---

Ambling: “Going at a slow, easy pace; strolling; sauntering”

As far as I can recall, no one has ever told me, “Slow down; you’re going too fast!” In fact, most hikers and backpackers I’ve been with want me to pick up the pace—because they have a destination to reach, and I impede the progress.

The reason I like to amble rather than truck through the outdoors is simple: I want to savor every part of the God’s creation I’m in, and like Thoreau, I want to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” around me.

This “Ambling”  page is where I periodically post the marrow I’ve discovered in my outdoor experiences. If you’re not in a hurry, amble with me and some of my colleagues.

See you outdoors!

Dean

[If you have a Facebook account, you can go to this WonderOfCreation Facebook page to see a group of photo albums.]

 

 

---

The Cedar That Isn’t

Sometimes I pester my botanist friend Lytton Musselman when we are in the field by asking him to tell me the common name of the plant he’s examining. He typically says, “I don’t know; all I need to know is its scientific name. Besides, common names are often misleading, if not totally wrong.” That fact, I learned, is especially true in reference to trees.

Did you know, for instance, that North America does not have a true native cedar? “Wait,” you might say. “I have two different kinds of cedars in my yard.” Actually, unless you have an imported tree, you probably don’t.

In Michigan we call two trees “cedars”: the Eastern red cedar, which is really a juniper (Juniperus virginiana) and the Eastern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis), which is really a cypress. I was really bummed to learn that the pencils I love to sniff when newly sharpened and the fragrant, moth-repellant wood in my mother’s old cedar chest were from a juniper! Nonetheless, thousands of old cedar/juniper fence posts planted by farmers are still standing strong all over the eastern United States after decades of weathering because of their resistance to rot. Their red hearts are still firm and fragrant.

But what about the big cedars in the Pacific Northwest, dozens of which grace Bluebell Springs, my brother and sister-in-law’s estate on Orcas Island? Well, those are actually Thuja plicata, another cypress. And those grand “cedars” are often found growing together with stately Douglas firs—which are really not firs! They’re false firs, a fact apparent in their scientific name: pseudosuga menziesii. In John Muir’s day, the Douglas fir was often simply called the Douglas tree because no one knew for sure how to classify it.  The Latin term pseudosuga actually means “false hemlock,” but to avoid total confusion, forget that fact!

Okay, then; if North America doesn’t have cedars, where are the real cedars? First, it’s important to point out that North America does have cedars: mostly Lebanon, Atlas, and Deodar cedars. It’s just that those are imported species—some having been imported for at least a couple hundred years. If you travel around the San Francisco Bay area in particular, you will spot many majestic specimens of these cedars. (They are often in the company of grand old eucalyptus trees, icons of the California landscape that are not native to California.  They’re from Australia!) The true cedars are grown as ornamentals all over the world. Two large and awesome specimens of Lebanon and Atlas cedars create a natural portal to the campus of the Pacific Rim Institute on Washington’s Whidbey Island. The Lebanon cedar needles are greenish, and the Atlas cedar foliage is more blue. Otherwise they look almost the same: exceedingly beautiful.

Check out the facts about the true cedars at these links: Lebanon Cedar, Cedrus libani, a cedar native to Lebanon, western Syria and south central Turkey; Atlas Cedar, Cedrus atlantica, a cedar native to the Atlas Mountains of Algeria (Tell Atlas​) and Morocco; Deodar Cedar, Cedrus deodara, a cedar native to the western Himalayas; and Cyprus Cedar, Cedrus brevifolia, found in the island’s Cedar Valley in the Troodos Mountains.

I was blessed about ten years ago to be able to see huge old Lebanon cedars in their native country. I was traveling with RBC’s Day of Discovery TV team as an associate producer and script writer for the DOD series The Wonder of a Tree. The fourth and final program in that series (viewable online) includes footage shot in Lebanon, and it also features Dr. Musselman, the head of the botany department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk VA—the rascal who has ruined my faith in the common names of trees and other plants and created all this scientific clarity!

O, just ignore the island of Cyprus appended to “cedar” in the list above. “Cyprus” comes from a Greek word that has a number of different meanings and may have nothing at all to do with cypress trees—which also grow on Cyprus!

And let’s not get started with the 27 trees commonly called “ironwood”!

---

 

 

A Multi-toned Symphony

From the time I was a little boy fishing with a bobber and a worm (which I still do on occasion), I have taken every opportunity to “wet a line.” One of my wife’s favorite pictures of me is from my childhood, proudly holding up a 15-inch largemouth bass, sporting a gap-toothed grin from ear to ear.  To a 6-year-old, that’s a big catch on the old bobber and worm.

God blessed me with a wife who also enjoys being on the water and “pulling creatures up from the deep.” We both grew up fishing but did so using completely different techniques. While I was fishing with a bobber and worm, she was learning to hand-line from her grandpa (Papa), a lifelong career fisherman, on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. It has been fun and frustrating for us to learn each other’s fishing technique—mostly for me because she constantly outfishes me.

Recently, we were able to do some fishing in the Cape Canaveral area of Florida. Our guide, Captain Frank, took us and a father and son from Tennessee out to try our hand at catching redfish and whatever else was biting. Together we spent a great morning on the water. We caught redfish and other species including  crevalle jack, flounder, pinfish, and catfish; and yes, the pattern held true, my wife did indeed outfish me. She even caught “my” redfish. But I got over it, and that evening we enjoyed our catch in a delicious meal.

So often when I am on the water and my line is tight with another sleek specimen, or I am sitting at the table relishing the different flavors that resulted from a good day of fishing—there’s no fresher fish than what you’ve caught yourself—I reflect on the amazing diversity in God’s creation. God made the waters teem with living creatures and blessed them, commanding them to multiply according to their kinds.

God celebrated diversity and uniqueness in creation, so how can we do otherwise? Part of our responsibility as stewards of God’s good gift of creation is to protect, when we can, the diversity within the myriad ecosystems. All creatures individually demonstrate the goodness and creativity of our God, even more so when they are considered all together. Herman Bavinck noted in his discussion of God’s glory: “There is endless diversity in order that all of them together [created beings] might reveal the glory of God.” The next time you are on or near the water, remember that below the surface is a swimming symphony of praise to God that flashes in hues of every color in the spectrum.

Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth” (Genesis 1:20-23)

J.R. Hudberg

---

 

Swinger of Birches

Robert Frost, hands down, is my favorite American poet. For many reasons. For many poems.

While I grew up in Michigan, not New England, like Frost—and grew up in a later generation—I often feel like he felt, see like he saw, and ponder like he pondered. No poem overwhelms me with nostalgia like “Birches” [below]. It paints a portrait of my childhood better than any artist could. The first time I read it, I felt as though Frost had been behind some tree making notes on the activities of we “OAK boys”: striplings Ohlman, Andrews, and Kenfield (Dean, Dickie, and Lanny). [Bent birch image source]

The opening line of the poem captures one of the OAK boys favorite activities: tree bending. Our woods didn’t have birches, so we used tall but thin beech, maple, and hickory trees. We would shinny up these skinny saplings that already had rough lives striving to reach the canopy for their share of sunlight before dying from lack of light. We would climb some twenty feet or so until we felt the sapling begin to bend. At that point, gripping with both arms and legs, we would start the tree to swaying, like those circus performers on tall poles, and attempt to guess at which point we could allow our legs to swing out so our weight would overcome the resistance of the trunk and allow us to ride gently down to the ground. Letting go of it, the tree top would then snap back up—but always bent in the direction of the boy it had gently let down. Never again would it bend but in that direction. When we had made it so limber it could no longer give us the thrill we wanted, we’d go to the next inviting prospects. A few hours of that would leave a dozen or so saplings bent every-which-way in the forest understory.

There were, of course, a few risks in this sport. First, you had to know that it was not smart to choose a box elder or a willow, which would snap instead of bend. And your grip had to be strong. But the biggest risk was what Frost referred to as learning not to “launch out too soon.” Because what would happen if you let your legs swing out before your weight would overpower the resistance of the trunk is that instead of dropping you to the ground in the direction you had intended, it would snap you back like an apple on a twig and try its best to throw you off in the opposite direction at about twice the speed of your original thrust. If you failed to get your legs back around the trunk and hold on literally for “dear life,” you were going to be flung somewhere into the woods at the victorious sapling’s discretion. My worst crash was into the branches of a thornapple tree, the result of which was a late afternoon visit to the doctor’s office where an inch-long thorn had to be wrenched from my skinny arm with a medical “pliers,” my mother’s tweezers having failed to make it budge.

Those memories are stirred up in the fall when the threat of ice storms increases in our part of the country. Though the ice can create havoc with power and phone lines, such storms are often followed by bright sunny days in which every twig becomes a piece of classy, glassy art. Usually by midday the ice-encased limbs start shedding their “crystal shells.” Enjoy this piece of early 20th century sentiment:

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows–
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
—From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

Masting Trees

A friend told me last week that he suspected we’d have a rough winter, “because the oaks in my yard are dropping a huge amount of acorns.” The notion that the size of nut/seed production in the fall correlates with the mildness or harshness of the following winter has been around for centuries. I got the idea from my dad, who got the idea from his dad, who got the idea . . . and so on.

Such country lore has always been fascinating to me, and since I enjoy being outdoors and like to collect wild nuts and seeds, I’ve noted the prodigious production of black walnuts this year. Because farmers and denizens of small towns in the American Midwest and Northeast often planted black walnut trees both for their nutmeats and for their wood (black walnut being a prime wood for furniture), walnut trees are abundant around us, thanks in part to squirrels, which transport the walnuts hither and yon for eating, storing, and forgetting.

Edible seeds such as acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, and beechnuts are often referred to as mast. When these trees produce a crop larger than typical, foresters say they are “masting.” Masting among such trees happens every few years. The effect of it is to ensure that not all the seeds will be consumed by squirrels and other seed/nut eaters and allow the tree to reproduce. In the lean years, nut predators thin out, and while they’re gone, the trees take notice and drop a ton of seeds to ensure germination. So suggest the botanists.

But when you read research conclusions about masting, you discover that there seem to be many mysteries about the occurrence. For instance, oak trees within a radius of some 350 miles often mast at the same time—as if they all got the Manager’s memo! And certainly around here this year the oaks, walnuts, and beeches got the message. Masting also doesn’t seem to depend on weather factors like the amount of sunshine or rain over a season, nor does it seem to be related to pollination or to soil and atmospheric chemistry.  There appears to be some relationship between masting and more global climate factors, such as those that create the el nino and la nina effects. But there seem to be no firm conclusions about it.

I confess to getting a little bit of perverse pleasure when “nature” throws naturalists a mean curveball like tree masting. Scientific researchers can get pretty cocky when they feel they’ve discovered the cause for this or that natural process. We humans all need regular reminders that we really don’t have all the answers—probably not even most of the answers. Sometimes I think trees are laughing up their leaves.

This year, a few million more walnuts around the Midwest are going to have a better chance to germinate. There are not enough squirrels to collect them all—a fact that’s made it easier for me to harvest a couple hundred of the tasty nuts from a single tree (leaving far more on the ground than what I had in my buckets)! The expression “a hard nut to crack” certainly must have come from those who harvested walnuts. Shucking, drying, and cracking walnuts is hard and messy work, but the flavor reward is worth the effort.

An extra privilege of my collecting walnuts this year was the location of the tree. It was in Woodlawn Cemetery in southeast Grand Rapids. This is the “garden of remembrance” where the bodies of Dr. M. R. De Haan, the founder of Radio Bible Class (RBC Ministries), his wife, and Richard De Haan, Dr. De Haan’s son and past president of RBC, are buried.  Since my mom and dad came to the Lord through the ministry of “Doc” De Haan, I like to

stop by his gravestone to get a refill of gratitude for him and for the ministry I now serve. On his memorial marker is the two-word phrase he used at the end of all broadcasts that came into our home every Sunday throughout my childhood and youth: “Perhaps Today.”

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

Hunter-Gatherer

Marge likes to shop for groceries. I like to forage. I have to admit, though, that if our lives depended on my foraging, we’d become mighty lean. (Since almost every popular magazine has an article on dieting, maybe I could write one on the benefits of becoming a hunter-gatherer!)

Wild foraging, while free, does not necessarily offer up the best-tasting food. Yet I’m getting accustomed to the quirky taste of some of nature’s freebies. One of those is the berries of the autumn olive bush, which are just now reaching ripeness. Earlier they were, like green apples, a bit sour. As fall progresses and frosts become more frequent, they get sweeter. I like to think that nibbling on sour berries is sort of doing penance for my part in helping to make the autumn olive another invasive species in America’s upper Midwest.

Sometime in the early 80s, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources decided to do something decidedly unnatural: They attached a little packet of non-native autumn olive seeds to the small-game hunting licenses of thousands of Michiganders—asking hunters to plant them when they got into the field. The DNR said autumn “olives” would be a wonderful new food source for upland birds and promised they’d be a boon for future hunting. They were right about one thing: The birds love the berries—like kids love candy. And their nutritional value to birds is about as good as candy is to kids. Now, thanks to dutiful hunters and seedy bird droppings, these hardy bushes are spreading all over the countryside. Even vacant lots in suburban areas are filling up with this hard-to-eradicate bush. The boon for hunters has become a bane for property owners. (When will we ever stop trying to play God with our natural habitat?)

Another forager’s goodie that fruits along with the autumn olive is the wild grape. These “fox grapes,” however, are native to our region and have been around for centuries. Yet if crafters did not pull down acres of these vines for wreathes and other natural decorations, one wonders if the autumn olive and the wild grape would become, together with the invasive oriental bittersweet, the kudzu plague of the north.

The taste of the wild grape is initially like a tiny, tart Concord grape, but the aftertaste is quite astringent. It’s indeed what you’d call an acquired taste. It reminds me of a southern persimmon that is not fully ripe: It can really cause the upper esophagus to rebel! Outdoorsy kids through the ages, however, have always yielded to the temptation to nibble a few wild grapes every fall.

This activity motivated Robert Frost to write what I think is one of his most delightful poems—simply titled “Wild Grapes.” The narrator in the poem is an adult woman recalling a time when as a child her older brother bent down a birch sapling full of wild grapes so she could have a whole tree full of grapevines to herself. When the much heavier brother let go of the tree, however, it snapped back up and carried the little girl into the treetops. He eventually had to shinny back up the tree and bend it down again so she could safely detach herself from it. I love the sentiment she expresses about that time long ago when she got her new lease on life
[“the life I live now's an extra life”].

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;
I had not learned to let go with the hands,
As still I have not learned to with the heart,
And have no wish to with the heart—nor need
That I can see. The mind is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart.

---

 

Wonders Everywhere

Most of us enjoy visiting dramatic outdoor destinations like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Banff National Park. In fact, untold numbers of us have intentions of visiting such places when we have the time and/or the money. Banff is one of those yet-to-visit places for me, as are Denali, the Olympic Peninsula, Glacier, and Big Bend. Further afield are Kruger National Park in South Africa, the Galapagos Islands, and Tibet. I have big intentions! [Click on the photos to see them larger; then click on the back arrow to get back to Ambling.]

But the reality is that most of us won’t get to all our desired destinations this side of the kingdom. Those dreams, however, sometimes have the effect of dampening our appreciation of and wonder in nature nearby. Most of us don’t live a stone’s throw from yawning canyons, towering mountains, or forests primeval. So we live in envy of those who do—many of whom are jaded about their local wonders.

Some, no doubt, may be envious of me, living in America’s Great Lakes region—one of the globe’s remarkable geographical features. And I do love living here. However, the shore of Lake Michigan, the closest “big lake,” is still about 45 minutes away. This means that for the most part my experience of the natural world is not a grand shoreline vista. Actually my most visited natural area is across the road where I walk the dog—an area of about three acres now glowing yellow with goldenrod punctuated with red rose hips on long arching stems and loaded crabapple branches. The big leaves of the milkweeds also stand out on their hardy stems, the toughness required to support the large pods that are about to burst and spread their “parachuted” seeds over the landscape. These yet unopened pods also provide nourishment for the brilliantly colored milkweed bug, the young of which often congregate in large masses that catch the eye and rouse curiosity in even the casual ambler.

Nearby in the woods, abandoned orchard, and ditches other signs of the changing of the seasons stand out. The most brilliant plant in the woods during nature’s swing shift from summer to fall is the seed-head of the Jack-in-the-pulpit. In fact, with its brilliant red berries and bright green stem, it seems to herald the approach of Christmas. It is, however, like Christmas decorations, merely to be observed. And because the summer was hot and humid, the mushrooms and other fungi proliferate and decorate the floor of the woodlands and the boles of dead trees with yellows, oranges, and various shades of white. Last week I came upon a clump of “chicken mushrooms” that looked like hot lava petrified on the side of a dead oak. Because of its brilliance, it is often called the sulfur-shelf, and it is one of the most delectable of wild mushrooms. Need I say that it tastes like chicken?

Berries of all sorts abound as well in this period before the changing of the leaves: wild grapes and the blue fruit of the Virginia creeper often hang side-by-side on intertwined vines, testing the novice forager’s skill at choosing the right fruit to pick for making jelly—or creating a bad bellyache. The beautiful blue and white “doll’s-eye” berries on two different wild dogwood bushes are also a temptation for the forager to resist—at least for eating. The brilliant high-bush cranberry fruit also heralds the coming of autumn, but its luscious-looking red berries are to be avoided until after a few frosty nights—at which time they can be made into a tolerable compote, if one can stomach the offensive odor they give off as they simmer their way toward edibility. (My family made me abort my one and only attempt!)

When it comes right down to it, when you learn to love God’s great outdoors, you will find wonders not only in the mega-majestic but also in the mini-majesty just outside your backdoor.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

 

The Gall

Irritating, that’s what it is—to plants!

Yes, many plants get downright irritated by bugs and bacteria, and they show it with some fascinating growths that botanists have chosen, aptly, to call galls (to “gall” means to irritate). Once you get attuned to what is normal for the appearance of particular plants, you soon begin to spot abnormalities. Most of the abnormalities that catch our attention are large-scale ones like diseases and infestations that kill the host plants—such as the spruce budworm infestation that is defoliating millions of acres of conifers in the Rocky Mountains.

Galls usually do not kill a plant, but they certainly add curiosities to many of our common trees and plants. The oak “apple” is one of the most common. I remember as a kid picking up those shiny, round, golf-ball size galls that collected under oak trees, but I didn’t have a clue about what they were or how they were formed. Later, as an adult, I found some horned galls on an oak that looked a lot like a miniature version of the spiked mace weapon of medieval times.

These unusual growths are caused by tiny wasps, mites, or smaller organisms that attach themselves to plants where cell division takes place and then irritate the plant in such a way that the cell division goes haywire—all for the benefit of the bug. Typically the abnormal growth that results provides habitat and/or food for the invading pest—often for larvae that live in it until they reach adulthood, when they exit and go on to start the cycle again.

What’s such a wonder to me is that while you’d think these growths would be ugly, shapeless blobs like the ash flower gall shown here, most of them have rather remarkable design and structure—almost as if the creature causing them desired an attractive home. What a great way to get a grand abode: Dig into a plant at just the right spot, cause an irritation that interrupts cell division, and have the plant’s own growth process provide your food and shelter.

I recently spotted the galls below in an area smaller than a football field across the street from our condo in land allowed to go natural. But to get a real visual treat, go to the Wikipedia article on galls and scroll down to the bottom to see a gallery of wonders. If you click on the links, you will see the amazing variety of galls that grow in oak trees around the world. [Click on the photos to see them larger.]

These natural curiosities reminded me of a thought expressed by George MacDonald, who was amazed at the magnificence of ice crystals at the edge of a puddle in the road.  In his typical elegant fashion he wrote about the unexpected beauty of such natural oddities:

I wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful.  The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought.  Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy therefore all His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

 

Countryside Consternation

Because my dad grew up on the farm, he loved the county fair. Even though he left the farm in his late teens after World War I (like all his five brothers) the farm, as they say, never left the boy. All life long he’d go to the cattle barns at the county annual fair to pat a few hindquarters of bulls and cows and pet the faces of the horses—especially the draft horses like those he used to harness and drive as a kid. A number of times we made the long drive to Chicago to attend the International Stock Show at the Union Stockyards on Halstead Street. Once we even considered eating at the exclusive Stock Yard Inn at the stockyards where you actually picked out your ultra-fresh steak from a cooler stocked with meat that had been cut in the slaughterhouse right next door. We couldn’t afford to eat there, but we did get to see one of Chicago’s former iconic restaurants. It and the stockyards are long gone.

Henry Ohlman

A side story: My dad came home one August evening from work with a bit of a limp. Mom asked him about it. With a sheepish grin, he lifted a pant leg to show a very bad bruise on his shin. “I went down to the fairgrounds at lunch,” he explained, “to see the cattle. And I forgot one of the cardinal rules: don’t stand immediately behind a horse or a bull when you pat it; you might get kicked. Man, that bull just about broke my leg!” A couple days later when he came home, he was chuckling when he came in the door. “I just had to go by the cattle barns again,” he confessed. “And I saw a man standing by the bull that kicked me. I told him to be careful, and lifted my pant leg to show him my bruise. The guy said, ‘I know; I own him!’ and he lifted both of his pant legs. Each shin had a bruise just like mine!”

Dad always enjoyed rides in the countryside—especially in late summer. He’d tell us, “On hot days like this, boys, you could almost hear the corn growing.” In the spring he would have instructed us, “You plant corn when the leaves of the oak are the size of a mouse’s ear.” We’d get farmish wisdom like that all year long.

Attending small town fairs in West Michigan and having a father who grew up on the farm are part of the reason I love the outdoors and enjoy the seasons. As we travel around, I still try to identify the crops that are growing in this or that field. I know my dad would be amazed to see the crops here in Michigan this year. It’s been a fantastic growing year: ample rain and lots of heat and sunshine. Yesterday I was alone, so I decided to take my camera and go for a ride in the country. The best visual treat of the afternoon was provided by two sandhill cranes that were feeding next to the road. What a feast they were having at a virtual banquet table: big grasshoppers caught out in short wheat stubble where they had no place to hide.

My consternation? That came because of what I know about the soybeans and corn grown here (and all over the world). My dad would have been astounded to see hundreds of acres of corn and beans, lush and luxuriant, with scarcely a weed to be seen. The seeds sown on these fields have been genetically modified not only to grow larger and more uniformly, but also to resist herbicides that are dumped by the ton on these fields to control the weeds. Pesticides too have been applied in abundance. And because these chemicals tend to sterilize soil, more tons of fertilizers and soil enhancers have been applied. Typically a fistful of soil contains billions of microorganisms to help plants grow, but chemicals pretty much burn them out. In a sense industrial farming is practicing a sort of reverse alchemy: using gold to turn soil into sand.

Here’s another sad fact. The soybeans I saw were almost certainly provided by one company. This company has made billions of dollars by genetically modifying soybeans to resist their herbicide. This herbicide will kill virtually any other plant but soybeans—their soybeans. And when a farmer agrees to buy the company’s seeds, he must agree not to save any of their legally-bound beans as seed for the next year: what farmers have naturally done for thousands of years. They have to buy again from the same seed supplier the next spring. Because the seed provides such a rich harvest, in just 12 years soybeans with the company’s patented gene went from being 2% of the US crop to 90%! (1996-2008). Now many farmers simply have two choices regarding growing soybeans: Use their seeds or don’t grow soybeans. The reality is similar with corn, where, however, there are a few more major seed producers. The story of this is told in the chilling documentary “Food, Inc.” It’s been out a few years, but I first saw it yesterday morning—just before my country drive.

A hundred years ago my dad and his brothers were planting corn with those nifty hand corn-planters now sold as curiosities in flea-markets and antique shops all over the country. Memories are still vivid of my protesting to my dad about how hard and tedious it was to plant a few rows of sweet corn in our garden using such a device—and then having to use a hoe or hand cultivator to weed them. After a year or two, he gave up on the garden. Supermarkets (which now on average sell over 40,000 different products) made growing your own food an unnecessary bother. And that leads to another sad story: Our average meal today travels some 1500 miles from farm to supermarket—instead of being hand-carried in baskets a few yards from the garden to the kitchen. We are indeed in the “brave new world.”

As a mild protest, I went to a local farm market after yesterday’s drive and got most of the ingredients for some awesome Southern gumbo. Locally grown cantaloupe topped with locally produced (and wonderfully good) Hudsonville Ice Cream was purchased for dessert. I suppose if we all protested in like manner, we might help to turn at least some of our “growing medium” back into soil.

---

 

 

Bamboozled

Marge and I and our oldest son, Greg, recently drove to South Carolina to celebrate with our youngest son, Dave, the launch of the first official CD his band has produced. He plays bass guitar for “The Sea Wolf Mutiny,” a group of Columbia International University alumni (CIU was formerly Columbia Bible College). Now I’m old-school when it comes to bands—like the Grandville High School band I played French horn in. So these new-school bands will always be a mystery to me—just as their lyrics will be mysteries to my aging ears and brain. But God love ‘em!

I’ve gone to Columbia often over the past ten years and always stop by and visit the CIU campus (where Dave’s wife is now on staff). One of the things I enjoy doing there is collecting bamboo poles from the rogue bamboo grove out behind CIU’s building and grounds facility. If you know anything about bamboo you understand why I used the word “rogue” in reference to it. Once loose, it runs amok and muscles out virtually everything in its path—dead or alive! That’s why, of course, in its native habitat people have used it for an almost endless number of purposes—if for nothing more than keeping it from taking over.  No doubt because of its ubiquity, bamboo has been an art theme for centuries.  Because of my fascination with it, it has become one of my favorite photographic and art subjects [See my collage photo below---taken in Swaziland.]

Since Michigan’s climate resists the growth of all but a few extra hardy and typically small, varieties, bamboo has always been a fun “exotic” for me, and because I enjoy woodworking, I love to experiment with it. But my experimentation doesn’t hold a candle to what Asians have done with it over the millennia. My first experience of their creativity with it (and bravery!) was on a trip to India where I saw how they used it for scaffolding. Now this was not scaffolding for getting to the roof or upper floor of a house or small building. This was a work structure they used for the erection of tall office and business buildings in the middle of their mega-cities. [See the links to get YouTube videos of this hard-to-believe practice.]

As well as being amazed by its use as scaffolding, I’ve walked through bamboo mazes in California, photographed it in Swaziland, made rough flutes of it for the grandkids, examined different varieties at ECHO, an awesome Christian hunger mission in Ft. Myers, Florida, seen pandas munching on it in the zoo, made hiking and walking sticks with it, made vases with it, and, of course, used poles of it for fishing as a kid. I even tried the interesting form of fishing in surf-pounded rocks in the Pacific: poke-poling.

Now several rods of bamboo are drying in the rafters of my garage, awaiting the next experimental project. For sure, though, I will not be using it for scaffolding!

What does any of this have to do with “bamboozled”?  Nothing, actually.  Like I like bamboo, I like the sound of the word “bamboozle“—which seems to have no known link to bamboo.  It’s a fun word—sort of like “gobbledygook,” which is also a totally made-up word.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

 

Old Man’s Beard

Over the past month I’ve traveled from the land of “old man’s beard” west to the land of “old man’s beard” east.  “Old man’s beard” is the common name given to the hairy lichen that grows on trees along the Pacific Coast of America from Northern California to Washington State—and in several other regions around the world.  I first saw it when I was in my early thirties on my first trip west of the Rockies—to Northern California.  I expressed my surprise to someone there that Spanish moss actually grew on the West Coast (my having become familiar with Spanish moss as a college student in South Carolina), and I was informed that it was not the same plant, and that they were really two very different organisms that only looked similar.  And, yes, this Ambling post will seek to clarify the difference!

Marge and I returned a couple days ago from a visit with our son Dave and his wife, Ruth, in Columbia, SC.  On Saturday last we decided to escape the heat and humidity of Columbia and head on down to experience the heat and humidity in Savannah, GA!  Savannah, of course, has a significantly more dramatic setting than Columbia, being on the coast and having an old town with a more dramatic history (the reason that it can still be risky to mention the name of Civil War Union general Sherman in that part of the country!).  I’ll leave out the history, however, and just show how Spanish moss lends such charm and mystique to the city.

Southern live oaks (like those that stereotypically line the lanes leading to Southern coastal plantation homes) are the most common host for Spanish moss—along with bald cypress trees, which characterize the swamps of the Southeast.  But Spanish moss is not really Spanish, nor is it moss.  It is an air plant (epiphyte), which does not live off the tree, but simply on the tree where it drapes itself over branches and catches both moisture and nutrients from the air and from the surface of the host tree.  Another name for it is “old man’s beard” like its apparent cousin on the West Coast

Strings of it can be over twenty feet long.  But long strings usually are broken off by wind or rain or simply by their weight.  So in less-traveled areas, piles of it gather on the ground.  When my oldest son tried to collect some of it to bring home a few years ago, a resident did him a favor by simply saying, “There’s bugs in there.”  What he was referring to was redbugs—or chiggers—which can cause nasty skin irritations.  They love to make their beds in the ground masses, masses which in the past were collected and dried (and no doubt “debugged”) to be used for furniture stuffing and insulation.  Today it is commonly used for mulch around living plants and a natural bed for unnatural plants (in creative artificial flower arranging).  Warblers and bats like to use it as nesting material.

Its most common—and most dramatic—use, however, is simply being the Creator’s decorative touch in helping to make the Deep South landscape another of His wonders.

But what about “old man’s beard” on the opposite coast?  It too is not exactly a moss, but a lichen.  This means that it is different from the southeastern plant.  As a lichen, it does attach itself to the tree with strong holdfasts (hence less likely to become detached).  Lichens, however, are also air plants and get most of their nutrients and moisture from the air and from a rather complicated interrelationship with algae.  The Creator has used this too as a most glorious decoration to lend character and beauty to the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Both plants can become a burden on their host trees by blocking sunlight from the leaves so drastically that the trees die.  But for the most part they “get along” and provide just more eye candy for already beautiful landscapes.  They bring to mind the first thing that was said about the trees in the Garden of Eden: They were “pleasing to the eye.”  I’ve often been intrigued by the fact that the Bible mentions their beauty before their utility.  I wonder how much of God’s creation is destroyed because we so often put utility before beauty (thinking in particular lately of the destruction of California’s redwoods and sequoias).  How long has it been since you’ve seen the beauty in the natural things you utilize or simply bypass every day?  That’s another way to ask, “Have you stopped to smell the flowers lately?”

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

A Visit to “Paradise”

There’s a sense in which Yosemite is paradisiacal: almost too much grandeur for the human mind to encompass.  So many of the park’s features, of the valley in particular, would be awesome alone.  El Capitan, the 3000 ft. granite monolith on north, and Cathedral Rocks on the south, over which Bridalveil Creek tumbles in glad abandon, no doubt make the grandest “gate” to any park in the world.  (Of a different sort is the living gate to the Mariposa Grove of mountain redwoods near the southern entrance of the park: several huge sequoias.)

Centered between El Cap and the Cathedral Rocks at the east end of the valley is another monolith that too would be a feature to draw an endless stream of fair-weather visitors: Half Dome.  Refreshingly cool and ever-changing Merced River runs through the middle of it all, adding just one more beauty feature to this picture of paradise (painted often by the great Hudson River School of artists) in the 19^th century.  “Founder” of that great cadre of grand landscape painters, Thomas Cole, captured the value of such beauty to the human soul.  Cole hoped his paintings would give city-dwelling admirers a yearning for the outdoors where they too could discover what he had—that “in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle [again] with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate.”

The chords of my soul still vibrate from this grandest of outdoor experiences.  Though photos of Yosemite can never even approximate the awe created by this wonder of God’s creation, I am posting below some photos of the falls and watercourses of the great national park—with thanks to our forebears who had the foresight to preserve this global treasure and to those living today who seek to preserve it by managing well its millions of visitors.  One knows that it is indeed a global treasure by the many international visitors whose different languages lend still one more pleasantry to the experience.  Here, in fact, it seems that Babel is reversed: instead of a manmade tower set in defiance of our Creator and resulting in linguistic confusion and dispersion, we have God-made towers that draw people of all languages back together—a congregation in praise of the Creator (whether or not recognized).  It’s just one more reminder of paradise past and paradise future.  “Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise Him all creatures here below.”

[Click on the photos to see them in a larger size.]

 

Upper and Lower Nevada Falls

 

Alder Creek

See you outdoors,

Dean

---

Ambling About the Bay

I’m sitting in a cafe in Sonora, CA.  This is the near the southern end of the Mother Lode: the rich mining area in the Sierra foothills where gold beckoned the 49ers some 150 years ago.  Though I am following in the steps of John Muir, this part of California gained its national and international acclaim from Bret Harte and Mark Twain, two literary giants who will be celebrated in Sonora tomorrow.  I, happy to say, will not be here, but in Yosemite.  So no “jumping frogs” in Calaveras County for me.  I’ll be taking photos of thundering waterfalls.

(A sad note: I will be in Yosemite three days after three careless individuals climbed over the barrier above Vernal Falls and were swept to their deaths after trying to wade in river 25 feet from the edge.  They say their bodies may not be recovered until fall.)

Today as I travel, I will leave you with a few photos taken in the San Francisco Bay Area [Click on the photos to see them in larger size]:

Tomales Bay, the rift created by the San Andreas Fault a few miles north of the epicenter of the historic San Francisco earthquake a century ago.  It separates the mainland from the Pt. Reyes Peninsula, a chunk of land that used to be about where Los Angeles is.

Fog watered wildflowers on the cliffs of Pt. Reyes.  The crashing of the surf and the barking of elephant seals can be heard drifting up these steep slopes.

South Pt. Reyes Beach

Pt. Reyes lighthouse just as the evening fog rolls in.

The world famous sea lions of Pier 39

Golden Gate Bridge from the Alcatraz ferry

Alcatraz, “The Rock”

San Francisco from the Alcatraz ferry

Twilight in the “City by the Bay”

Coit Tower above Pier 33

Golden Gate Bridge in the pink of twilight

Foggy Golden Gate from Ft. Baker.  My last view of it for this trip at least.

See you outdoors,

Dean

---

Big Tree—Little Cone

Marge and I are going into our fifth day on the trail of John Muir from our “base camp” in Moraga, California, a laid-back town of grand trees and low traffic (a rarity in this area) that lies over the hills east of Oakland.  Our super hostess, Janet Dobbs, a friend for thirty years, has provided us a great place to stay at her home surrounded by her lovingly tended gardens.

Yesterday I did my “Wonderbird” post in a café that once served as the railroad depot for Mill Valley on the east side of the San Francisco Bay and a couple miles north of the Golden Gate in Marin County, where we lived from 1978 to 1982.  Mill Valley was named for the sawmill that provided a significant amount of lumber for the building of San Francisco.  It’s often fog-mantled hills and valleys on the western slope of Mt. Tamalpias are once again covered by [new-growth] coast redwoods, the major timber for the sawmill in the 19^th century. (Sad, isn’t it, that so many of our towns, developments, and streets are named for features that no longer exist.) [Foggy redwood photo source: Beatrice M. Varga]

A few grand old-growth redwoods still stand in the center of the town as living monuments to a “resource” the old-growth portion of which has been cut down to the last 4 percent of its former extent. One of the old-growth stands near Mill Valley has been named for John Muir, who championed the preservation of both species of redwood: the coastal redwood and the sequoia of the Sierra Nevada.  Note the intensity of his feelings for the tree in an article he wrote in part to stir the American people and government to save this national treasure:

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot defend themselves or run away. And few destroyers of trees ever plant any; nor can planting avail much toward restoring our grand aboriginal giants. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the oldest of the Sequoias, trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the eventful centuries since Christ’s time, and long before that, God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people. [From "Save the Redwoods" by John Muir]

Below is a question and answer list from the brochure for Redwoods National Park.  If you want a multi-media experience online, be sure to go to the National Geographic site dedicated to educating us all about this wonder of God’s creation.

Which is bigger, a giant sequoia or a coast redwood? Sequoias found in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains are larger in volume, but not taller.

Is the redwood the oldest tree in the world?

No. Bristlecone pines, found in many parts of the western United States, are the oldest. Some may be as old as 5,000 years.

How old are the oldest redwoods? Some redwoods live to 2,000 years.

What is the average age of the redwood trees? 500-700 years old.

How many redwoods have been logged? 96 percent of the original old-growth coast redwoods have been logged.

Where is the tallest redwood? A tree dubbed the Tall Tree in the Tall Trees Grove once measured nearly 367.8 feet (120 m). Subsequent logging in the Redwood Creek basin subjected the grove to windier, drier, and hotter conditions. The Tall Tree’s crown fell off in the 1980s.

Today, other identified tall trees grow throughout the California redwood region. As long as the entire forest is allowed to thrive, tall trees will survive the seasons and the centuries.

Why do redwoods grow so tall? The trees grow tall for the following reasons: large amounts of rain (60-140 inches per year), mostly from February–May; summer fog which reduces evapotranspiration; temperate climate, average temperatures between 45 degrees and 61 degrees Fahrenheit; rich soil in river bottom flats; few natural enemies; burl sprouts (see following question), which promote growth after injury by fire or toppling; wind protection by other redwoods.

Why do redwoods live so long? Favorable climatic conditions; tannin in the bark, which makes it resistant to insects like termites; thickness of the bark helps protect the inner core of the tree from fire.

Ponder this in closing: the huge mass of the redwood comes from tiny seeds in a cone that is about the size of a thumbnail.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

Bay Area Impressions

Being back in the San Francisco Bay Area for a few days has brought back a flood of memories and deep-lying impressions. We lived here in Marin County from 1978-82. Our fair town, Novato, is some twenty miles north of the Golden Gate. I was administrator of Valley Christian School then, and as a native and long-time resident of Michigan, I was always fascinated by the natural dynamics here, which are dramatically different from my home state.

One of those differences is the summer fog. In July it is not unusual for the weather to be clear, sunny, and 80 degrees in Novato, and 20 miles south toward the Golden Gate Bridge you are engulfed in misty fog with the temperature in the upper 50s. This phenomenon is the source of the quote attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson: “The coldest winter I ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco.”

It’s a quirk of climate that I had to find out more about, and my study eventually led to this Michigander teaching California students at Valley Christian School a unit on the Bay Area Climate. Here is why there is so much fog in this area in mid-summer—fog I’ve been experiencing once again the past couple days:

There is a virtual river of ocean water that flows from north to south along America’s West Coast from British Columbia to Baja: the California current. In the summer this current is pressed close to shore by a Pacific Ocean high pressure air mass that migrates down from Alaska. Prevailing winds swirl clockwise around the mass, which propels a surface current southward down the West Coast. This movement pulls colder water up from below. So the warmer summer air over the Pacific is moved by the prevailing west winds over this cold-water current, which in turn causes moisture to condense and form a large fog bank just off shore.

Here’s where California’s infamous Central Valley summer heat comes into the picture. Temperatures often over 100 degrees cause the air to rise and create a low pressure air mass on the east side of the coast range. So you have a cool high-pressure mass pressing down over the ocean and some fifty miles away a hot low-pressure air mass rising. This, then, acts like a pump, which pulls the cooler surface air toward the valley. The fog is then carried with it through all the gaps in the coastal mountains eastward—the lowest gap being the Golden Gate where the San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific. Hence the millions of photos of the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge taken by residents and visitors since that engineering marvel was completed in 1936.

When we lived here, we never tired of summer evening phenomenon of fog creeping in through the gaps and eventually flowing over the tops of the lower hills like white frosting being spread by the hand of the Creator [photo source]. Though, as Stevenson noted, you have to be prepared for the damp and chilly air that comes in with the fog.

I felt the chill again yesterday as I hiked in the beautiful hills and valleys east of Oakland and Berkeley, where the heavy moisture accents some of my favorite natural fragrances: the pungent scents of the California bay/laurel and eucalyptus trees. These odors are wafting in the air as I write this in the home of our friend—drifting over the table from a wooden bowl in which I have deposited the pocketful of bay leaves and eucalyptus pods I was compelled to collect. They will go back with me to Michigan where their long-lasting scents will continue to revive memories of one of my favorite places to amble.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

 

The Mint in My Life

I am not sure exactly how mint became one of my favorite plants—and flavors, but I can affirm that mint is a part of every one of my days.  I shave with mint soap lather every morning and brush my teeth with mint-flavored toothpaste every night.  And midday I might be found chewing mint flavored gum.  That’s not to count my homemade peppermint astringent and self-picked and dried spearmint leaves for mint tea.

I think the fascination started with my being shown mint growing on the shore of Gull Lake—and being amazed at the taste of what I thought was a mere weed.  (Are there really any “mere weeds”?)  It was at Gull Lake that my first memories of a family vacation were formed.  They include being chased by an angry dog and being bit on the seat of my pants, having to get food from the rented cottage’s icebox loaded up every other day with an ice block Dad got from the corner store, which had ice from the lake stored beneath layers of sawdust in its ice shed—and catching my first fish: a couple small bluegills that had been enticed by the only “bait” I could find: some mint leaves.

So maybe it was that good luck fishing that made me first fond of mint.  Second had to be my discovery of Chiclets mint-flavored gum that I discovered in the offering envelopes in racks on the back of the seats at Calvary Undenominational Church in Grand Rapids.  (That was the church started by “Doc DeHaan”: M.R. DeHaan the founder also of Radio Bible Class—now RBC Ministries—and the pastor who led my mom and dad to Christ).  For a long time I did not know that the gum had been “planted” by my dad.  Of course my older brothers had to inform me of that fact when I eventually complained of not finding gum every Sunday.  That was probably around the same time I was so callously informed that there was no tooth fairy and no Santa Claus.  How cruel older brothers can be to their innocent younger siblings!

Further favor toward the savor came when living later in Hastings, a town we moved to when I was three: our Baptist church pastor always had a pocketful of Brach’s peppermint “lozenges” that he handed out to us kids after the morning service.  And every once in a while he even had some of the pink ones (wintergreen lozenges).  We called them simply white and pink “peppermints.” Only later did I discover that both of these flavors came from essential oils that had been distilled from plants.

And only recently have I learned another fact that may have made my Michigan upbringing favorable to an appreciation of mint: in 1900 90% of the world’s mint oil was produced in Michigan, most of it being grown within a 90-mile radius of Kalamazoo.  In fact, the town that was the center of the most productive mint acreage was named “Mentha,” after the plant (mentha piperita: peppermint and mentha spicata: spearmint.  Although Wrigley’s Doublemint gum ingredients are still a trade secret, I sort of suspect that it is a mix of both oils.)

Now all that’s left of Mentha, Michigan, is the ruins of an old barn, the fields having long ago been turned to the production of the farm staples: corn and soybeans.  Recently on a visit to see my sister in a nursing home in Lansing, Marge and I took a side trip to see one of the last of the original mint farms in the state: the Crosby Mint Farm.  Unfortunately, that farm narrowly averted foreclosure a couple years ago and the operation of the distillery is minimal.  Most of the mint oil produced in the US comes from the Pacific Northwest, with Michigan having slipped to number five in output.

Having learned all of this recently, I now find that my fascination with mint has increased.  However, I have not yet read all the stuff crammed onto the bottle of Dr. Bronners mint soap that I’ve been using for years.  Just for fun, follow this link to see the copy that appears on what has to be the world’s most crowded label.  Here is just a sampling:

Yet without the Moral ABC, after father-mother-wife murdered, ourself tortured- blinded, unable to remember our name ‘Bronner or Heilbronner’, this 76 word deathbed message, repeated 4 time, helped save our life in ’46! In ’86, 6 billion strong, it’ll help rally-raise-unite all life All-One: “ATOM BOMBS CAN BE CONTROLLED BECAUSE URANIUM IS RARE! BUT HYDROGEN BOMBS CANNOT ALWAYS BE CONTROLLED BECAUSE HYDROGEN IS EVERYWHERE! IN 1910 NIGHT TURNED INTO DAY WHEN HALLEY’S COMET (ALMOST) EXPLODED! SO IF I DON’T GET OUT OF HERE, A HYDROGEN BOMB CHAIN REACTION MAY EXPLODE GOD’S SPACESHIP EARTH! I AM FIGHTING FOR UNITY NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, BECAUSE IN ONE WORLD WITH HYDROGEN BOMBS, WE’RE ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE OR WE’RE ALL NONE! ALL NONE! Yet, forced to sleep on the roof of the YMCA, penniless with the pigeons, we could not teach the Moral ABC of All-One- God-Faith, without which none can possibly unite the Human race! For we’re All-One or none!

Say what?!

The Bronner family made its fame with its mint soap first made in Germany in 1858.  Sadly, the factory was taken over by the Nazis and Dr. Bronners parents, who were Jews, were transported to death camps and were among the millions of victims of the Holocaust.  Trying to figure out exactly what Dr. Bronner’s faith and/or philosophy became is next to impossible to figure out (he died in 1997), and you need to use a magnifier to read his label tract that has text printed in all directions.  Craziness on the bottle, but darn good soap inside—and it’s eco-friendly (a favorite with backpackers).  Since I enjoy the coolness of menthol, I make a shaving foam from the soap by putting a quarter-sized amount in my hand, putting a few drops of water in it, and rubbing my hands together briskly until it makes a rich lather.   Just don’t get it in your eyes!

Follow the links in this article to learn all you may want to learn about mint—like discovering that mint farmers were made exempt from service in World War II because mint oil was considered an essential product for the war effort.  And you probably didn’t know that domestic geese were enlisted to eat the weeds out of mint fields, because they could do so without damaging the plants and they would not eat the spicy mint plant.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

One Step Forward . . .

As toddlers, many of us may well have dreamed of endless sandboxes to play in, but since few remember their toddler dreams, joy in the thought of endless sands probably went subliminal.  Perhaps that’s the reason that Michigan’s massive sand dunes bordered by a vista of endless water creates a sort of ecstasy for children and relieves tension for adults. [Sandbox photo source]

I had a free afternoon last week to wander the shore and dunes of Lake Michigan at Hoffmaster State Park just south of Muskegon—finding that such ambling indeed does quiet the spirit, and if you desire to climb the dunes, gives your heart and legs a good workout.  Steep dunes, in fact, can provide the reality on which an old metaphor is based: “one step forward and two steps back.”  In a couple spots I had to stop climbing upward and go laterally because I was losing ground with each step!  And there’s a sort of reversal of that metaphoric reality when you go down the steepest slopes: “one step forward and four steps down!”  It had rained the day before and there was a damp crust of firmer sand over the dry sand on the dune I climbed, which meant that when I started down, the sand immediately under foot became a fragile “ski” that would have sent me down in a tumbling rush if a few saplings had not been at hand. (With my new camera around my neck, it could have also become the photographer’s nightmare: sand in the lens!).

After spending a few moments taking some photos for a family visiting from St. Louis (mom was trying to herd everyone into poses from which she would have been absent) I wandered the shoreline for a while—experiencing the phenomenon of “singing sands”:  There’s a spot between the totally saturated wave zone and the dry dunes where there is just the right amount of moisture in the sand for your feet to make a squeak with every step, which is not unlike the crunch of snow under your feet when you walk in it in especially frigid weather.  You can read about singing (or barking sands) on this Wikipedia link (Go to the bottom right-hand corner to hear a recording of the sound.)

Sand dunes are a very dramatic ecosystem where on windy days change happens as you watch: waves reforming the beach and ribbons of blowing sand moving up and over the top of bare dunes to create drifts and mini sandstorms.  Such drifting and shifting sand over the years has buried entire abandoned villages, and to the dismay of landowners, blown away valuable property or threatened to inundate their homes and required them to take expensive measures to stop the encroaching drifts.

If you visit a dune area only occasionally, you are often surprised to find an entirely different appearance every time you go.  Where trees once stood solid, you might find them toppling where the sand has been blown away from the roots.  The roots of many plants in dune areas go very deep in search of water, and many trees take on a sort of grotesque appearance with bare twisted roots looking more like limbs.  The survival capacity of such trees is amazing.  Some roots have been exposed so long that they are hard to distinguish from limbs.

On my amble along the shore, some deep yellow flowers caught my eye; so I wandered up into a blowout to discover what they were (a “blowout” in dune terminology is a spot on the shoreline where the wind has managed to clear out vegetation and created a rift of mostly bare sand that projects well into what was earlier a stable, wooded hillside).  In a park a blowout is the sandbox of a child’s dream; on your own property, though, it can be a virtual nightmare.

Parks are also great places for botanists to test dune stability and erosion prevention.  The planting of native marram grass is the most common way to stabilize the dunes.  Once the hardy and deep rooted grass has taken hold, the drifting stops.  Then other plants begin to grow.  The flowers, I discovered, were the hoary/hairy puccoon, which stood out like torches in the otherwise gray-green setting.  After taking a few photos to add to my wildflower picture library, I also discovered a few of the rare Pitcher’s thistles that grow only in the dunes of the Great Lakes. They survive by sending their roots down as far as six feet!  Also amazing to find were hundreds of oak seedlings that were taking root from last year’s acorns—no doubt assisted by one of the wettest and cloudiest Mays I can remember. Most will likely be blown away, covered up, or dried up by fall.

The dunes of the Great Lakes are the largest fresh water dune system in the world—which is one reason the US government established the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore to help preserve this system and provide enjoyment for millions of visitors.  The Sleeping Bear Dunes are the most extensive and tallest dunes on the Great Lakes.  Its highest dune is about 450 feet tall (depending upon whether the wind is piling on or shaving away its peak).  Some years ago when I was flying from Grand Rapids to Minneapolis on a crystal-clear and cloudless day, I spotted the dunes from the plane as we started across the Big Lake at Muskegon.  They were some 115 miles away!  I could see them like a white beacon on the horizon as we flew over the lake and on over Wisconsin’s beautiful Door County.  They were still visible when we were well past Green Bay. [Dunes photo source]

Sand dunes: what a wonder of creation!  (If you follow the links in this account you can learn a great deal about them.  And if you have not loaded Google Earth onto your computer, be sure you do that.  The satellite photos and tools on Google Earth make a “virtual reality” of such wonders that you could get for real only if you were an astronaut).

See you outdoors,

Dean

---

 

Ye Olde Farmstead

“I was born on the dining room table in that old house.” “Yes, Dad, I know. You say that every time we drive by here!” That was a common conversation with my father when I was a teenager and we lived some six miles from the Hudsonville farm where Dad was born and where he and his five brothers labored under the stern rule of my grandfather, whom they called “the Kaiser” (which was fitting, since his father was born a quarter mile from the Rhine in old Prussia.) The old house on Van Buren Street is long gone and the foundation hauled out to enlarge the field of rich, loamy soil, part of which is also highly valued muck.  Hundreds of acres adjoining it are now filled with crops or topped by dozens of greenhouses filled with flowers. [You can see it on Google Maps here.]

Last week I decided to amble out that way—compelled a bit by nostalgia, but mostly by my thoughts and feelings about creation care and how circumstances are so radically different now from when my father was a child. A hundred years ago he would have been nine and already doing the “chores,” which is a euphemism hard farm labor. Child labor laws did not apply to farmers. The farm he was born on was only one of three properties that my grandfather worked (he and my dad were both “Henry”—in a long line of Heinrichs that goes back to the Reformation). Actually, when he was nine, they were tenants on an even larger farm, which was between his birthplace and an 80-acre woodlot from which mature timber was sustainably cut to help supply hardwoods (mostly maple and red oak) to the furniture factories in Grand Rapids, then called America’s  “Furniture City.”

As I drove the couple miles between Dad’s birth farm and the tenant farm last week, my attention was yanked to what is probably the largest agricultural rig I’ve ever seen—operating a half-mile from where my grandfather used draft horses. I discovered that it is the John Deere DB120 planter that plants seeds and chemicals at the same time. Here’s a description of it (along with a photo I took of it.  Click on it to see it larger.):

The DB120 is an agricultural planter made by John Deere. Upon its release in 2009, it was the largest production planter in the world. It has a 120 feet wide tool-bar and plants 48 rows which are 30 inches apart. It is estimated that the planter should sow 90 to 100 acres per hour at 5 to 5.5 miles per hour ground speed. John Deere claims that the planter is 30% more productive than their 36 row DB90 planter. To transport such an incredibly wide implement, the DB120 folds into five sections. The planter weighs in at over 20 tons empty and almost 24 tons when loaded with seed. The DB120 had a limited release in 2009 with orders being taken for the 2010 season. It retailed at $345,000 dollars. The DB120 needs a GPS System to guide it as there are no row markers to indicate where to position the tractor/planter.

I have to confess that I was awed by the machine and the engineers and technicians who made it.  I can’t image what my grandfather would think were he alive today! I guessed that it was half a football field wide, which, it turns out, was not far off: it’s 120 feet wide. The reality of the difference a hundred years has made in how we “do agriculture” is really shocking.

I drove another mile to the corner where the tenant farm was, already knowing that, contrary to Dad’s birth farm, there the farm fields were almost gone.  But the house, barn, and old shed were still standing. West of the house, which has been added to and remodeled many times, is a huge complex of Little League ball fields. South of the house and across the road is a mega-church with a pond and fountain. West of the church lies the lone section of the farm on which corn is still grown—but probably not for long: The city of Hudsonville is one of the most rapidly growing communities in Michigan. [See the site on Google maps here. If you go to street view at the corner of 28th and Baldwin, you will be able to see the farm buildings from the street level. ]

From there I motored a couple more miles to the “woodlot.” The photo here shows what’s become of it: a lake surrounded by houses that run from around $400,000 to whatever (no doubt less now than when they were built!). My grandfather bought the 80 acres a couple days after my father was born (April 4, 1902) for $2,800 and sold it fifteen years later for $4,500. Years later after the forest was clearcut, I believe it was farmed for a while. Later yet, however, a gift of the great glacier was discovered below the soil: gravel. And when the gravel gave out (or perhaps because of the difficulty of dredging gravel out of the water-filled pit—the water table being close to the surface there) the entire 8th of a section was sold to developers who put up the houses. [See the site on Google maps here.]

It was a hot and humid the evening I took my drive, and nearly every house had a dock and a boat, but there was not one watercraft on the water! What does one get a boat for but for puttering around a lake on a warm night’s eve?

What are my thoughts about this history and all these changes duplicated thousands of times around America? For sure they are conflicted—especially since yesterday when I heard Diane Sawyer on an ABC news report that nearly all our store-bought produce still has pesticide residue on it even after washing, and some of it is actually inside the fruits and vegetables (strawberries being the most contaminated). The big John Deere rig, as the picture shows, carries three large tanks that instills insecticide along with the seeds. I’m not sure what seed was being sown (if the word “sow” is still appropriate) since most corn and soybean crops are already well above ground. (As my dad commonly said, it was a good year when the corn was “knee-high by the 4th of July.”) Perhaps it was another Monsanto seed product that is “Roundup ready” (seeds engineered to tolerate Monsanto’s flagship herbicide). I’m uncomfortable about that too, after reading a report today about Roundup being in our blood and linked to genetic deformity in children.

What a can of worms, eh? It brings to my mind Francis Schaeffer’s thoughts in Pollution and the Death of Man about the lyrics of The Doors’ song “When the Music’s Over”:

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down

Says Schaeffer: “St. Francis’ use of the term ‘brothers to the birds’ is not only theologically correct, but a thing to be intellectually thought of and practically practiced. More, it is to be psychologically felt as I face the tree, the bird, the ant. If this is what ‘The Doors’ meant when they spoke of ‘our fair sister,’ it would have been beautiful. Why have orthodox, evangelical Christians not produced hymns putting such a beautiful concept in a proper theological setting?”

Yes, why?  And what indeed are we doing to the earth, our fair sister?

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

 

Turtle Time

Nature Nearby

I have to confess that if I had the opportunity I would go every other day to some exciting outdoor location, be it a bog, a marsh, a cypress swamp, a desert—or a national park or two! But few folks have that sort of opportunity—including me. What I really do, however, is only an occasional excursion surrounded in time by a lot of mundane activities: walking the dog, walking to work, walking the dog, going to the store, walking the dog, spending time with children and grandchildren, and walking the dog.

That being the case, and my soul demanding attentive connection with the natural world, I’ve learned that there’s a great deal I don’t know about God’s creation even within a half-mile radius of our home. I’ve written often about the wonders of the old orchard that lies between our condo and RBC. There’s another couple acres that have been allowed to remain wild between us and Wal-Mart, but since it’s a rare deer haven in our heavily developed area, I leave that spot alone.

For a number of years I’ve walked our condo lane looking and listening for birds in the conifers that line its length, and have every so often pinched off a brilliant chartreuse twig of spring growth from a Colorado spruce, which is almost feathery soft, to brush against my face. Across the county road there are some balsam firs and what look like Douglas firs hybridized for landscaping. Along our lane are Austrian pines, red pines, a lonesome jack pine, and Colorado spruces. I used to call them the “blue spruces” but learned by seeing them growing next to each other that there are natural blue and green varieties. Some new spruces have been planted by the condo association that have cones only about a quarter the size of the standard spruce. (Horticulturists and animal breeders are alike: always tinkering with genetics!)

This year I’ve decided to learn more about the life cycles of the trees in the area, and spring is the ideal time to do that. As is virtually always the case, what I’ve learned is amazing. Let me share (as illustrated by my photos) just the bit about how the wonderful conifers reproduce.

I have always noticed the different fruiting structures on the trees, but never understood exactly what I was looking at: As new growth begins, swelling twigs push off the waxy tip covers that protected them in the winter. Then clusters of what appear to be new cones seem to pop up almost overnight; but these never get hard and they never stay. Instead they sort of bloom and start shedding yellow “dust” in the wind—or when I snap them with my finger to create a virtual cloud, not of dust, but of pollen. Such, of course, is the cause of many spring allergies (along with oak pollen). Here’s the amazing part: these temporary cones are actually the male cones that cast into the breezes their pollen grains (male gametophytes), some of which are snagged by sticky young female cones (the permanent ones). When the grains land, they create a pollen tube that extends down between the cone scales (ovules) to fertilize the female gametophytes.

Then, as is common in virtually all reproduction, fertilization occurs, and the egg begins to divide and grow as the cone itself also grows and hardens into the mature new cones we see by summer’s end. The male cones dry up and drop off to add to the duff on the ground below the tree. In the second year, the cone scales open up and drop their fertile seeds to grow new trees—that is if squirrels have not gotten to the seeds first! Eventually the old female cones drop from the tree and often find themselves as parts of Christmas decorations. (That reminds me of the time a few years back when I was scolded by a neighbor for snipping a few cone-laden boughs from along the lane to use in the house. He felt I was “damaging community property.” I guess he was unaware that for healthy trees careful pruning leads to more growth, not less.)

But that’s not the end of the evergreen wonders. You’ve probably noticed that most permanent cones are near the top of the tree—especially on the spruces—and most of the temporary male cones are nearer the bottom of the tree. So how do the two tango? Well, it’s best that they not. That would result in too much inbreeding and weaken the stock. To ensure genetic diversity and healthier trees, it’s better that the female cones catch the pollen from male cones of other trees. If the female cones were below the male cones on the same tree, simple gravity would ensure that they would get the majority of pollen from above them. Instead, by being near the top they are more likely to receive windblown pollen from other trees.

That’s a total “wow” to me. Yet some claim that none of that was intelligently directed: it was the result of time plus chance and accidental order—called “unguided evolution.” Hmm. I have to go with the sentiment expressed by Joaquin Miller, who, examining a tree, exulted, “Ten thousand leaves on every tree, / And each a miracle to me; / And yet there be men who question God!” And this set of “miracles” is one of hundreds that surround us and show us the Creator’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20). I wanted to share this recent lesson with you just in case you’ve not experienced a creation wow lately. Go out now and hug an evergreen!

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

---

 

Bog Walk

Yesterday was a bit chilly but gloriously sunny; so I took the opportunity to go to my “secret” boggy lake in Michigan’s Yankee Springs Recreation Area (Barry County) to take photos of some of the typical bog plants that most folks rarely see. I was hoping to see the striking flowers of our northern pitcher plant, but because of the cold spring, they were just starting to bud.

[Click on the photos to see them in a larger size. The ones that enlarge are my photos.  The ones that don't are usually gotten from the Web---mostly from Wikipedia.]

Bogs are wonderful places, and rather rare in the US—found mostly in the northern and northeastern states from Minnesota to Maine. They were formed by the retreating glaciers, and some have been around

for thousands of years, having trapped water in hollows in areas where there is not a large inflow of fresh water. This creates a good habitat for the prime creator and maintainer of a bog: sphagnum moss that leaches hydrogen atoms into the water to create acidic conditions, which in turn sets the stage for bog plants like the pitcher plant, sundew (both carnivorous plants), cranberry, blueberry, Labrador tea, cotton grass, some rare orchids, and poison sumac, the relatively uncommon plant that has given a bad name to our very common smooth and staghorn sumac that you see along the roadside.

These ubiquitous sumacs sporting their flame-shaped ruby red seed clusters at the top of each branch are not poisonous. In fact, throughout the summer those fresh seed heads can be soaked in water to create a tangy lemonade-like drink call “rhus tea” to which you will want to add sugar! Sometimes when I hike I will take a few of the seeds and pop them in my mouth (after checking for insects!) for a refreshing burst of sour—spitting them out when the flavor is gone

One way to identify a bog, or at least boggy areas, is to look for the tamarack tree, that curious conifer that’s also deciduous. It looks a bit like a feathery pine tree from a distance, but in the fall the needles turn yellow and drop off. This makes them look like dead evergreens. But in the spring, the star-burst needle clusters will erupt from the branches and even the trunks along with the leaves of the surrounding non-coniferous trees. Tamaracks that grow in the most acidic part of the bog don’t grow very large and take on a dwarf-tree look without the traditional spire of their larger neighbors—but may in fact be older than a thirty-foot tree growing in less acidic conditions.

Many Cornerstone University students here in Grand Rapids who take general biology from my friend, Professor Ray Gates (known as “Gator”), often take a “bog walk”—but quite different from mine. They go to a more typical bog that has a large floating mat of sphagnum moss surrounded by a moat of brownish water that has to be crossed before they can climb up onto the floating island. Sporting grubs that can be sacrificed for the muddy experience, they wade chest to neck-deep through the moat and for their trouble end up with a great adventure identifying the plants found on the undulating central mat—taking care to look for “puddles” that are really holes in the mossy mass and into which you can drop down over your head. “If you fall through and drown and we don’t find you” Gator tells them, “you will have the good fortune of having your body well preserved for hundreds of years—because decomposing organisms don’t live in the acid water.” That usually suffices as a good warning.

So far Gator has not lost any students! But they do go away with a great college memory told and retold over the years.

One reminder for me of a bog walk in the Jordan River valley in Northern Michigan is a dried arrangement of tawny cotton grass that we have had in our home for perhaps ten years. It is a regular keepsake that helps to keep fresh in my mind this awesome habitat—this amazing and wonderful curiosity of God’s creation.

[For more photos of Gator's bog walk, go to the website of Margaux Drake.]

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

Pitcher Plant “Eating”

Insects crawl or fly into the water in the pitcher plant, but when they try to get out, the downward facing hairs on the inside of the pitcher prevent their escape.  When their bodies decompose, the nutrients from the bug are absorbed by the plant and help make up for the lack of nutrients in the acidic soil [Click on the photo to see it in a larger size]:

 

 

---

Bawled Out in the Woods

A prime location for spring wildflowers near Grand Rapids is Aman Park.  It’s another of the many artifacts left by the glaciers that covered the region eons ago.  I spent a good part of the day on Wednesday practicing with my new camera and enjoyed a mostly solitary stroll.  It was true ambling: my spending about 5 hours to cover about a mile.  The wildflowers are two to three weeks late this year because of one of the most miserable Aprils I remember—probably one of the coldest, wettest, windiest, and cloudiest Aprils on record.  The old saw is really true this year:  “April showers bring May flowers.”  (Yes I do know what May flowers bring: pilgrims!)

Here is a brief overview of Aman Park:

Sand Creek has cut a narrow valley through the park’s 331 acres.  Trails wander ridges high above the valley.  Other trails cut through marshes, bogs, forests, and fields.  The six trails that  weave over the rugged yet peaceful environment offer a beautiful and stark contrast to the boisterous city nearby [I never actually considered Grand Rapids especially boisterous, but compared to the park, I suppose any town would be.]

Wildflowers are spectacular in the spring, and the diverse terrain and varied plants of the park produce continual showings through the year, from skunk cabbage and marsh marigolds to beech and aspen, and even to the gray of leafless branches pocketed with ice crystals.  All seasons show off something in this retreat.

I’ve made it a point to visit Aman Park during spring wildflower season nearly every year, and I’ve not been disappointed with what the Creator has wrought in this special place.  It’s the first place I saw the spectacular pileated woodpecker in Michigan, and that was only about 15 years ago.  [Photo taken by my son Greg today, May 9]

I grew up in a Michigan that was horribly hard on its wildlife: if it had fur, fins, feathers, or four feet, it was fair game.  Every hawk was a “chicken hawk” and needed to be shot.  I never saw a crow close up until I was an adult, because they were “corn thieves” and needed to be shot; so they kept far away from houses and barns.  Most of us kids more or less thought a bald eagle was something out of the history book—like turkeys.  I thank the Lord for persistent conservationists.  Because of them, we can now see turkeys, bald eagles, hawks of all sorts, pileated woodpeckers, trout fisherman standing in Aman Park’s now clear-running Sand Creek, and a wonderful protected woodland to delight this old man’s soul.

O, about being bawled out:  When I was down by the creek shooting photos of the Virginia bluebells, I heard a pileated woodpecker drumming on a tree not too far away (and man do they drum!).  Well, I had decided to take my Ipod with its bird guide application with me along with a small portable speaker.  So I turned it all on and played two of the calls of the woodpecker, plus a recording of one drumming.  It was hardly 20 seconds and I saw the awesome bird flying in to check it out.  I quickly grabbed my camera from my tripod to see if I could get a nice shot of it, but it played hide-and-seek with me and then flew off just before I could get it in my viewfinder.  That seems to be one of Murphy’s laws about wildlife photography: “Your best shot will be the view you get just before you have your camera ready”!

Well, when I got back to my car, another codger like me was getting out of his car and hanging a nice pair of binoculars over his neck.  He was friendly, and we chatted a while about the wildflowers.  “But my main interest,” he said, “is birds.”  “Hey,” I said, “I just had a close encounter with a pileated woodpecker down by the bridge.  I called him in and got a nice look at him.”  “O,” he said with a stern look, “but we don’t do that in the spring.  It disturbs their nesting,” “I’m afraid I was bad,” I said.  He went on: “There are precious few of them around.  We don’t want to mess with their breeding.  I have led birding trips all over the country and have birded all over the world.” Then he turned and trudged off.

I do know that basic rule of birding, but being excited about possibly getting a good photo, I had simply forgotten about it’s being nesting season.  But let me tell you, when you’ve been scolded by a veteran birder, you have been SCOLDED!

See you outdoors!

Dean

[Wildflowers from the top: trillium, trillium "carpet, Virginia bluebells, round-lobed hepatica with fallen feather, and trout lily/adder's tongue.]

---

 

The Salt Marsh

One of my purposes for the recent photo trip I took with my son Greg to the coast of South Carolina (where we knew we would find spring in early April) was to experience the drama and completely different nature of the salt marsh. And we discovered that because of its flatness and relative inaccessibility, it’s not an easy place to take pictures.

Many of the denizens of the damp are well hidden by the tall grass, and the birds that enjoy picking around for food in the mud flats see you coming from a long way off, and simply move on just beyond the range of your lenses—unless you have one of those $6000 white lenses you see wildlife photographers with! So we pretty much had to settle for scenery—which is most dramatic at sunrise and sunset. We did, however, find one brown pelican that was not going to be disturbed in his repose by our picture taking.

The Southeastern coastal region has been visited by hurricanes so often that most folks over the centuries have valued their protective features enough to leave them relatively undisturbed—unlike other regions, like California where most of its coastal wetlands have been destroyed. The problems related to that have been the topic of many scientific studies:

There are some major contributions that wetlands make toward our ecosystem and many of them are crucial to the welfare of mankind. A major function of wetlands is that they naturally clean the table waters. With the use of microorganisms it is possible to naturally clean the water supply much better than many water purification plants. A benefit of purifying water with the use of wetlands is that not only does it save the taxpayers money but it also saves the environment from the pollution that a water purification plant would produce. Another function of wetlands is its storage ability. In the event of a large storm or heavy rain wetlands can store the flood waters so that they do not over run the nearby area. To reduce the effects of flooding wetlands are able to store “storm water and gradually returning it to surface flow, reducing the effects of erosion by stabilizing soils, and dampening the effects of wave action” (M. Dennison et.al. 1993. Wetlands also provide a feeding ground and habitat to many fish, waterfowl and other wildlife). Many endangered birds nest and breed on the shores of wetlands and these habitats are crucial for their survival. The destruction of wetlands has become a major problem, especially in California.

In the United States the destruction of wetlands had been enormous, however in the state of California it has been estimated that nearly ninety-three percent of the wetlands have been destroyed. With profit producing coastal real estate the hungry pockets of California developers will do whatever it takes to find more land to build on. It is unfortunate that much of this coastal property were once wetlands that have since been filled, drained and built upon just to support the real-estate market.

While the Southeast has protected much of its tidal marsh area, developers have still made great profits by building on the barrier islands that lie between the wetlands and the ocean. The advantage to such building is that when hurricanes do come, the structures themselves create even more formidable barriers—until they are washed off into the marsh or the ocean, to the consternation of homeowners and insurance companies. Many of such disasters called “acts of God,” could have always been avoided simply by not building human habitations in high risk areas.

A Wikipedia article on salt marshes mentions another problem with the destruction of coastal wetlands: “Major cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Venice and Tokyo have all expanded out into areas of salt marsh. The remaining marshes surrounding these urban areas are under immense pressure from the human population as human-induced nitrogen enrichment enters these habitats. Nitrogen loading through human-use indirectly affects salt marshes causing shifts in vegetation structure and the invasion of non-native species. Human impacts such as sewage, urban run-off, agricultural and industrial wastes are running into the marshes from nearby sources. Salt marshes are nitrogen limited and with an increasing level of nutrients entering the system from anthropogenic [human caused] effects, the plant species associated with salt marshes are being restructured through change in competition.”

Greg and I enjoyed our adventure in the coastal Southeast, but we did find ourselves bothered by the gated communities that would not permit us access to the vast stretches of beach where we were expecting to do some beach-combing. We settled instead for walks in the marsh area at low tide. I did find a few nice sea shells which, though covered with caked-on silt, gave promise of treasures to take home for the grandkids. When we got them back to our campsite where I was planning to scrub off the silt, I was startled to see them begin to move around in the container. They were actually the homes of hermit crabs! So since they had first rights of ownership, they went back into the water.

Now we are back home in still chilly weather (see the guest post by Anna Connelly on the 24th: “Snow in April”) where we are experiencing spring for a second time this year—albeit agonizingly slow.

See you outdoors!

Dean

[Click on the photos to see them in a larger size.]

---

 

“The Tree”

If you have followed my amblings for awhile, you will know that trees are some of my favorite things.  I’ve been blessed to have seen one of the oldest stands of Lebanon cedars, the Sherman and Grant sequoias, and several stands of the massive coast redwoods—including the redwood you drive through.

But for all that, I have to say that the most charming of all big trees I’ve seen is the Angel Oak outside of Charleston SC, known locally as “the Tree.” My son Greg and I saw, videographed, and photographed it from almost every angle a few days ago.  It was one of the “targets” we were aiming at for this spring’s photo shoot in the coastal lowlands of  the Palmetto State.

What makes it so fascinating is that, unlike the redwoods that allow access only to their  massive trunks, the Angel Oak lets you wander amid its most impressive branches—literally!  It gives you the sensation of walking through a fossilized mutant octopus.

Following is the description of the tree from Wikipedia.  The photos are mine (Greg’s much larger and more impressive images will be showcased later.)

The Angel Oak is a Southern live oak tree located in Angel Oak Park, in Charleston, South Carolina, on Johns Island, one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands. It is estimated to be in excess of 1500 years old, stands 65 ft (20 m) tall, measures 28 ft (8.5 m) in circumference, and shades with its crown an area of 17,000 square feet (1,600 m2). Its widest crown spread point-to-point is 180 ft, which is longer than any other live oak in the country. Its longest limb is 105 feet (32 m) in length.

The Angel Oak is thought to be one of the oldest living organisms east of the Mississippi River. Angel Oak stands on part of Abraham Waight’s 1717 land grant. The oak derives its name from the Angel estate, although local folklore told stories of ghosts of former slaves would appear as angels around the tree.  The tree has become a significant tourist attraction.

It has survived countless hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and human interference. Angel Oak was damaged severely during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 but has since recovered.

Acorns from the Angel Oak have grown to produce authentic direct-offspring trees. Live oaks generally remain short in proportion to their outward growth.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

How I Lost My Driving Rights

Guess Who Came for Lunch?

The deep snow cover here in Western Michigan has put a damper on my ambling—or should I say a “freeze.”  I don’t have snowshoes (yet!) and, being balance-challenged, I can’t cross-country ski.  So my recent meanderings have been mostly with the eye from my home office window or from the car.  I’ve been challenging myself to learn most of the trees in Michigan by their winter profile, so since Marge does most of the driving, I have kept my eyes and mind busy while traveling.  One recent delight was spotting about a dozen over-wintering swans on the nearby Thornapple River.

Today’s wonder, however, was taken in from the comfort of my home office: a close-up view of a hungry Cooper’s Hawk who has been trying to give an alternate meaning to “bird feeder.” So far he’s been unsuccessful.  Yet he has been successful in keeping the birds away.  There are no doubt dozens of well-stocked bird feeders within a half mile of our condo, so the birds “migrate” en masse from one location to the next.  It’s sort of a game of birdie musical chairs with the hawk being “it” most of the time.  But when he manages to snag a chair, he devours the unseated victim. The rest of the birds seem to breathe a sigh of relief when one of their kin gets “taloned”—perhaps thinking a bit like humans when someone else succumbs to risky behavior: “Glad it wasn’t me!” One wonders what birds think when they see blood and feathers on the snow.  For sure, birds understand the maxim, “There is safety in numbers.”

One of the many nice things about bird watching from your computer desk is that you have immediate access to online bird guides like the Cornell University “All About Birds” site and the WhatBird.com site.  I use these a lot.  And when I’m afield, I have my iBird application for my Ipod.  This one is particularly fun because if you also have a battery-powered set of portable speakers for your Ipod, you can broadcast bird sounds and call many birds to your location.  Last spring I had fun watching crows circle me for several minutes trying to figure out why I didn’t really look like an old crow.  Nuthatches, chickadees, and titmice especially come out of the woods rapidly when they hear my bird calls.  Last summer I had wren nesting in a gourd on our garage, and I would keep the male on the alert every once in a while, by opening the window and playing wren chatter on my computer.  Hope I didn’t mess up his bird psyche.  However, the traditional “pishing” usually does better.  One spring in my old orchard I pished in 10 different bird species in a few minutes.

This is especially fun when I’m out with the grandkids.  It helps them learn their birds better by seeing them for real.  For a couple years I helped with our oldest grandson’s allowance by paying him a dollar for every new bird he could spot and verify with a bird guide.  But with six other younger grandchildren approaching the age when they will be able to use bird guides, I may have to reduce the offering—or get a second job!

See you outdoors,

Dean

The photos here are of the Cooper’s hawk who came for lunch today.

---

Crystal Mornings

The last couple days have given us fantasy mornings. With the temperature in the mid-teens, clear skies, and humidity fairly high, everything outdoors gets “crystallized.” Ice crystals form on every twig, weed, seed head, leaf, and needle making the natural world take on an appearance that one can only describe as magical. You go to bed in the dark of midwinter and wake up to an atmosphere that is almost otherworldly.

George MacDonald described it this way when he observed ice crystals on a mud-puddle:

“What could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious, work of nature, always kept it beautiful? The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy, therefore all His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form.”

I could seek to describe it more fully, but only photos can suggest the reality of such a phenomenon. And I say “suggest,” because the reality has to be experienced for one to sense the full effect of it—including the frigidity required to make such ephemeral beauty:

The Sycamore That’s Not a Sycamore

One tree I really enjoy in the winter is the sycamore.  It’s a tree that has a dramatic appearance even without its leaves.  Its mottled bark and the whiteness of its spreading limbs make it stand out among its rather drab neighbors—especially when outlined against surrounding evergreens.  Big ones are truly so majestic that even children often ask what they are when they see them. [Photo source]

Having just returned from a whirlwind Thanksgiving trip with Marge and our oldest son, Greg, to visit our youngest son and his wife in Columbia, SC (Dave and Ruth) images of beautiful sycamore’s lining the French Broad River and other lowland settings are still fresh in my mind.  Sadly, so are images of the princess tree and the tree of heaven, which are not as regal or divine as their names suggest.  They are rapidly growing and spreading invasive trees that are beginning to dominate the landscape of the American southeast.

I

admire sycamores not only for their beauty, but also for their hardiness—now having to compete with these tough invasive trees and other invasive plants.

Sycamores are often one of the best climbing trees you can find—with lateral branches typically so neatly spaced that you can do a sort of stair-step climb winding around the main trunk and right up close to the top.  We had one in the yard of one of our homes that I couldn’t resist climbing—even in my fifties.

I plan to climb a tree every year until I’m physically unable to do so!  You know the old truism that “you can’t take the boy out of the man.”  I have to confess that with tree climbing that is indeed the case with me.

In fact, about a month ago we had a major wind storm here with gusts up to 60 mph, and I, having read how John Muir climbed a Douglas fir in a Sierra windstorm to learn how a tree “feels” in the wind, had to climb a red pine near our condo to get a small sense of what Muir experienced.  After fifteen or twenty minutes swaying about 30 feet up, I reluctantly came down because of the chill that came with the setting sun.  It took me a few seconds to get my “land legs” back. [See windblown video.]

The “climbability” of sycamores would lead one familiar with the life of Christ to recall Zaccheus who climbed a sycamore (to see Jesus)   Or did he?  Actually he climbed a sycomore-fig tree.  Sounds strange, doesn’t it.  The sycomore-fig (note the o after the c, not an a) is entirely different from what North Americans know as the sycamore.  It is indeed in the fig (ficus) family, and produces figs—on its trunk.  But the figs, to be edible, need to be “dressed” either by oiling or piercing to make them good to eat.  The ancient prophet Amos took care of sycamore figs (Amos 7:14).  [See Lytton Musselman’s Bible Plants site to learn more about it.]

To add further to the confusion, lands of the Bible actually do have sycamores like those North Americans are familiar with—only they’re not called sycamores, but plane trees!  Pictured is a natural collage of plane tree leaves: a photo I took in Jerusalem [Click on photo to see a larger one].

So the plain truth is that the plane tree in Israel is the tree related to the North American sycamore, but the tree that Zaccheus climbed was not a sycamore, but a fig tree, which is not native to North America.

But they are, nonetheless, also very climbable trees—as the old Sunday school song tells us.

---

Saying Goodbye to Phyll

You know, chlorophyll!

This is the time of the year when we occupiers of the upper Northern Temperate Zone bask in a riot of reds, yellows, oranges, and browns as green fades away—as the food factories in the leaves of deciduous trees, the chloroplasts, go the way of our savings: they die and plummet downward (“The falling greenbacks drift by my window”—). Now if we could only depend upon our financial institutions to ensure that next spring our accounts will be up and flourishing! Fortunately, nature has a much more consistent CEO— One who enjoys giving more than taking. His promises you can take to the bank.

Okay, enough of that! (My botanist friend Lytton Musselman, of Bible Plants fame, could extend that metaphor and add a dozen puns to it!) As awesome as autumn colors are, I was surprised to learn the other day when reading an essay on autumn by Thoreau, that folks in his day and region seldom took note of them. He wrote, “I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the brilliant tints, was taken by surprise and would not believe there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.” Now, Henry David is talking about New England, the world capital of fall colors! Frankly, I think he was exaggerating (not an unusual thing for him). How could his fellow New Englander,  Longfellow’s blacksmith in his shop “under the spreading chestnut tree,” not notice the beauty outside his door each autumn? (Nor could the blacksmith have believed that in 60 some years, those common beloved chestnuts would be extirpated from the country.)

Here in Michigan in 2010 you cannot escape the botanical wonder of chlorophyll receding in order to reveal the brilliant pigments below its green layer. If it were not for the conifers (evergreens), by the time the blanketing snows arrive, about the only green we would see outdoors would be what’s painted on human artifacts. This change of seasons actually gets in your blood as a native northerner. We lived in California first for seven years and later for five years, and I have to confess that one of the things I missed the most was this seasonal change. That does not mean, however, that after three or more months of snow cover one does not pine for green (How’s that one, Lytton?). Those extremes actually work their way into your psyche making the pleasant seasons of spring, summer, and fall even more appreciated.

This bit of ambling is for the purpose of sharing with you some of the kaleidoscopic visual wonders created by the disappearance of chlorophyll from our foliage, beginning with the subtle edge fade of wild ginger—a phenomenon I just noticed after all these years of wandering in the autumn woods.  In order after that are maple leaves on a mossy stone (clearly not a rolling one), leaf strewn trail to the Thornapple River, sumac “flames,” and aspens, which if seen in video would indeed be quaking.

[Click on the photos to see them larger.]

See you outdoors,

Dean

---

The Old Dog and Me

“My soul needs a dog.” That’s the line I used that Marge says finally twisted her arm enough to say yes about getting a dog after some 4 years of being dogless. But I really didn’t just “use” the line. That’s actually the way I felt. Maybe it goes all the way back to Adam in the Garden, when he was required to name the animals. Theologians point out that naming in the ancient context was not merely coming up arbitrarily with “dog” or “cat.” Adam would have had to come to understand the nature of each animal before giving it a name that captured that essence. John Wesley, in fact, believed that Adam and Eve could understand and communicate in the “language” of the animals and that the animals understood that they were to be in obedience to our first parents as a part of the “good” created order. French philosopher Jean Mouroux felt that people act as nature’s priest. Whatever the relationship is, I know there’s something good and therapeutic for me to have an animal companion.

Another line I could have used is, “I need a dog for my health.” If you surf the Net with search terms “pets” and “health,” you’ll find an amazing number of research results highlighting the physical and emotional benefits of having and caring for a pet. “WebMD,” for instance, has a slideshow that concludes this:

It only takes 15 to 30 minutes with a dog or cat or watching fish swim to feel less anxious and less stressed. Your body actually goes through physical changes in that length of time that make a difference in your mood. The level of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, is lowered. And the production of serotonin, an important chemical associated with well-being, is increased. Reducing stress saves your body a lot of wear and tear.

When Marge finally gave in, she said, “Okay, but you know the dog has to be big.  I don’t want a little yippy dog.”  Well, Shadow filled the bill: he’s a hundred-pound, eight-year-old, black, Labrador retriever with white chin whiskers (so we bonded immediately!). And his name is truly apt: he shadows me everywhere I go in the house and even tried sleeping on the bed. When you’re drifting off to sleep and a hundred-pound beast launches himself onto your bed, you take notice! He tried that only once. Sulking, he finally resigned himself to sleeping right next to me, stretched out on the floor more than half the length of the bed. After being stepped on a few times there, he eventually came to understand that sleeping on my old recliner in the office was the best bet.  And he’s for sure not yippy: but when a stranger comes to the door, his basso bark about puts you into orbit.

Our family is convinced that retrievers (Labs and goldens) are just about the best dog you can get—especially when you have children around. Shadow is our sixth. We learned about Shadow on Craigslist where a lady had put out the plea: “Wonderful dog, free to good home.” She had gotten a job out of state and could not take the dog with her. She learned about the job on Wednesday and needed to move the following Monday. When we decided to take the dog, Marge had to hug the weeping woman and assure her that her “baby” would indeed have a good home.

And we’ve been blessed with a great dog who loves people and other dogs—and even allows the grandkids to crawl all over him. Because he was a house dog and also spent two years on the road in an eighteen-wheeler, he’s about as civilized as an animal can get—and somewhat un-Lab-like in having no desire to wander in the boondocks. And that’s sort of a blessing for me, since when I go off into the woods and meadows for observation and photography, I don’t want a dog with me: For some reason wildlife does not stick around when a half-bear is crashing through the brush.

So if you are in southeast Grand Rapids and see an old dog and an old man, both with white chin whiskers, it might be “me and my Shadow strolling down the avenue.”

---

 

Doug Fir and the Chocolate Chip Tree

In Washington’s Deception Pass State Park are several awe-inspiring specimens of the chief timber trees of the Pacific Northwest from Northern California to Alaska. It was my pleasure to observe and pat the flanks of several of these a couple weeks ago (the hugging of such giants being out of the question): the Douglas fir and the Sitka spruce. Without these trees, the building of our homes would cost us a great deal more. Their abundance, qualities, size, and growth rate make them the most utilized sawn timber in North America—and hence the most likely candidates for overharvesting.

Like the great white pines of the Great Lakes region and the longleaf pine of the Southeast, without adequate regulation and commercial restraint, these vast forest resources are also destined for virtual depletion. Symbolic of our lack of foresight regarding the conservation of our forests is America’s premier wooden battleship, the USS Constitution—now preserved in Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard: Its original three main masts were of eastern white pine, which have been replaced with western Douglas fir—a wood unknown to settlers when “Old Ironsides” went to sea in 1798.  No white pines could be found that were large enough for the great ship.

This presently abundant tree is truly a giant, surpassed in height only by the coast redwood—its tallest measured specimen being 329 feet high! And it is really not a fir. It’s a species of its own that is more spruce-like than fir. Hence it was commonly referred to in the late 1800’s simply as the “Douglastree.” The tree has retained its “Douglas” designation in part as a tribute to David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who first obtained its seeds for cultivation in the UK. Douglas, in fact, introduced some 240 plants into British horticulture before he died at age 35 while doing research in Hawaii. He fell into a pit-trap while climbing the Mauna Kea volcanic peak, and was trampled to death by a bullock, which had also fallen into the trap.

The Douglas fir is the fourth most common tree in North America, and it is the second most common Christmas tree (after the Fraser fir). Because of its abundance and strength it is the most commonly used lumber for construction, so most folks who live in homes built in the past 60 years or so probably sleep each night with heads only a few inches from a Douglas fir 2×4. As standing timber, the Doug fir is fairly easy to pick out among its peers: western redcedar, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce. Of the four, the Douglastree has the most deeply fluted trunk and its cones, usually ubiquitous beneath the tree, have three-pointed bracts that stick out between the scales—sort of like a forked tongue sticking out of a snake’s mouth.  There is really no other cone like it.

The Sitka spruce, with a cone about the same size without the bracts (like the Colorado spruce), is identified by its scaly bark and could be taken at first to be a hemlock. But when you pull a scaly chip from its trunk, the color beneath is a rich milk chocolate—hence my designation as the “chocolate chip tree” (at my age one needs those sorts of memory aids!). The Sitka spruce is also a champion tree in height—the tallest of which was measured at 317 feet, and it’s the premier timber tree of Alaska. Of all the woods, it has the highest strength-to-weight ratio—a fact that led to its common use in the manufacture of airplanes before World War II. This same feature has also made it the best wood for ladders.

The Sitka spruce is also known as one of the fastest growing conifers, being able to reach a height of 200 feet in 100 years. Because of its knot-free nature and its fiber structure, it is the most common wood for music sounding boards: in pianos, guitars, and pipe organs. So most church-goers have their soul blessed by the resonance of Sitka spruce every week or so. Its most common uses, however, are for lumber and paper pulp—a common blessing we might contemplate every time we visit our home’s “necessary room.”

Thus endeth my ambling among the great trees of the Pacific Northwest—for this year at least. I leave you with a sunset silhouette featuring the Douglas firs, Western hemlocks, and Western redcedars of Bluebell Springs on Orcas Island of the San Juan Archipelago in Washington State of the United States of America—where I hope the conservation of our forests is now a primary national aim (a hope for Canada too, eh?).

---

 

Big-leaf, REALLY BIG, maple

I could hardly believe it the first time I saw it: the leaves of the big-leaf maple. Even though we lived in Northern California for seven years and could have seen specimens of the tree, I did not recognize it.  So the first time I really saw a big-leaf maple was when I slowed down enough after arriving at Bluebell Springs to pick out the trees from the forest.

I was incredulous: “Jim, that leaf looks just like a maple leaf, but it’s way too big! What kind of tree is it?” His grin at being able to get one up on his self-proclaimed amateur naturalist brother was wide: “It’s a maple—a big-leaf maple!” “No way!” “Yes way”—and more grin.

I mean I could imagine a maple with leaves maybe two or three times the size of a typical Michigan maple—having seen the tiny leaves of some Japanese maples. But a leaf so large that you could lay five or six sugar maple leaves on it was an amazement to me. The photo here shows three different maple leaves I brought from around our home in Michigan laid out above a big-leaf from a maple that stands like a sentry at the side of the Bluebell Springs drive—along with a couple nice Douglas firs, and some cedars. The leaves above the big leaf are, from left to right, the red maple, sugar maple, and Norway maple.

Though not as tall as the chief timber trees here in the Pacific Northwest, the big-leaf maple holds its own in grandeur and grace—putting on a show from spring through fall. It often stands hidden among conifers until autumn, when the leaves turn to gold, then bronze, then gone. In the Olympics the big-leaf maple is often host to huge amounts of tree moss, making them look like the bearded granddaddies of the forest.

They, like their eastern peers, provide sweet sap that can also be made into syrup—an activity that is growing because of the trend toward organic and local food products. Their wood, too, is turned into typical maple products and is the chief hardwood in the Pacific Northwest.

When you get a chance, take a look at the Wikipedia website on maples. There are 125 species of them!

---

“Oh, the Cedar Tree!”

Oh, the cedar tree! If mankind in his infancy had prayed for the perfect substance for all materials and aesthetic needs, an indulgent god could have provided nothing better.

-Bill Reid

If you’ve been reading my recent WOC posts, you’ll know that I am presently visiting my brother and sister-in-law, Jim and Bev Ohlman at their “estate”: Bluebell Springs on Orcas Island in the upper Puget Sound. Orcas is one of the San Juan Islands—a major vacation spot for summer travelers in the West. I say “summer visitors” because when November rolls around the weather “goes south” along with thousands of Pacific Northwest “snowbirds.”

But it’s the gray, gloomy, and wet months (November through April) that make these islands such a summer delight: sunny and normally cool days in which to enjoy the trees and other flora that beef up on the winter rain and fog. The next few “Ambling” posts will highlight some of these wonderful trees, most of which are in ample supply here at Bluebell Springs—emeralds in a setting almost unparalleled in natural beauty, with an abundance of birds and deer taking of its fare and providing even more of God’s creatures to delight in.

The Western redcedar is a major actor in this cast of stalwarts—as the little reverie by Bill Reid above indicates. It was the most important tree to the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest—providing them with clothing, shelter, tools, transportation, and furnishings from cradles to coffins. Strips of cedar bark up to thirty feet in length were skillfully taken from the trunks, hung up to dry, then beaten into fibers that were used for baskets, ropes, hats, and mats. A sister tree, the yellow or Alaska cedar, provided smaller and softer fibers that were woven into cloth for skirts and other attire.

Of course today we see it all over North America in the form of roof shakes, siding, and fence posts. The wood is ideal for these purposes because it is soft, easily split, and naturally resistant to rot. One roof made of cedar shakes here in the Northwest lasted from 1859 to 1909 before it began to fail.

I had the woodworker’s joy of using cedar lumber to construct a small generator shed for my brother last week—both the siding and the shakes were cedar, and the odor when you cut it is wonderful.  Of course I am an incurable wood sniffer as well as tree hugger. The “barn” in which my wife and I are staying also has cedar siding, trim, and roofing.

The photos posted here were all taken at Bluebell Springs.

---

Hemlock or Hemlock?

I’ve always been interested in edible wild plants, but usually try the edibility part myself before I share—especially with our kids and more especially when it involves mushrooms!  With those I make sure I try only the easy ones like morels or white puffballs—remembering that composer Johann Schobert, a major influence on Mozart, killed himself and his whole family be eating misidentified “edible” mushrooms.  But I think in one incident I might have come close to poisoning myself.

In the summer of 1993 I was particularly seeking to find and identify sweet cicely, which is supposed to be native to our part of Michigan.  It has been used for seasoning because of its anise or licorice-like flavor—and I like both licorice and anise.  I failed to find it after several sniffs and nibbles of plants that looked like it.

The following spring I had the opportunity to go along with a college chorale on a trip to Perugia, Italy, as the photographer.  We stayed in Rome the first night, and the following day our host took us to see the old city—and the Pope (along with some 10,000 others!).  Walking to the subway terminal with the group, I spotted a plant by the sidewalk that looked just like sweet cicely, so I plucked a small leaf from it to sniff it and do a tiny nibble.  Bad mistake!  My lips went numb.  What in the world had I sampled?!  Then I recalled Socrates, who had been forced to kill himself by drinking a cup of poison hemlock juice.  Greece, Rome, the Northern Mediterranean—well known to have poison hemlock growing wild all over. Let me tell you—sweet cicely and poison hemlock sure do look a lot alike. But as Gomer Pyle might have said, I was, “Dumb, dumb, dumb!”

I survived that ordeal with only numb lips—but did learn one of the wilderness survival techniques: if you are starving and need to eat plants and don’t know what you are eating, you’re supposed to touch it to your lips, and wait; then take a slight nibble, and wait; swallow a tiny amount, and wait for a few hours. If you don’t get sick, you might increase the amount you ingest a little bit each day (I suppose until you are rescued or dead!).  The system works!  I’m thankful that I survived to become a little wiser (think “less dumb”!).  I was reminded of this episode when driving through Kentucky last week where I saw large stands of poison hemlock in full bloom (smart enough now to spot it from a distance!).

Later, on into the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, I saw more hemlock—or hemlocks.  But that was the tree, not the herbaceous plant of Socratic fame. I don’t have a clue why such different plants have the same name.  As I mentioned in my last “Ambling” post, the hemlocks of Appalachia are under serious threat from an accidentally (“they” think) introduced little bug from Asia called the wooly adelgid.  Seeing the graying foliage and dead branches of thousands of these majestic trees standing out in the Southeastern forests is sad—another reminder that invasive species of all sorts are creating havoc around the world.  In Southeastern US, however, invasives seem to be taking over: kudzu, princess tree, tree of heaven, and oriental bittersweet, for instance.  Now the emerald ash borer, which has killed millions of ash trees in the Midwest, is on its way south and has the potential of killing off the entire ash family in North America—billions of trees (Ash borer damage shown in photo to the left).

All of these species are native to China.  We buy billions of dollars worth of commodities from China—and they send us invasive species free!  Hmmmm.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

The Dying of the Trees

“Under a spreading chestnut-tree

The village smithy stands…”

“O no, Dad, not again!”

That was my youthful reaction to my dad’s quoting of the one poem he remembered from eighth grade, the last grade he attended as a farm boy shortly before the First World War.  It was the beginning of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic, “The Village Blacksmith,” a poem I eventually memorized myself in a time of nostalgia long after my dad’s journey to Glory.  He’d quote it whenever any of us kids came home and recited poems we’d learned in school—and then he’d go on with, “You’re a poet and don’t know it; your feet show it—because they’re long fellows”: long feet being something that could be said about most of us boys of Dutch stock.

My nostalgia, however, was not just related to Dad’s quoting of the poem; it was also the result of knowing that the chestnut tree has been extirpated from America.  “Extirpated” [meaning, fittingly, "uprooted"] in the botanical sense means that no viable and self-propagating individuals remain and mature in a region where they were once common.  Specimens may still be preserved, however, typically as the result of lots of TLC and chemicals.  The chestnut is one of the trees that we’ve lost—the result of a chestnut blight fungus that, ironically, was already killing the majestic trees when my dad was learning the poem.  I still remember prints of paintings that illustrated Longfellow’s poem.  The fungus eventually killed some four billion trees [and resulting now in a new business endeavor: salvaging and selling chestnut timbers from old barns and homes].

(Marge and I are now just south of Appalachia, in Columbia, SC, visiting our son Dave and his wife Ruth.  The chestnut trees in the photo at the top have been preserved on an Asheville, NC, estate just up the hill from Ruth’s grandparents home: Bill and Louise Quakenbush.)

Then in my day, the elm bark beetle, arrived in the Midwest about the time I started college (1960), and by the end of the decade all the towering Y-shaped elms that graced many of the streets in our area were dead.  A few specially cared for large specimens remain to remind us of the common beauty we lost.  [Since the disease does not kill the roots, short elms still grow to about thirty feet in fence rows before they die].

Now another pandemic tree disease has changed the landscape on our very own street.  The emerald ash borer has infested ash trees all over Michigan and is marching on to the north and west.  Today when I walk home, on my left will be at least a dozen dead ash trees and on my right will be a few living ones that were given treatment just in time to save them—at about $150 a tree per year.  However, the trees in the wild simply must succumb to the disease—once again leaving us only with specimens for recollection of more fruitful times.

These are the dying trees that have had an influence some way on me in my place.  In your place, you may be losing millions of hemlocks (Appalachia).  Further south, you’ve already lost your long-leaf pines.  In the Southwest, you’re losing your saguaro cactus.  In Colorado and California, your mountains are turning brown and being made susceptible to massive fires and then landslides because of the die-off of your lodge-pole pines.  All over the nation we are losing our dogwoods.  And all around the world this depressing story is repeated—with human exploitation adding to the decline caused by disease.

As a long-time lover of trees, I’m saddened by this.  The causes are multiple, mysterious, and mostly unmitigated in spite of our human efforts to save them.  This reality brings to mind a poem by C. S. Lewis, a fellow tree-hugger:

The Future of Forestry

How will the legend of the age of trees

Feel, when the last tree falls in England?

When the concrete spreads and the town conquers

The country’s heart; when contraceptive

Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded,

Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,

And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from

Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?

Simplest tales will then bewilder

The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?

Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,

Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.

What was Autumn? They never taught us.”

Then, told by teachers how once from mould

Came growing creatures of lower nature

Able to live and die, though neither

Beast nor man, and around them wreathing

Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight—

Half understanding, their ill-acquainted

Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings

Trees as men walking, wood-romances

Of goblins stalking in silky green,

Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn’s

Collar, pallor in the face of birch girl.

So shall a homeless time, though dimly

Catch from afar (for soul is watchful)

A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

See you outdoors,

Dean

---

On Finding a Glow Grub

So what were you doing at 11:00 last night? Me? I was on my knees in the dark trying to photograph a grub of sorts that caught my eye when I was checking my new solar powered sidewalk light (safety precaution for a step in the sidewalk that can be missed in the dark). Walking back toward the front door, I spotted something glowing rather brightly at the edge of the walk. Using me pocket light, I found that it was a yellowish larva slowly crawling up from the dark recesses at the edge of the lawn.  I was amazed.

Now I’ve been walking to and fro upon the earth for several decades and had of course seen fireflies—and I have seen bioluminescent little creatures on ocean beaches and some in ocean waters.  But a grub that glows—in Michigan?  Was this something new in nature? Had I discovered the first wave of some weird invasive species? One thing was certain: I had to try to capture a photo of it using the timed exposure mode on my camera. So I picked it up and put it in plastic container and brought into the house—even showing it to Marge, who had almost entered the land of nod. “What did I marry?” must have come to her mind for the umpteenth time!

Well, the results of my endeavor are here now posted for all to see. Isn’t it a wonder?! (the bug, not my photos!). The photos are certainly not Nat Geo quality, but they do justice to the phenomenon. And, of course, I had to power up my computer again and go do a Google image search for it. So what is it? A firefly larva. The fact that I had never seen one before humbles me again, and keeps me from thinking I’m some sort of expert on God’s natural wonders. I have to repeat again the verse that appears on our masthead: “He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted” (Job 9:10).

You can learn more about firefly larvae on this Website about “the evolution of bioluminescence”  including the conclusion that “the bioluminescence reactions are believed to have evolved independently in adults and larvae, so there is still much left to explain about these structural differences (Oertel et al. 1975).”  Now, I know that most Christian biologists today believe in some sort of evolution, which, of course, they also believe is a God-ordained and God-superintended process.  But I have to confess that I simply can’t wrap my mind around a conclusion that bioluminescence in larval fireflies “evolved independently” from the same phenomenon in adult fireflies!  I’m glad they’re still humble enough to say, “There is still much left to explain.”  It strikes me more forcefully with every new mystery of life revealed that “evolution” must just be their code word for God.

---

Making a Hiking Staff from an Ash Sapling

If you’ve been hanging around WOC for a while, you’ll know that one of my hobbies is making hiking sticks (“staves” to be proper, I guess).  I make them from several tree species: maple, oak, hickory, white cedar, white pine, alder, aspen, and ash.  Ash and hickory are favorites to make out of freshly cut saplings, in part because in the spring it’s a breeze to strip the bark from them—which is really just for aesthetics, not for any structural purpose.  In fact, leaving the bark on makes them a bit stronger.  Yet ash and hickory are still tough, stripped or not.

My schedule yesterday worked out in such a way as to leave me a couple hours to putter; so I went to the old orchard where many ash saplings are growing and cut one that should make a good hiking stick.  In a sense I am saving these ash saplings from slow death: many of them already falling victim to the nasty emerald ash borer that has pretty much wiped out all mature green ash trees in our region.  And collecting any saplings growing in a forest understory is typically not a problem.  Because they have to fight for light under their parent trees, more than 90 percent of understory saplings eventually die.  A maple grove is a particularly good place to find straight saplings—made that way because their struggle for light draws them as rapidly as possible straight upward.  You can see the results in the dramatic shape difference of a nicely shaped and wide-spread lonesome maple that has grown up in full light compared with the tall, narrow-spread maples of a mature forest where they have grown up together.  Those, of course, make the best saw timber.

So back to my ash sapling.  I discovered years ago that if you cut them from around late April to the middle of July, when the sap layer is full of moisture, you can peel them almost like bananas.  The same for hickory.  This process is a wonderful tension reliever for me: something you can do almost mindlessly.  Sometimes I will do it right where I cut the stave.  Other times I will take it home—which is what I did last evening.  One thing I love about this part of the process is the wonderful sweet smell of the stripped stick.  There is nothing else like that smell, which is carried in the air by the moisture just released.

When that’s done, all you need to do is straighten out any bow in the stick and put it in the rafters to dry.  You can straighten out a gentle bow by holding the stick almost parallel with the ground and pressing down on it with your foot—bending it a bit beyond straight.  Fresh ash is limber; so you can press on it pretty hard.  You just have to be careful with your foot because the stick is slippery.  And you don’t want to hear any cracking sound!  If the bow in the stick is pronounced, you need to take it to the stove and heat it above a wide burner—slowly turning it right where the bow is.  When the stick is hot, but not burned, you quickly take it to a carpeted area or back outside where you do the foot press again. (Trying to do this on a hard surface could give you a hernia—when the stick slips and you do the “splits” accidentally!) When a stick is heated like this, you can actually feel the fibers relax as your foot presses down.  A heated bend is almost always permanent.

I usually give my sticks three months to dry—the rest of the summer, and that works great, because being in Michigan, your fair-weather days are relatively few.  I will wait until late fall and winter to do my crafting.  If you want a white hiking staff, the ash is perfect.  All you need to do is lightly sand it and then apply a finish.  I usually do not lacquer sticks.  I don’t like too much shine.  Most of the time I use a neutral paste wax, setting in the first couple coats with a heat gun or hair dryer on hot.  And I will round the top end either with a sanding wheel or by chip-faceting it with a whittling knife.

An alternative is to “ebonize” the wood by scorching it with a torch.  This too takes practice.  You don’t want the wood to actually ignite.  You can easily blow it out when it does ignite, but at that spot you will get a major dimple.  The key is to make it uniformly black with no white showing through after a light sanding, which will reveal any under-scorched areas.  You just re-torch those places, again making sure the flame does not stay on one spot too long.  When you are done with that, and it is still hot, it is a great time to wax it.  The heat helps the wax melt into the fibers.

I have also made a finish without wax that I really like—especially the smell.  I collect chunks of pine pitch from the Austrian and red pines that line our condo drive and melt them in a “not valuable” pan over a hot plate in the shop.  After it has all melted, I strain the bugs and wood bits out of the mixture through a “not valuable” seive, and then pour in linseed oil at about a 50/50 mix.  While that mixture is still warm, I brush it on the stick and set it deep with a heat gun.  I might do three coats, and then let it dry.  Rubbing it briskly with old towel rags takes away the residue and leaves a nice satin look, while retaining the odor of pine pitch and linseed oil: familiar old odors that will give me a rush of nostalgia.

The final touch is to either drill a hole just below the top and affix a leather thong, or do both that and lace on a leather grip.  Further, you can also make a wrist saddle out of a wider piece of leather strung on the strap, which is a great comfort feature.  To make the thong strap just the right length, you grip the handle and let your wrist rest in a spot where your fingers cross the thongs at their second knuckle bend right in the middle of the grip.  Tie a knot in the thong on the far side of the hole right at the spot where the length is just right.

And that’s it.  (And maybe a lot more than you actually wanted to know!)  But if you do want to do this and have more questions, drop me an email: deanohlman at gmail dot com.

See you outdoors (with your new stick!)

Dean

---

On crayfish and “snakeholes”

As a Michigan-bred kid with ready access to lake, pond, and crick (aka “creek”), I knew crayfish well.  Never having experience with seashore life, however, my buddies (the OAK Boys: Ohlman, Andrews, and Kenfield) simply called them crabs.  I even experimented by offering a tender finger to a little crab just to see if its “pinchers” were really strong enough to cause discomfort.  Dang, they were!  If I remember correctly, it lost one of its arms in the ensuing struggle and I created a vivid memory.

That was just one of many childhood episodes that proved to me that learning by experience is usually much more effective than learning from instruction.  It also made me realize that if you determine to learn only by experience, you hurt a lot and you won’t live long!  I think that’s what God was trying to get across with Adam and Eve in the Garden.  At first experiential learning seems to be extremely quick and efficient (attributes we Americans love).  But when you calculate how many experiences you must have to equal the knowledge gleaned from the combined experience of millions, you realize that instructional learning really does have the advantage.  Hence my long journey from Kindergarten through graduate school.

But . . . . it was not until years later that I learned (from instruction) that all those curious snakeholes we never saw snakes in when I was a kid were not snakeholes; they were crayfish burrows.  Because the OAK Boys slept at night, we never actually saw crabs out of the creek stalking across the grass, which they will do at night.  And to tell the truth, because of the fact I’d never seen a crab in a hole, I was incredulous about the whole thing.  “You gotta be kidding!” was my first reaction (that was years before the expression “no way!”).

[crayfish photo source: by stormahawk ]

Yes way.  They really are, and there are lots of photos now available on the Internet to prove it to me. At night they perch near the top of their mud castles and wait for prey: insects, small frogs, worms, and little boys.  I’m sure glad I didn’t have that fact to add to my childhood fears—especially our fear about a bobcat that had been seen in the neighborhood by some older kids who said it was likely hiding in the treetops ready to pounce on us and grab us by the throat with its fangs until we suffocated and our bodies be fed to bobkittens.

So the other day when I was walking to work, I came across a crawdad hole in the lawn here at RBC.  And I was incredulous all over again.  The hole was forty paces from the nearest open water, which was an algae filled drainage ditch, which in turn did not become running water until it was a football field and a half away from the mucky puddle and in turn ambled into a cattail marsh in the I-96 roadside ditch, which was at least a half mile from a large open pond.

You know, you don’t have to get too far outdoors before you’re hit smack in the senses by endless wonders of creation.

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

“Grandpa, the salamander is dead”

A sad granddaughter called me this morning: “Grandpa, the salamander is dead.  I wanted to play with it this morning and thought it was asleep; but it was dead.  I’ve been crying a lot.”  I told Elle how sorry I was.  We were out for a walk in the woods yesterday, a wonderful warm spring day for doing things like nettingwater striders and water boatmen—just to look at and then return to the water because they’re not creatures you can keep in captivity.

“People probably think I’m different,” Elle told me as she rushed to net creatures in the creek.  She’s seven.  “Girls aren’t supposed to like things like this.”  I told her that most boys and girls probably have innate curiosity about wild things (Of course I did not actually say “innate curiosity”!) but that adults often squelch that inquisitiveness with often-irrational fears about nature or by merely showing no interest in it.  Wouldn’t this grandpa be thrilled to see Elle become a biologist!

After spending a half hour at the creek, we went salamander hunting by turning over logs in a moist area near feeder streams that wander out of a marsh now being fringed with the brilliant green of skunk cabbages unfurling with a rapidity almost visible from the black muck that Elle was sure was going to swallow her.  I could hardly believe that the second log I turned over revealed one of the curious creatures I loved to catch as a kid.

Elle was instantly mesmerized.  So I knew we had to find a way to make a pet out of it.  We had taken along a waxed bag for just that purpose; so we scooped up some of the muck, some decaying leaves, and a clump of moss and put it all in the bag along with “Sally” or “Spotty” (she couldn’t decide which name she liked).  We were coached in this endeavor by a school teacher and his daughter who were also out doing collecting.  His daughter and her curiosity about wild things proved that if Elle was “different,” other girls were different with her (“Can I feel it?” she wanted to know).

When we got back to our house, we quickly made up a nice terrarium for the salamander.  And this morning I was going to go online to learn more about how to take care of it.  But, alas, the tiny thing probably died of post-traumatic stress in the night.  It reminded me of the many creatures I killed as a boy—trying to make pets out of them.  I think that Elle and I are more and more convinced of the wisdom of leaving wild creatures in the wild.  So I told her that, with her parents’ permission, we might consider getting creepy, crawly pets from pet stores where they have been reared in captivity.

And that opens up another whole can of worms: the pet trade and all the damage it continues to do.  Almost everything we do with wild creatures has a moral dimension that we probably don’t give enough consideration to.

---

Thoughts on a pooping baby hummingbird

I finally discovered why I was not able to upload my videos to YouTube: a problem with our setup in the RBC building (Thanks for the tip, Ria!).  At the following links you can find videos of a hummingbird tending her nest and nestlings at The Living Desert in Palm Desert, CA.  What a wonderful place that is.

The first video shows the mother bird feeding her nestlings and even tossing a loose feather out of the nest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUHAy3R5MGA

The second video is a tiny touch of life in the nest—in which one of the two babies shows it has enough sense to not dirty its own nest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB4SCUwGqCo

Do you think that’s instinct or knowledge? I ask the same thing about every young bird the first time it makes a nest—exactly like the one its mother made while never having seen one made.  How does such vital information get transferred from one bird brain to another?  I heard the philosopher Holmes Ralston III lecturing on the Source of  knowledge and information once (See an impressive, but not easy, essay here.)

Dr. Ralston asked this question: “How much does the Internet weigh?”  Nothing, of course, we answer.  “Is the Internet real?”  Yes, of course, we answer.  “But to be real, it has to be material, physical, measurable by human tools, right?”  Hmm, thinks the materialist.  Indeed, are the thoughts of a materialist, or anyone, real and meaningful, or are they just random chemical sparks of the brain’s synapses with no real significance or purpose?

Isn’t it interesting that all living systems exist and perpetuate themselves on the basis of non-material information.  What would a computer be without non-material knowledge and information that brought it into existence and continues to utilize it?  I wonder where original information came from if an originating Mind did not exist.  Brings me back to those old philosophical questions: “What is matter?  Never mind.”  What is mind? No matter.”

Philosophical musings from a guy who had to drop out of college philosophy!

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

Sad, sad sea

One of the highlights and lowlights of my recent excursion in the Coachella and Imperial Valleys (Palm Springs and south) was a couple visits to the famous and infamous Salton Sea with its teeming and dying wildlife.

You probably noted the paradoxes! But they don’t end there: the salty Salton Sea was at first a freshwater lake. And it is surrounded by vacation resorts without vacationers.

My first glimpse of it this year was at sunset, which made it appear like liquid coral upon which hundreds of white pelicans (with strange-looking pre-nesting “horns” on their beaks), diving ducks, and grebes were bobbing and alertly looked for signs of tilapia fish just below the surface. Hundreds of shorebirds also waded in the shallows.  If you could ignore the odor, you could continue to entertain the notion that this was a pristine water wonderland. The odor was from furrows of dead tilapia on the beach—a beach composed not of sand but of barnacle shells and old fish bones. Those creatures had already met their doom at the hand of unseen killers: agricultural pollution, salinization, oxygen-depleting algae blooms, and deadly bacteria.

The Salton Sea is a young body of water that was formed in 1905-7 when the man-constricted Colorado River swollen by unusually heavy rains and melting mountain snow burst through dikes and flooded much of the valley region between Palm Springs and Mexico.  Efforts to stop the flow failed, and within a couple years, the sink reached its peak depth of some forty feet and covered around 500 square miles.  This was not the first time, however, that the mighty Colorado had flooded the basin.  Canyon walls show ancient shoreline marks far above the current level of the sea—now about 30 feet deep and under 400 square miles.  In fact, the Native Americans living there several hundred years ago were skilled fishermen.

So in two years, a dusty desert sink sported a great new lake—within an easy day’s drive of sprawling Los Angeles and a short hop from celebrity-rich Palm Springs.  By the fifties and early sixties, it was such a big attraction that annual vacationers at the Salton Sea outnumbered visitors to Yosemite!  It was a recreational heaven circled by resorts.  People were drawn there by the beauty of the setting, by a variety of water sports, by great tanning beaches (no cancer concern then), and by the millions of birds that used the lake for feeding and nesting as well as a migration rest stop.  Over 400 species of birds have been identified as users of the lake and the food and shelter resources surrounding the lake.  So this was a heavenly haven for birds and other wildlife as well—made more critical, in fact, since California had been busy draining and then building on most of its wetlands, the value of which was recognized too late

But the Salton Sea was also a great source of water for increasing agriculture and a handy drainage basin for runoff from industrial farming, spring runoff from the mountains, excess water from the desert cities to the north and multifarious gunk from a river running from the south out of Mexico.  The inevitable result of human abuse and overuse was a receding water level, increased salt concentrations, and pollution from fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides.  Most of the artificially planted freshwater fish died off leaving the hardier tilapia to survive until the arrival of more pervasive threats.  Now they too are dying off in great numbers.

So the scene now is quiet and peaceful except for the sounds of pelicans and seagulls celebrating life without predators.  Almost all of the resorts are decaying hulks, boats are virtually absent, and the birds pretty much have it to themselves—taking in fish and other water creatures that contain poison in their bodies that will eventually weaken the immune systems and shorten the lives of the birds.  Another resource once thought too big to deplete is fast becoming our second Salt Lake.  Or, perhaps more accurately stated, our own Dead Sea.  The Salton Sea was created by and is now being destroyed by inept exercise of human power and poorly regulated industrial agriculture at the expense of the creation—in part so the entire nation can have sweet corn in May.  By 2050, it could be a dry lake bed composed of micro-fine (PM-10) and toxic dust ready to be lifted ton by ton on eastward traveling winds and deposited all over the United States—a more sinister version of Death Valley.

You can read more about it at the following links:

 

 

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

One of  my favorite places

Joshua Tree National Park is one my favorite natural places in the world—in part because it is other-worldly.  I had the day free yesterday to take in this one-of-a-kind biotic community that makes it a favorite photographic theme for album covers and advertising images.

I’ve been there when wildflowers were in full bloom, when there was snow on the cacti, and even in the midsummer heat, which, thankfully quickly dissipates as the sun sets leaving the afterglow atmosphere utterly magical as the rocks and joshua trees turn rosey and the bats begin to zig and zag in the deep blue of the twilight sky.  You feel like you’re in a living museum that has its heat, light, and moisture set at “perfect.”  And, in reality, you are indeed in one of our Creator’s museum showplaces.

Yesterday was the first time I was there when the joshua trees were actually in bloom—each flower cluster about the size of a small football.  Of course I had to shoot a few photos of this.  I spotted one cluster hanging very low near the road, so I pulled over to get a shot close up.  I had to stoop to get a macro shot, and when I straightened up, I ran my noggin right up into the spears of an overhanging branch, and in seconds had blood running down my forehead.  Glad I had a bandana to press down on it.  In about five minutes the bleeding stopped, and when I looked in the mirror later, I couldn’t even see where I got stabbed.  The tips of the branches are needle sharp, so the wounds were like pin pricks.

Near the west end of the park is a place called the Wonderland of Rocks, an apt name.  Our boys particularly enjoyed rock scrambling there, and we usually started our climb at Barker Dam, an empoundment built by ranchers around 1900 that still holds water.  Because of heavy rains a few weeks ago, the reservoir was about as close to full as I have seen it.  To celebrate my return to this wonderland, I did a little rock scrambling—discovering that being several pounds heavier and twenty years older makes it a bit more risky.  Fortunately, I survived the ordeal with no injuries—nor with holes in the seat of my pants from sliding down the coarse granite (a lesson I still remembered!)

I stayed until sunset—the photos of which are stereotypical of those shot by just about every visitor who stays until day’s end.  Besides, I wanted to also take in the stars looking through thin, dry air completely away from the light pollution.  And, PTL, I finally got to see the Milky Way for the first time in about a year.  Driving out of the park at night is also an adventure as rodents scurry across the road in the light of your high beams.  Driving some 40 miles through such a landscape at night, your low beams seem to be totally inadequate.  Being late, I think I had to dim my lights only twice.  You can only imagine the nighttime drama of life in the desert that’s taking place out there in the moonless darkness.

To learn more about this fascinating place, take a look at the Wikipedia article on it.  You can follow links from there to other sites.

See you outdoors,

Dean

---

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

Close Encounter of the Wildlife Kind

Yesterday (Tuesday, March 9, 2010) was an unusually warm day for early March, at 54 degrees (F); so I decided to take my camera out to capture some of the early signs of spring.  Streams and puddles of melting snow were abundant, but not particularly photoworthy.  Bird signs were everywhere: geese staking out nesting spots and fighting off all suspected interlopers, hawks in pairs—each looking in opposite directions for prey, pairs of mallard ducks darting from pond to pond, and a big flock of newly arrived red-winged blackbirds sounding off like fifty gate hinges badly in need of lubrication.

[You can see the photos larger if you click on them; then hit the back arrow to get back to the post.]

Near dusk a couple days before I had spotted a flotilla of about 20 swans on nearby Thornapple River and thought it might be neat to get some photos of such an unusually large lamentation of swans (see the collective names of animal groups here). Going to the spot where I had seen them, I didn’t even find a duck.  So I headed southward and caught a glimpse of one, but no group.  To go farther south I had to drive up out of the Thornapple valley before I could get back to another river vista point.  That’s when I got my “wow” experience.  I was driving past the east end of Grand Rapids’ main east/west airport runway and caught a quick glimpse of a huge bird on the ground—and it had an entirely white head: a mature bald eagle standing hardly 30 yards from the road!

I did a quick turnaround and slowly drove back and to the side of the road where I could get a good shot—fully expecting that such a man-wary bird would be gone before I could even get my camera up and focused.  But because traffic was pretty common on that stretch, it had apparently decided that cars were not a concern.  So I had the delightful experience of a close encounter for several minutes with this majestic bird, which had spotted a road-killed raccoon and had dragged it off the road onto a patch of melting ice where it could stuff itself without being bothered.  It was, however, being closely observed by flocks of starlings and red-winged blackbirds and a dozen crows eager to finish off what the eagle left behind.  It reminded me of that Far Side cartoon of lion “police” talking to curious animal onlookers taking in the gruesome sight of other lions feasting on a recent kill and saying, “Okay folks, move on.  There’s nothing to see here.”

[See my video of it on WZZM TV here]

What a delight it was to have a “wilderness experience” right next to an urban airport—the result of the Endangered Species Act that I had earlier in my hyper-conservative life considered interference with private property rights.  I compare that to my experiences as a kid growing up in a blue-collar town where if a critter had feathers, fur, fins or four feet, it was fair game.  Every hawk was a “chicken hawk” and needed to be shot wherever one was seen.  Every crow was a corn thief and you only saw them at a great distance in the country—almost never in town.  Deer were virtually never seen; the first one I remember seeing close up was one a neighbor had shot.  And the only fish you caught in area rivers were “trash fish”: suckers, catfish, chubs, mud-puppies, or carp.  Now I thank the legislators who had both foresight and the courage to pass wildlife protection bills in spite of the ire of many within their constituency.

I have come to realize an important fact: the nature of wild animals is to a significant extent what people make it.  The wildness and tameness of most animals is often related directly to the threat they feel from people—fear almost always rightly warranted.  I used to think that the account of birds and animals flocking to be near Francis of Assisi was mostly all legend.  Now I believe the accounts were probably true.  Although I am still dubious about his making peace between a man-eating wolf and the people of Assisi by telling the people to stop harassing the wolf and telling the wolf to stop eating people!

See you outdoors!

Dean

---

 

 

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

 

 

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:”";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Countryside Consternation

Because my dad grew up on the farm, he loved the county fair.  Even though he left the farm in his late teens after World War I, like all his five brothers, the farm, of course, never left the boy. All life long, he’d go to the cattle barns at the annual fair to pat a few hindquarters of bulls and cows and pet the faces of the horses—especially the draft horses like those he used to harness and drive as a kid.  A number of times we made the long drive to Chicago to attend the International Stock Show at the Union Stockyards on Halstead Street.  Once we even considered eating at the exclusive restaurant at the stockyards where you actually picked out your ultra-fresh steak from a cooler stocked with meat that had been cut in the slaughterhouse right next door.  We couldn’t afford to eat there, but we did get to see one of Chicago’s former iconic restaurants.  It and the stockyards are long gone.

A side story:  My dad came home one August evening from work with a bit of a limp.  Mom asked him about it.  With a sheepish grin, he lifted a pant leg to show a very bad bruise on his shin.  “I went down to the fairgrounds at lunch,” he explained, “to see the cattle.  And I forgot one of the cardinal rules: don’t stand immediately behind a horse or a bull when you pat it; you might get kicked.  Man, that bull just about broke my leg!”  A couple days later when he came home, he was chuckling when he came in the door.  “I just had to go by the cattle barns again,” he confessed.  “And I saw a man standing by the bull that kicked me.  I told him to be careful, and lifted my pant leg to show him my bruise.  The guy said, ‘I know; I own him!’ and he lifted both of his pant legs.  Each shin had a bruise just like mine!”

Dad always enjoyed rides in the countryside—especially in late summer.  He’d tell us, “On hot days like this, boys, you could almost hear the corn growing.”  In the spring he would have instructed us, “You plant corn when the leaves of the oak are the size of a mouse’s ear.”  We’d get farmish wisdom like that all year long.

Attending small town fairs in West Michigan and having a father who grew up on the farm are part of the reason I love the outdoors and enjoy the seasons.  As we travel around, I still try to identify the crops that are growing in this or that field.  I know my dad would be amazed to see the crops here in Michigan this year. It has been a fantastic growing year: ample rain and lots of heat and sunshine.  Yesterday I was alone, so I decided to take my camera and go for a ride in the country.  The best visual treat of the afternoon was provided by two sandhill cranes that were feeding next to the road. What a feast they were having at a virtual banquet table: big grasshoppers caught out in short wheat stubble where they had no place to hide.

My consternation? That came because of what I know about the soybeans and corn grown here (and all over the world).  My dad would have been astounded to see hundreds of acres of corn and beans, lush and luxuriant, with scarcely a weed to be seen.   The seeds sown on these fields have been genetically modified not only to grow larger and more uniformly, but also to resist herbicides that are dumped by the ton on these fields to control the weeds.  Pesticides too have been applied in abundance.  And because these chemicals tend to sterilize soil, more tons of fertilizers and soil enhancers have been applied.  Typically a fistful of soil contains billions of microorganisms to help plants grow, but chemicals pretty much burn them out.  So in a sense industrial farming is practicing a sort of reverse alchemy: using gold to turn soil into sand.

Here’s another sad fact.  The soybeans I saw were almost certainly provided by one company: Monsanto.  Monsanto has made billions of dollars by genetically modifying soybeans to resist their herbicide Roundup.  They’re called “Roundup ready” seeds.  Roundup will kill virtually any other plant but soybeans—their soybeans.  And when a farmer agrees to buy Monsanto’s seeds, he must agree not to save any of their legally-bound beans as seed for the next year: what farmers have naturally done for thousands of years.  They have to buy again from Monsanto the next spring.  Because the seed provides such a rich harvest, in just 12 years soybeans with Monsanto’s patented gene went from being 2% of the US crop to 90%! (1996-2008). Now many farmers simply have two choices regarding growing soybeans: Use Monsanto’s seeds or don’t grow soybeans.  The reality is similar with corn, where, however, there are a few more major seed producers. The story of this is told in the chilling documentary “Food, Inc.”  It’s been out a few years, but I first saw it yesterday morning—just before my country drive.

A hundred years ago, my dad and his brothers were planting corn with those nifty hand corn-planters now sold as curiosities in flea-markets and antique shops all over the country.  Memories are still vivid of my protesting to my dad about how hard and tedious it was to plant a few rows of sweet corn in our garden using such a device—and then having to use a hoe or hand cultivator to weed them.  After a year or two, he gave up on the garden.  Supermarkets (which now on average sell over 40,000 different products) made growing your own food an unnecessary bother.  And that leads to another sad story:  Our average meal today travels some 1500 miles from farm to supermarket—instead of being hand-carried in baskets a few yards from the garden to the kitchen. We are indeed in the “brave new world.”

As a mild protest, I went to Heidi’s market of locally-grown produce after yesterday’s drive and got most of the ingredients for some awesome Southern gumbo.  Locally grown cantaloupe topped with locally produced (and wonderfully good) Hudsonville Ice Cream was purchased for dessert.  I suppose if we all protested in like manner, we might help to turn at least some of our “growing medium” back into soil.