Fragments From Floyd

But of course we already knew that even earlier in the day of the afternoon on which this image (er, these images) were taken. Isn’t it considered good luck if the first thing you see in the morning is a bat in the room fluttering in your somnolent peripheral vision as you’re drinking your first cup of coffee? Said bat disappeared thereafter and could not be found. Read: Ann freaked.

Company (red shirt with two large poodles image foreground) walked in the house to visit yesterday afternoon and immediately the bat greeted her. Ann freaked. Bat cooperated by restricting itself to our bedroom. I returned a moment later, creature in dustpan. “How’d you get it?” she asked. Punnily I answered: “Batted it.” Stunned it with a broom and released it outdoors.

Garden shed roof goes on today, metal terra cotta pre-painted, should match the barn roof you see in the picture above. Spread about half of the donkey poo out of the back of the truck (thanks again, Ron! but oooh my back!) but was not able to crank the tiller to work it into the soil. I’ll make an emergency small engine consult to my neighbor this afternoon and hopefully have it looking like a ready plot by the weekend.

So you can see T-dog has met his match and then some–two 8 year old poodles came to play and they took no crap off the guy-dog. They actually bantered and taunted and chased and played coy and ran in the creek and had a grand time yesterday afternoon when a former co-worker of Ann’s brought Tsuga some playmates. Wore him out!

We stood at the edge of the pasture post-dogromp waiting for what sounded like a small and very slow plane to crest the treetops to the west. It seemed to be taking forever and I finally gave up watching. When I turned around the Goodyear Blimp (throwing its voice as often happens in these hollers) had appeared over the east ridge and quite freaked me out!

The combined image at the top of this post is 1) the blimp at 200mm spliced into 2) the scene at 50mm focal length–otherwise the blimp in the sky would have appeared about the size of one of the dogs on the ground. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

 

We didn’t know we might need the services of the Univoltine Root Mining Weevil, but such is the case. Suppose, then, it is a good thing our pervasive pesticides have missed this little guy. link

While he looks formidable, he’s only the size of the letter “o” in 12 point font, they say. But we may be talking about large numbers of them needed to do their job: ridding the place of a European invader you may not even have noticed. Or smelled.

Garlic Mustard–botanically closer to the latter, a member of the “Cruciferae” to us elder botanists and a good name. It’s flowers, as exemplified by this example, often form a CROSS with their four equal petals. The heart shaped leaves are distinctively shaped, but if you are in doubt, pluck, crush and sniff. There will be no doubt you’ve discovered the “garlic” part of the name.

Alliaria petiolata–what a pretty name. And not a shabby looking thing either, except for the fact that, especially in “disturbed areas or forests with high deer populations.” it is spreading like crazy, outcompeting native flowering plants for sunlight in forested clearings and along roadsides in Floyd County–and from as far south as Georgia and north to Alaska.

ECOLOGICAL THREAT

Garlic mustard poses a severe threat to native plants and animals in forest communities in much of the eastern and midwestern U.S. Many native widlflowers that complete their life cycles in the springtime (e.g., spring beauty, wild ginger, bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches, hepatica, toothworts, and trilliums) occur in the same habitat as garlic mustard. Once introduced to an area, garlic mustard outcompetes native plants by aggressively monopolizing light, moisture, nutrients, soil and space. Wildlife species that depend on these early plants for their foliage, pollen, nectar, fruits, seeds and roots, are deprived of these essential food sources when garlic mustard replaces them. Humans are also deprived of the vibrant display of beautiful spring wildflowers.

Garlic mustard also poses a threat to one of our rare native insects, the West Virginia white butterfly (Pieris virginiensis). Several species of spring wildflowers known as “toothworts” (Dentaria), also in the mustard family, are the primary food source for the caterpillar stage of this butterfly. Invasions of garlic mustard are causing local extirpations of the toothworts, and chemicals in garlic mustard appear to be toxic to the eggs of the butterfly, as evidenced by their failure to hatch when laid on garlic mustard plants.  link

So the biocontrol folks at USDA seem to be thinking this little weevil won’t mistake our target mustard for a close relative–like cabbage or broccoli in your garden. How these little beetles might be distributed is something I’ll investigate. I’ll get back to you when I know more.

Meanwhile: many parts are edible. If you can’t like’em, eat’em.

The pattern so far is for yet another icy winter, with the snow line creeping a little further north each year as the climate changes. So there will be no White Christmas on Goose Creek this year. Ah well.

Even so, I’ve been trying to get in a snow state of mind, what with it now being officially winter.

This shot came from a surprise March snow almost three years ago after the frozen creek had melted and the trees hung like embroidered lacery along Goose Creek.

If you look carefully, you’ll find this image (very tiny version) on page 28 of the Blue Ridge Country Magazine 2008 Travel Guide. Larger image at Flickr.

Yes, mom and dad, it might mean turning off your favorite weekend sports show or afternoon soap. It may require that you put off that nap or cleaning the gutters or the 101 other to-do’s you’ve given a little checkbox in the ordering of your daily life. But you could do no better (a possible equivalent might be to read to your child) than taking him or her outdoors for a Green Hour.

We’ve probably missed the mark in our narrow focus on “exercise” and “physical fitness” and organized sports when we should have been looking instead or at least in important addition at promoting pure and plain ol’ play. Some play is physical and burns calories, but some of the best is for the sheer joy of creating adventures and finding patterns and using the imagination outdoors. The latter may be more important than we’ve realized in helping shape our little one’s values and understanding and in the end, their care for our world that they will inherit.

Green Hour is an effort by the National Wildlife Federation to encourage parents, grandparents (and other kinds of grown-up children) to take the time to take their kids out under the sky. I encourage you to join the “Community Corner”–a growing resource of connected adults concerned about the consequences of “nature deficit disorder” on our increasingly denatured kids. See you there!

Americans are, by and large, not very geographically aware on either the larger or smaller scale of things. As long as we can find our way home from the mall and know where our yard ends and theirs begins, we pretty well have all the bearings from the landscape we need to navigate in the smaller world. And if the airline pilot or GPS can get us across the larger expanses, we’ll read a magazine while the world goes by. After all, if you’ve seen one planet, you’ve seen them all.

And I point the finger at myself in this as well, except that sadly late in life (my early twenties) I discovered the wonder of maps. And since those days, I’ve been both fascinated and enriched by mind-traveling over the lines and squiggles of a map. Any map, really.

From it will come troves of grounding and place-orientation in imaginary travel that places one town accurately in relation to another; follows the course of creek to river to sea.

If it’s a topo map, all the better. I can begin to understand why a given stream will curve and twist they way it does, guided and hindered by the hard rock core of old mountains, or having channeled its way through some less resistant extrusion of limestone or such.

A case in point: I spent a full day in Patrick County last week near Stuart, and a few weekends before had a book table in Meadows of Dan in the same county down below the Blue Ridge. A month from now, I’ll be spending the better part of a day in Danville, down near the North Carolina line and east of Floyd.

Meadows of Dan. Danville. It has to be the same river for which these communities are named, I reasoned. But how does it get from the Pinnacles of the Dan near Meadows of Dan to Danville, and where does it go from there? I confess, I hadn’t a clue. And now, I do. More, later.

Take your camera to the nearest stand of the season’s goldenrod, boneset, Joe Pye Weed, ironweed, and/or jewelweed.

Bring home some insect pictures. Process gently, and serve.

To whet your appetite, sample from this installment of Circus of the Spineless, and then perhaps munch from the smörgåsbord of the Bug of the Day slideshow. (Call the kiddies, they’ll enjoy this!)

And before you mistakenly esteem insects too lowly on the food chain, look here. And mind the puppies and kittens near the flowerbeds, won’t you.

Some of you will remember a month or so ago when our six-year-old grand daughter, Abby, came to visit. She is like a sponge, soaking up the details of all the alien creatures and greenery she never sees on the South Dakota prairies back home. (She soaked up quite a bit of Goose Creek, too!)

And so her grandpappy did his best to enrich her time in woods and pasture by showing her little details that might interest her. Once, she highjacked this teacher-student relationship and showed me something new to science–a joke that, as most jokes do, requires a little background fact, then twists it in a new and unexpected way.

The image above is the very common Queen Anne’s Lace. On many of the flat-topped inflorescences, there is a central deep purple single flower. I don’t know that anyone knows why. (I once asked a very high authority in the botanical academic world why the dark central flower. “Heck if I know” was his disappointing answer.)

And so, I found such a flower and pointed it out to Abby. Then we did a little survey of the couple dozen plants nearby to see how many had and how many didn’t have the central dark flower.

A few days later, Abby came running from the edge of the woods. “Look, Dumpa!” She had “found” a specimen new to science.

I was amazed. (And more than a little amused.) She’d plucked a tiny Deptford Pink and stuck it in the center of a Queen Anne’s Lace. She’d created a visual joke, and the two of us knew why it was funny–a shared twist on nature that made us both laugh.

Was it only a week ago Abby spent all day–literally all day–in Goose Creek terrorizing the poor minnows? Some of the were captured and released a half dozen times or more, I’m certain.

I needed a few more pictures to finish out my Powerpoint words-and-images presentation I’ll be doing several times later this summer. This scene above will weave into the narrative, ending with several more shots of Abby and Tsuga together–not a difficult twosome to find in the same frame last week:

In his book, Last Child in the Wood, journalist and author, Richard Louv, calls this condition “nature deficit disorder”. He describes the costs of our de-natured existence and also offers encouragement that we can do better for our children.

The “Leave No Child Inside” campaign that has come from his work is just one possible path to give back to children the sounds, sensations and sensibilities that are lacking when they are not participants in the rhythms and cycles of the natural world.

But then, in our small corner of the globe, the task of immersion in nature is not that hard. And when Abby visits Granny and Dumpa on Goose Creek, they just give her a bucket, a small minnow net, a big yellow dog, and an afternoon outside. The rest, she makes up as she loses herself in play.

I had a thought after I posted this image of Black Eyed Susans (and other flowers) taken yesterday on a Floyd County roadside. Here it is:It would be neat for contributors from all over the country to offer their images to an aggregate gallery called America’s Roadside Bloomery. All images would include in their composition a road of some kind, just to place it, and then the wildflowers that grow there unplanted.Hiway department wildflower beds don’t count.Each image should be 72 dpi, max size of 800 pixels on the largest side. Information should minimally include the location, if possible some ID on the flowers, and any other pertinent or interesting information.If you would like to accept this assignment, send them to me at — fred1st over at gmail — with Unplanted Garden in the subject line. I will upload them to a public gallery on Smugmug.I’ll collect these through October (there are lots of fall asters, Joe Pye Weed, Iron Weed, etc.) If at least thirty are received, we’ll go farther.We’ll vote and there will be a first, second and third prize–some combination of the book (Slow Road Home), the two sets of photo note cards, and screen saver images for your computer.Please forward this pleasant “assignment” to your photog friends. The more, the better. I will set up the gallery with this image soon, and it will be ready for your submission.

Here’s the 800 pixel version of the image above. (Link back to the front page of Fragments)

Now. Get out there while the flowers bloom. And stay out of traffic!

UPDATE: And speaking of traffic. AMERICA’S ROADSIDE BLOOMERY, a call to action for photographers. Cool! — kindly posted by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit Saturday morning. Now you peepers send in those pix! Deadline: 15th of October for submitting, voting completed October 31 and prizes awarded.

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That title contains some essence of what I’d like any potential photography book to be about. In some cases, the actual subject of a photo would be of most interest. But more often than not, it would be about the magic of a lighting moment–the light itself, the thousand different species of light–that come and go in this single small cleft of landscape and span of sky through four seasons.

This grassy composition lies just beyond the maple tree seen here earlier this week. Both scenes become worthy of the time to capture them photographically because they both benefit from the very same early morning light, shifted so far south along the ridge in the summer months that the sun’s rays drop just there, just then.

I could create my own private Stonehengian calendar: a shaft of light at nine o’clock in the morning on the first day of summer will spill through the cleft in the maple trunk and strike the earth exactly here, the pasture grasses from must that angle. I could place a permanent marker on the spot to honor the light, the day, the year, the lifetime it marks.

And so it is for all the light that comes to Goose Creek. It is predictable, and it is so very transient and unique to each given moment and place in time.

To be honest, this shot of the grasses came from this day last June. This year, in the very same spot, the pasture has been cut and is only a foot tall now. But I know what I would have seen on this date in that exact place at 9 am when the sun came over the ridge so predictably. Except this June 28 is cloudy; the sky is flat-gray and somber with a thin fog lying over the stubble of pasture grass–its own kind of special light.

Click for a larger image.

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