Day 16: more color explodes!

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BREAKING NEWS!

We are huddled inside, practicing good social distancing and in some cases totally unaware of what is happening outside.

Meanwhile, our man in the field—literally up to his fetlocks in the field—reports that intense color can be found flooding local meadows and if it looks like good old Classic Yellow French’s flowing over a warm salty bagel, you wouldn't be far off. And that does not mean you are craving a food you cannot have because the bagel shop is closed.

According to Green Deane’s “Eat the Weeds” website wild mustard is native to Eurasia and has been cultivated for 5,000 years. It was brought to America in the 1700s as an edible because all parts of the plant are eaten in all parts of the world.

Wild mustard is in the cabbage family of Cruciferous vegetables and has become widespread and varied like tomatoes and was widely enjoyed on family tables as a potherb until someone labeled it a weed. (The same is true for dandelions.)

If you look at your bottle of Classic French’s in the fridge you’ll see the top ingredients are vinegar and mustard seeds. The different varieties of mustard plant seeds have different tastes, but all have some sort of zip.

Our man in the field is keeping this Cherokee Farms location a secret in case times get truly hard, it would serve as his salad bar.

More on this developing story as it comes into our Nature Calling news desk.  

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Day 15: color explodes

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BREAKING NEWS!

Color has exploded outside! And we are still socially isolated inside? I know. Bummer. But just so you know. Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) is now in bloom throughout the Tennessee Valley. Considered either a tall shrub or a short tree—you can decide that one—the light to dark magenta flowers appear before the heart-shaped leaves.

Found throughout the Southeast, with Tennessee being at the center of its range, redbud is the first blast of intense color to explode in Appalachia. Found naturally in the understory of mixed forests and along hedgerows of farmland, redbud makes an excellent native landscape ornamental.

And if you look closely at the top photo, you will see the flowers do not form at the tips of the branches as do most flowering trees, instead, they are "cauliflory." [Great new Scrabble word in case you dust off your set for a game later this evening.] It means they bloom along their stems and branches. Neat trick.

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Day 14: Nick gets lifer

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OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT!

Serious birders—a term preferred over birdwatcher by serious birders—keep “Life Lists,” noting the time and place they see a new species. Sometimes they even get a photo to document the moment. And sometimes it is a fairly common species but one just not easy to find or see, like a diminutive Eastern Screech-owl because they are most active at night long after serious birders go to bed.

Local naturalist Nick Stahlman recently tallied a new life bird at Victor Ashe Park. And using what's called the "Stahlman Method" of taking a photo with his cell phone through one barrel of his binoculars got the above great photograph of a red phase.

Who needs a $3,000 telephoto lens?

Congratulations, Nick.

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Day 13: morning has broken

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HEADLINE NEWS!

As remarkable as it may sound, the sun came up yet again "like the first morning. Blackbird has spoken like the first bird. Praise for the singing. Praise for the morning. Praise for them springing fresh from the world."

The blackbird was an American robin which is not really a robin but a thrush, but the sun was indeed the sun. 

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Day 12: sun came up

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BREAKING NEWS!

This just in to our bureau desk: Annie got it right last night: the sun did indeed come up this morning over South Knoxville as seen from Chapman Ridge. The near perfect sphere of hot plasma rose at 7:30 A.M. for all to witness who happened to be outside practicing proper social distancing.

Since we have had overcast days for about a month many of those that saw it were astonished. 

Roughly 93 million miles away, the Sun is a G-type main-sequence star or yellow dwarf. It's surface temperature is roughly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At its core it is something like 27 million degrees Fahrenheit but let's not go there. And as any fourth grader can tell you it is the center of our Solar System but not our universe. 

“The Sun currently fuses 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, converting 4 million tons of matter into energy every second as a result,” says Mr. Wiki. Energy to warm our days.

“You can bet your bottom dollar there will be sun,” said Miss Annie.

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Day 10: two turkeys for dinner

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BREAKING NEWS!

While preparing to eat dinner tonight two wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) came to join Lynne and Bob Davis (Homo sapiens). Perhaps the largest birdfeeder birds you’ll attract to your yard, they lack the pazazz of a goldfinch, still they were a treat to watch.

It has only been a decade or so since wild turkeys simply were hard to find in Tennessee but recovery efforts led by TWRA and US Fish & Wildlife have brought them back.

I write about the colorful transatlantic history of wild turkeys and why they are even called "turkeys" in my first UT Press book Natural Histories. 

Thanks, Lynne! 

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Day 7: at least, bluebirds are doing well

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As we settle into our new reality, our new mandates. Stay at home. Self-quarantine, self-isolate and do not get the virus and/or pass it on. What then do we do? 

They seem to want us to stream. But isn’t that just watching TV for 12 hours a day and true, I have watched more than my share of Andy Griffith, but every now and then we all need to go back to Mayberry. Jeez, life was so simple then.  

Instead, we could read or write a book. Work one of those jigsaw puzzles hidden in the closet or, maybe, and this is the entire point of this: watch the birds just outside our windows.

This morning, a yellow-rumped warbler in breeding plumage took a splashy dunk in my birdbath. And I have been having great enjoyment in watching Eastern bluebirds come to my suet feeders. Why? I live in the woods and we all know that bluebirds prefer grassland and open non-woody habitat. It says to me that their population is doing well and they are reaching out to places they would not normally go.

We can take pride in this because roughly 100 years ago their population was in decline. That was reversed when people started putting up nest boxes for them. And speaking of Mayberry and the 1960s, the first bluebird box trail came to our area in 1968. That's when TVA biologists that included Ben Jaco and Dick Fitz set up a pickup truck full below Norris Dam.

Everything needs a sense of shelter and a home to stay in when a scary pandemic is all around us. 

Recently, I received several bluebird photos from Betty Thompson, our eye to the sky in Kansas. And for the photo at the top, she didn’t even have to leave her home.

Thanks, Betty!

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Day 2: live deliberately

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” from Walden: Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.

So it comes down to this. We have our new marching orders. To stay healthy, we must stay apart and only venture out into the world for “essential things." 

Who would have ever guested it would have come to this?

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Day 1: baby season has begun

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As we settle into our new realty, avoiding crowds, groups and going anywhere people tend to assemble, there are still things that need to be done.

I am a volunteer transporter, shuttling injured and orphan animals from UT Veterinary Hospital to wildlife rehabilitator Lynne McCoy in Jefferson County. It’s a 45-minute drive and my passengers are boxed and generally quiet…scared. Well, wouldn't you be.

Orphan baby season has begun and yesterday it was two young rabbits. Lynne has already taken in several young squirrels. Most will grow up with her constant feeding and she'll turn them loose to begin their wild albeit un-pampered lives.

If you find baby bunnies it is really best to leave them alone. Mom only feeds them twice a day and the rest of the time she's away from the nest feeding herself, so they are not orphaned, merely hidden. Mom knows where they are at. 

McCoy has been doing this since 1973, and last year she took care of 190 squirrels and 373 rabbits.

We are all proud of you, Lynne!

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brain overload

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Stop!

Don't read this!

Don't! Don't! Don't!

It could be the one piece of information that overloads your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and compromises your brain's ability to make good decisions today. You may end up ordering a double dusted cinnamon mocha latte and you really don't like double dusted cinnamon mocha lattes. All you really want is a cup of coffee with cream.

Henry David, the master of Walden, says to keep it simple.

Actually our brains have changed very little since our innovative ancestors the Cro-Magnon people began to paint aurochs on the cave walls at Lascaux in France. And that was some 32,000 years ago. Why did they do it? They were passing on information, stories. "Big beasts! Big horns! Bad!"

Flash forward: In our twitter, Google, Facebook, web-surfing, blogosphere world, the Information Age is inundating our paleolithic brains with too much information. In an article appearing in Newsweek in 2011 titled, "Brain Freeze: How the deluge of information paralyzes our ability to make good decisions" writer Sharon Begley reports that recent studies conducted in various venues all seem to prove that too much information is just that...too much. The end result: we make poorer and poorer decisions. Our brains freeze at critical moments.

Is there a brand new lemon yellow SUV parked in your driveway? What were you thinking?

Perhaps you should turn off your computer and go outside and sit under a tree. Or better still maybe go creatively express yourself by painting a prehistoric cow on the side of your house.

Your over-taxed brain will thank me.


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Ephemeral spring?

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With climate change, it is a hard to predict spring. We know we will have one but will it be early or truncated? Will the woodland wildflowers have a proper amount of time to bloom, be pollinated and set seeds?

At any rate, the ephemerals are ephemeral. They have to emerge and bloom before the leaves come back to the trees. It is their moment in the sun. I write about them in my third book Ephemeral by Natural…well, that was a no-brainer.

Naturalist Lynne Davis sent me a photo of hepatica (Hepatica nobilis) blooming at William Hastie Natural Area and I found cutleaved toothwort (Cardamine concatenata)  in bloom on the Homesite at Ijams Nature Center. So we have to think that spring has begun.

Thanks, Lynne. 

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Birds-of-prey talks

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A special thank you to those who attending my two Identifying Local Birds of Prey talks in the past week.

Of course, the presentations included Doc, the state-permitted, non-flighted American kestrel under my care. Doc seems to enjoy the road trips and the enrichment of getting out and sharing his story and the current status of kestrels, the smallest falcon found in the Americas. After his injury a year ago, he is now a wildlife ambassador for the state of Tennessee.  

We also learned how to quickly identify the vultures, owls, hawks and other falcons found in our valley. And with the hawks: the difference between the Buteos and Accipiters. We have two species from each genus here year round.

This is a good time of the year to focus on this topic with the leaves still off the trees and the raptors being more observable.

The two talks were well attended with a total of 127 people giving up watching Jeopardy! for one evening.  

First, thank you to my friends at the University of Tennessee Arboretum and to Janet and Michelle for inviting us.


And second thank you to the good folks with the Tellico Village Naturalists Club and to Lynda for inviting us.

UT Arboretum

Tellico Village Naturalists Club

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