Environment – Page 17 – The Edge of the Wood

We need more ice

I’m sitting beside a stream a short distance from my home, lower, some people say, than is normal even for a normally hot August, which this August has not been. It’s been hot. July was the hottest month in the hottest year since records have been kept, and August is on track to eclipse July. In some places, it was hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk.

Some politicians say the world is not getting hotter, and if it is, it’s not the fault of humans, and if it is, well, we need the jobs. On the other hand, keeping those heat-making jobs means we can save buying frying pans and kitchen stoves.

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The only home we have

We The People have a long history of preserving public land for the enjoyment and education of all of us, and for, we have been lately learning, the health of this whirling blob of mud we call home. Yet, we are destroying indigenous families and forests to make room to grow quinoa in South America, and palm oil in Asia.

Here at home, the Republican platform calls for the federal government to get out of the business of owning public lands. There is profit in those forests and canyons – oil, natural gas, coal and lumber are waiting to be harvested by industries that have little concern for the health of our grandkids. (I wonder whether those folks might be interested in giving up the thousands of military reservations we non-military peeps are not allowed to visit. I would love to visit that cave dug into the rock a few miles from my home.)

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It’s getting hot out there

TThree Black Vultures showed up in the backyard Tuesday and headed for our stream. They were not looking for food; they craved water. They hover over us every day; that was the first time any of them landed so near our house.

Drinking water is in short supply in many wild places. We are in a time of year when water levels often are low, but Marsh Creek, in places where it normally only is low, is nearly dry. I was shooting pictures of a pair of Great Blue Herons looking for enough water to support a fresh frog for lunch when a Mallard drake swam by, about three feet over the surface of what used to be the creek. There was more water in the humid air than in the stream bed.

On a nearby fence rail, a dozen starlings sat with mouths open, panting. Other critters presumably have found shadier places to await sundown.

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Busted left wing

Wednesday, there were four eggs in the bluebird nest. Thursday, I didn’t check. Friday evening, the eggs were gone. Nary a sign. No chicks, no shells. Nothing but ne(s)t.

I turned around on the slide up which I had walked to view the nest mounted to the roof of the children’s play structure. I guess I slid, because that’s what one does on a slide, lost my balance and crashed into the garden, on the way becoming tangled in the plastic netting effective at keeping out rabbits and neighbor’s cats but not so much a 260-pound lummox trying to walk on slippery slides.

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Industrial strength obfuscation

I grew up around farmers who often used words, or didn’t, in hopes you would hear what they wanted you to hear rather than what they actually said.

I once asked a fellow to suggest a good car body repair guy.

“A lot of people like Ted Jacobs,” Jake said, (the names are not real) then after a short period of thought, “And some think Ken Strasbaugh does a pretty good job.”

“You didn’t mention Jimmy Godson,” I noted.

“You could go there,” said Jake.

I took the hint and didn’t.

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If we love it …

On the coast of Maine, investors found undeveloped sections of rock upon which gulls sometimes still roost and waves crash. A little dynamite reduced the moguls to rubble and bulldozers pushed them to the ocean’s edge, leaving a flat place on which to build a cottage in which city folks will pay exorbitant amounts to live for a week. I know; I’ve been among those city folks.

Miles away, other investors have found really nice lakes populated only by Common Loons and bullfrogs. They have divided the shorefront into tiny lots so people from crowded burgs can move to crowded lakesides.

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An extraordinary queendom

A friend used to say the trees caused the wind to blow, like when you wave one of those Japanese hand fans. “Whenever you feel the wind, you look and see the trees are moving,” he said in an offering of proof. He wasn’t all that far-fetched.

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“You just have to think ahead.”

A new bridge is planned for Fairfield Road in Hamiltonban Township. Or maybe Highland Township (as it appears to be on the county’s online map.) There seems to be some question which end of the bridge is the municipal line, but it is a state road, and therefore a state bridge,

A look underneath the existing structure reveals a need for some repair — not immediately, but soon.

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A beautiful time for a drive or a walk

Beside a road off Pa. Route 34, somewhere north of Gettysburg, Don Yost and John Deere team up to pull a chisel plow through a field of corn stubble.

Last year was no-till for the field, and the crop was corn. No-till means the ground is left unturned, the roots of the previous crop keep the hillside from flowing to the bottom in heavy rains, and new seed poked into the earth with a tool made for the task.

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We’re the smartest, except for the others

The stream roars softly over a barrier of rocks near where I sit taking inventory as Grady the Golden pads about the area on his own cataloging mission.

Nearby, a long-needle pine catches my eye, not for the needles – they are common enough – but for the pine cones protruding from the trunk, That is not something I’ve previously noticed. Later, down at the Michaux State Forest office, Forestry Technician Mike Rothrock tells me it is common for young Pitch Pine to have cones growing from the trunk, as well as the more common configuration, growing from the ends of branches.

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Fishing season opened this week

Fishing season started this week. It was too darn cold to brave the squadrons of fisher-folk who’d be gathered in all the most productive places, though I did buy my license.

When I was a lad, we were one of two families living year-round on the lake. Some summer folks from town had their weekend-only cottages in clusters; between the clusters were large trees that passing storms had pushed into the water, and lily pad farms where the broad leaves and deep grasses hid lunker Chain Pickerel.

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Drive slow, (Free Range) children

If the history of our planet could be compressed into 24 hours, we humans would account for little more than a minute. About nine minutes before that, dinosaurs roamed the globe, until a big rock fell from the sky, blew a hole in the ground somewhere south of Mexico, and evolved the dinosaurs into extinction.

In real time, about 250 million years ago, dinosaurs left footprints that became filled in with sand and other sediments, which compressed and would eventually decorate the capstone on rock walls of certain bridges where men fought and killed each other so their leaders could continue, or not, to base an economy on the unpaid labors of other men.

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“Signs, signs, everywhere a sign…”

Springtime color is beginning to flow over the range. A Red-bellied Woodpecker just landed atop the swingset. It is a distinctive creature, its back a mosaic of black bands and white triangles. A bright red skullcap extends back to its shoulders. My books report there is some red on its belly, but rarely is it visible.

A few Northern Mockingbirds have dropped by, while overhead Snow and Canada geese head for their nesting grounds. These are welcome signs, dulling the sharp pain of cabin fever.

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Frozen lakes, guns and contracts

Wind blowing across the frozen lake has carved a thin layer of snow into hard-packed ripples, like white mud that has flowed down a hill during spring thaw. The granddaughter and her young friend make tracks across the ripples, then take running starts to slide across the ice where the snow has blown clear and polished the glassine surface.

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What’s the weather forecast?

It’s downright balmy out as I consider these thoughts. The thermometer claims about 45 F, and there’s a breeze blowing across what is left of a 30-inch blizzard that blanketed us just over a week ago. The raised-garden frames, themselves only about 10 inches high, are well exposed. There is weather outside my window, and it’s not bad.

My mother used to watch the weather forecast every night. She would announce, “It’s time for the news,” and take her place on the end of the couch.

But it wasn’t the news that interested her. She would talk through the news. In fact, one could say when the news was on TV was the time for news of the family and people we knew. One might call it “back fence time,” only we didn’t have a back fence, and if we had, there were no neighbors close enough to lean on it.

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What if Marsh Creek was in Flint or Uniontown

Marsh Creek, a short distance from my home, is bloated like a certain writer who has partaken overmuch of turkey and ice cream at a family dinner. Rain pours down on the tableau, filling the myriad tributaries that flow into the creek like an array of gravy and soup bowls, each adding ingredients they have collected from minor hills and valleys in the larger creek’s watershed.

Just over a week ago, a snowstorm laid a biodegradable covering across the scene. Now the rain melds it into the water that is its main ingredient, expanding the creek to a degree the spring and summer feeder streams will not.

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Bats’ and fairies’ return awaited

“The sky is falling!” That’s the cry around my home whenever the rain or snow comes down upon us. Tuesday afternoon, the sky was falling in a great white cloud of snow. Fifteen minutes after it began, it was over, leaving white patches on the still-green grass where the ground was a little colder than other places.

The mini-blizzard lasted long enough for a little girl whose home I passed on the way home to put on her coat with the hood and dash outside. She jumped off the porch to the sidewalk and, tilting her head up with her tongue out as far as it would stretch, started catching snowflakes.

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EPA defines a bee killer

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.” – Naturalist and preservationist John Muir, 1838-1914

The quote received a bit of supporting illumination from the Environmental Protection Agency this week – a little reminder that this great life-system of which we humans are part is a sophisticated (some might say complicated) bit of cosmic machinery.

In a report published Wednesday (Jan. 6, 2016), the EPA said it has figured out what is killing honey bees. The culprit (or one of the culprits), it seems, is neonicotinoids-based pesticides. That has been a suspicion in some quarters as an explanation for what is generally termed “colony collapse disorder.”

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Wishing a sustainable New Year

A few days ago, I told my 12-year-old granddaughter she had no immediate worry about rising sea levels. We live about 500 feet above sea level, and the level at the eastern seashore is predicted to rise only a few inches by the end of the century.

I lied.

It’s nearly the end of December. It is technically winter but in eastern Canada, lots of ducks and geese are saving their energy for making more ducks and geese by not flying south until the lakes ice over, which so far they have not.

We humans, on the other hand, can bend our environment to our wishes. We think we can simply manufacture more food and housing and we will be OK. So far, we have been able to pull it off. By some accounts, the next three decades are going to make water very expensive in some parts of the nation.

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