Looks to be a nice day to travel–a mere 2.5 hours–from the ONE-STOP town and county of Floyd to the far busier and busier than usual University town of Charlottesville. The Banff Film Festival was in town this week, too, so the joints a’ hoppin’, especially for someone coming from the quiet of Goose Creek.

I have some events coming up, and wanted to reproduce my original “visual essay” from PowerPoint into a Mac-compatible program (Fotomagico) and that is done: some sixty images and about 15 minutes of narrative around the topics of sense of place, familiarity with the creatures around us, and a return to curiosity and a sense of wonder out-doors, especially for our kids.

The first time I’ll present this program will be April 12 at Wytheville Community College at 7 pm. Location TBA.

Well, I’ll hope to check in here (and on Facebook and Twitter) off and on to bring you up to speed on the Festival of the Book and related goings-on–if indeed there are any. I’m going to do my best to stay out of trouble while watching others who probably aren’t. I’ll be taking notes!

Ann came back from a walk having seen these scarlet cups (fungus) and the title of this post is the phrase that came to mind. I thought that had been my term on the blog one spring, as it is an apt descriptor of this first dash of color weeks before the bloodroot and coltsfoot appears.

But I can’t find that I’ve used the term on Fragments for this transient “bloom” of March. But did find it described this way at Wikipedia–desperate winter, indeed!

One field guide says “it is a welcome sight after a long, desperate winter and is the harbinger of a new year of mushrooming.” Common over much of the northern hemisphere, it occurs in eastern North America, in the midwest, in the valleys between the Pacific coast and the Sierras and Cascades, and in the Old World (Europe, Africa, Australia, and India). It is also found in China.

Because it features Skeeters (“a Million dogs sold”) in our former home town of Wytheville, a friend sent along this video below about the “red hotdog corridor” that cuts a swath through southwest Virginia, across the decades, and well into central Alabama where I grew up with the Hooray for Valleydale marching band of pigs singing the praises of their mild-flavored hotdogs.

The Valleydale owner spent a small fortune on his ads (one of the first ads to air when WSLS in Roanoke started in 1952), but those munchkin voices are as clear and fresh to me as if it were yesterday. And I’ll be darned if, even before breakfast, the thought of a couple of pan-blackened dogs on a soft white-bread bun smothered in mustard and chili makes me want to skip the Bran Flakes altogether.

Matter of fact, when I’m away from the Healthy Diet Enforcement Police, I think I’ll snag me a couple of red dogs in Charlottesville. With everything. No, hold the onions; I’m on duty.

By the way, watch the twitter sidebar, where I’m more likely to report from “the field” for a few days than to the blog proper; or follow me at twitter.com/fred1st for all the latest.

Kinda broad at the shoulder, narrow at the hips, and...

It is not an un-heard-of way of coping with inevitable misbehavior.

In high school, I had a friend whose parents held no illusions that their son would not look for and find alcohol somewhere—illegally, and with no small risk of harm. So they stocked the fridge with beer, and my friend could drink himself silly in his own room. He did just that a time or two, then it lost is cookies—I mean its charm, and he was never so enamored of intoxication later on in college.

So we’re thinking of using the same psychology with Tsuga, our carrion-craving carnivore, our often-AWOL dog, in his addiction to guts and bones.  If they’re out there–and they very often are–he WILL get his nose in the wind and find them.

If we know without a doubt that he’s going to disappear in the woods for hours to find it and eat anything that dies (or is killed by hunters, coyotes, or disease—with the inevitable GI consequences almost always in the wee hours the following day), we might as well stock the pantry at home with disgusting dead stuff and give him free range where we can keep an eye on him.

We could look for road kill and deposit it out by the garden shed. We could offer our front yard as a drop-off point for all the deer remains from that which will be illegally killed and field-dressed and dumped up the road in the creek between now and hunting season.

We’d know where he was while he was eating this awful stuff, and we’d have some idea of how much he ate of what, when—and have a better idea of what we were in for at 2 a.m. the next morning.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Image: Tsuga at three months. And his rear axle NEVER DID grow into proportion with his front quarters. He’s still sorta broad at the shoulders, skinny at the hips (and every body knowd you didn’t give no lip—to Big Tsuga.) With apologies to Jimmy Dean.

Showy Orchis, a native orchid

Grab your calendar now: circle the weekend of April 23rd. Got it?

Now, call or email Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast in Rocky Mount, Virginia. 540.483.4616  Book yourself (and your Significant Other) a room (or come solo and enjoy even MORE P&Q.) AND very important: sign up for the nature/photography package.

This trip is primarily but not exclusively for photographers at all levels. I’ll share my personal “eye” on nature both through my photographic vision and technical and aesthetic approach to landscape and nature still-life photography. But I’ll be putting on my naturalist hat, too, and we’ll be keeping a list of wildflowers, edible plants, stream organisms and maybe even identify a few spring warblers along the way.

SATURDAY:

From the B&B, participants will travel Route 40 to Woolwine where we’ll meet at 10 am. From there, we’ll drive a mile to park  near Rock Castle Creek and take a leisurely photo-shoot walk a level mile or two upstream, enjoying the peak bloom of Virginia Bluebells, several Trillium species and more than a dozen wildflowers backlit by the shining waters of the creek.

Around noon, we’ll head up into the sunshine of the Parkway and enjoy box lunches (provided by Edible Vibes in Rocky Mount) in the vicinity of Saddle Gap, looking out at the vista that carries the eye to the edge of The Commonwealth. We’ll take a wider view, talking about the geology and ecology of this part of the parkway and putting on the wide-angle lens to take in the early leaf-out of the high-elevation forest. We’ll hike into the forest along one of the marked trails, and end the planned program officially at 3 pm.

Thereafter, folks can stay where we find ourselves at 3, or venture into Floyd, or travel down the parkway a few miles to Mabry Mill (lots of photo-ops there!) or over to the crest of Buffalo Mountain (at almost 4000 ft) to catch the late afternoon sun and sunset. Ah, spring. Can you smell it?

SUNDAY:

After a scrumptious breakfast, we’ll gather in the parlor to view and discuss the photographs we shot on Saturday. I’ll have collected images from all the cameras (or folks can email them from their room later) and we’ll project them for all to see and learn from–both photographically and natural-historically. If folks are interested, I’ll work with some of their straight-from-the-camera images in Photoshop Saturday night so we can see before-and-after versions and different ways to “interpret” the light the camera gives us.

I’ll put all images (of nature, landscapes and of memorable moments of our weekend) up on an online gallery for everyone to view and share with their envious friends who didn’t make the right choice and come join us. There’s always next time–but there will only be ONE Spring, 2010!

Want to know more before you make up your mind? Event limited to first 10 who sign up. Field-trip only status: details pending. PLEASE spread the word!

Fred speaks a bit about nurturing your inner photographer

Fred’s Bio with links to galleries

The Day after Winter

I am pleased to say that the White Witch of Winter has released her grasp on Goose Creek–maybe not forever, but for now.

The rutted road may be pocked by potholes, but even the potholes hold hints of spring. At last.

This is not okay. The diversion of US topsoil, ground-water irrigation, fossil-fuel manufactured fertilizer, and millions of petro-barrels-as-spoils-of-war to grow grain crops to produce gasoline for American automobiles is not okay. Only the agri-conglomerates and our government (if there is indeed any difference) think this is a good plan.

Meanwhile, our tax dollars are subsidizing the production of ethanol to the tune of 6 billion dollars every year.

From that grain (mostly corn), 330 million people could have been fed for a year. But no. The push for biofuels by American and European governments elevated food prices by 75% while over 1 billion of the world’s people go hungry.

There are perhaps some other crops than food grains that could be converted to gasoline (sunflowers seem promising and yield both food and fuel) but they too deplete our top soil, water resources and require an energy input that is a significant percentage of the energy extracted.

Basically with the bad-idea of biofuels, what we’re up against is having to play the role of sun-plant-oil energy conversion one year at a time to replace the stored sun-plant-oil stores in the ground of fifty million years of fossilized summers that we’ve foolishly used up in 100 years as if it were a never-ending pot of gold.

Meanwhile, the low-hanging fruit of conservation and energy efficiency, personal habit and engineering changes that might allow us to avoid the need for growing gasoline, continue to take a far back seat to business as usual, benefiting all the usual suspects.  | Source: The Guardian

What this guy does seems sort of crazy–slogging around in shallow southern ponds, feeling for snapping turtles with his feet.

But I think back and wonder how many mossy-backs I stepped on or near in my college days in those same ponds and creeks, up to my neck in tepid water stalking snakes and frogs–often at night, mind you! I can hear it now–a chorus of narrow-mouthed, southern and fowler’s toads, hylid tree frogs: squirrel, bird-voiced, gray, and green (think Kermit ) and ranids, including but not limited to banjo and bull and bronze: all at full voice on a sultry southern Alabama night an hour’s drive from Auburn. That, and a six-pack of PBR–I tell you, life don’t get no better than that.

But I digress (imagine!) I know this guy does this mostly for the attention and his fifteen minutes of fame and for the “sport” of it, but folks down south eat “right smart” of turtle, and I was with a (toothless) old cooter back then who was a similar kind of reptile gourmet. He told me that “they’s seven kinds of meat in a turtle: they’s chicken and pork, beef and lamb, shrimp, fish, and goat.”

I found that curious, and in response to my question he told me “No, they ain’t no turtle meat in thar ‘tall.”

Tsuga's Disgusting Discovery du Jour

He ran off. Again. Up the Valley of Bones–the boulder field of a former high, rocky mountain long ago weathered away.

For some reason, it is among those jumbled, moss-and-fern-covered stones that the local wildlife goes to day, as there are no front porch steps to crawl under like our dogs used to be fond of doing on their last days.

And here’s what he found: but what is it?

The tail is almost 18″ long. You can see a close-up of the fur, white-tipped, overall dusky brown to gray.

My best guess is coyote. Any other guesses?

This year, 2010, is the UN Year of Biodiversity, a year of global focus and action to reverse the recently accelerating pattern of species extinction. Or it is just another year not at the beginning but somewhere on its way to the middle of the Sixth Great Epoch—the first (and probably only great extinction era) that will be caused by man. It has been called the Anthropocene.

Niles Eldridge (Museum of Natural History) has this conclusion about the odds we will change our relationship to non-human parts of the biosphere:

Though it is true that life, so incredibly resilient, has always recovered (though after long lags) after major extinction spasms, it is only after whatever has caused the extinction event has dissipated. That cause, in the case of the Sixth Extinction, is ourselves — Homo sapiens. This means we can continue on the path to our own extinction, or, preferably, we modify our behavior toward the global ecosystem of which we are still very much a part. The latter must happen before the Sixth Extinction can be declared over, and life can once again rebound. Read more…

That our impact on the atmosphere plays no small role in species extinction is a considerable contributor to my interest in “climate chaos” issues.

SourceWatch has this to say about the relationship between climate change and habitat loss:

Per Feeling the heat: Climate change and biodiversity loss and Never Mind That Boiling Kettle, “International scientists from eight countries have warned that, based even on the most conservative estimates, rising temperatures will trigger a global mass extinction of unprecedented proportions. They said global warming will set in train a far bigger threat to terrestrial species than previously realized, at least on a par with the already well-documented destruction of natural habitats around the world. It is the first time such a powerful assessment has been made and its conclusions will shock even those environmentalists accustomed to “worst-case” scenarios.”

On recommendation on how to reverse our indifference to biodiversity comes from Britain’s environment secretary, Hillary Benn:

“We have got the Climate Change Act that means for the first time the carbon consequences of the decisions we make have to be taken into account by government, and so the next thing is to do that in the same way with the natural world. The report prepared by Sukhdev can do for our understanding of the natural world what Nick Stern did for the understanding of the economic impact of climate change.”

The Stern report led to the Climate Change Act, which requires the government to publish carbon budgets setting out how it will cut emissions. One consequence is that “dirty products” become more expensive for the consumer.

Asked how nature could be priced, and biodiversity targets set, Benn said:

“We will need to think about the most effective mechanism for taking account of the economic impact of decisions we make in relation to biodiversity.”

We’ve vastly underestimated the integral role that creatures besides man play, functions that are necessary to health on this planet just as the mix of blood cells with their various antibodies and protective functions are necessary to the ongoing health of a single human body. It’s called homeostatis. We’ve undervalued the role that the mix of organisms play in providing the “environmental services” that have maintained global homeostasis. The opposite of homeostasis is called illness.

We have only a little time and one chance to turn our ship away from the reef. We don’t get another. This is the year.