Up for June
The forest tent caterpillar we found along the roadside seemed at first glance to be stretching for the sky.
As Oscar Hammerstein wrote in the classic tune from Carousel, June is bustin’ out all over. Our own schedule is bustin’ at the seams, as we try to keep track of all the birds and bugs and blooms, and continue to set up a building’s worth of colorful and creative new installations at The Naturalist’s Notebook in time for our June 25 season opening, and as I immerse myself in SI’s extensive London Olympic preparations. It seems hard to believe, but within 30 days we will be making the flip turn into the second half of the year (as Michael Phelps might put it).
Since one of our interactive displays at the Notebook this summer will involve a highly inventive chicken, maybe I should describe the rapidly passing year this way: We’ve almost half-filled the 2012 egg carton with completed months. With that in mind, here are a full dozen welcome-to-June notes:
1) This is a great time to see caterpillars. Many have already metamorphosed into butterflies here in Maine; we’re seeing swallowtails in particular. The roadside forest tent caterpillar we saw is destined to become a somewhat destructive (and, to my eye, less beautiful) moth, but Pamelia and I still enjoyed watching it cling to (and gnaw on?) a blade of grass. A bit of sixth-month creepy-crawly trivia: Caterpillars have six tiny eyes (able to sense light but not recognize shapes) on each side of their head.
2) In Case You’ve Never Heard June Is Bustin’ Out All Over (click below) I’m hardly a Broadway expert, but if you need a boost to your day this certainly is an upbeat number. Oscar Hammerstein, by the way, also collaborated on the musicals Wildflower, Green Grow the Lilacs, The New Moon and Very Warm For May. America’s favorite naturalist-librettist?
3) The Acadia Birding Festival As I write this, groups of avian-watchers are on trails and boats in and around Mount Desert Island enjoying one of the year’s best events here in Maine. I hope to be with them tomorrow.
What are these birds? They were among the types shown during a bird-I.D. panel discussion at the Acadia Birding Festival on Thursday. O.K., we’ll tell you. They’re storm petrels.
4) How to Watch a Hawk Like a Hawk. Right now Cornell’s world-renowned ornithology lab has a camera trained on a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks. They’re perched on a light pole above athletic fields at the university’s campus, in Ithaca, New York. Click on this short behind-the-scenes video below to see the hawks and hear how the lab set up the camera.
5) A Storm Discovery
Flash. Crack! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Flash. Crack! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Flash. Crack! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Pamelia and I learned during a nighttime thunderstorm this week that our resident wild turkeys, perched in the trees around our house, don’t like lightning. At all.
6) New York Bathers
During a whirlwind visit to New York for SI work and a wedding, Pamelia and I walked through Central Park, where softball players were sliding in the dirt and birds galore were bathing in it. All were having fun.
7) Mummified Dogs
I’m eager to receive our copies of Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death, by Bernd Heinrich, the great naturalist and scientist whose artwork and writings we’re highlighting this summer. (He’s tentatively set for Notebook-organized events—some held at the Notebook, some elsewhere in the area—on August 20 and 21.) The book has just come off the presses, and I’ve interviewed Bernd about it and many other topics in a lengthy Q-and-A we’ll be posting on the blog soon.
It’s interesting to look at how we humans handle death, not just of fellow homo sapiens but of other animals. Mythology has long been a driving force. In millennia past, bodies of several species were mummified in the belief that this would create harmony between a departed spirit and its corporeal host. Archaeologists in Egypt have found millions of mummified dogs and jackals. Sad to say, most of these animals were apparently killed as pups and mummified as part of a ritual tribute to Anubis, the Egyptians’ jackal-headed god of the dead. We live in a strange world.
A few days ago Notebook contributor visited the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, and sent back a photo of mummified dogs on display as part of an Egyptian exhibition. “They’re beautifully painted and carefully protected by the elaborate folds of fabric you see on human mummies from the Fayum period,” she reports. It’s hard to make out the painting, but here is the picture:
The mummified dogs.
8) Six for the Sixth Month
• Insects have six legs.
• Beehive chambers have six sides.
• So do cubes.
• Six is the atomic number (number of protons or electrons) of carbon, an element found in all forms of life.
• Snow crystals have six corners.
• Any person on Earth is supposedly six degrees of separation (through friends who have friends who have friends) from any other person on Earth.
9) Maine’s Changing Climate
Pamelia and I went to another Science Cafe talk sponsored by the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and heard from Kirk Allen Maasch of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. I hope to write more about this talk soon, but among other highlights was Kirk’s explanation of how and why climate change has become more noticeable in our state in the last three decades. Maine happens to be the northernmost range for many species and the southernmost range for others, so what happens here will affect—and is already affecting—numerous plants and animals. Maine is projected to become not just warmer but also wetter in the years ahead, with more rain and less snow.
Maine’s climate has been warming, though the average year-round temperature along the coast, where we live, is still just 44.3 degrees. The global average is about 58 degrees.
10) Our First Roadside Iris of the Year
11) Inspiration and Tragedy
You may have read about the death of Marina Keegan in a car accident this past week shortly after her graduation from Yale. Near the end of her college career, Keegan, a gifted writer and fresh voice who was to have begun work this month as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker magazine, wrote a essay about being part of a college community. It’s a lovely piece of writing about the bonds and camaraderie that make shared experiences so important to us as a species. It’s called “The Opposite of Loneliness.” Click here to read it:
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/may/27/keegan-opposite-loneliness/?cross-campus
12) ANSWER TO THE LAST PUZZLER
As some of you correctly responded, the bird in that Maine photo was a blue-headed vireo. Don’t know if you saw the comment, but a trio of blog readers invented names for some fictional blue birds they’d like to see: an ultramarine flycatcher, a cobalt sapsucker and a Prussian-faced booby. Any other suggestions?
Here’s a short video of a blue-headed vireo nesting in Massachusetts:
TODAY’S PUZZLER:
Can you guess?
What kind of nestlings are shown in the photo above, which was taken this week in Maine?
a) herring gulls
b) juncos
c) blue jays
My first job was to crush the Total flakes into fine pieces.
I’ve been reading a book called How to Fossilize Your Hamster. It’s written by Mick O’Hare of New Scientist magazine and, yes, it will be available at The Naturalist’s Notebook when we open for the season next month.
I don’t have a hamster, nor would I want to fossilize my pet, but O’Hare’s delightful book is filled with other strange experiments and fascinating insights. I now understand why some types of cheese melt lusciously under the broiler and other types sit there in a lump. I’ve learned how to measure the speed of light using a chocolate bar, a ruler and a microwave oven. (Warning: possible future Notebook blog.)
I was startled to discover that I could remove visible pieces of iron from a bowl of cereal using water and a magnet. The steps are shown below. O’Hare suggests doing the experiment with a high-iron cereal, so I chose Total.
Total touts its high iron content.
I started by crushing about two-thirds of a cup of the cereal with a mortar and pestle.
Grinding away…guess I could have saved myself work if I had opened the cereal bag from the bottom, where all the dust settles.
Total? Totally pulverized. Ready for the next step.
I mixed the crushed Total with hot (not quite boiling) water in a Ziploc bag. The book doesn’t say how much water to add, so I just guessed and made it somewhat watery. Maybe half a cup? Following O’Hare’s instructions, I let the mixture settle for about 20 minutes.
I wasn’t sure if the experiment would work. The two-inch magnet I’d bought at Home Depot seemed fairly strong, but I was worried that my mixture was too soupy. Per O’Hare’s instructions, I tilted the Ziploc bag to allow the cereal to gather on one side and then moved the magnet beneath the soggy Total particles. Iron, being the heaviest element in cereal flakes, would supposedly sink to the bottom, just as iron and nickel descended to the core of the Earth when the planet was forming 4.6 billion years ago.
O’Hare reveals an interesting fact about the iron in your cereal—a fact that also explains why this experiment is possible. He says that cereal companies don’t fortify their products with iron ions (a form of iron that would combine with the other cereal ingredients more thoroughly and be easier for humans to digest) because that would make the cereal spoil faster. Instead, the companies use the regular metal form of iron, much of which goes through your system undigested…and some of which can be extracted from the cereal with a magnet.
Anyhow, after some magnet-waving, I initially saw nothing. Then my kitchen lab associates lifted the Ziploc bag toward an overhead light for better viewing. Voila! There it was—a small clot of iron threads, right near the magnet.
You can see the dark clump of iron just above the magnet.
A closer look at the iron.
One more look, with the gray iron strands again clearly visible.
So perhaps you should stay away from the iron-fortified cereal the next time you’re going to be passing through an airport metal detector. And after this, I probably will have to show you the speed-of-light-with-a-chocolate-bar trick. That, and how to use Alka Seltzer to make a 1970s lava lamp.
Thank You…
…very much to all of you who sent comments or emails with condolences and memories about Wooster. I sure miss her lying asleep by my chair as I write this.
Stray Dog Completes Race Across China
I posted this on the Notebook’s Facebook page, but I know a lot of you aren’t on Facebook. If you like dogs, it’s worth a click:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-18218878
Look to the Sky
Venus
The newly arrived edition of the Mount Desert Island-based Sorrento Scientific Society newsletter, called Guillemot, has some helpful stargazing tips. All winter and spring we got used to seeing Venus as the brightest light in the early evening sky, but on June 5 (between 6:04 p.m. and 8:15 p.m., to be exact, at least in this part of coastal Maine) our neighboring planet will pass between the Earth and the Sun, an event that won’t happen again until the year 2117. You’ll be able to watch this transit as you would a solar eclipse—very carefully, by projecting the image through a pinhole in a cardboard box or using some other such device. (You’ll have to look really closely, because Venus is only 3 percent as wide as the Sun.) For the rest of the summer and fall you’ll be able see Venus before sunrise, back in its alternate role as the Morning Star.
Meanwhile, you can look into the southwestern sky after sunset and see another planet, Saturn, filling the evening void left by Venus. Guillemot calls Saturn “the only bright object [now] out there” in that part of the sky at that hour.
A black guillemot, the namesake of the newsletter and a bird seen frequently here in Maine.
Answer to the Last Puzzler
The tiny egg shown in our last blog came from the official state bird of Maine—a black capped chickadee. (Thanks to Notebook contributor LJ for the photograph and the identification!) The extra-credit answer: The whiptail lizard is the state reptile of New Mexico.
The egg, hatched and grown up.
Today’s Puzzler
What type of bird is shown in the picture below, settled in its nest? The photo was taken this weekend in Maine:
a) a blue-headed vireo
b) a cerulean warbler
c) an indigo bunting
Can you guess?
Tribute to a Friend
Wooster in her New York City days.
Losing a loved one is never easy. Saying goodbye to a fluffy-headed kookball dog who followed you, watched you, slept with you, defended you, took you on walks, spun circles when you told her she could ride in the car; who dutifully obeyed her two older-sister cats, showed up to share evening cookies, raced up the stairs and leaped onto a couch for movie nights; who got compliments and lovies from Meryl Streep on a chance New York City sidewalk meeting; who did her best to overcome insecurities from a difficult (before-us) puppyhood but still had a few demons; who barked at horses, motorcyclists, skateboarders, men in hats, tall people and the whoo-whoo! part of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil; who adored snow and lobster and her grandparents and Wendy the UPS delivery person and broke into a smile every time you came home…that can be especially difficult.
We were living on Wooster Street in downtown Manhattan after the shock of 9/11 (the edges of our windows still taped up to keep out the smoke from nearby Ground Zero) when we decided to add a dog to our world. A soft-coated wheaten terrier who’d had some hard knocks in Iowa and Connecticut proved irresistible, and after an improbable chain of events involving a driving detour, wilting dahlias and Pamelia’s mother needing a haircut, ended up cradled in my arms, riding home with us to New York and a new life as our Wooster.
Wooster as a puppy.
Dogs evolved from wolves into Woosters with a lot of help from human breeders. We wanted animals who would protect, love and obey us (and, yes, look cute). One trait never changed: Dogs crave the pack. Wooster never belonged to a dog pack—indeed, she started demonstrably disliking other dogs when she was one and a half—but she was part of what we called the “six-pack”: A family made up of Pamelia, her mom, our two kitties, Wooster and me. She shared in everything, from trips to naps to dinner. Whenever I dialed an Indian restaurant and started giving our address over the phone, Wooster would start barking, as if to tell us that she knew that chicken masala and a delivery man were on their way.
Wooster adapted happily to life in Maine. Here she’s taking a breather after leading us up Cedar Swamp Mountain in Acadia National Park.
Our six-pack had been reduced to a three-pack—Pamelia, Wooster and I—by the time Wooster’s body started giving out last summer. We worked together to squeeze as many walks and happy moments as we could into the precious months we had left. Wooster had one final day on her bed at The Naturalist’s Notebook, and one out-on-the-town ride-around in the car, and one last morning on the bed, with Pamelia sketching her. Dogs shape us almost as we have shaped them, instilling us with much of their own unshakeable loyalty and deep love and pack camaraderie. At least Wooster, our beloved kookball, did.
She was a good sister to kitty Hedda.
A familiar pose, this one in her final weeks.
My enduring image of Wooster: crossed paws, frog legs, ready for whatever’s next.
Nice Words
The other day we received our first blog comment written in Russian in Cyrillic characters, so I contacted our Notebook friend Anne, who spends a lot of time in Russia. She said the comment (which was addressing a blog post from many months ago about Georg Steller, the German botanist, zoologist and explorer, translated to:
“Great (fantastic) portrait of Georg Steller!!! Thank you!
Among other achievements, Steller was the first person to describe the pinniped that is now known as the Steller sea lion (below), which is found in the waters of Alaska and eastern Russia and is endangered:
Acadia Birding Festival
Just a reminder that the Acadia Birding Festival, which we’re helping to sponsor, begins on Thursday, May 31, and runs through Sunday, June 3. There are bird-watching walks, talks and boat and canoe trips from morning to night every day. Don’t miss it! We’ll try to post some highlights. For a detailed schedule of events, go to:
http://www.acadiabirdingfestival.com/schedule.htm
Answers to the Last Puzzler
1) The word reptile comes from a Latin word that means:
a) monster
b) scaly-skinned
c) creeping
Answer: c) creeping
A trio of creeping reptiles called whiptail lizards. Bonus question: Whiptail lizards are the official reptile of which state—Arizona, New Mexico or Utah?
2) The Latin root of the word amphibian means:
a) of two modes of life
b) water traveler
c) swimming feet
Answer: a) of two modes of life. Most amphibians initially develop gills for breathing underwater but later develop lungs for breathing on land.
An American bullfrog, one of our favorite amphibians.
Today’s Puzzler
What kind of egg is shown in the photo below?
What is it?
As we enjoyed a coastal drive on the Schoodic National Scenic Byway, we turned right onto the peninsula for a visit to SERC.
If this were an SAT test, here would be the question: Alaska is to the United States as (BLANK) is to Acadia National Park.
The answer would be Schoodic, a section of Acadia that is physically separate from and wilder than the main body of the park, which lies roughly 40 miles away and covers two-thirds of Mount Desert Island. That’s not to say you need a bush plane and a bear rifle to go to Schoodic. Pamelia and I took the scenic drive there the other day and enjoyed both the pristine setting and a destination that you’ll be hearing much more about in years to come if you care about science and nature: The Schoodic Education and Research Center Institute, more commonly known as SERC.
The SERC Institute campus.
Two of the most significant decisions of the last century in Down East Maine were a) the 1969 vote by a few hundred citizens in the town of Trenton to veto the building of a nuclear power plant and aluminum smelter on the shores of Union River Bay, on Acadia National Park’s doorstep; and b) the shifting of a U.S. Navy base in the 1920s from a beautiful corner of the park and Mount Desert Island—Otter Cliffs, located close to The Naturalist’s Notebook—to the Schoodic peninsula. The latter happened thanks to the efforts of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who saw the base as an obstacle to the gorgeous, coast-hugging route of Acadia’s then-under-construction Park Loop Road, which he was helping to fund.
The decision left Mount Desert Island more pristine, but initially took a toll on Schoodic. “When the base was built, this place was clear-cut,” Abe Miller-Rushing, the science coordinator for Acadia National Park, told Pamelia and me as he gave us a tour of the now-woodsy, 80-acre SERC complex. “It became a forest of radio antennas.”
Abe led us around the SERC campus on former paved roads that have been transformed into walking paths like this one.
A vital hub of cryptography work and radio communication in World War II, the base was decommissioned in 2002 and the land turned over to Acadia National Park. Federal econonomic-stimulus funds over the last few years helped transform it into the new SERC campus. Several of the paved roads were torn up and replaced with walking paths. Buildings were renovated. The Navy base’s bowling alley became a long bunk house in which visiting school groups often reside. In all, some 20 buildings—including an auditorium, science labs, art studios and rentable-by-the-week apartments—dot the campus.
The shoreline near SERC. No sunshine on this day—that is, no SERC du soleil.
SERC now sleeps as many 300 and attracts scientists, naturalists, teachers, artists (including participants in Acadia National Park’s artists-in-residence program) and student groups from the U.S. and abroad. Its official mission is “to guide present and future generations to greater understanding and respect for nature by providing research and learning opportunities through its outstanding Acadia National Park setting, unique coastal Maine facilities, and innovative partnership programs.”
On the day we visited, interpretive ranger and educator Kate Petrie—through an Internet video hookup—had just been showing a class of fifth-graders in Kansas a Maine tidal pool. Visitors from Oman were in residence, learning from Acadia and SERC staffers how to grow and improve their country’s park system and use nature to boost tourism.
If you don’t know much about Oman and its wildlife, here’s a taste: One of the sea turtles that nest at the Ra’s al Hadd Turtle Reserve on the Indian Ocean. Some 30,000 turtles nest here, as many of 13,000 of whom migrate in from the Arabian Gulf, the Red Sea and the East African coast.
That’s Oman shaded in darker tan. It abuts (from north to south on the Arabian Peninsula) the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
One building at SERC has this giant map of the coast of Maine covering the floor. It offers hands-on learning and toes-on learning at the same time.
Abe told us that among its many other initiatives—from field research to efforts to combine art and science to the instruction of advanced-placement high school teachers—SERC is setting up a bird-banding program that will operate year-round and fill an important scientific niche: Currently there is no such coastal banding center north of the Maine-New Hampshire border, a four-hour drive to the south. (Cornell has a station there, on Appledore Island.) Given the number and variety of birds that migrate to or reside in the Schoodic-MDI region—a whopping 338 bird species have been spotted in Acadia National Park alone—it’s important to keep track of how the populations are faring.
Abe had invited us to tour SERC and meet with him to talk about possible collaborations with The Naturalist’s Notebook. We are looking forward to those. And on a return visit we hope to see one of the many porcupines that Abe says show up almost every day. SERC even hosted a lecture last year called “The Unusual Life of the Porcupine” given by one of the country’s leading experts on those unique, lumbering, tree-climbing creatures. Where else would you get to hear a talk like that? And learn about Oman, sea turtles, World War II and tidal pools that are visible in Kansas? If you’re in Maine visiting Acadia and want a great experience, take the drive to SERC and see…the other Acadia.
One of the many porcupines that live at or near the SERC Institute.
Using Thoreau to Measure Climate Change
Abe Miller-Rushing is himself a scientist—a phenologist, to be exact. That’s someone who studies the timing of cyclical natural events such as bird migrations and flowers blooming. He recently co-published an op-ed piece in The New York Times on how the nature observations of Henry David Thoreau are aiding in the study of the ever-earlier-in-the-season timing of many natural phenomena. Abe has found, for example, that highbush blueberries in Concord, Mass., which flowered in mid-May in Thoreau’s day, are now flowering in early April:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/early-bloomers.html?_r=1&ref=henrydavidthoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Bird Sightings (Cont.)
Here’s a field report from Downeast Audubon’s International Migratory Bird Day outing last Saturday, courtesy of naturalist Lynn Havsall: “We had fantastic looks of singing Blackburnian, Black-throated Blue, Black-throated Green, Black & White, Parula and Pine Warblers along with Brown Creepers putting on quite a show and a very upset male Golden Crowned Kinglet that had his orange head feathers raised like a cardinal! It was cool!!!”
A black-throated green warbler.
A northern parula.
A golden-crowned kinglet.
Correspondent Virginia Jacobs (if you didn’t see this in the comments section of the blog) wrote to say that in Ohio the juncos have gone, the finches and chickadees are back and oven birds have been in evidence. On the subject of oven birds she recalled that when her son was young he used to look for what he called “stove birds.” Instead of tufted titmice he watched for what he called “tufted tiptoes.” If I were an artist, I would love to draw a tufted tiptoe.
Keep the observations coming!
Nature Movie Fest
Reel Pizza, one of our favorite haunts in Bar Harbor, is holding the Maine Wildlife Conservation Film Festival this Friday to Sunday. There are way too many good films to list, but the subjects range from jaguars to whales to tamarins to the importance of shade-grown coffee plantations to migratory birds (I told you I was going to keep pounding that subject into everyone’s head). Check out the lineup at:
http://mainewcff.com/Schedule.html
Answer to the Last Puzzler
Question: What do you call a cow that has just given birth?
Answer: Decalfinated!
(Thanks to correspondent George Stransky for that one.)
Today’s Puzzler
1) The word reptile comes from a Latin word that means:
a) monster
b) scaly-skinned
c) creeping
2) The Latin root of the word amphibian means:
a) of two modes of life
b) water traveler
c) swimming feet
Happy Bird Day
This Rafael Lopez painting is the poster for this year’s big event. Organizers say the piece reflects the joy, curiosity, and beauty of birds, while sharing the importance of community in bird conservation.
Today is International Migratory Bird Day. The event was created in 1993 and now is celebrated at more than 500 sites throughout the Western Hemisphere. I just read an online piece from the Jerusalem Post saying that Israel is marking the occasion too. The theme this year is 20 ways people can help protect and preserve birds every day.
We’ll write more about those 20 ways in future posts, but I’ll mention one that is near and dear to The Naturalist’s Notebook: drinking bird-friendly coffee! The world’s thirst for coffee has been steadily growing, and migratory bird habitat in Central and South America and the Caribbean has been devastated by clear-cutting for non-shade-growing coffee plantations. Ever since the Notebook opened we have sold bags of coffee certified as bird-friendly (that is, shade-grown and organic) by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Institute. The coffee is a bit more expensive than the stuff sold in supermarkets, but it also tastes better and—far more important—helps birds!
Please stock up on bird-friendly coffee when you come to the Notebook this summer. And spend at least a little time today appreciating birds!
Another Big Event
We’re delighted to announce that acclaimed ornithologists and writers Jeff and Allison Wells will visit the Notebook on August 18 for a bird walk and talk and a book signing for their great new field guide, Maine’s Favorite Birds. We’ll be writing more about the Wellses and the event soon. Put it on your calendar!
Avian Action
Hummingbirds and warblers are showing up here after their long migrations. We put up two hummingbird feeders yesterday and within minutes both had ruby-throated hummingbirds drinking from them. In addition we just saw a yellow warbler, wood thrushes and an ovenbird, among many others. Let us know what you’ve been seeing where you live.
A yellow warbler
Forgot to Ask…
I meant to include this in the last blog post. In our tidal walk Pamelia and I saw this apparent cluster of eggs attached to a rock. Each egg (if that’s what they were) was about the size of your fingernail. I saw an article suggesting that they might be clam eggs—which would make sense, given all the clams in the bay. But can any of you confirm what they are?
A big storm flooded the road into Seal Harbor on Friday. Pamelia and I made it through in our trusty aqua-wagon and made more headway in our nonstop preparations for the Notebook’s 2012 season.
The bad weather also whipped up some big surf along Ocean Drive in Acadia National Park.
The rough water forced the closing of the Thunder Hole viewing platform in Acadia.
Magical Moment
Notebook friend and correspondent Kathy Weathers recently had a memorable experience off the California coast. She and her husband were on a 42-foot sailboat going from Marina del Ray to San Diego and back, and as Kathy writes:
“THE highlight was marine life sightings (pelicans, seals, sea lions, one sunfish, one gray whale) and watching dolphins hunt their prey. WOW! A mile-long line of common (I think) dolphins moving quickly into hunting formation to devour a school of fish. At one point, a group
broke off to swim alongside the bow. I lay down on the bow, extending my arm. They were about three feet away, some turned to make eye contact, blew through their air holes, and dove again. About a half-mile from shore, three small birds (at different times) landed for a rest. We quickly scurried to offer fresh water and sesame seeds, but they seemed to want to just rest.
“We retrieved 20 mylar balloons [from the sea]. The first was a light blue star, the next said
Happy Birthday”—coincidentally, Kathy’s husband, Prent, was celebrating his birthday—”the next 10 were various colors tied together … a bittersweet scavenger hunt for birthday wishes. I’d love to have those items banished the way plastic bags are in some communities.” Thanks, Kathy!
The Tortoise Man
This giant tortoise is from the Galapagos Islands, where Notebook team member Julie Olbrantz’s parents just had some extraordinary nature-watching experiences.
If you didn’t see this NPR story when I posted it on our Facebook page, take the time to click on it now. It’s about the inspiring 86-year-old man who is singlehandedly restoring the population of giant tortoises on one of the Seychelles islands. Click below:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/11/152350238/120-giants-found-living-with-86-year-old-man
Answer to the Last Puzzler
A few of you came up with alternative answers to the riddle, “How do rabbits keep their hair neat?” One of you came up with “in a bun” (as in bun-ny) and another of your proposed “a hare net.” The official answer is “a hare brush,” but I’ll take all three as correct.
Today’s Puzzler
Another riddle: What do you call a cow that has just given birth?
Time and Tide to Get Outside
The super-low tide was peaking at 6:08 a.m., so Pamelia and I grabbed our boots and our coffee and headed for the water.
If you’ve just roamed more than 200 yards off shore in one of the year’s most extreme low-tides, you might sit down and ask your self a philosophical question: Are my boots half-full (of sea water) or half-empty?
You have wandered (stepping carefully) through a world of clams, mussels, urchins, anemones, shrimp, crabs, starfish, rock weed and other forms of Maine sea life, much of it breathtakingly colorful, in lovely dawn light. Your feet are numb from the 44-degree ocean water. An adventurer might judge your boots half-empty—after all, you could have roamed a few yards farther out, gotten a little deeper, seen even more—but nothing about this morning feels the slightest bit empty.
We started seeing the red starfish (or sea stars) that seem to be here—or to be that color—only at certain times of the year.
By going far from shore we also saw blue sea stars. Pamelia was shooting new images for her low-tide photo series for The Naturalist’s Notebook. This shot wasn’t good enough to make the cut; you’ll see far cooler images if you come to the Notebook this year.
This mini-crustacean—a young shrimp?—faces a challenging life because of all the hungry predators in the bay.
A cluster of sea urchins.
You thought I was kidding about the boots full of water?
Back on Land…
Spring life is popping out all around—in our case indoors as well as outdoors:
An indigo bunting showed up this week. Buntings are a type of finch and this one joined our massive and chatty flock of other finches: goldfinches, purple finches and pine siskins.
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We planted our dozens of dahlias indoors to give them a jump start on the season. Within hours, tiny yellow spiders appeared. I’m guessing that they were dormant in the potting soil and came alive in the heat of the house. Within a few days their numbers had swelled to the hundreds and they had woven a six-foot-by-10-foot web. Before our house turned into an arachnophobe’s nightmare, we took the plants outside for an afternoon and set the spiders free. We think they might have been argiope aurantia, also known as black-and-yellow garden spiders or corn spiders.
Because the dahlias started growing fast, I put a ruler in one pot to measure the height. Notice that the highest point on this dahlia is nine-and-three-quarter inches. Check out the next picture.
This is the same dahlia two days later. I would estimate that the highest leaf is now about 15 inches. That’s more than five inches of growth in 48 hours. Which makes me wonder….
…whether last weekend’s so-called supermoon—the biggest full moon of the year because the moon is so close to the Earth right now—might be aiding the plants’ growth in some way. Farmers have planted by moon cycles for centuries, and some research has shown that in times of especially strong lunar gravity (such as now, causing the dramatic tides) water rises higher in the soil. Might that extra-strong pull also help lift water up into plants, speeding growth? Just a hypothesis. Maybe dahlias just like our living room.
On a walk, Pamelia and I spent time studying one of the many small blue moths that were flitting around. I say blue because the other side of this moth’s wings are strikingly blue. This side provides camouflage in the woods. The black-and-white striped legs and antennae reminded us of the color pattern made famous in the buildings of Siena in Italy (which in turn were inspired by the black-and-white horses belonging to that city’s mythological founders).
Our woods are blanketed with newly blossoming trout lilies, also known as dog-toothed violets. Notice the trout-like pattern on the foliage.
While driving nearby, we saw what we thought were three wild turkeys—perhaps part of the flock that has lived by our house all winter. Then we got closer and realized that they looked more like farm turkeys. Escapees, perhaps? We don’t know of any turkey farm within 20 miles of here.
Along the shore we found this maze design on a piece of our 500-million-year-old coastal schist. The rock is metamorphic, meaning it was transformed by tremendous heat and pressure under the ground.
I love maps, and a Notebook correspondent passed along a link to some beautiful map-collage work by artist Matthew Cusick. I'm not sure how well you can see it on this piece, called The Rachel's Wave, but this is entirely made from cut-up maps. Check out some of his other work at mattcusick.com
Nice Note
After our last blog post, on naturalist Bernd Heinrich’s upcoming visit to the Notebook, we received many happy emails from people who have stopped by in seasons past and are eager to return. Here’s just one:
“We visited your store last September on our first trip to Maine. Your store is one of my all time favorites of all the places I have traveled in the U.S. I taught biology in Ohio for 36 years and I always tried to do displays of biological themes and incorporated art as well. I am a nature collector and follower. I could have spent days in your store. I absolutely loved all that you have put together to educate everyone about the environment. I wish I lived closer to your store as I would gladly volunteer and help you in any way.”
Speaking of…
I swapped emails with Bernd Heinrich, who said waves of migrating birds had just reached Burlington, Vt., this past weekend. While watching a woodpecker hole over the course of two days as part of his research, he either saw or heard 62 bird species.
Answers to the Last Puzzler
1) How many octopus species are there?
a) 28
b) 289
c) 2,890
Answer: b) 289
2) How tall is the tallest tree on Earth (a redwood)?
a) 298 feet
b) 379 feet
c) 415 feet
Answer: b) 379
Today’s Puzzler
A riddle: How do rabbits keep their hair neat?
A Trip to Vermont to See Bernd Heinrich
Vermont is dairy country, and Bernd lives just up the hill from this idyllic scene.
Bernd Heinrich is one of the world’s foremost naturalists, biologists and science and nature writers. He is the subject of an inspiring documentary by filmmaker Jan Cannon called An Uncommon Curiosity. Having read many of Bernd’s books (some of them New York Times bestsellers), including Mind of the Raven, Ravens in Winter, Winter World (about how animals survive in snow and cold), the Thoreau-esue A Year In the Maine Woods and The Snoring Bird (a can’t-put-it-down account of the extraordinary, war-torn saga of his family, especially his father, Gerd, himself a great naturalist and a world-traveling museum-specimen collector), I often find myself trying to think like him when I walk through the woods—observing extra closely, looking for clues, posing questions to myself about what I see and hear.
One of the highlights at The Naturalist’s Notebook this summer will be an August visit from Bernd. He will give a talk, sign books and take part in some fun activities that, in the tradition of the Notebook, combine nature, science and art. This week Pamelia and I drove to Burlington, Vermont, to talk to Bernd and look at his exceptional body of drawings and paintings of the natural world. We’ll be presenting a major show of his work all summer.
Bernd, who is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Vermont, welcomed us to his home outside Burlington.
Pamelia and I took a triangulated route to Burlington by way of southern New Hampshire, where we made another Notebook-related stop. After seven-and-a-half hours on the road—through the White Mountains and the Green Mountains and past lovely stands of birch, their new leaves billowing in ephemeral clouds of light yellow-green—we pulled into Burlington, one of the country’s most progressive and environmentally minded cities, set on Lake Champlain. As we ate dinner that night, discussing how fortunate we were to be meeting with a naturalist known as (among other distinctions) the world’s leading raven expert, I glanced up at a TV above the bar and saw an ad for a new movie: The Raven. Good omen.
Bernd's pet rats seemed delighted to meet us, as did a pair of friendly dogs.
Our five hours with Bernd the next day were memorable indeed. His home is set in beautiful countryside overlooking a beaver pond with a lodge in the middle. A goose nests on top of the beaver lodge. In his kitchen Bernd poured me a cup of coffee from a Mason jar on the stove and added milk and honey, a tasty combination I’d never tried before. (Bernd, the author of Bumblebee Economics, is also a beekeeper, though his bees mysteriously died over the winter, perhaps as part of the widespread colony-collapse phenomenon.) After chatting about birds for a while, we retreated to his detached studio, where Bernd started pulling out boxes and file folders full of wonderful sketches, drawings and paintings of plants, fungi and wildlife. Some dated back to his days as a PhD. student at UCLA and even to his childhood. “You don’t know it until you draw it,” Bernd said with a smile.
Bernd showing Pamelia and me art pieces in his studio.
I don’t want to leak too much of what happened after that—you’ll be able to see the results if you come to The Naturalist’s Notebook this summer—but I will note that Bernd, ever the enthusiastic scientist, excused himself a couple of times to go watch sapsuckers. He has observed some fascinating behavior involving sapsuckers recently and he can’t wait to figure out answers to some of the questions he has about the birds.
This illustration shows the skulls of a blue jay (upper left), a crow (lower left) and a raven, all members of the corvid family.
Some of his work, such as this painting of winter finches, still had the Post-it notes stuck on by his book publishers as instructions to printers.
A few of Bernd's books in the studio.
Bernd has some books on his shelves that you probably don't have on yours.
Bernd caught this mouse (with his drawing eye) at snack time.
This sapsucker pops its head out in one corner of a larger painting. Bernd has been doing his sapsucker research both at his home and at his beloved cabin in rural western Maine, where he also has conducted much of his raven research over the years.
Bernd wrote us naturalist's notes to go with certain pieces we took with us. Most of his pieces already have notes and observations written on them describing the species or behavior shown.
As we were getting ready to leave, we saw what Bernd said was the first white-throated sparrow he'd spotted this year.
You’ll hear me say this more than once before the year is through, but take the time to read some of Bernd’s books if you want to deepen your appreciation of the world around you. And come to the Notebook this summer if you’d like to see a show of truly remarkable naturalist art (and buy more of of his books). Thank you, Bernd, for giving us a day we’ll never forget.
On our drive home, we passed through Rumford, Maine, where the falls were roaring after a day of heavy rain.
Fluke Sighting
Vermont may be New England's only landlocked state, but these whales' tales greeted us at the edge of Burlington. The black granite sculpture, made in 1989 and officially called Reverence, is meant as a statement on the fragility of the Earth. Ice cream buffs might be interested to know that it's located near Ben & Jerry's headquarters.
A fine forest fern fiddlehead face, unfurling—future fire fuel?
Fern Fact (er, Fun Fact) of the Day
Part of Pamelia’s research for a very colorful 2012-13 installation at The Naturalist’s Notebook has taken her deep into the history of the Earth and the universe. This week, as often happens, she mentioned to me something amazing: Most of the coal in the world today comes from ferns that grew between 360 million and 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous period, a time in our planetary history that saw amphibians and land plants prosper and that derives its name from a Latin term meaning “coal-bearing.” Most of the land back then was warm and swampy, so that the continents were covered with forests of ferns. When these ferns died, they formed thick layers of dead plants, sank into the ground, and were transformed by heat and pressure into the form of carbon that we know as coal—and call, appropriately, a fossil fuel.
Answer to the Last Puzzler
One reason that many birds’ eggs evolved as oval shaped rather than round is that oval eggs don’t roll off flat surfaces on which birds would lay them. (Try rolling an egg and you’ll see that it doesn’t move in a straight line, it traces a circle and comes back to where it started.) More birds survive if eggs don’t roll off, fall to the ground and break. Any cook who’s ever set an chicken’s egg on a kitchen countertop should be grateful.
Today’s Puzzler
1) How many octopus species are there?
a) 28
b) 289
c) 2,890
2) How tall is the tallest tree on Earth (a redwood)?
a) 298 feet
b) 379 feet
c) 415 feet
—Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
