark Littmann's environmental writing class at the University of Tennessee. We met recently outside at High Ground Park near campus in search of an environmental topic for the day.

And it was so easy to find with the afternoon temperature hitting 94 degrees on a date that normally averages 64 degrees, a full 30 degrees hotter. The last time it was that sultry on October 3 was 1884, just a short time after the Civil War and the need to maintain Fort Higley on the high ridge top had ended. 

For this field trip, I served as host and source for the story and answered an array of questions about the ecology of the site, plants, trees, birds and other wildlife. Just how do they survive during a prolonged dry spell? It is not easy. 

Good luck to you all. And thank you for inviting me Dr. Littmann.

   

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hot day, few monarchs

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On our second trip back to Cades Cove as part of the monarch tagging project for the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont we found more hot, dry conditions and some flying insects. Yet, most of the butterflies were non-monarchs. 

It was believed that the stationary dome of high pressure with little wind was keeping the long distance travelers roosting to our north. Any migrant needs a good tailwind to help push them along.
  

Confused Eusarca
Wiki Media. John B

Still, every outing with young naturalists is an opportunity to teach with field guides in hand. The most abundant lepidopteran netted that day was actually a small yellowish-green geometer moth oddly named the Confused Eusarca (Eusarca confusaria) identified by Wanda DeWaard. 

The geometer moths are so called because their caterpillars, or inchworms, appear to be measuring the earth. And at 24,901 miles in circumference, it is going to take the small caterpillars awhile to measure. I'll do the math. The earth is 1,577,727,360 inches from point A all the way around to point A again.  

Thanks to Wanda, Ruth Anne, Erin and all the rest of the monarch hunters.

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