Blogger Woes: Too Early to Declare Victory

Template hell. I was just about to announce my redemption from pergatory when, with the final tweaking of links and blog post title colors--nothing more--the Adsense sidebar blocks went wonky. Shucks.

I'm not sure I'll stick with this exact configuration. And notice I lost the header with images. Somebody (Gary?) some while back sent me a new and improved script for the top banner plus images to replace the crude tables I had used before (and which my old template still uses.) If I can locate the better script, I'll think about putting the old header back up. But no rush. I'm just happy not to have sent the whole thing up in smoke.

If anybody has problems viewing the page, do let me know. It looks alright to me, but different monitor resolutions, browsers, fonts and such can make a difference.

Like a Weed: Forget-Me-Not Part Two

A closer look at our discovery (Part One) reveals the details of this sea of tiny blue flowers, details easily missed from a distance to those too busy for a bugs-eye view. It means getting down on your knees in the wet sand--a small price to pay for such a visual memory.

And among the details of form and color in this closer view of Myosotis scorpiodes is the inflorescence type. A flowering plant's "inflorescence" is the way it holds its flowers on the main and secondary stems. (Great page about flower types is at Wayne's World) This flower (and in fact the flower family to which it belongs) is characterized by this unusual type of flower growth form called a helicoid or scorpoid cyme. (More about that tomorrow in Part Three.) Getting an uncluttered shot to show this took some doing, so I'm especially pleased with this shot.

What I wasn't pleased to learn, however, is that this plant is considered an INVASIVE, primarily of wetlands. As a plant brought here (for aesthetic reasons, most likely) and escaped from cultivation, it spreads readily in places like our sandy creek. Ann spotted it yesterday downstream on her drive to town.

Next Thursday I'll be participating in (and photographing and writing about) a workday on the Blue Ridge Parkway to remove invasives from a parkway wetland area near the VA-NC line. More about that then, of course.

Phoenix: Fragments from the Ashes. Or Not

I'm going to have to do something drastic--not to mention half-informed--to be able to make changes to the sidebar again.

One day last week, comments disappeared, only for a single post. To get it back, I hit republish (my blog is housed off-site, not with Blogger) and when the page reappeared, the background was white. My light gray text disappeared, of course.

A reverting to a saved February template brought back the gray background (and the old header images, and the outdate Adsense blocks, and the first not second set of notecards.

I'd really like to fix all that--and add some important new elements as well--but now if I do as much as add a single space or change one letter of one word in the template, when I preview it, I'm back to the white background .

Blogger forums have been silent to my posts for help. I'm on my own with this one. So if I disappear for a day or three, I am fumbling blind trying to start over with a fresh template and build it back, one item at a time.

I'll still have Nameless Creek as an outlet for my blogger notions, so check over there if things are FUBAR'ed here. And of course, if anybody has an inkling what might be going on, or how to make this repair/transition without excessive hair pulling, I'm listening. I probably won't dive in until some time tomorrow.

Forget me Not -- Part One

On a sandy spit of temporary island heaped up in last winter's storms, blooming in profusion between foot-wide rivulets of Nameless Creek, we discovered a sea of pale blue flowers. (You can see a bit of red barn roof in the background.)

While we had never seen this plant before on our place, I recognized it, drawing from some seldom-visited recess of plant-taxonomic memory, as a member of the Borage Family, characterized by just the kind of infloresence--or flower-growth arrangement--as we saw here in miniature. Lovely, and all the more so for being so unexpected a find on a routine walk: forget-me-not, Mysotis scorpiodes.

But more about this plant tomorrow and Friday.

Riffles

Some times, some moments, this place, these times are so beautiful, achingly so, that it doesn't seem real. Often those fleeting instants have to do with flowing water--such a blessing in its music, its purity, the magic of its genesis out of oceans, rains, underground rivers.

When I slow down enough to listen, I hear voices there, laughter mostly, but have not learned the language. Not yet.

Wild Life Alert

When we see the dog stand up suddenly from the porch with his eyes focused intently across the pasture, we know it is far more likely we have four-legged than two-legged visitors--usually deer--and at times, he won't even bother to challenge them.

But when we see the dog stand up suddenly and look straight up into the maple tree just beyond the mailbox, our guests are certainly not deer.

While our arboreal drop-ins are most usually squirrels or chipmunks, this time we looked out the window just as Tsuga was about to get a mouthful of raccoon tail.

And here is where our marital dimorphism (a subject for later this week) cut in: she grabbed the rifle, I grabbed the camera.

"It might be rabid!" she warned.

"He seems healthy enough to me" I hollered back, as I chased the uncooperative bandit back and forth from one side of the crotch of the tree to the other. "Hold still and smile" I pleaded.

Finally, he tired of our game, and backed down the tree, down into and along side of Goose Creek, minding his own business, and disappeared.

Love of Country: The Local Reach of Patriotism

I have put up the first of two parts of an essay read at Chateau Morrisette Winery's Spoken Word Dinner of May 11. The topic was patriotism--not an area much visited at Fragments. Or isn't it?

...and so I asked myself--as I walked our forest path near home later that day--what then does it mean to be PATRIOTIC? Am I thankful for the blessings of my FATHERland, my country? Yes, no question, and the more so--I thought as I stepped from rock to rock across the creek--as I have come to discover what is sacred in this very COUNTRY-SIDE, as I gain a richer understanding of the specific geographies of my life, and know by heart the land within these boundaries of home.

My patriotism begins to grow from a physically-specific love and honor to a certain landscape--not from abstract feelings of national self-regard held within borders too vast to comprehend.

As I think was true for our forefathers-my love of Pater Land begins in thankfulness for the abundant providence of MATER Earth, this "gift of good land" that is our blessing and covenant.

I'll post part two at Nameless Creek tomorrow. Part One

It's Just War

For a country whose (previously) predominant Christian moral code forbids killing, the proposition of war has been a difficult matter. Many have wrestled with the conditions that must be met to call a war JUST. This very day, our children die in a war about which, as parents, neighbors, friends of those soldiers, we must ask: Is it justified? We must each decide, and speak and vote and act accordingly.

And on this day of memorial, God bless Americans who serve and die or live beyond war with its many wounds, and God bless the fallen and displaced of Iraq.

Criteria of the Just War tradition:

• Probability of success: Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success;


• Proportionality: The overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved.[6]


• Last resort: Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted.


• recapturing things taken


• punishing people who have done wrong


• Comparative justice: While there may be rights and wrongs on all sides of a conflict, to override the presumption against the use of force, the injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other;


• Legitimate authority: Only duly constituted public authorities may use deadly force or wage war;


• Right intention: Force may be used only in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose—correcting a suffered wrong is considered a right intention, while material gain or maintaining economies is not.

Friday SHoRTs

&tc... This has been a difficult fern to make look nice, because unlike yesterday's featured pteridophyte (Osmunda cinnamomea) that had feather-duster distinct spore-producing separate stalks, this Interrupted Fern (same genus) looks like it forgot what it was doing, interrupting the leafy sterile frond for a few iterations of spore-producing pinnae, then resuming its green photosynthetic tasks.

&tc... Funny how time heals--even very tiny wounds. I'd almost forgotten. In the garden this week, I've been so intent on my planting I haven't dwelt on the stingy itchy spots down next to my scalp and on my arms. I just remember to wear a cap and a long sleeve shirt and go on. But it occurred to me yesterday: hey, these are not your plain vanilla gnats. I've only one or two years before felt that invisible irritation, but never before the middle of June: Noseeums. Biting midges so small you can fit three on the head of a pin. Dang global warming.

&tc... Places of Our Lives: a Visual Essay. That's what I've tentatively titled a program I'll be giving twice in October. The plan is to take three "makes a point" essays and illustrate them with digital images. The chosen pieces are (1) Child's Play: Addressing Nature Deficit Disorder; (2) Calling Them By Name--that encourages folks to learn to identify trees, birds, wildflowers etc as a way of gaining appreciation and respect for our personal environments); and (3)Where I am Married--that talks about sense of place, particularly mine for where we live our lives.)

&tc... I plod with the iPod. Personally, I'd ditch iTunes if I could. I'd expected more of Mac. Even so, I'm manually adding and deleting now, and it's working okay. Yesterday I loaded an mp3 book-on-CD (not exactly a streamlined process but it works) and with my new Sony Earbuds purchased at BestBuy in South Dakota, I'm happy. I also found most of my lost music library on CD's hidden in the wardrobe. I used to take these to work years ago--Beatles, Lettermen, lots of classical stuff, Harry Nilsson. NeoLuddite wife Ann still gives me grief, which I accept, having had lots of practice.

The Seldom Scene

I have a few *pterible images from that Blue Ridge Parkway meadow full of ferns I discovered a couple of weeks back, and will post one or two of my favorites.

As with wildflowers, the first blooms (as if ferns had them) are most attractive. Ferns, in addition to their lacy leafery, often have this seldom-seen "fertile" stage, as in this Cinnamon Fern, when they are busily producing spores by the millions for dispersal in the wind.

As I'm sure you remember from biology class, those spores, against all odds finding favorable soil, can produce a gametophyte, a little heart-shaped leaf that will produce either an egg, or a flagellated, swimming sperm.

Given the necessary film of water between the two (understand why there are no desert ferns?) the multi-tailed sperm swim to the egg along a chemical gradient (they "smell" the egg, in a sense) and voila! a fertilized egg (the sporophyte phase in this "alternation of generations") begins to elongate into what will become a fern frond--either a "sterile" leaf-only frond, or one these fancy feather-duster-looking arrangments (or some variation on the theme generally not as gawdy as this) that is "fertile" and spore-bearing.

Now. You may expect a pop test on this at our next meeting. Do your homework.

*Pteridology is the study of ferns, so if I'm having a pterible day, it means I'm seeing lots of them!

Cost of Gas | Cost of a Gallon

I remember buying gas for seventeen cents a gallon. It was pumped for me while I listened to the dashboard radio. My windows were cleaned and oil checked while I waited, and I got a free glass for the $2 fill-up. And a car wash token.

So will $4 a gallon sting? Sure. Will it happen? Sure. MUST it happen? You figure. Whatever your end-point, it is a finite resource, and we're burning the equivalent of decades of accumulation out of the ground every day.

And the point for the long term is NOT to insure a constant flow of cheap gas, but to become collectively motivated for a society not built around the automobile, plastics and the international transport of cherries and lettuce.

We need to be "making other arrangements", as James Howard Kunstler puts it--not simply rearranging the furniture.

While we have supported many of the mass-action campaigns that MoveOn.org has initiated in the past few years, Ann and I were both disappointed with yesterday's alert about gas prices:

As of yesterday, gas prices are the highest in U.S. history—-we just passed the 1981 record, even adjusted for inflation. Prices could reach $4.00 per gallon in parts of the country, just in time to crimp summer vacation plans. As consumers suffer, the oil industry continues to reap the windfall—breaking profit records on an almost quarterly basis. It's outrageous!

I sent the following comment (took some doing to find how, you can go directly HERE.) And if you concur, please feel free to use my email as a template, modifying it as you see fit. Don't you think there is a kind of poetic symmetry to deluge MoveOn with email petitions encouraging change? Hmmmm?

I was disappointed to find MoveOn with such short-sighted issues as avoiding a "crimp in summer vacation plans" due to increasing gas prices.

While I'm sure Big Oil is not about to miss an opportunity to stick it to consumers, it is because gas has been so inconsequentially cheap in this country that we treat it as a renewable resource and tolerate such abysmal fuel efficiencies and waste.

When MoveOn begins to measure the value of its causes by dollars alone, my wife and I lose our confidence that your organization truly represents us, or the hundreds of thousands ready to rethink society towards a sustainable future.

Please let supporters know you have a bigger-picture, deeper-economic understanding of the future of fossil fuels in this country.

A gallon of gasoline weighs about six pounds. When you burn it, you release about FIVE POUNDS of carbon into the atmosphere.p 19 Deep Economy | Bill McKibben

Looking Back, Thinking Black

I'm revisiting my digital archives to view some of my images in black and white. In the future, I'll try to see them that way in the field.

I often have the final image in mind when I'm composing a picture, but that image hasn't really considered black and white.

BTW: First thing this morning, I was trying to figure out why comments seem to be disabled from the "Summer's Coming On" post from yesterday (thanks for the heads-up, Doug, it was not on purpose!) and while "fixing" I managed to screw up my template. Short term solution has been to replace it with a copy (thank goodness!) from February, so we've reverted to some old header and sidebar images until I can tweak it.

Going Out for Chinese Food?

Eat in, Eat Local

China has become the Walmart of the world, and we can't get enough cheap food! But at some considerable price.

From the spate of recent food contaminations and public poisonings, it's apparent our system for insuring untainted vegetables and meats and canned products has its problems. They start early in the supply chain: the lowest bidder for many food products these days is China. Their prices are so low, in fact that they have driven American competitors out of business.

Ah, but isn't that what makes the world go 'round--getting the largest volume for the least dollars?

However, there is the issue of quality, where the lowest bidder may also have the lowest standards for fish and fruits:

China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."

What we have resisted until now is buying Chinese meat.

But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.

But the demand for chicken "nuggets" by the opulent and corpulent of the first world will ultimately see Chinese poultry become "legal tender" at MackieD's. Can you say salmonella?

So will locally grown chicken, fruit and vegetables cost us more? Yes. And much less. Quotes from Washington Post

Summer's Comin' On

Done laid around, done played around, this old town too long...

(If you're old enough to remember where those lyrics came from, be careful you don't break something getting up to fetch that next cup of coffee.) And come to think about it, I think it said "Winter's coming on, and Summer's almost gone. But I garbled my blog post title out of it anyhow.)

* Well we have arrived in a new season. It is early summer when the pasture grass is puppy-back high. We can easily lose Tsuga these days over in the field, except that his tail pokes up out of the grass like a periscope. Maruading for mice has grown more difficult over there now that their hiding place is protected by the thick pasture grass, so Tsuga has turned to woodland prey--chipmunks and baby rabbits, and of course the ubiquitous burrowing moles--to assuage his hunter instincts.

For those of you who live in or are expecting soon to visit Floyd, be sure and check out the artwork of Floyd resident Ron Campbell. You can find samples of his work in the Chamber of Commerce window on Locust Street, in the Country Store (see side image) and for sale at Bells Gallery.

Ron came out to Goose Creek this weekend and took some pictures of our old barn. His images will serve as a basis for black-and-white artwork--the kind you can see, for instance, on this page of artwork from Floyd County. So, soon, there will be cards and prints (and maybe even a bench) available with Slow Road's favorite barn. I'm looking forward to several potential collaborations with Ron, so stay tuned!

* And, as I told a friend this morning in an email, I don't set my sights so awful high anymore, knowing that it is often better to travel hopefully than to arrive. I am certainly thankful for the visibility, but can only vouch for ONE acknowledgment from the WaPo blurb over the weekend. Maybe you can't here from there. I dunno.

* And finally for now, I needed to expedite the replacement of an image on a friend's blog he uses for business purposes. He needed to know how to resize a picture from the gallery I had done for him some time back. Here's a great online image processing site you might want to bookmark for such a purpose. Pixenate

Now I feel like I gotta travel on. (Kingston Trio do this first? Anybody know and willing to admit it?)

Beginning of the Beginning

We are poised in our time between humanity's proclivity for self-indulgence, arrogance and short-sighted self-destruction and a time of healing, cooperation and sustainable relationship with each other and the planet. Some of you understand. You feel revulsion and you feel the possibilities to do better--far better--for the sake of our children's children, and because it is the RIGHT thing. The problems are many. So too may be the solutions.

"But what can one person do?" we hear so often, perhaps from our own lips or unspoken thoughts.

While working in the garden yesterday, mending the fences from last year's deer damage, feeling more than a little discouraged about the state of the world, I listened to Paul Hawken describe our collective understanding about our place in the grand scheme of things, and encourage his listeners wisely in ways we CAN and ARE changing the way we do things to each other and the planet--perhaps, even in time to avoid paying the consequences of where our bigger-hammer approach to commerce and politics seems to be carrying us.

I encourage you to pull this thread. If you could use some encouragement, some hope, and a vision for a brighter future than the one we see at first glance in the media, take time to visit at least one of the links below.

Read the advance endorsements of Hawken's Book, Blessed Unrest by Jane Goodall, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, David James Duncan, David Suzuki and others.

Watch the short video where Hawken speaks at the Bioneers conference describing this "movement without a name" that may already include more than a million like-minded organizations and 100 million people. If you think you're alone and powerless, watch.

Buy the book. Give to your children.

And finally, visit Natural Capital, and read about WISER, the World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility. Let's find out where we fit best, each one of us. We all have strengths, skills, gifts, experience that can be used toward the healing of injury--environmental, political, and economic. Maybe it's NOT too late, after all. Perhaps we are at the beginning of the beginning, a time of blessed unrest--and not the beginning of the end.

Ripples on the Big Pond

I am grateful to Jerry Haines for bringing Slow Road Home into the view of readers in the DC area and beyond in his column, Road Reads, in the Washington Post Travel Section. The brief review is online now (you may have to register) and will be in print in the paper on Sunday, May 20, 2007; Page P02

This mention represents a disproportionately wide reach for a small book about small things from a small place. I look forward to finding out that even in the bigger burgs and busier burbs, there's still a receptive heart for words about places that are slow. And quiet. But not ordinary!

From the unpredictable alchemy of connection between new readers and the story of Slow Road Home, this writer's journey has taken much of its energy, enthusiasm and joy. You just never know what new friends, places and opportunities to share will open up, even from the least threads of synapse. And this is no small thread.

The summer, until late August, is open for book travel and talk. I'm hoping I'll become plesantly "booked" and that this web of conversation with the words of the book and the photo-images will continue to grow and blossom.

Note: There's also a link to the WaPo piece from the "What Readers Say" page on the book website.

Parkway Wildflowers

I caught a flash of orange-red out of the corner of my eye, off in a morning meadow beside the Blue Ridge Parkway. "California poppy escaped from cultivation" I thought, but pulled off the shoulder anyway, because these small but colorful flowers were nicely backlit against dark morning shadows in stark contrast to the plant's brilliance.

But as I walked closer through the damp grasses and ferns, I could tell this was not poppy, but Indian Paintbrush--an uncommon wildflower in my experience. Here they pose along with Golden Alexander.

The botanically-best thing about the Parkway is that there is almost always a place you can pull over, get out and explore.

And almost anywhere you do that, if you take your time and wander off into the woods, you'll find something of interest.

But remember: the Blue Ridge Parkway, while it is the nation's LONGEST national park, it is in many places only a hundred yards wide, and then, you're on private property. So go with this thought in mind.

Fred's Victory Garden. Or Not.

As I contemplate the gardening year ahead, what comes to mind is the vintage Wide-World-of-Sports opening action that showed us the disparate fates of two ski-jumpers. Their success and failure will live forever in some our chronologically-gifted minds. Remember?

One happy skier is airborne, leaning forward, building speed down the ramp, then buoyant and balanced, graceful and solid in his landing; the other, ill-fated, off-center and out of control, he careened over the side of the jump, wind-milling arse over teakettle in the agony of defeat.

It could go either way every gardening year, I acknowledge as I head out with my seeds, my hoe, and my hopes momentarily intact. Sadly, at the end of gardening year 2006, I was the second of those two jumpers-humiliated, humbled and broken. Sports fans gasped in horror. Ouch. That's gotta hurt.

I blamed myself, though I knew the garden's sad and sudden demise was surely due to matters beyond anything I could have done. Maybe it was the four inches of rain we had the week before Sudden Garden Death. Or, perhaps we were finally paying the chemical price for putting the garden in the only possible place it could go in our less-than-ideal rock-infested deep valley location: over the septic field. (I thought grass-and veggies-were supposed to grow greener there!) I had the soil tested for excess chlorine, considering this possibility.

The total garden wipeout was all the more heart-breaking because at the end of the gardening year of 2005, we had five walnuts cut from around the garden. We get little enough light in this deep holler, and the trees had grown tall and wide enough to cast a significant shadow. Also, you may know, their roots exude a toxin poisonous to competing plants-including those of the edible vegetable variety. (We bartered one large walnut trunk towards an oak desk, and burned the tops for firewood, even though I think walnut makes more ash than heat.)

The other tragic fact about our 2006 garden's utter failure was that we had made its success a kind of sink-or-swim test of our self-sufficiency: let's work as if we are totally dependent on summer's produce alone for the coming winter's food. I set the bar high, and didn't even get airborne. Test score: we would have starved.

Okay. Here's the full confession part of this dreary tale: we have seen the enemy and it are us. Well, it are me. Yep, single-handedly I wiped out our garden from sheer ignorance in my gardening zeal. Soil tests in March '07 showed the soil was NOT ACID ENOUGH! Somebody (gulp) must have put too much wood ash (walnut, actually) and leaves on the soil. Mea culpa. The big OOPS. I have followed the advice given to bring our little plot back to a healthy pH, and we'll hope for the best.

The best. Now just what does that mean, in local gardening terms? Is the best we can hope for to create the lushest, tastiest and most tempting Deer and Insect Salad Park on Goose Creek?

As my daughter would say: you want some cheese with that whine?

I admit it: I'm discouraged. We have rectified my toxic attempts at organic soil amendment. We have removed the shade trees to maximize our sunlight, and repaired the five-strand electrified fence.

And yet, with all the hours of tilling, stooping, bending, pulling, hoeing, watering and coddling in the months to come, we may still suffer the agony of defeat. Make that "the agony of the feet"-deer feet-tramping the Swiss Chard, mincing the smooth spaces where I would plant fall greens, tramping down the waist-high corn. Deer: rats on stilts. What's a gardener to do?

And I dream of the Fortress Garden. I see rat wire sunk two feet below the surface to keep out burrowing insectivores-moles and shrews-that would tunnel their way into the battlement. Twelve foot posts are buried three feet into the earth, cemented in place, to hold up a ratwire-reinforced nine-foot electrified fence. There is razor wire across the top. The entire structure is covered by a drape of fine-mesh Kevlar netting to keep out the crows that would maliciously pull up the new bean sprouts, the cruel Japanese and Potato Beetles that turn vegetable leaves to lace, and the menacing eye-seeking ear-buzzing gnats of July that make a gardener slap his head silly.

But daydreams end, and life goes on, powdery mildew and blossom rot notwithstanding. And as I stand here on the leafless plain of our future garden in early May, I look around and see the greens and golds, reds and yellows of all the blessings that can come from the tiny seeds in my bucket, still embryo-like in their packets full of promise and hope.

You know, I bet that the guy that ended up in a crumpled heap off the edge of the ski jump eventually got back up and tried again. And so, too, will we. I'll get back to you in September with the judges' scores.

Printed in "The Road Less Traveled" | Floyd Press | May 17, 2007

Summer Stock. Woodstock. Photo Stock

What do I know about image sales? Not nearly as much as I hope to after a few months growing a portfolio over at Lucky Oliver. What! You never heard of LO?

Swing over and take a look, including a visit to the blog where the "grand scheme" marketing plan unfolds. Or start from the Main Page, the Big Top of this carnival of imagery and community.

I'm pleased that I deal with people--folks like Jill yesterday who repeatedly looked at an image I was trying to submit unsuccessfully and guided me along through a string of immediate email replies until I got it right. I now have my first three images accepted, and hope for a few dozen more over the next few weeks.

The other thing I appreciate at Lucky Oliver is that the story of the image is given considerable emphasis. There's more going on here than a simple repository of pix. It's early yet, but I'm impressed with the feel of the place, and hope you'll help spread the word. Heck, maybe toss your three in the ring and see if you win a Cupie Doll. Step right up! Roll up those shirt sleeves, and test your luck and skills, bucko!

Ant Ecology | Old Dog, New Tricks

I love that nature is an inexhaustible source of solace, beauty and education for me--and that it is so easy to approach in our chosen location and style of living here in Floyd County.

And I love the fact that I can still share my discoveries of aesthetic or natural history interest with "field trippers" from around the world who share the journey with me through the weblog.

I'd rather you have been there to see it, but next best thing, I can show and tell.

I remember being told in my Pteridology summer course at Mt. Lake Biological Station (back in the Pleistocene era) that Bracken Fern (pictured here) was perhaps the most world-wide of plants, found on every continent. So, it has been around for some while, and done quite well for itself. I wondered back then what made it so successful. Now, I have one clue towards an answer.

Every Braken fiddlehead in the sandy meadow along the Blue Ridge Parkway earlier this week had one or more Carpenter Ants stationed on its three-part unfurling frond. This certainly was more than a random search for food or mates, I figured, and when I got home, I looked it up.

Take a look at the right-hand image. See the wet black spot near the spot where the three prongs of the fern leaf come together? It looks rather like the eye of this otherworldly bird-like creature.

It is a NECTARY, not unlike what many flowers offer their insect visitors. Except, of course in this case, there are no flowers. The ant gets a sweet treat. It seems what the fern gets is protection from other predatory insects while it is in this tender, vulnerable stage.

In our meadow over where Nameless and Goose Creeks come together, there are NO ants on the mature fronds of Bracken Fern. By then, the plant is tough and able to take care of itself. Maybe this association accounts for some of the success of this worldwide fern.

So whaddaya know. The old biology watcher has learned something new about this amazing world--a living planet that has been equipped to take care of itself so very well in such interesting, cooperative ways.

Blogging Lite

I sat myself down the other day and gave myself a good talking-to. I wagged my finger in my face and told me firmly that, if I was serious about being serious about doing anything more of substance--most particularly this supposed book I talk about doing with color photos--then I'd best start making time for it.

And not the usual kind of time at the computer, distracted easily and often by email alerts, quests for word meanings in Answers.com, checking my visit stats or Adsense tallies or the live figures on book sales (or lack of the latter two items.)

In the end, it made sense to me when I suggested that, on Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays--days when I am here with blocks of potentially (and relatively) uninterrupted time at the desk, I must NOT turn on the browser, must turn off email notification, must let the phone ring, and put the dog in the pen (which he thinks of as reward anyway!) and just focus. And no blogging until at least 10 o'clock.

I did that this morning, and in alternate moods, thought I made astounding progress and thought the task impossible and my skills for such an undertaking seriously inadequate. But then, maybe I just haven't found the narrative thread, the voice, the story. It occurred to me that I probably have enough images that are both informational and aesthetically adequate to do a children's field book of sorts.

But no, I told myself, you have only ONE of these expensive to produce books in your wrists, your brain and your bank account, and it probably should be aimed at the Slow Road Home kind of readers with interest in the cultural and natural history of the Blue Ridge.

I don't think we've gotten to the end of this discussion quite yet. I'll let you which of the Bickersons comes out on top, though, when and if it gets resolved.

Great To Be Alive!

This is what you'd think the birds were singing the other morning--so cheery and sweet, peppy and happy! But of course the males are really chirping "you want summa me?" and "so's ya muddah"--that sort of thing. "Step over that line. Dare ya!"

But it lifts my spirits, even when I'm objective and face facts as facts. We are blessed to have such a rich diversity of bird life yet, and should not take it for granted. It could well be that our children's children might only have the recordings if we don't do a better job of protecting our passerine (songbird) winter habitat in South and Central America from the logger's chainsaws (among other weak links in the chain of bird life.)

This home grown clip (link below) was taken hand held with my ever-present Olympus DS2 recorder. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) you can never get a clean recording of birdlife here on the creeks for the incessant babble of water over rocks. Can you hear it--Goose Creek in the distance, the brook by the house only 15 feet away as I stand on the back porch with the birds all around? Imagine you are out there with me, an audio field trip to Goose Creek.

http://64.106.159.99/sounds/morningbirds.mp3

Check out indentify.whatbird.com for great information and help identifying those unknown birds you spot or hear every day (don't you?). In my clip, prominent (though by no means exclusively) you'll hear Kentucky Warblers (ChippyChippyChippyChippy). And who is making the cheWit cheWit CHEWITT! (Listen and compare my Kentucky warbler and Hermit Thrush --tee oh lay! oh lay oh Teee!--to the website's recordings) And what other featured songsters do your perceptive ears hear?

And while you're in an audio state of mind, visit the freesounds project to which I will probably upload my bird clips when I've accumulated a few more.

The Burning Bush | Flame Azalea

Flame Azalea | Rhododendron calendulaceum | acid soil loving shrub of the southern Appalachians

I had what I would call a successful day in "the field" with the camera the other day--a wonderful couple of hours devoted to stopping whenever, where ever and for how ever long I wanted along the Blue Ridge Parkway to photograph whatever struck my fancy.

My chief objective was to bring back some Flame Azalea pix, but they aren't the easiest flowers in the world to photograph, as I could have better explained to my friend Dennis, on whose porch my parkway excursion for the morning ended.

"What difference does it make if the wind is blowing?" he wanted to know.

While there are several issues photographically, I suppose the greatest challenge with this particular flowering shrub is the depth of an individual flower, what with the three inch exserted stamens; and the globular, one in every direction way the flowers are arranged in the flower cluster, adding the challenge of additional depth--up to maybe six inches across.

Another complicating factor is that it is often difficult to find a cluster or group of clusters in good light, not bobbing in the wind, where ALL the flowers are in bud or flower, without a few brown and droopy spent flowers spoiling the prime-of-life composition.

Set this whole mess of orange or yellow waving along all axes in a 10 mph wind, and it makes for no small task on a cloudy day to get an image in focus without cranking the ISO up into the grainy range (>400 max).

So, here's one of just a couple (true color, actually DEsaturated a bit) with the 18-80 Nikkor and D200. The 18-200 mm lens won't be back from Nikon for at least another week. (Man, I sure am glad somebody talked me into keeping the backup lens!)

Aren't we blessed in these gentle mountains to have Flame Azalea as a common roadside shrub?

There is another fact about this plant I hope to tell, but that will require yet another arduous morning out on the Parkway with my camera. Well, darn. Somebody's gotta do it!

Forests: Our Last, Best Hope Up in Smoke

When I end up with 80% of an online article highlighted in Diigo, that tells me this is something I think is significant and worth passing along, even when I feel generally like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. So let me start with this quote toward the end of this piece called Deforestation: The Hidden Cause of Global Warming from the Independent/UK.

"In a world where we are witnessing a mounting clash between food security, energy security and environmental security - while there's money to be made from food and energy and no income to be derived from the standing forest, it's obvious that the forest will take the hit."

What's the so-what? Only this:

The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

How much CO2 are held by forest that is likely to be burned in the coming four years? Oh, not so much:

Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

But hey: there are no multinational corporations made fat by NOT "harvesting" this "crop." I mean, they're only trees. They just sit there and take up space where we could put a shopping mall; or make a pasture to raise cheap beef for Triple Patty Cheeze Croissants.

I think, dear folks, we are doomed. If we can't simply passively accept the benefits of something as elemental as the environmental services of a self-sustaining scrubber for the environment we have in what forests we have left.

A couple of you out there, please take a look at this.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom(s)

I was back in my home town of Birmingham for Mother's Day last year, part of an ongoing story. You can read about it, reposted at Ronni Bennett's Elder Storytelling Place today.

And if you forgot to send your mom a thank-you this Mother's Day, here's a flower to share with her.

Spring in Passing

The solution to finding the spring we missed while out West: go HIGH young man, go HIGH. (Well, forget the young part.)

The Blue Ridge Parkway is lush with spring wildflowers along its 3000 foot plus ridges, and it took great will power (I caved a couple of times) to keep my appointment at Mabry Mill and Chateau Morrisette yesterday afternoon. Oooh! Black Cohosh, Fire Pink, Pink Geranium. Interrupted Fern--so much more a blur as I sped along to my appointed tasks.

I did pull off a couple of times and wandered down into the woods. I caught myself just before I got down on my knees in my dress pants to get a better view of this patch of Lily of the Valley. I intend to go back right away. The Flame Azalea is almost in full bloom.

Where in the World | Dakota, May 2007

There's too much cooking this morning to trickle out the Dakota images one at a time. While I don't expect many (especially on a Friday) to take the time to click through 13 images in the gallery, you might want to see the first 4 or 5 of the Badlands.

Serving Suggestion: Here's the first image in "large" format. Scroll down if your monitor doesn't show the caption. Then hit the RIGHT ARROW key to move to the next image.

Thursday Shorts 10 May 07

* ~ * Good News from Melville: the 18-200mm lens is fixable (you may remember how poorly it bounced on the clinic floor two weeks ago tomorrow) and will cost me just three hours pay to fix! oh JOY! It will be back in a week

* ~ * I visited professional photographer Johnny Sundby in Rapid City last week, and I must say, his studio is most impressive as was his kindness to show me around and talk about the processes in his work, including the production of full-color books (he has at least three.) He made me aware of Four Color Imports and gave me a contact email which turned out to be the president. I was contacted by email by a rep offering to call and discuss my project, and lo and behold, at the time I had requested (yesterday morning) I had a pleasant and helpful conversation with a representative who is now working on a quote for me. Gulp. Johnny got a good price per book because he was confident of sales of 3500 to 5000. I, on the other hand...and no, I don't begin to have the book completed even conceptually. Just something for me to be thinking about, an uncertain carrot on the very real stick that creates that wonderful tension between what is and what can be.

* ~ * So. I'm hoping for a good turnout at the winery tomorrow night, especially as I have chosen to attend that event instead of the Mt. Rogers Naturalist Rally this weekend--a gathering I first visited with my students in 1975. A scheduled field trip leader didn't make it, and at the last minute (as participants were gathered at the steps of the old Konnarock CCC building on Saturday morning) they asked "is there anybody here who can lead the wildflower trip at Grindstone Nature Trail?" and my students vociferously volunteered me. I lead that same trip for 11 years, and once again in 2005. There are 12 field trips Saturday morning--salamanders, invasive weeds, geology, trees, mollusks and more. Sigh.

* ~ * I have several panoramas and other shots from the Badlands I'll share starting tomorrow.

Child's Play

We were house-bound a good bit of the time in Dakota, but even so, we were able to do some "fun" things with Abby.

She'd never had much chance to jump rope, but her dad had a professional-quality rope (leather?) that was of course, too long for Abby, but worked very well with two people operating the controls (Granny Anny and the Dumpster).

With considerable practice, Abby learned to run in while the rope was high, and even jump and turn 'round a couple of times. She was quite proud, and so were we. And it burned off a little of that surplus of energy that six-year-olds need to vent (but ~60 year olds, not so much.) Here you can see she has pretty good hang-time--some good springs in those young legs!

We also worked a little on using the bow-and-arrow that had arrived earlier in the week from Goose Creek by mail. There's more coordination to such a simple thing than you'd think, until you break down all the steps that have to be learned in sequence to make it work.

She finally got to where she could get one of the suction-cup-tipped arrows pretty much across the downstairs room--another new skill under her belt.

However, those feathers (that were simply for looks, glued to one side of the shaft) were too much temptation for Maggie the cat, who promptly picked up an arrow in her mouth and ran off with it and ate the "bird" part of the arrow. Bad cat!

Bee Mystery More Serious by the Flower

This mystery continues, and chances are, even if we discover the cause, it will be years before things get back to a healthy normal.

"Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said." Yahoo News

Want to keep up to date on this topic from a reliable source? Check out the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture site's coverage of Colony Collapse Disorder.

Ashes to Ashes, And One Failed Garden

I didn't think I was putting out too much woodstove ash on the garden last winter, but apparently, the story was told mid-summer when the garden suddenly up and failed. I mean it disappeared overnight after a period of heavy rain. I blamed the rain (though I couldn't explain why; our soil is sandy and doesn't get waterlogged like clay soil does.)

This March I had a soil test done by sending off a sample to Virginia Tech's soils department. We have seen the enemy, and it are us. Prescription for correcting what ails our vegetable garden (other than an excess of deer and moles): it is TOO basic! ACIDIFY!

Soils over the growing season tend to become more acidic due to leaching of basic ions, and the usual remedy is to add lime to "sweeten" the soil. But in our case, we are advised to add acidic ions. Apparently the combination of wood ash and raked leaves was too much of a good thing.

And believe me, it isn't easy to find agricultural acidifiers! Finally, after a good bit of shopping, I found AG sulfur (to acidify) and UREA (to add nitrogen only, there's an excess of P and K in the soil) and after some tedious calculating, I broadcast 1.7 pounds sulfur and a half cup urea for each 100 square foot of garden.

With the rains we've had this past week, those amendments have soaked deeply into the soil so that this next week, we can get serious about putting in our DEER SALAD PARK otherwise known herebouts and cynically as a vegetable garden.

Some Slow Road!

Quite frankly, I'm a little overwhelmed this morning. Some of that is jet lag. Yes, I know it's only two time zones difference between Goose Creek and South Dakota, but for us home bodies habituated to the cycles in our little valley and regimented strictly by its rhythms, it doesn't take more than two time zones to throw us off balance.

And of course, there's the inevitable catching up, confronting the cost of one's time away from home measured in calls to make, bills to pay, deadlines to meet and impending calendar events. What WILL I do for the paper this time? I had hoped to bring back something from the trip, but started following a line of thought down a rabbit trail and couldn't bring him back around for a shot. I thought I'd discover the point of what I was writing after I got into it, but it didn't happen. Doh.

And I have 150 shots from the trip to sort through (deleting 3/4 I expect) but I really shouldn't work on that (or be typing a blog post for that matter) until I work my way down through the piles all the way to the actual surface of my desk and get some of these to-dos checked off.

But I allowed myself a few Photoshop moments over my third cup of coffee to merge the very first four images from our brief Badlands visit. What you can't tell from this picture (click to enlarge) is that the wind was blowing at 35-40 mph. My daughter has one in her camera of me leaning 45 degrees attempting to walk back to the car where everybody but the idiot photographer was sheltering from the wind chill factor!

I'll hope to get up a little gallery of Dakota pix, but it won't be today. I'm too frantic in my semi-retired slow-lane task-oriented hyper-responsible state of mind to do much more fun stuff. Unless, of course, I reward myself late morning with just one more peek at the badlands pix. There is one panorama I'm really looking forward to working on, and may pay my buddy Doug to print out on his MegaMammoth Epson Billboard-capable printer.

Paradox of Spring

We're returned from less than a week away, and there has been an explosion of green!

Having just come from the vast plains of South Dakota, to be enveloped by this leafery is a little like swimming underwater after sailing the vast expanse of oceans. It takes a little time to remember the full-immersion feel of it, appreciate the flow of creeks, hear the sounds of birds in the trees so close at hand.

But it is not fully spring even yet. This morning, there is a heavy frost on the pasture, gray green in the first light. A fire perks in the wood stove with what I had thought was wood put back for October, a time when these tiny translucent leaves that hide our hillsides will fly brown and brittle in the cold winds.

Good to be home.

Big Sky Country: Badlands, Briefly

Well we certainly know how to pick'em. We fly 1200 miles to an alien biome full of places to explore. And South Dakota arranges to get 10% of its annual rainfall (accompanied at various times by pea-soup fog and at all times by 30 mph winds or greater. Until the cloud cover broke (but not the wind) yesterday. (I had to check and see: SD's annual rainfall is about 17.5". Do you know what your state's yearly total is?)

So, we finally made it (very briefly and very superficially) out to the Badlands, and I can at least say I've hurried into one edge of the area and come back with a few usable pictures for the scrapbook. It will be next week, most likely, before I'll have time to take a look at them and post a little gallery of South Dakota pictures, one of which will be...

Our daughters ultrasound that we attended on Friday--this, a high-tech 4D version it's called. The image is all gray and grainy, the usual blobs the trained eye only can see as human. Then he switches to 4D and edges and depth appear in a sepia-toned image. Amazing: a beautiful baby girl. Name very much undetermined and the source of much maternal angst during our few days here. Thirty-something years back, we had chosen a girl's name: Noel. But backwards, she would be First Noel. Along those Christmasy lines, I suggested our new granddaughter's name could be IVY. The Holli and the Ivy. Nah, I think not.

Yesterday, coming back from the Badlands, the skyline to the north (and very near-seeming from my daughter's neighborhood) stood The Needles, shafts of late afternoon sun streaming down behind the stark silhoutte of these rugged Black Hills pinnacles. The lighting was spectacular, but the only pictures are in my mind. Sigh.

We went out to see Holli's horse, boarded with a friend of hers south of town. While we were standing there, the ground began to shake. My first thought was "so they DO still have those Minuteman silos armed and ready!" The rumble built, seemed to be getting closer and over the horizon comes one of these, right over our heads. The horses seemed used to it, I don't think I would ever be. (I failed to appreciate how close we were to Ellsworth Airforce Base.)

Okay, y'all. I'd like to see a half dozen of you at this event. I'm sort of the odd man with Blue Ridge Pens, not a regular attendee being an hour away from their Roanoke group, so some present or future friends and blog readers in the audience at Chateau Morrisette on Friday night would be a real pleasure. There are probably some rooms at Woodbury Inn. T'would make a great week-end getaway.

Windmills No Threat to Cats

One of the objections often stated for windmills in the increasingly strident debates that stand to do nothing by grow in coming years is that the long swirling blades of mountaintop windmills spell massive death to birds.

Turns out, we'd be better off to control our burgeoning feral domestic cat population than to avoid a potential source of energy in our rather bleak future as easy oil goes the way of the dodo bird (an extinct species that succumbed to predation in part by cats imported to the Mascarene Islands where they once lived). Here are some interesting figures that come from a recent study of wildlife impact of mountaintop wind generators: link

A long-awaited federal report on the environmental impact of wind power suggests birds have far more to fear from high buildings, power lines and cats than they do from the swirling blades of wind generators at Altamont Pass and elsewhere.

But North America's bats might have plenty more to worry about, according to a report released Thursday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The report said bats might be at considerable risk in the southwestern United States and elsewhere, where reliance on wind power has been growing. The wind-power turbines generate sounds and, possibly, electromagnetic fields that lure the acoustically sensitive creatures into the spinning blades, scientists suggested.

In the United States in 2003, wind generators accounted for only three-thousandths of 1 percent of bird killings -- no more than 37,000 birds. That same year, possibly as many as a billion birds died in collisions with buildings, and electrical power lines may have accounted for more than a billion more deaths, the report said. And domestic cats were responsible for the demise of an estimated hundreds of millions of songbirds and other species every year.

In the eastern United States, up to 41 bats are killed annually for every megawatt of wind energy generated along forested ridge tops, the report said.

One of the more interesting and potentially palatable sources of wind energy would come from interstates, inherently already aethetic sacrifice areas. Have you ever stood on the side of the interstate with a crippled car and practically been blown off your feet by a passing 18-wheeler?

At Engadget you can see pictures of two prototypes of hiway wind-to-current sources: one overhead, the other in the median barrier panel. Makes sense to me. So instead of NIMBY, how 'bout YPOOI...Yes, Please On Our Interstates.

King Coal's New Clothes

This persistent unheeded issue from the "national sacrifice areas" of central Appalachia is finally rising up into the radar outside the hills and valleys that have born the brunt of exploitation, and previously-powerless mountain people are gaining a voice. Where we get our coal and what it is doing to our nation is not a trivial problem to be swept under the rug, though for too many years, it has been. Consider:

"One million metric tons of explosives are used each year in Central Appalachia --by the coal industry-- to blow up the mountain