Natural Histories: osage orange

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This time of the year, the hedge apples are falling. 

UT Press writes, Natural Histories "illuminates in surprising ways the complicated and often vexed relationships between humans and their neighbors in the natural world."

Perhaps the most vexing encounter in the book between humans and the natural world occurred when the boys in gray engaged a simple hedge planted due west of the Harpeth River n Middle Tennessee.

On November 30, 1864—153 years ago this month—the horrific Battle of Franklin was fought south of Nashville. An osage orange hedge row played a key role in the outcome stopping one division of the advancing Southern army "dead" in their tracks. When the smoke cleared, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had lost almost 7,000 men in just five hours. (The Union army's dead and wounded numbered significantly less: only 2,326.) Here's a snippet from my book:

"The almost forgotten Battle of Franklin was a death knell. “This is where the Old South died,” says activist Robert Hicks, “and we were reborn as a nation.”

I visited the site on this date in 2004. It was a rainy day much like today. Here's another passage from the book:

"Leaving Lewisburg Pike, I walked along the rain soaked streets and soon found the two aged osage orange trees still growing in the vicinity of the railroad line. Historian Cartwright had told me about the old trees just an hour before. Both were perhaps descendants of the hedgerow that stopped Loring and, as such, were living monuments. It was a circuitous chain of events that moved osage orange from its native Red River home to this historic point of all out chaos; turn back the clock and replay the era, day by day, and it would not have unfolded in exactly the same way. I paused just long enough to admire the towering presence of the elderly trees; and as the rain began to fall heavy once again, I zipped up my coat, turned and walked away."

Excerpts from my book Natural Histories published by the University of Tennessee Press.

The fruit of an osage orange looks like a green brain

and probably tastes like one too,

although, I must admit, I've sampled neither.

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natural histories: feathers

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"Her dark fingers worked nimbly with the innate accuracy that can only be achieved by doing the same highly skilled task over and over. Or perhaps it was cultural knowledge and her hands simply knew what to do. Beside her lay a pile of soft and wide contour feathers. A closer inspection of the heap would have also revealed a multitude of earth tones: bronze, gold, amber, rust, umber, copper, terra cotta; colors that looked good against the Native American’s burnt sienna skin.

Using strands of tree bark, she lashed the lower shaft of each feather—known as the calamus—to a network of plant fibers, an interwoven foundation that in itself took hours to weave…In the end, she stood up and wrapped her creation around her shoulders checking its length. She was pleased. "

Excerpt from Natural Histories published by the University of Tennessee Press

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natural histories: amphibian decline

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The spring peepers have been peeping their little hearts out at the nature center the past few evenings.

Although the frog populations at Ijams seem healthy, worldwide that is not the case. Here's an excerpt from my book Natural Histories.

"Biologists that study amphibians and reptiles are called herpetologists. Like the scientists that study birds, herpetologists have been keeping records of amphibian populations for years. In the late 1980s some of these specialists realized they weren’t seeing or hearing the numbers of amphibia they once had. These declines were believed to be localized because no one had ever attempted a global survey. That’s when a group including Jeff Houlahan with the Ottawa-Carleton Institute of Biology in Ontario, Canada began to pull together data from reports and published accounts from all over the globe. In time the study accumulated information on 936 amphibian populations from 200 researchers located in 37 countries in eight regions of the planet. What they discovered affirmed their worst fears: the declines weren’t just local, but global.

Amphibian populations—frogs and toads, salamanders and newts—have been decreasing since 1960: overall a steep drop from 1960 to 1966 followed by a smaller but steady slide between 1966 and 1997. The initial sharp downswing in the early 1960s was approximately 15 percent a year. It was followed by a slow fall of 2 percent a year from 1966 to the late 1990s.

The global declines weren’t exactly the same in all locations. Both North American and Western Europe showed population loss for the six years after 1960, but only in North America did the slow decline continue after 1966. The initial decline in the early 1960s was more dramatic in Western Europe than North America but the continued slump had lasted longer in the latter until by 1997 both continents had lost about the same in overall numbers.

If you do the math, using the annual 15 percent loss for the years 1960 to 66, followed by the 2 percent annual loss from 1966 to 97 the total decline is over 80 percent in just over 40 years. Of the 936 amphibian populations in the study, 61 had disappeared altogether.

That’s startling, but do we know the cause?"




- Natural Histories published by UT Press.

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natural histories: West Nile virus

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UPDATE:

Early in my book Natural Histories, I report on West Nile virus. In fact, I close the chickadee chapter by saying, “At this point, no one knows what the long-term affect of West Nile virus will be on chickadees or other birds. Recent loses may just be a temporary blip on the radar. It may be commonplace for their population to fluctuate.”

I wrote that in 2003. Seven years later we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. The avian epidemic—it can also infect horses and humans—has slowly lost its punch.

The most recent issue of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s BirdScope reports that “West Nile virus hit American crows particularly hard. When the disease first appeared in New York City, in summer 1999, nearly 5,500 crows died in four months. Tests suggested the disease was 100 percent fatal to crows. Many other species, from jays and magpies to gulls and chickadees, also proved susceptible. Millions of birds died as West Nile swept across the continent in just five years.”

Ten years later: “In a new analysis of the virus’s effects on American crows, Cornell Lab researches learned that West Nile virus became less virulent as it raced westward across North America. They also found that crows in diverse habitats were less likely to come down with the disease than crows in species-poor areas.”

This suggests that habitats with a high bio-diversity are better able to mitigate the pathogen’s effects, diluting it so to speak.

From the point of view of the virus—and admittedly, that's a narrow point of view—it's not advantageous if your host dies. Host dies, virus dies. It's counterproductive, particularly if the infected host dies so quickly that the pathogen has not had time to jump to a new one. It's better if the sickened carrier lives and moves about so that the virus can spread and spread and spread, to an increasing number of new hosts.

Crows breathe sigh of relief: their populations are

recovering from affects of West Nile virus.

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Battle of Franklin

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"The almost forgotten Battle of Franklin was a death knell. “This is where the Old South died,” says activist Robert Hicks, “and we were reborn as a nation.” Leaving Lewisburg Pike, I walked along the rain soaked streets and soon found the two aged osage orange trees still growing in the vicinity of the railroad line. Historian Cartwright had told me about the old trees just an hour before. Both were perhaps descendants of the hedgerow that stopped Loring and, as such, were living monuments. It was a circuitous chain of events that moved osage orange from its native Red River home to this historic point of all out chaos; turn back the clock and replay the era, day by day, and it would not have unfolded in exactly the same way. I paused just long enough to admire the towering presence of the elderly trees; and as the rain began to fall heavy once again, I zipped up my coat, turned and walked away."


Excerpt from Natural Histories published by the University of Tennessee Press.

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Chota with the boys

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Whip-or-wills on Mother’s Day

“I was reading Natural Histories by Stephen Lyn Bales. And as good timing would have it, I read the chapter on Whip-or-wills on Mother’s Day in May. The story of the Cherokee Chief Oconastota was weaved into this chapter, and the place of his burial happens to be the best place in our area to hear Whip-or-wills. I was very moved by the whole chapter, and the exquisite way the author connected our history to this elusive bird. I made an impromptu decision and said to my two sons, “Let’s get in the car boys, we’re going to Chota.”

“At an hour before sunset, we headed down the trail to Chota monument. Just like the author described, we saw Orchard Orioles and Indigo Buntings as we walked. Once there, we visited the grave of Oconastota, and my boys thought it fitting to put some stones and wildflowers on his grave marker. In the center of the pillar monument was a rectangular stone slab with
a bathtub-shaped indentation. The three of us lay down in the center of the stone slab and felt the warmth of the sun still in the rock. Each boy was cradled in each arm, and we looked up at the sky and waited for the first Chuck-wills-widows to start their songs. The light faded to nothing; the Chucks were whistling their songs, and the 6-year-old boy was getting spooked by the Indian Spirits he was sure he was seeing. Then we heard the Whip-or-will. I stood by the waters edge, and cupped one hand at an ear towards the Chucks, and cupped the other ear towards the Whips, and stood in sheer joy to hear both birds at once, in such
a beautiful, sacred place.

“On the way out of the parking lot, I saw eye-shine in the road. I knew it was one of our singers, a Chuck or a Whip, which one I will never know, but a first sighting for me either way. I slowly
drove closer, and the bird flew low over the car before disappearing in the dark. I was so happy to see the bird, and so happy to end the day so beautifully. My boys will always remember how a
bird can thrill their mother.

“And from now on, I will go to Chota at sunset on Mother’s Day, hopefully with my sons. A wonderful book spawned a wonderful new tradition for a nature-loving mother and her two precious boys.”

- By Janet Lee McKnight



Respectfully reprinted from the June 2010 issue of “through the BiKNOXulars,” the newsletter for the Knoxville Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society.

Natural Histories published by UT Press.

Thanks, Janet.

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cockle bird

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It is always difficult for me to pass a common cocklebur and not think of the extinct Carolina parakeet. On the surface, the two species—one a bristle-seeded plant, the other the most colorful bird to ever fly through our skies—seem to have little in common. But the two are inexplicably linked because the spiky plant’s seeds were reportedly the birds’ favorite food. Go figure. But we all have to eat something.

Cocklebur invades farmlands and can be poisonous to livestock, including horses, cattle, and sheep. “Some domestic animals will avoid consuming the plant if other forage is present, but less discriminating animals, such as pigs, will consume the plants and then sicken and die,” reports Wiki. Poor pigs! And the seeds are the most toxic parts but the parakeets fed on them with no ill effect, yet they are the ones now extinct. But, something else did them in, not the cocklebur.

I wrote about the colorful member of the parrot family in my book Natural Histories.




- Photo of cocklebur taken along the Will Skelton Greenway at Forks of the River Wildlife Management Area.

- Painting of Carolina parakeets on cocklebur by John James Audubon.

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book talk

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I'll be doing a short talk about my book, "Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley" on Sunday, September 20 at 4 p.m. at the Betty Anne Jolly Norris Community Library in downtown Norris, Tennessee.

Please, stop by and say hello.

Thanks to library director Patrisha Austin-Halsey and Kathy Bivens for arranging the talk.




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pawpaw island

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"My visit was well timed, as it happened to be early fall, pawpaw season. I left to search for a patch I knew about on an island near downtown Sevierville.

"It was raining, at times hard and soaking, as I waded through a shallow section of the Little Pigeon River. Wandering around the tall grass on the soggy island, I wondered: Was I the first to search this place barefooted looking for food?

"I doubted it. During those long ago depression days, shoes were as hard to come by as groceries. And what about the Native Americans? The McMahan Indian Mound is located less than a mile from the secluded dollop of land."

Excerpt from my book "Natural Histories," published by UT Press.


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book discussion

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Friday morning, May 9, at 8 a.m., I will be doing a discussion about my book: Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley for the Tellico Lake Rotary at the Tellico West Conference Center in Vonore, Tennessee.

The book was published by the University of Tennessee Press.

Book signing

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As part of Educator Appreciation Week, I will be handing out information about Ijams Nature Center and signing copies of my book Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley tomorrow: Thursday, May 1, 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Booksellers located at 8029 Kingston Pike

Please stop by and say hello.

book discussion

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I will be doing a discussion about writing and my book Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee on Thursday, April 10 at 7 p.m.

book signing

As part of the “First Friday” series, I will be signing and selling my book, Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley and "Natural Histories" note cards at Mast General Store located on Gay Street in downtown Knoxville, Friday, April 4, 6 to 9 p.m. and Saturday, April 5, Noon to 3 p.m.

Please, drop by and say hello.

book discussion

I'll be discussing my book Natural Stories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley at the next meeting of the Open Door Book Club at the Fountain City Branch Library, 5300 Stanton Road, on Thursday, March 27 at 10:30 a.m.

Please drop by and say hello.