Fragments From Floyd

This year’s Naturalist Rally, the 34th, was both well and enthusiastically attended. The weather cooperated (I’ve gathered on Saturday morning there in years past the  second weekend in May with snow on the ground.) I was able to show a friend from home my favorite and familiar walk where I used to lead field trips. The Painted Trillium image here is a memento of that afternoon.

Dr. Stephen Hopp (who I know probably tires of being thought of as Barbara Kingsolver’s husband) presented the Friday program on the “Sights of Bird Sounds”, a topic he has researched for many years. What are birds saying to each other when they call? I learned a lot, and will be coming back to some of that later on.

This year’s crowd was bulked a bit by the presence of ten or so members of the Abingdon Master Naturalist group, and here again, more about this soon.

But without a doubt, my most indelible memory of the weekend was the opportunity to stand on the other side of the podium there in the Konnarock Community Center and address the crowd of closely-kindred spirits. The program coordinator had read my pro/retrospective of the Rally from my May 2 blog post. She felt it deserved a wider audience, and asked me to read it at the Friday night program.

And while I doubted many Fragments readers or Floyd Press readers really appreciated the poignancy of the sense of both loss and celebration in that piece, I knew that this crowd would understand. They would feel what I had felt when I wrote it. And I think this was the case, and am thankful for this unexpected opportunity to share.

I’ll have a few more images for you from the trip, though the sun never really showed itself and the wind never really calmed enough for good wildflower closeups. But for one more year, I was close enough to all of it to remember.

 One thing about an interest in nature is that, no matter how long you live, if you keep your eyes open, you will continually see new things–or at least unnamed things.

If there are any bryologists out there (and of course you know that means “those who study mosses”) I’d be much appreciative to know the proper name (scientific and common) of this little beauty found at Mt. Rogers last week, which until further eluciation, I will call Shining Star Moss.

Want to know more about mosses and also discover a new way to search? Check out this Powerset view of Wikipedia’s spread on mosses, and stay tuned for much more from this semantic search engine!

This year, the 34th annual Mt Rogers Naturalist Rally happens on May 9-10 and I will go. It will be like going home. But then again, neither I nor the world is the same as it was the first time I gathered with others for the Saturday morning field trips at Konnarock.

It was the spring of 1976 and as a twenty-something new faculty member, I’d successfully petitioned the community college to let me offer a new “plant life” course that I would gladly develop–a class I envisioned as field trip intensive, wild foods and ecology minded, hands-on botany. The class was offered, and students (from local freshmen to retired world travelers) signed up. We began our field excursions right away in a small caravan out to stalk the wild asparagus!

I was told about a new outdoor event in May at Mt. Rogers and was intrigued: a congregation of fellow tree huggers! Ten students went with me; we pitched our tents Friday night after the dinner and speaker and awoke at daylight to a light frost.

Saturday morning, more than 120 participants gathered to be matched with the designated field trip leader of a dozen scheduled events–birds, plants, geology, small mammals, mosses, salamanders and more. But one of the leaders had become ill at the last minute. Could anybody lead a wildflower field trip, the organizers asked from the top of the steps of the old CCC building?

My students volunteered me, and I reluctantly agreed. It was such a rewarding experience, I went back for eleven years after that to lead the same field trip over the same familiar terrain of Grindstone’s nature trail across gentle slopes of rich cove forest–a 3/4 mile loop where year after year I repeated my little speechlets at the same bends of the trail about this fern or lichen or wildflower. I came to know the place by heart.

In 1987 we moved away, and not long after returning to Virginia in 1997, I revisited Grindstone and the Naturalist Rally–a kind of double homecoming. Many of the human faces were the same, save for the passage of time. Some folks in my long absence had never missed a single year. But much about the natural face of the area was not the same, even in the short span of years since ‘76.

The dark visage of the area’s 5000-foot mountain crests (Rogers, Whitetop and Pine) are less dark now than they were then. The evergreens (spruce-fir, white pine and eastern Hemlock) are under siege by adelgids and beetles, the trees’ abilities to resist compromised by acid precipitation and climate change. The summit trails are strewn with unnatural blow-down of dead treetops, open light reaching the mossy forest floor that was for centuries in dark shade all day long.

The birders at Mt. Rogers see a different mix of birds now on their field trip, some species less abundant, others missing entirely, many showing up at odd times as the northern migration season warms earlier than what has long been normal. The accelerating disappearance of tropical forest converted over the past four decades to pasture for beef production and now to biofuel crops spells doom for many once-familiar Virginia summer songbirds that winter in shrinking South American habitat.

And saddest of all for me: on my solo reunion walk around Whispering Waters trail at Grindstone in 1998, some of my old friends–rose twisted stalk, showy orchis, umbrella-leaf, and yellow trillium–were not there where I had always found them all those May field trips before.

I want to stick my finger in the dike, to click my heels and have the natural order right again. Can humankind live in harmony with this world for good? Can we as good stewards keep an eye on the sparrow even while we live off the bounty of our finite home place?

If in the end it turns out that we can successfully be both stewards and consumers of our vanishing natural wealth, that change of heart and habit will come in no small measure from those across the world who live in nature, who are attuned to its nuances and small wonders and who by necessity or choice, immerse themselves in the outdoors–many for the sheer love of it.

So I’ll be pleased to cast my lot again this year with the bird-watching, stream stalking, butterfly-netting, tree-hugging naturalists at Mt. Rogers–a group who, as a whole, are filled with wonder in the out-of-doors. And in wonder, it has been said, is the beginning of wisdom.

Are you keeping up with White Nose Syndrome as wildlife scientists continue to search for an explanation and fears of spring bat movements put other states beyond the four known to harbor the condition on alert? In Pennsylvania and West Virginia, dead bats are being tested to rule out WNS and no cases in those states have been confirmed.

Batmanagement.com (map source) has what is probably the first organized focus I’ve seen on WNS that was presented in a poster presentation last summer (2007) by Alan Hicks who continues to study the condition. Notable from the poster (pdf) is the unusual high temps in the studied caves and the season overall, though it is not known to what degree higher than normal temperatures may contribute to the bats “death by starvation.”

What does seem certain is that, as I learned in ecology class so long ago, “you can never do just one thing.” As insectivores with massive appetites, the absence or reduction of summer bats will mean more of their food stays in the air and on munching on food crops. Also related to warmer temps and  of note on the mosquito front…

As the warm season sets in, the risk for the West Nile virus to manifest becomes higher as mosquito populations increase numbers. The season normally begins in April and lasts until September, but due to warm weather this year, the first cases of the West Nile virus have been reported as early as March 19.

Rain. Sunshine. Rain. Sunshine. I’d hoped to find the Virginia Bluebells blooming, water-droplet-covered in the fleeting breaks of sun that taunted me all day yesterday. But even by 10:30, the bluebells were still in the shadow of the ridge.

Instead I walked the logging road that is almost every day a part of our outdoor survey of what’s happening in our little realm. The ground underfoot was a soft sponge, rivulets running under my boots and steam rising where sun shafts struck wet twig, trunk and blade.

Surely I could find something lens-worthy to carry home. But something I don’t already have pictures of, I wondered?

Yes, I have other images of beech leaves, but not these beech leaves, not in this exact light and of this exact composition.

Can one ever have too many similar images? Do I stop thinking about spring, my work, my children because I’ve thought about those things before?

Whoever called this spring-flowering tree redbud wasn’t even close, though not all are as pale pink as these growing along George’s Run yesterday. The lighting wasn’t ideal but I’ve meant to stop here in years past while the hillside was awash in this lovely “red” of spring. By the next time I pass that way, the buds will be gone and the heart-shaped leaves will have replaced them.

Redbud is a legume, a member of the bean family, and its roots I believe harbor rhizobia, the bacterial nodules that help put useable nitrogen in the soil. Redbud seems to strongly favor alkaline soils–such as that produced by the limestone bedrock that runs through Georges Run but ends not far north when you cross the Montgomery County line into Floyd.

We don’t have a single redbud on our property or the road in, for that matter. There are a couple more shots of this patch uploaded to the Flickr gallery.

If misery loves company, then we should be pretty happy. I keep hearing of more folks who once were able to garden unmolested–or should I say unDEERravaged. But once THEY get the taste of something tastier than grass, there’s no turning back. And others I’ve heard about are going vertical so the horizontal is worth the time, expense and sweat-equity that goes into a garden.

And this garden fence will outlast us by a long shot, and others will reap the harvest of our investment–her investment, really. I would have given up. Between the above ground and below ground invaders, the insects that come earlier each year, the cold soil, the arthritic body parts and the general lassitude of the end of middle age, I would have written off the garden as one of those things once precious and productive of both gratification and groceries.

Life goes on, and as one ages, they gradually relent and give things up, rather in reverse order to the gains added in strength, skill and wit as one grows older. I was prepared to let gardening go. I hope I’ll be glad she was determined to invest in the earth–an increasingly wise place to put one’s income as banking on human economies becomes more and more a gamble. But I digress.

I’ll show additional shots over the next few weeks and the summer. This one puts the garden in context–below and nearer the house, wedged between the road (plus the county’s cussed 15 foot right of way that eats considerably into our only level potential garden plot) and the bank, which we’ve had to excavate into and then shore up with railroad ties on the house end. Exposure is long side to the southeast.

We were limited in the length and stopped where we did opposite the house because to come farther image-left brought us into the septic field. Construction offers not so many options on “mountain land” and you use what you’ve got.

You can see how close to the creek the garden is–good for using the little lawn and garden battery for pumping to irrigate if we need to (versus running a hose straight down the drive from the well’s artesian pressure to power a trickle-hose.)

Being on the creek is bad in the sense that we are in the low point of a low sheltered valley– a frost pocket–and a growth zone NORTH of the main plateau of the county a mile and a half west and five hundred feet higher than we are. Our hours of sun, of course, are also reduced here (and so is the summer heat that Roanoke will endure. We’re often 10 degrees or more cooler here in July and August.

So we’ll need season extending ideas. Cold frames, for instance. And someone emailed about “plunge pits”–I haven’t googled that yet, but will. I’m also going to put down some scrap black plastic in a few places for a couple of weeks to see if we can get the soil temps up so seeds don’t rot in our garden when most Floydians have plants a foot high.

The garden shed will cover the width of the garden and be ten feet deep, open for the most part on the house side. You can see the taller post that will support the header for the metal roof. That work may start today.

Bottom line: I’m feeling almost extinguished garden zeal again. We’ll see what comes of it. Stay tuned.

Some politicians seem to feel we really don’t need bother with the messy unpredictable and unprofitable world of rank and file and mostly nameless creatures that unfortunately for them do not vote or contribute to campaigns or to the tax infrastructure or to the patriotic consumption of goods and services.

Might be wise to take a second look, politicos and myopic number-crunchers because the (insert the name of any unsung and obscure living species here) that you think worthless today could save your life, our lives tomorrow.

While I’m not suggesting that nature’s creatures only have a value if they can be exploited for OUR good (as some seem to have it), nevertheless, as we destroy coral reefs and rain forests, opportunities like these two examples might be lost for good. Just me thinking out loud–which is after all the nature of the blog from Goose Creek.

Alligator immunity may be the key to help us cope with the “superbugs” that are no match for antibiotics anymore.

Clams work for free to filter bird flu viruses.

Last week we took the rare discretionary trip that had both a purpose and an excuse. The purpose, to see some favorite Floyd Occasionals who otherwise live near the SC coast near Myrtle Beach. The excuse, to present my little Dog and Pony show to a local Audubon chapter to which a friend of theirs (and now ours) belongs.

As our timing would have it, the weather was mostly not compatible with beach walking or bird watching or botanizing–which broke my heart. We (and especially Ann) had a refresher course on the meteorological term “chill factor” but ended the tutorial just short of hypothermia–on a moving pontoon boat in the rain from which this photo of a drying cormorant was taken. We learned a lot about the 18th century rice plantations that in the early 1930s became a part of the Huntington estate that now includes Huntington Beach and Brookgreen Gardens, more about which another time.

The March 2008 issue of National Geographic has been folded back for weeks now to the article on “The Hunt for the God Particle” and I’ve been reading a paragraph or two every little bit as the mornings allow. It may help us answer the ultimate cosmological question in the title of this post.

Fascinating stuff: that soon, either North America’s Fermilab or Europe’s CERN will create colliding particles that could set off either the most profound discoveries of our existence, or the end of it. Depends on who you believe, who you trust. And it doesn’t really matter because we will climb this mountain because–at least for now–it exists. The risks are slim but oh-so-consequential, the potential gains: cosmic.

Not everybody is bullish on crossing this physics threshold that represents a new and unprecedented step in human history and science. What if it turns out we have more courage and curiosity than wisdom or prudence? Here’s the matter at hand from the NY Times:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

Questions about the doomsday scenarios may well come up at CERN on April 6, during a public open house at the LHC. Some researchers have gotten the word to be prepared to talk about microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked. MSNBC

From this massive experiment, profound questions might be answered about why and how the universe was formed and why it continues to exist as we find it billions of years after the origin of time, matter and energy out of nothing–in the beginning.

Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if (however unlikely) we destroyed creation in our quest for the God Particle? What a peculiar animal we are, driven, hungry and confident that in making the right tools, we’ll find the universal equation, pluck the ultimate fruit from the Tree of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Wish I was going to be around to see how this Story of human curiosity and genius turns out. Or then again, maybe not.