I seem to have come down with a cold, so before what I call stupid pills and other people call benadryl kick in, here’s the post for today.

This lone damsel in deer’s dress (think about it) seems to know what the season is all about. Yes, it is the 30th of September and she and we may be enjoying the mild, clear days with achingly blue skies and frequent dry breezes, noticeably cool mornings, warm afternoons, and pools of sun that you can actually sit in with pleasure. But there are monsters in the woods just waiting for us with bows and arrows. I wonder if she’s going to make it through to continue ravening on our spring plants?

And speaking of which, how about them wildflowers and vegetation fuzzily glimpsed, but nonetheless rampant? My tender ministrations!


This is supposed to be an “art” picture. I now feel that I should tell you that, since it might not be apparent. Swarms of tiny gnats (ours don’t bite) were drifting through the air on the north side of the house. They were practically invisible in the late afternoon shade except for a space where a beam of westering sun came through the clerestory windows above and through the upstairs window and down into the front yard. Then they reflected tiny motes of light dancing through the air.

One of the good things about the Great Microstegium Pull is being forced to examine the ground closely. As mindless a task as it is, the camera that I always bring usually sits meters away and often I don’t stop to photograph an interesting encounter. I’ve missed a few things. But here’s some stuff I’ve seen in the last few days.

I feel a little bad about my neglect of the mushrooms that have been popping up. Lots of Russula, those red-topped ubiquitous mushrooms that the squirrels seem to love to nibble on; lots of little brown mushrooms, which we call those that are basically unidentifiable except by experts; and lots of amanitas.

A nice bolete, pinkish purple, popped up alone in the pine barrens this week. It’s probably a Violet-gray Bolete, and with its scaly stem, may be Tylopilus eximus.

UPDATE Jan 2, 2008: Thanks to Todd Osmundson, who emailed his identification:

The mushroom that you show is Tylopilus chromapes (classified as Leccinum chromapes by some specialists, though there is disagreement on this point). More information is available at [here].

You can see the pore structure here, characteristic of boletes, where the gills would otherwise be in “normal” mushrooms. This one, if it’s what I’m thinking, is too bitter to be palatable. Mushroom experts, weigh in with your disagreements!


Here’s a stand of one of my favorite mints, Purple Giant Hyssop, Agastache scrophulariifoliae. It’s a favorite of bees and butterflies, and with its bottlebrush spikes of flowers and its height (near 2 meters) is a striking plant.


It’s also a very well-behaved mint, with none of the psychopathic tendencies often seen in such terrible relatives. At least here it’s not invasive. It also weathered our substantial 5-month drought this spring and summer, and the deer don’t like it. What could be better?


Wandering through the woods I came across this lone plant with its amazing zigzag stems and single terminal flower.


Both Glenn and I are almost certain it’s a Euphorb species but still haven’t figured out which one. There are a lot of non-natives floating around, but they are typically very weedy and sun-loving, some very pernicious. This one just strikes me, without being able to justify my intuition, as a likely native, similar to flowering spurge, but clearly not that.

The identification problem will be solved, certainly, but at the moment Glenn says he’s blocked at the key and our Radford Vascular Flora doesn’t describe anything quite like it. You’d think those zigzag stems would be a dead giveaway!

Someday we’ll have to do a special on Euphorb flowers, because they’re very strange. Nothing is as it seems - the petals are not petals, the male and female parts are highly separated, and there are amazing nectaries (that green ring that the “petals” are connected to).

Well. This turned out to be longer than I thought, but strange things are happening off the US Pacific coast, and I thought you’d like to know.

Robin at Dharma Bums sent me an interesting article on the odd interruption in annual upwelling along the California coast in the last two years. Since this has relevance (I think) to the equally odd hypoxia that the Oregon coast has seen this year, and since much of the South American west coastline will see in the next half-year something similar as the current El Niño develops, I thought it meet to gather my thoughts on the subject.

There are a lot of pretty pictures, but they’re all tiny png files and should load quickly.

Some definitions are inevitable:

Upwelling is an oceanic phenomenon where cold, nutrient-rich (and usually oxygen-poor) waters rise to the surface from the bottom of the ocean. Ocean bottom currents are s o s l o w, taking decades to get anywhere, and as they move along the bottom they pick up nutrients and lose oxygen. Upwelling of the cold bottom waters usually means an explosion in the population of surface fishes and other organisms as the food webs are enriched from the bottom up.

Downwelling is the opposite, and usually results in low populations of surface organisms.

There’s also the overlapping phenomenon of stagnation when warm surface water moves in for one reason or another and actively reduces oxygen levels and nutrients.

There are permanent upwelling and downwelling regions in the world, mostly at the poles and along the equator, and these are driven by long term underwater currents.

But there are also periodic wind-driven upwelling and downwelling events and those are the subject of this post.

You’ve probably heard of the periodic boom and bust fishing along the South American west coast. Busts occur during El Niños because of stagnation (warm surface waters) and scarce nutrients, and booms occur during normal years and La Niña years because of upwelling of nutrients from cold bottom waters. A full explanation can be found here.

The El Niño example is due to the Trade Wind easterlies coming to a stop and even reversing sometimes in the strong El Niño years. In normal years and in La Niña strong trade winds blow the warm West South American surface waters westward and bottom waters rise to replace the surface water, and that’s the upwelling. In El Niño years all that warm water sloshes back from Australia to Peru and coats the western South American coastal waters with a stagnant surface of warm water, preventing upwelling, and fishing is bad.

That in a nutshell is how it works, but you might have figured that things couldn’t be so easy. HAHAHAHAHAHA

There’s this interesting phenomenon called Ekman Transport, and it’s driven by ocean winds and the Coriolis force. The Coriolis force is that thing where moving masses in the northern hemisphere tend to drift to the right, and in the southern hemisphere tend to drift toward the left. It’s due to the rotation of the earth, and the direction of drift is all you need to know.

Even though that’s all you really need to know, you *really* need to know that this amazingly obscure thing has huge effects.

As winds move across the ocean, they drive the surface waters ahead of them, but due to Coriolis force the surface waters actually move at about a 45 degree angle to the direction of the wind, to the right in the Northern Hemisphere. As you go deeper and deeper, the current direction spirals around clockwise (in the northern hemisphere). Eventually you reach a depth where the current direction is actually opposite to that of the wind direction way above!!

The California Interruption:
Such strange things can happen off a coastline. Here’s some pictures I made with my very own hands. Let’s take a west coast in the Northern Hemisphere, like the coast of Oregon or California. Along the Pacific coasts the winds shift from north winds to south winds, depending on the time of year, and rich, interesting things happen as a result.


The charming figure on the above left shows upwelling due to northern coastal winds (red arrow, and remember that winds are named in the direction they come *from*) that begin in April or so. The blue means cold, upwelling, nutrient-rich, and perhaps oxygen poor. The yellow means warm surface waters, perhaps oxygen rich, but nutrient poor.

Because of Ekman Transport, the north winds move the surface ocean waters to the southwest, and this off-shore current sucks up cold nutrient-rich waters from the bottom. In the fall the winds typically reverse (right panel) and the surface waters move toward the shore, causing downwelling, warmer, nutrient-poor waters, and poor fishing.

(Interestingly, the situation is opposite on eastern coastlines: upwelling is caused by south winds. And the whole thing is reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, just to add an extra bit of fun.)


The last two years along the California coast have seen an interruption or months-long delay in the upwelling spring event. And no one’s sure why. El Niños affect the California Current, but there wasn’t an El Niño event to explain this. There is a periodicity in the California Current and upwelling events every 10-15 years, but by all past experience the last two years should have been in a strong upwelling period. I haven’t been able to find anything about what the semiannual wind conditions have been.

It’s a problem. Not only does it affect fishing, but it also affects the entire oceanic ecology of the region. Kelp forests and their rich ecosystem depend on such nutrients, and the effects extend into the air and onto the land as seabirds and shorebirds suffer population losses.

The Oregon Hypoxia:
There are many places where annual hypoxia (low oxygen events) occur on an annual though sometimes unpredictable basis. The Gulf of Mexico hypoxia event off the coast of the mouth of the Mississippi is a well-known event, which has been getting larger in recent years, creating a veritable desert devoid of the fleeing fish and sea life. That event has more to do with warm waters and nutrient-overloaded output from the polluted Mississippi than it does with any of the upwelling/downwelling stuff. Algae grow rampant in the warm polluted waters and suck all the oxygen out at night, creating the hypoxic conditions.

Another phenomenon that some Gulf Coast communities wait for with eager anticipation during the summer months is Jubilee. This is especially seen in Mobile Bay, Alabama, and many of my parents' friends watch eagerly for it. When the wind conditions, the Bay temperatures, and a few other unknown factors are just right, temporary hypoxia occurs, and fish and crabs are driven ashore, where their human predators wait to scoop them up, literally by hand.

You don’t expect hypoxia along the Oregon coastline though, and again, no one is quite sure why this year oxygen-poor waters appeared at the surface, causing fish kills and ocean life migrations.

It happened in 2002, was thought to be a one-time event, and then it happened again last year, and now it’s happen yet again. Hypoxic waters rose to the surface near the coast and the reduced oxygen caused marine life kills.

And again, oceanographers and marine biologists are puzzled. El Niños have an effect, but as in the California coast problem, there hasn’t been one. Periodic changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation may also be having an effect.

Now, bottom ocean waters have travelled slowly in a current near the bottom for a few hundred years, gradually being depleted of oxygen though they may be full of nutrients. This is to be expected. They might normally rise to the surface and become oxygenated and beneficial as they do (right panel below). Off the coast of Oregon the bottom waters that rise up are the less oxygen-depleted waters of the California Current.

One the left below is a pretty picture of layered waters without upwelling. On the right is another pretty picture of what *should* happen when annual upwelling occurs:


Here’s an ugly possibility, and it’s my own speculation. It appears that these bottom ocean waters are rising to the surface and accumulating in such a way that they cannot be oxygenated at the surface. One possibility is that they may be overlayed by warm surface water that prevents the upwelling from breaking through to the surface. Nutrients and algal growth just exacerbate the hypoxia problem in the warm surface waters:


Another possible explanation is that the cold, unusually oxygen-poor Arctic bottom waters are now migrating down the west coast and replacing the more benign California current ocean waters, again for unknown reasons. And of course there’s the inevitable suspicion, too, that the 400 kg gorilla, sitting unnoticed in the back of the room, global warming, is responsible.

What’s clear is that these are unusual situations along the US Pacific coastline. To what extent they are new phenomena driven perhaps by climate change, and to what extent they are cyclic phenomena that we are just becoming aware of is pretty much unknown. The ability to measure and observe in detail is a fairly recent one, and will probably require years of continued observation to begin to construct an explanation. This is all new to us.

I haven’t been able to find any information that attempts to explain BOTH of these, the California interruption and the Oregon hypoxia, as a single phenomenon. The commonality is of course that these are very unusual phenomena that have repeatedly occurred in the last 4 or 5 years. The difference is that upwelling is occuring along the Oregon coast, but it’s hypoxic. Upwelling *isn't* occurring as expected along the California coast (and one has to wonder if it would be hypoxic if it did!). I’m sure there are connections being attempted - just haven’t found any yet. And that 400 kg gorilla is continuing to scream at us.

My life is nothing but Microstegium right now. I still don’t see flowers which is very good, and continue to handpick. Somewhere around 140,000 now. I take the camera, just in case, but it is neglected. The current progress:


The three busy workwork days are over, at least, and I’m wondering if I’ll do the rest of the creek before I go into a final evening of work for the week. A nap looks awfully good!

I appreciate the comments. Everything is just fine. Robin sent an interesting link about the lack of upwelling along the California coast, for the second year, and I’ve spent a little time composing some simple drawings depicting Ekman Transport and wind-driven up- and downwelling. You asked for it!

Or is that redundant? Should we have simply El Niño?

The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, after a couple of months of giving 50/50 chance, has announced that El Niño has developed in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean and should reign well into 2007.

For us in the southeast this means colder, wetter weather than usual. For those in the northwest US, I’m sorry to tell you that this extends the draconian warm drought you’ve been experiencing.

The CPC has a lot of predictive information based on past El Niños (and La Niñas, and neutral years, too) here.

Scroll down to section IV (Basic Composites) and click on any of the 3-month averages for maps of temperature and preciptitationa anomalies for El Niño to see what to expect from past events.

The future: La Niña (but not always) often follows El Niño, beginning usually late spring and last into the latter half of the year. That reverses the precipitation and temperature expectations, usually giving us in the southeast hot droughty weather, and those in the northwest cooler, wet weather. I’m generous, so I’ll hang with Robin and Roger hoping for a La Niña!

There are innumerable good websites explaining the ENSO cycle, and I’ve also posted on it here.

No, this isn’t a tribute to Florida Homecoming Queens, although you should enjoy making your own by going to the proud Florida Cracker’s blog and enjoying the weekend’s festivities.

Everything seems to be a month behind. This includes the goldenrods, what few of the asters that did anything at all, and populations of bluecurls and gerardia that we’ve been watching for along some of the dirt roads. I’m guessing the reason is the four or five months of drought in the spring through midsummer.

(And, by the way, courtesy of Glenn who introduced it to me this morning, add this to your vocabulary: ruderal. It means a roadside community (and probably any disturbed site). I’ve often wondered at how distinctive the communities of roadside plants can be on dusty dirt roads. The side of a dirt road is usually hardpan, unless it’s rained recently the plants are coated with dust, dirt roads are usually built on ridges and therefore rather dry most of the time, and I imagine this is a rather harsh environment. I suppose it could be stored in your memory banks next to riparian, just a ways down from alpine.)

Glenn discovered what appears to be a late manifestation of Vanessa virginiensis, the ubiquitous American Lady, which will become a very nice butterfly of the brushfoot persuasion. The larvae were quite large, longer than 8 cm or so.


I haven’t seen any adults that I’m aware of, so it was nice to make the acquaintance of the ones feeding on this plant. The circular yellowish striping, and the large white dots, are very prominent. And yes, Glenn went where most men will not go and at my request stroked the fearsome spines to show that they did not in fact sting.


The plant these babies were feeding on is Sweet Everlasting, Fragrant Rabbit Tobacco, or just Rabbit Tobacco. As are so many plants recently, this one has been removed from the genus Gnaphalium and renamed as Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium.


The “gnaph” root seems to mean “wool”, and the “obtusifolium” part refers to the blunt leaves. Indeed the stems, flowers and the undersides are covered with tiny fine hairs that gives the impression of the plant being white.


It’s a common plant east of the Rockies, but worry not if you live to the west - there are plenty of cudweeds for you too.

The flowers are not insignificant, but they are not showy. They are rayless composites, and never really open further than this.


I’m taken by the plant, despite its commonness and what others would call weediness, and especially since it has revealed itself to be a caterpillar host plant for American Lady. In fact, if I go to Lepidopteran Host Plants Database, and put in Vanessa virginiensis, the host plants listed are in fact the asters of this sort: Cudweeds, Pussytoes, Rosinweeds, and Wormwood.

There is the sometimes pesky matter of the name change of the genus. It’s not really a problem, and seldom is - the name change is just from the genus Gnaphalium (obtusifolium) to the related genus Pseudognaphalium (obtusifolium), and if you know one you’d know the other too.

Where we can find reasons for this kind of changing names, they usually amount to what I find for this one. From Arthur Haines:

The genus Gnaphalium, colloquially referred to as cudweeds, has been found to be highly polyphetic (Andeberg 1991). The traditional classification, of a broad and variable Gnaphalium, includes species of very different lineages, and hence is artificial (i.e., it does not accurately portray the evolutionary history of the group). The genus has, therefore, been dismantled and reorganized into smaller, more homogenous, and monophyletic groups.

I’ve written about the terms monophyletic and polyphyletic before so won’t go into that in detail. Except to say that the overwhelming underlying philosophy in botanical classification is to put things together that are most closely related (monophyletic). It’s not really the fault of taxonomists decades ago that they sometimes grouped things that were unrelated (polyphyletic) but it’s time to clean house.

I realize it’s annoying, but these really are good solid reasons and there are no good alternatives. And it’s happening a lot right now, these name changes, and that’s because DNA analysis and more powerful software for teasing out and sorting similarities and differences have made it clear that some things shouldn’t be placed where they are, because they’re not really very closely related.

Or more, maybe, About Unfamiliarity?

At any rate, Vicki at Outside In had a rollicking post about ignorance and I warned her she had tweaked my interest and that I was just going to have to run with it. I’m not going to further comment on her article, but it did consolidate a few Wayne-oriented thoughts.

If by slim chance you haven’t heard this old cliche, you’ll enjoy it:

A generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more until she knows nothing about everything, while a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.

I may even have gotten the sexes right there, purely by chance. Having worked with specialists before, I think I prefer the generalists.

I’m familiar with the intimidation people often feel at a lack of knowledge, whether it be Chinese culture or plant systematics. Sometimes the intimidation is expressed in less kindly, defensive ways, and we’ve talked about this before so need not go into it. More often people (and I mean everyone who occasionally reflects, here) once every now and then feel remorseful over how little they know and how much there is to know. How could I not understand this? The holes in my education are profound. Maybe someday I’ll detail the hilarious consequences of this, holes that caused those in the vicinity to look considerably askance at me, and, had they been less forgiving, laugh in scorn.

It’s an endearing trait to me, this desire by others to know more, and I like it in myself too. I watch Glenn, focused to sharp brilliance over the plants he cruises the area for, collects, and brings in to identify and propagate, and understand that he’s way ahead of me in having thrown himself into this particular project. It’s nice to know that I can move in and out of his space of investigation at will, retreating when I want to my own related efforts.

I think of things that I don’t know: I really would like to learn more languages, for here you have a real chance to understand other cultures. I’m familiar with Russian, and regret not at all having taken three years of Latin in high school. I was pretty good at learning languages, but I haven’t yet followed up.

I’d like to be more adept at construction, which is to say that I’d like to be at all competent at it. Few things impress me more than someone who knows how to build something and moves about his or her tasks with ease and confidence.

And I see people who seem to think that the posts (the drier ones) here must suggest that I have an innate or deep knowledge that I have called upon to describe a scroph, perhaps, and casually lay out the ecological interactions with insects or other animals.

So I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you haven’t figured it out yet. I seldom write a post about a plant or animal or fungus without fortifying myself by reading about it fairly extensively before posting. In other words, maybe I knew *something* beforehand but not as much as I’ve written. I’m honest - I do reference my sources - but by and large you’re reading things I’ve just learned too.

None of that bothers me. I know myself well enough to know that’s going to be the case for a long long time (100 down 269,900 to go, and that’s just with flowering plants). It does bother me a bit that others might conclude that I’ve vast extensive knowledge when nothing could be further from the truth. I am curious about a great many things, and I’ve no fear or disinclination to find out about what I don’t know, and I enjoy putting it together and presenting it for what it’s worth, but that’s the extent of it. (I do try to remember what I’ve learned!)

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that others could relate their particular expertise or passion in just this sort of way. Indeed, having read the writings of others, I’ve cheated a bit. I know they can.

Happy Autumnal Equinox to everyone. A day early but I knew you’d want to get your preparations and shopping done. Tomorrow the sun theoretically spends an equal amount of time above and below the horizon everywhere. After that, the nights are longer and longer as we head into winter.

Oddly, of course, at this time in the Earth’s precession, the Earth is closer to the sun in the Northern Hemisphere winter, and in the Southern Hemisphere summer. Over the next 13,000 years that situation will have gradually reversed until the Northern Hemisphere is facing the sun when the Earth is closest to the sun. As you know, oceans (Southern Hemisphere) reflect sunlight while land masses (Northern Hemisphere) absorb it. As we move more and more in the direction of 13,000 years from now, the Earth will be absorbing more and more heat from the sun from this orbital phenomenon. Not good.

The days are becoming bearable. Temperatures in the last few days have been in the mid 70s (F) and the skies have been deep blue and clear. It’s possible to actually work in the fields without breaking a sweat. Of course the next couple of days will see mid 80s temps as a warm, moist air mass moves up from the Gulf of Mexico, but that’s ok.

I still have not noted flowers on the Microstegium, but they are surely on the way. I’m making a last push in the handpulling, hoping to finish the major areas begun four years ago by Sunday. After that it’s roundup time.

The current progress, a total of 120,000 plants pulled (click for a slightly larger, more readable version):

The Blog Meme: An interesting meme, unique among those which are uninteresting to me. I picked this up from several blogs, and it’s certainly appealing for the “me me me” aspect, but perhaps the nicest thing was that it was entirely voluntary to do so, rather than feeling obliged because someone listed me among five as a victim. And in keeping with this idea, no one will be pegged here and anyone can take it and run. That’s really what memes are: ideas that intrigue enough to be propagated, without coercion.

I’ve mutated the meme of course, as I always do, and there are more mutations at the end, but this one should come at the beginning (mutations bolded):

What is the mission of your blog?
Whatever I’m interested in. Maybe I should even say what I’m interested in that most others are not, necessarily, or perhaps have never considered.

90% of this is what others have come to see as “on topic”, things in the woods that I see, photograph, and add to my increasing set of observations of the organisms I see on my 40 acres of property, as well as what I think of these. In most cases these are things I knew nothing about before, but that I have learned about from reading, from investigating, and from the folks who see what I post and know more than I do. But there’s more to what interests me that falls into the other 10%. Science fiction, movies, books, climate, paleontology, tectonics, astronomy, computer programming, photography, and even personal matters, and (probably to the consternation of some readers) I will write about all of these.

And now the formal meme:

Are you satisfied with your blog’s content and look?
Yes. I change its look infrequently. Last time I made a change it was a color scheme to make people feel warmer in the winter. I didn’t follow it up this summer with a color change to make people feel cooler in the summer, so I hope no one sweated more as a consequence. It’s simple, no advertisements (as if), and it shows what I want to show, and nothing that someone else wants me to show. I admit I’m a pill about advertising.

Does your family know about your blog?
Sure. My parents read it fairly regularly, and enjoy the photographs. My sisters will read it if I prompt them, and at least with one, when she’s slumming with me on the phone. I enjoy that my family reads the blog, although I definitely constrain my writing (to some extent) to respect their sensibilities, which are really no different from anyone else’s.

Do you feel embarrassed to let your friends know about your blog, or do you consider it a private thing?
On the contrary. All my friends know about the blog. What they do with that information is their prerogative. Only one reads it regularly and he’s a sweetie. He even comments. He’s fully informed of my activities and must be the astonishing revealer of information when others ask how Glenn and Wayne are doing. Another friend would read it enthusastically but he’s not computer literate. Some of my other friends claim to read it but I have statcounter. I know better. Friends often comment (to me) that they don’t know what’s up with me, that we haven’t gotten together in so long (as you know, I’m a fairly insular individual even with my friends) but the barebones info is always available on the blog, ready and waiting for friends to see and inquire about, except most never do, because they never read the blog. Gracious, they’d know ever so much about me if they did. Embarrassment? Perish the thought.

Has blogging brought about positive changes for you?
No doubt. It’s provided me an incentive for disciplining myself to write on a regular basis, something I hope will someday lead to bigger things, and a venue for documenting the things that are important to me. The array of things that interest me turns out to be multitudinous.

Do you only read blogs of those who comment on your blog, or do you also like to find new blogs?
I read many blogs which have little or no idea of my existence. It’s no problem.

What are your thoughts on commenting? Is it important to you that people leave comments?
See below for the mutation. I very much enjoy comments, otherwise I’d just turn them off and write in a vacuum. But for the foreseeable future, I would still continue to write on a near-daily and sometimes twice-daily basis if there were no comments, and this is occasionally the case with some of my drier posts. Much of this is documentary for my very specific purposes and I don’t expect others to take note of my obsessions in commentary.

Does your visitor counter matter to you?
Well, I have installed StatCounter, so that’s a tacit admission that I’m curious, of course. I only present the “unique count” which amounts to 100-200 per day, rather than the “total count” (which includes multiple page hits and which sometimes inflates the count by a factor of 10). The “regular visitors count” is generally 20-30 per day, a count that has been consistent for about a year. So you can see that I have analyzed this and that it must interest me. However I haven’t taken any particular steps to increase the count, so while it interests me, it doesn’t matter.

Do you try to imagine what fellow bloggers look like?
Of course. These aren’t just virtual people on the other side of the screen. They’re real people. I’ve even met some of them.

Do you think there is a benefit to blogging?
Gracious, yes. I very often go back to the 719 previous posts of the last 2+ years as a source of information, because that’s the mission - documentation of the changes on our 40 acres, and the observations from year to year, and what I might think about that. Aside from the mission, it’s brought me into contact with a number of folks who I feel a definite affection for. And I enjoy going back to the most frivolous posts (for an egregious example) that I’ve completely forgotten about and re-reading them.

Does criticism of your blog annoy you?
Negative or positive criticism, it really doesn’t matter. My blog is largely non-controversial (who can complain about my opinion of tree-ear mushrooms?). No one has ever criticized negatively. The folks who read this blog are very gracious. There has been some positive criticism in some technical things, which I’ve addressed to the extent I’m technically able. I’m afraid I’m my most critical critic. No, it doesn’t annoy me.

Are there any types of blogs you avoid?
Vapid blogs? It doesn’t take long to avoid them. I’m not interested in mainstream culture, so if that’s the case, then out they go. I would expect no less from those uninterested in what I have to say.

Political blogs? Unlike most responders I’ve read to this meme I do read certain political blogs, even some conservative ones, and with gusto. Political blogs don’t depress me, although sometimes they’re tiresome. Very tiresome. They go on and on. After a couple of years of reading, and developing the ability to discriminate between information and opinion in this venue, I’ve come to realize that there are quite a few political blogs that offer me more timely, more accurate, and in retrospect, more reliable information than the mainstream media. The mainstream media have increasingly offered us less and less timely, and increasingly inadequate information. They lag behind by weeks or more and do a much inferior job of offering details on impending events. Goodbye mainstream dinosaurs, you were good for nothing years ago and now there’s something better. No, I have no problem with reading the more remarkable of polical blogs - they’re a welcome change.

And since I love to mutate memes, here’s a few new questions:

When did you start your blog and how has it changed since you started it?
July 2004. The mission has not changed, however, early on I was slightly more inclined to let loose and post on political matters, in an in-your-face way. There are some terrible things going on that just appall and infuriate me. But it’s really not my style to engage in this manner. Robin of the Dharma Bums and I talked about this through email and she said something interesting to me: people come to their blog expecting a certain thing and politics isn’t it. And she is right, and there’s no doubt that I respect my readers. So I have ramped that down quite a bit over two plus years, but at the same time I’ve watched how gracefully she and Roger make their points, without being in-your-face, and have tried to emulate. There are things that are important, but they can be soft-pedaled. Once in awhile I get out of control.


Do you respond to comments?
Oh yes. I understand that if you’re a political blog with hundreds of comments, this is impossible and in any event the commenters take control and entertain themselves without the blogger’s input. But I’m a blogger with an average of ten comments a post, and I’ve really no excuse for not paying attention to those who take the time to read what I write and respond. Otherwise I’d just turn my comments off, invite email instead, and watch how few people take me up on the alternative. I modestly evaluate that people respond, not just because they something to add, but also because they enjoy the interaction. Let’s face it: on a blog my size, commenters seldom read each other’s comments without some encouragement from me, the blogger. Since they interact amongst themselves infrequently, it’s clear they enjoy the interaction with me, the blogger. To ignore my commenters would be rude.

This is a delicate topic and one that I know others don’t agree with, but I do know others who do understand what I’m talking about.

If I have 30 comments listed, probably 10-15 are my own responses to the comments. Anyone who takes the time to make a comment gets a response that I hope is as substantive as what they offered. My parents taught me this, although at a time when there were no blogs (or computers for that matter), that when someone pays you attention, acknowledges you, then you respond, not just graciously whether in agreement or disagreement, but with substance commensurate to that that they took the time to offer. I can’t help but think that to do otherwise is rude. At first I thought graciousness might be a Southern peculiarity, but no. The evidence against that is overwhelmingly to the contrary, and the evidence comes from all over the world. It has nothing to do with regionalism.

As a corollary, I must say that when I comment substantively on another blog (and when I comment substantively, I do mean with substance, as opposed to a throwaway), and am ignored, I gradually get discouraged and sooner or later, stop commenting regularly. (Doesn’t mean I stop reading that blog though!)

In mid-August I posted on Tree-ear, Auricularia spp, found growing on a fallen branch. That was an odd “jelly-like” member of the phylum we think of as including the regular old mushrooms and puffballs, the Basidiomycetes. This one, which sort of looks like that, is a member of the Cup Fungi, the Ascomycetes. Around here the ones that look like cups appear in the late summer and fall. I see beautiful Devil’s Urns, tiny Scarlet Cups, and Bird-nest Fungi. In the spring we have Morels. This one has the distinctive cup shape. A little patch of these beauties was growing directly out of the soil.

I’m guessing this one to be one of the Recurved Cups, Peziza species, based on the way the edges curl over. However, I’m no expert, and someone else may certainly know better!

The neat thing about the Cup Fungi is where the spores emerge. Regular mushrooms drop their spores from their underside gills or pores. These have a dramatic spore release from the inner velvety surface of the cups. When they’re ready, the slightest vibration of air or touch and clouds of spores will be propelled out of the inner surface like columns of smoke. There’s clearly some kind of active ejecting mechanism.

Another beneficiary of our recent pleasant and somewhat moist weather!

There are some things they just don’t tell you in books or webpages. Maybe no one knows, or hasn’t cared to ask. We are, after all, getting rather specific here. So I’ve set aside a little area to construct a crude experiment asking a few simple questions about our invasive grass, Microstegium vimineum.

Here are the positions of the subjects, which are all in the same general shady moist area, an area that two years ago was moderately infested and this year is mostly a few clumps and numerous singletons, plus some areas with no infestation at all (the wire cage isn’t a part of this; it just protects a young witchhazel):




The investigated area is to be a meter or so around each little flag. All plants were removed from the general area, expect as indicated. Yes, I actually left some plants, and that means I’ll have to keep a special eye on this area for more years, but I think it’s worth it.

This area below was free of any plants at all this year, and no less than 3 meters from any other plant. I chose it as a negative control for spurious germination of several-year-old seed next year. So next year I’ll treat any plants that appear as background noise:


This area had a clump of 20 moderate and small plants, and believe it or not I’m not going to remove these. The question will be how many seed will these plants make that germinate next year, above background. The clump of 20 is important because sometimes there are density dependent factors like cross fertilization that are critical.


To complement the above test, I have an area a ways away that also had 20-24 plants of the same size (below left). But in this case I *did* remove these plants (below right):


Finally I have six singletons that I am leaving. Three of them are in this area, and are small, medium, and large in size. They are at least 3 meters from any other plant that was removed or not removed. This is a test of fertility of variously sized singletons, a little confused by the possibility that there may be seeds still in the ground, but that’s been controlled for in the above treatments. After all, there’s really no point in wasting time pulling 1 cm tall plants if by this time of year they have no hope of making seeds.

And *really* finally the other three singletons were found much farther away, and totally isolated from any previous plants. These are much more rigorous tests of whether a single plant can self-fertilize, or whether they are self-incompatible. (Many species of plants are self-fertile, not requiring another plant to produce seed, and many others absolutely require a partner plant.)

As I say, this is a crude sort of experiment. The questions are simple and few, there isn’t much replication, but nonetheless there should be results that are interpretable.

Next year, at the Sparkle.

Feast on the banks of the mighty Sparkleberrysprings Creek:

I was working along this section of the creek on Friday, and was extremely pleased to see what I think (and will confirm after the Glenn Extraordinaire gets done with it) is Downy Lobelia, Lobelia puberula, growing in considerable abundance along the bank in many places. As this is a threatened/endangered plant, it occupies my attention, and I spent Friday wading up the creek about halfway and pulling Microstegium from the banks. I was pleased to find only about 1500 Microstegium plants within reaching distance.

Since the creek runs through a 350 meter-long hollow, there’s a fairly steep slope on either side, rising to a paralleling ridge on the west that comes close to marking that boundary side of the property. Here we’re standing on the bottom of the hollow looking at that very ridge in the late afternoon. The green growth in the foreground is a large patch of Microstegium that will be destroyed in the next week. Two years ago you would have seen the entire slope covered with the evil weed. Now there’s Christmas and Southern Lady Ferns.

Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)

I was going to post this tomorrow but thought - hell - you’ve all had a hard week, I’m sure, and why not have some fun?

Occasionally I like to go slumming on the statistics page of our ISP, and one of the entertaining things to do is to look at the keywords, carefully crafted by those seeking to approach our humble site. I’ve categorized just a few of them. Let’s take a peek.

The most common search phrases:what are niches
what is niches
niches?Yes, there is niches. There is many niches.
And then there are these, which make me feel warm and cuddly and happy:cute snake
baby snakes
how to take care of baby snakes

You’ve come to the right place and we try to be helpful:
names of cats so l can pick a male cats name and picturesWe suggest Fluffy. That’s always good. Unless you dried Fluffy in the microwave.
graveyard jokeWe here at Sparkleberrysprings specialize in graveyard jokes, especially about Fluffy. Which one did you have in mind?
how many seconds are there in the month of may2,678,400. We aim to please.
little white flowersYes indeed. Many little white flowers.
how old is a tree with 14 light ringsThis is a trick question, right?
we value you foodswe value you foods, too
pronounce microstegiumA very good question. We always suggest pronouncing botanical names With Authority, and no one will question you. That’s what we always do. (Soft “g”, and we speak With Authority. )
getting rid eliminating september microstegium vimineumWe feel that we getting rid eliminating august, quite frankly. september ok.
capitalize grasses in a sentenceGrasses in a sentence.
(OK that was cheap. Suggestions?)
alternatives to blow drying longhair catMicrowave.

You might have come to the right place, but we need a little more information:
lord has chosen you as a vesselWhat’s the salary?
athens ga axe murder oglethorpeWhat’s the salary?
what is the difference between a decidous tree and a tree?Decidous. Or even deciduous.
what baby snakes are brown in georgiaMost of them.
browning sediment of the human dorsal surface of the tongue. how the clean itThe clean it with the oven cleaner, of course.
some float strawberriesSome do, some don’t. This is zen, isn’t it? We know zen.
does baby orchids have an medicinal values and if so what are they?I finds it beneficial to fry baby orchids at least once an week.
9 month old grows 2 inches in one year her cells are going through mitosisWhen will the madness stop?
gay box turtlesOh, gosh, there’s so many answers, almost all of them good. We definitely need a little more info here. We are experts. If we don’t know the answer, we know experts. And if you’re concerned, I’m sure the Senate and House will pass a law against them any day now.
dirt dobbers stingIndeed they do. Why did you bother them?
vanity names in floridaYou’ve come to the wrong place. Allow us to direct you to Florida Cracker.
succulent birdhouse roofsYou’ve come to the wrong place. Allow us to direct you to The Dharma Bums.
describe the little wasps invasion experiences yourselfOh, you first.
tying a bandana pirateI’m sorry, I’ve just mastered tying a half-windsor, so long as he holds still.
name of particular plant who s group is angiospermUh... all 270,000 s of them?

We recommend that you try again with fewer keywords:
looking for a place where the road is closed for a few days a year due to a large amount of snakes crossing over during a season

plane work with budget estimate of gene bank of medicinal plants \medicinal plants garden
at the start of the 20th century the people worl look at examples of social medical political and technological changes that were occurring.-over where filled with optimism and enthusiasm for what the new century seemed to have in store. little did people know of the dark clouds hovering culminating in the world at war by 1914

what is the approximate apparent size of jupiter through a 6mm eyepiece in a typical dobsonian telescope compared with the size of the naked eye moon

We recommend that you try again with more keywords:
ouk
blg
cnn
wetter
xst

Every month there are several of these inquiries. They seem to be directed to this early post. I don’t know why anyone would want to kill elegant stinkhorns, but there’s a lot of folks out there who have it in for them. I suggest a fig leaf:
kill mutinus elegans
how to treat mutinus elegans
mutinus elegans allergy
mutinus elegans kill
how to kill mutinus elegans stinkhorns
killing elegant stinkhorn
how to kill mutinus elegans
mutinus ravenelli
ravenel s stinkhorn eradication

More killing requests:
getting rid of great golden digger wasps sphex ichneumoneus
eliminate dirt dobbers
how to kiln mud dauber
eliminate mud dobbers
how do dirt daubers create

exterminating frogs
This is only a drop in the bucket. You wouldn’t believe how many people want to kill frogs. It’s not just our President and Senate Majority Leader. Why - my guess is that somewhere around 30% of Americans want to kill frogs. Hmmm.

And this precious nugget:
organic treatment to rid of digger wasps
Let me get this straight. You want to rid of an innocuous, beneficial insect, and you insist on doing it *organically*? You must be an American.

Thank goodness we only have to worry about deer:
electric fence elephant
And then two months later:
elephant electric fence

Here’s a few miscellaneous that don’t seem to fit into any particular category but are fun to contemplate:
postdoctoral cup fungi
chicago board of trade corn prices from 1970-2006
go buckeyes!
dreaded stinging mosquito
smack their behinds
web sights that can give my pitchers urls
jim and tammy baker 80000 dollar dog house
41 lanier jekyll island death women haunted
obscene objects unshown brit museum
purge and urge
love galls
landfill for sale
modem scientist picture & name
your assignment for today
forgetting to turn the stove off(I admit, this one gives me the willies.)

A few search phrases (unedited, despite the incorrect implications they might imply - I did NOT, for instance, pee ON the front porch, I’d never do that) that evoked some oldies but goodies that I’d totally forgotten and might be worth a trip down memory lane should you care to join me:
peeing on the porchI confessed to it, now how about you?

advertising in orbitWe’ve polluted everything else, why not the skies?

parabolic cookersI now see where all the “hot daddy” hits come from. And I thought that was for me.

under stairs officeI am a Harry Pewter.

download the enormous eggThis one gave me childbirth nightmares, but it turned out not to be so.

rocket to limbo - nourseMy science fiction proclivities.

the lathe of heavenAnd here they come again.

seed collecting and identificationBy request, although I’m not sure she ever read it.

caterpillar problems with waldsteinia lobataWaldsteinia is one of our great discoveries. How nice to see that someone else knew about it.

dogvomit fungiI’ve saved more dog owners vet bills, and none has ever reimbursed me.

jerry lee jacksonThe biology teacher from hell.

living playtex glovesI’ll just let you enjoy this one.

does roomba really work?And the answer is, yes, and the cats love it.
And last but not least, and I recommend you have a seat and not be in the middle of dinner. My unintended unkindness is offset by the fact that the hydrocarbons from this man’s overpaid jowls could run America’s entire transportation industry for a year. Hell, the man’s jowls can no longer find a purchase on his chins and have migrated to his eyelids.

All right, all right, I intended this bit of unkindess. The guy gets a hundred million dollars a year for the rest of his miserable life. He can take it:
ceo of exxon makes
lee raymond exxon
lee raymond ceo

A few years ago we started noticing this coarse, ugly plant appearing all over the yard and in pots. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a lot of people seeing it.


Last year Glenn identified it as Hairy Crabweed, or Mulberry-weed, or just Fatoua, Fatoua villosa, and it’s another gift from China. It was first noticed in Louisiana in 1964, and has spread rapidly into at least 22 states. Apparently the widespread appearance of this annual is primarily through seeds in purchased horticulturals, as the plant is a pest in greenhouses as well as disturbed areas.

It’s easy to recognize - the broad toothed leaves typical of the Moraceae (Mulberry family) and the small, inconspicuous flowers that emerge from the leaf axils. It loves its own company, so if you find one, you’ll find a whole bunch:


It’s certainly a pest. While not in the same class as Microstegium which simply chokes out everthing, it is appearing in diverse habitats on the property ranging from full sun and thin soil to deep shade along the creek.

Something else to keep an eye on.

I received email from Jean in Oregon describing a personal invasive weed eradication program, and she agreed that I could post it. It *is* nice to know there are still more people out there trying to get rid of some nasties, and very interesting to find that many of our observations and experiences and tactics parallel so closely! I’ll let her add in comments any further identifiers.

It’s nice to know there are more crazies out there. We have a similar
problem with an invasive grass here in the Pacific Northwest.
Brachypodium sylvaticum -false brome-appeared on the Oregon State
University research forest about 35 years ago. They did nothing and just
let it spread until quite recently when they finally figured out that they
needed to be concerned because it outcompetes tree seedlings in clearcut
plantations. In the meanwhile it has been spread by logging equipment
throughout Oregon, and into Washington and California–maybe Idaho also.
It is particularly pernicious as it thrives just about everywhere–shade,
sun, wet areas, dry areas, meadows, forests... I have heard a biologist
state that it is going to permanently change the nature of the forest
understory in the Pacific Northwest. It overwhelms just about everything
except the trees–the bigger ones not the seedlings.

And we have it on our 13 acres. It came down onto our property off the
commercial forest land above our back line. I saw it coming but had no
idea what it was until about four years ago. By then we were heavily
infested. I cried for a year and then 3 years ago our botanist son
started us on pulling it. We’ve been pulling for 3 years–crawling
through the blackberries and poison oak and dodging the yellow jacket
ground nests. I think we are winning slowly. But it is also going to be
a lifetime occupation. We are an island surrounded by infected properties
where nothing is being done. Deer carry the seed in their fur and
distribute it wherever they walk which is just about everywhere.

It has different growth habits than your problem. It is perennial so we
need to get the roots. We’ve found that in the forest there is enough
duff that we can get the roots a high percentage of the time even during
the dry summer. And it appears that even if we don’t that pulling the top
off seems to sometimes kill it. The stems tend to break off at the roots
and often include the growing tip. The seed only appears to be viable for
2-3 years. So this summer we were pulling the seedlings of–we hope–the
last viable year in the areas where we’ve been working for 3 years. And
it doesn’t set seed the first year. I think it is not until the third
summer that it sets seed. We’ve got some experimental plots set up to
confirm this.

The first year the three of us spent 2 months everyday morning to dark
working on this. Last year my husband and I spent 6 weeks. This year it
took the 2 of us a month and then a couple more weeks less intensively
pushing out into areas we hadn’t hit yet.

We have a creek going through our property and have chosen not to try to
fight it in the creek bed. The seeds just come down the creek and
reinfect so it is a losing battle.

We are also not trying to fight it in our meadow areas other than by
scything the seeds off. It’s too difficult to sort it out from the native
grasses as it moves in. We could herbicide it and replant but it will
just take over again and we will just have to herbicide again in an
endless cycle.

We have used a grass-specific herbicide in a few areas where the
infestation was overwhelming or where the seedlings coming up the year
after the initial pulling were too thick to deal with on a large scale.
Our experience with the herbicide has been very mixed. We haven’t used
Round-up as there are year round plants, as well as summer dormant plants,
that I value and didn’t want to hit.

I’m obsessed with this stuff and it doesn’t take much of an excuse to get
me talking to people about it and our battle. Some people listen and are
interested–others tend to drift away and put some distance between
themselves and these nutty people.

In mid June, I posted on the witchhazel cone gall maker, which are induced by the tender ministrations of the witchhazel gall aphid, Hormaphis hamamelidis. Here’s another, the witchhazel spiny gall:


These woody galls form on the stem, just a few on each plant. Like the cone gall maker, the spiny gall maker is another aphid, Hamamelistes spinosus, and the very distinctive spiny galls are full of developing aphids. And like the cone gall aphid, the spiny gall aphid alternates in its life cycle between River Birches, Betula nigra and Witchhazels, Hamamelis virginiana. The adult female, having developed over the winter on a river birch, will fly to the witchhazel and irritate a developing flower into producing a gall, into which she lays eggs. The emerging aphids will fly back to the river birch and overwinter there.


Each gall on this plant was attended by one or two of what appear to be Black Carpenter Ants, Campanotus spp. There were a few aphids around, and this may be what was attracting the ants since they do feed on aphid nectar.

I think it’s very strange how such distinctively shaped galls arise from different species of aphids on different plants.

The days from hell, Sunday through Tuesday, are over for the week! Today, a very pleasant cool rainy day, I’m going to spend a little time rereading some of the favorite blogs that I’ve neglected in the past three days.

In the meantime, yesterday’s short time in pulling Microstegium netted me a Spiranthes, one of our little native ground orchids, Ladies' Tresses. I’m not sure which species this is - they are not so easily recognized on sight, and Georgia sports 13-14 species, according to USDA plants.

I haven’t seen a large grouping of these neat little plants with their spiraling flowers. They seem to appear singly when they do, but this one was in an area that I haven’t seen one before, so that’s good news.


The spider came extra, and I haven’t identified it yet.

Our household was awakened at 2am this morning by a cacophany of yips and barks, a series of arguments and general chatter moving past the house a few hundred feet away. Coyotes. The noise was incredible.

They were apparently on a run and the noise blast moved rapidly past and then faded quickly into the distance.

All the cats were inside, so no problems. We hear coyotes frequently in the far distance, but they seem to keep mostly to the open pastures along Blacksnake Road a half-mile or more away. This is the first time they’ve moved through our lower, much more densely wooded area. Quite an experience.

Deer hunting season started yesterday, here. According to the Georgia 2006-2007 Hunting Season Regulations (pdf), which is actually a fascinating read in itself, it’s archery only for the next month, then a week of primitive weapons, and then until Jan 1 it’s firearms. Rifles, semiautomatic weapons, cannons, Tomahawk cruise missiles probably. Time to be careful and break out the orange. I’ve started carrying a little radio with me, something I hate to do but prefer it to the alternative.

Reading through the above guide, I find this, which disturbs me:

SMALL GAME
Alligator Zone/Quota Limited September 9 - October 1 1 per quota permit holder
Crows Statewide November 4 - February 28 No Limit
Dove Statewide September 2-16 12 per day, 24 in possession
October 7-16
November 23 - January 6
Fox & Bobcat Statewide December 1 - February 28 No Limit
Grouse Statewide October 15 - February 28 3 per day
Marsh Hens Statewide September 7 - October 13 15 per day
November 4 - December 6
Opossum Statewide October 15 - February 28 No Limit
Quail Statewide November 18 - February 28 12 per day
Rabbit Statewide November 18 - February 28 12 per day
Raccoon Northern Zone: October 15 - February 28 1 per day
Southern Zone: October 15 - February 28 3 per day
Squirrel Statewide August 15 - February 28 12 per day
Snipe Statewide November 15 - February 28 8 per day
Woodcock Statewide December 16 - January 14 3 per day
Trapping Statewide December 1 - February 28 No Limit
(mink, otter, fox, opossum, muskrat, skunk, bobcat, weasel, etc.)

No limit on crow, opossum, fox, and bobcat. No limit on bobcat?? I must be missing or not considering some piece of information here.

Note the date of hunting bobcat: Dec 1 - Feb 28. Bobcat mating season in our area is January to March (although the breeding season varies widely from website to website), and gestation time is 62 days. It’s just conceivable that a female bobcat could be killed after having delivered. Cutting it a bit close, I think.

An interesting little Commentary by Harold Brown on the Georgia Public Policy Foundation website may provide a clue in its title: “Wildlife measures an excessive success”. Excessive? Seems a strange choice of word for a blanket statement, especially in view of the human population increase which we must never never mention, although I suppose one could apply it to the deer population.

By the way, and this is something I notice a lot when googling - identical wording of google matches at different websites. The above bobcat link, to the Georgia Wildlife Web Site at the Georgia Museum of Natural History, has a very close resemblance to the entry at The Zipcode Zoo. Much of the text is identical, down to the numbers. There is a terse, unlinked reference at the Zipcode Zoo to the GaNHM as one of its contributors. This may not be the best example of copying and pasting, because the Zipcode Zoo, the presumptive copier, does reference somewhat the GaNHM, but there it is. It does not link to the GaNHM page that contains the identical wording. I will point out the the Zipcode Zoo does have a different mission, and it does a great job at protecting photos, and some of its photos, as in the bobcat pic, are absolutely great. Copying and pasting text though, and in this case more for the potential for promulgating mistakes, really bothers me.

Last month at this time I posted on a yellowjacket nest near the house.

A few weeks ago while pulling Microstegium from the Kat Semetary I discovered another yellowjacket nest, in time to avoid it. Yesterday Glenn mentioned that on one of his trips he’d found the nest completely dug out and the combs strewn all over the ground.

Here’s the new, much larger hole, and the yellowjackets are no longer there. I wasn’t able to find any combs, but the grass is bent and positioned as if something much larger had been getting into the hole while digging it out.


I suppose we have a number of candidates. Of the ones I’ve seen mentioned, skunk, raccoon, and weasel are possibilities. I’d consider 'possums and armadillos as well.

I’ve seen this one other time, five or so years ago, a nest near the electric fence that had been dug out in a similar fashion with comb tossed about.

The camera returned. Pablo made the connection!


When I saw this plant as one of a little colony in the deep woods I wasn’t quite sure what it was. I thought at first it might be a spurge because of the odd flowers, with their two long stamens and the flattened corolla (the fused funnel of petals). But when I got a specimen up to the house and realized it had squarish stems, opposite leaves, we both decided it was in the Verbena or Mint family.

It’s Horse Balm, Ox-balm, or Richweed, Collinsonia canadensis, and it is in the Lamiaceae, the Mint family. The leaves are large and broad and very toothed, and apparently smell of citronella. The plant is named for Peter Collinson, a botanist in the early half of the 18th century and a friend of Ben Franklin and John Bartram. The florets are arranged in a raceme, and each raceme is itself a part of a panicle, and so we have a compound panicle.The flowers aren’t just odd for their two antenna-like stamens; they also have this long hairlike style.

Horse Balm, whose roots do apparently have medicinal value, is a shade-loving plant, found in rich moist soil in deep hardwood forests, kind of odd for a mint. The genus Collinsonia includes three other species. The one is found throughout the Eastern US from north to south. The other three species are more or less confined to the southeast. They are considered to be “sensitive plants” in that their habitats are prone to destruction by logging and development.

A nice little find. In pulling Microstegium I can accurately claim that I’ve been over every square meter of seven or so acres (should I use hectares?). I’ve run across a number of new species but this is something special. Apparently it’s also caterpillar food for Celastrina argiolus, or Holly Blue Butterflies, and several Noctuid moth species, according to the UK Natural History Museum Hostplants and Caterpillar Database.

Part 1, I’m afraid, because Glenn took the camera for the day and then left it at the lab. He didn’t bring it home. He forgot.

Now Glenn and I have quite a comfortable relationship with the camera. Periodically in the early am, Glenn will ask, quite unnecessarily, “Can I take the camera in?” and I will fuss about making sure the batteries are charged and say, “Of course!” But I do expect it back in the evening. I do use it practically every day.

And so I am dancing about tonight, crying Uncle Martin, Uncle Martin, and the camera is sitting in a cold hard lab 25 kilometers away staring uselessly at its lens cap.

(To Glenn’s credit he was crestfallen, and offered to drive back and get the camera, as he saw how very interesting this plant was, but I said, “gosh no”, so as you can see this is all ultra melodrama concocted simply for your pleasure. I will point out that this is yet one more example of Glenn’s extraordinarily generous nature and he absolutely would have done it, too, yes, he would have driven 50 kilometers there and back just to retrieve the camera if I’d demanded it. It really is rather remarkable and so I should remark upon it: Glenn has been unfailingly generous and kind just about every day of the 28 years that I’ve known him, and I’ve never known anyone like him.)

Not so me, I’m no saint, no sir. So to exacerbate the melodrama, you don’t have the post that I was really really REALLY excited about, since I discovered the oddest plant on my treks eradicating the evil Microstegium. We both agree - it’s not a rare plant but it’s an exciting find in an area that would (just to make a point, a very pointed point) have otherwise been inundated with Microstegium, so there. Tomorrow, maybe, if he remembers to bring the camera home. Let’s cross our fingers.

You can excoriate (or anoint) him at galau@plantbio.uga.edu. Or you can excoriate me at hughes@plantbio.uga.edu. Or you can stay at home and do it right here.

One of my first posts here detailed my second-year efforts in eradicating the Microstegium, July 24 2004. Last year I also reported on the State of the Microstegium on July 24 2005. And this year the State of the Microstegium comes in early September.

This is a project I began in 2003, when we discovered what this lush, creeping plant was. If I’d looked ahead to what it was going to involve I might not have started it, but I did and now after four years I can’t back out. It will, ultimately, be a lifelong project, but hopefully will in a year or two occupy less of my time than it does now.

Microstegium vimineum, as many of you now know, is an invasive Asian grass that is taking over large shady moist areas in the Blue Ridge, the Great Smoky Mountains, and in general much of the southern Appalachians. It is my nemesis, or I am its, you decide. I began eradicating it from our 40 acres in summer 2003, at that time wholly through application of glyphosate in the form of roundup or one of its competitors. This wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity and I will not apologize. The only alternative on a property this size was to sit back and let it take over.

Summer 2004 saw a similar approach, but by last summer I was doing a substantial amount of handpicking as it became feasible and even necessary, and the use of herbicide became inadvisable.

(Although I’ve rationalized its use in the above links, I’ll just repeat here: Microstegium is very sensitive to glyphosate and the herbicide can be used at low concentrations. As some of the photos in the above links show, a mature stand of the grass is a monoculture that stands hip-high. The glyphosate spray settles on the leaves without dropping to the ground, and the grass is dead about a week later. The time window for application is in the late summer so many other plants have gone dormant and are not affected.)

As the summers have passed, the Microstegium has become less and less dense, and smaller and smaller, and a number of other more desirable plants have taken its place. This renders the use of herbicide problematic and the above rationalizations can’t be defended, so I resort to handpicking.

Last summer I started too early, and made a discovery that they don’t tell you about in the books. The seeds, which have a 5-7 year lifetime in the soil, continue germinating all summer, so by the time I’d get through with an area and come back to it a week later there would be a few new plants. This summer I started in the first week of August, and over the last month have picked 95,000 plants. (How do I know I picked 95,000 plants?) The map below documents my progress to date:


The areas outlined in green lines have been handpicked, the numbers indicate the number of plants pulled, and the green dots represent patches that will have to be sprayed within the next few weeks before flowering. I figure I’ve done 7-8 acres at this point, with probably 12 acres or so to go.

Microstegium has some characteristics that make it easy to eradicate and some that make it difficult. These are the characteristics you have to know if you have an invasive you want to get rid of.

Microstegium is an annual. This can be good and bad. It won’t come back from roots next year. (It can come back from the "stilts" in the same year if it’s not pulled completely.) It produces tons of seeds. You want to know these things about your invasive. Biennials and perennials are probably going to make deep roots.

The plant lives in shady, moist areas which, in my case, are inaccessible to mowing. I’d love to be able to control this plant by mowing, but it’s impossible. The flowers and seeds will form at the base even on mowed-down plants. Unmolested stands are monocultures, and the plants are large, and susceptible to herbicide without harming other plants. In later years, the infestations become sparse but still must be eradicated, yet the application of herbicide is no longer a good idea. Hand-pulling is necessary.

Because the plant lives in shady, moist areas, it abounds around the 300 meter length of Sparkleberrysprings Creek. Do not spray an herbicide around a creek if you can possibly help it. Herbicides and their solvents are toxic to amphibians and fish, and running creek water will transport the droplets downstream. I don’t spray within 2m of the creek. In a week or so I will wade up the creek pulling the growth along the banks.

The seed live 5-7 years in the soil. I figure most of the plants at this point are derived from seed that are 5 years old.

The plant flowers in late September, and so the month before that is when eradication should be done. If your invasive flowers in the spring, then that would be when you want to eradicate, before seed form.

The plant is sensitive to low amounts of glyphosate. This is good since it may not affect many other plants, or at most will only damage them slightly. It’s a non-specific herbicide, which is good because it’s cheap and bad because it has the potential to affect other species.

Here’s ten observations and recommendations that have entered my wandering mind in the accumulated 48 hours or so of handpulling so far:

1. There’s a sort of a zen quality to this effort. Never look forward, it’s too depressing. Always look back (OK, that’s not zen). You want to see what you’ve done, and you want to be checking to see if you’ve missed anything. I take a different route to the next swatch of land just to check over what I’ve done. At this point I step back and look over everything I’ve done so far with great satisfaction but I don’t look forward!

2. Collect the victims in a 5 gallon bucket with a split down the side


3. Singletons (photo below) are gifts from heaven. *Always* pull them up, no matter what else you’re doing. You will never find them again, and next year there will be 50 plants and the year after that, a couple thousand.

4. Watch out for lookalikes. In the photo below, there are two plants, but only the plant on the left is Microstegium. The one on the right is a young Brachyelytrum erectum, Bearded Shorthusk, a very desirable competitor.


5. Know your morphs. Most of the Microstegium is a rather sparsely leaved grass:


However there is the occasional very leafy plant. It must go:


6. After three years, this is a discouraging sight. Don’t be discouraged. It’s probably an old nucleus whence much else came, and means you’re getting to the core of the problem. In this case, I will come back and spray this patch after having picked the sparser growth surrounding the patch. In the time it takes to fully handpick, I could easily cover a territory of occasional growth ten times the size. It’s a tradeoff that must be made.


7. Don’t give up. As I said before, if I’d looked down the road four years ago, I probably wouldn’t have started this, but it compels me now and must be done. I saw improvements even in the second year, and now in the fourth I’m very encouraged. New desirable plant species are returning, and comparing the land with adjoining property where no eradication has been done provides year-round satisfaction.

8. Wear proper clothing. Everyone tells you to wear long pants and boots. I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to if you don’t want to.


9. Don’t look to others for approval or understanding. There are some who will understand, but most will look at you oddly and move away a bit. You’re probably not going to get a MacArthur Grant for this. You are on your own and the only reward you can expect will be the satisfaction you derive. This is also a zen thing.

10. Bring plenty of beer. You’re going to need it.


Previous posts in this series:

Eradicating the Microstegium July 24 2004
State of the Microstegium July 24 2005
Statistics July 28 2005
Final Report on the Microstegium August 26 2005
Winter Grasses November 26 2005

The first word of the title is: the

I know this is beating a dead horse, but it keeps coming up in all sorts of ways. There was a time when the United States could claim that its insistence upon retaining the English system of measurement was in good company - after all, South Yemen also used the English system. My understanding is that now it’s only the US that employs as a matter of routine the English system.

At home, I spend more time than is necessary in re-acquainting students with the metric system. Oh, they’ve heard it all before, to most it’s a silly sort of thing that they just have to remember in order to pass an exam, and they have absolutely no other motivation to incorporate it. They have no intuitive grasp, and most scoff at any intent to try to gain one, of the very few measurements - their weight in kilograms, their height in centimeters, the distance in kilometers from home to school, the speed limit in kilometers per hour, or the volume of a tank of gas in liters, and that a comfortable temperature is 25C. The amazing convenience of metric in converting from larger to smaller units bypasses them completely. They’re content to remember that there’s 12 inches per foot, 3 feet per yard, 5280 feet per mile, 16 ounces per pound, 4 quarts to a gallon. Good grief.

I admit to being a little schizoid on this blog. I feel comfortable using either system but on one day use English and on another day use metric, depending on how I feel. I think it’s time to become consistent and so from now on I use metric.

Jimmy Carter, for all his faults as President, made in the latter half of the 70’s a great effort to move the US toward an intuitive grasp of the metric system. I recall road signs, mileages, and speed limits going up to familiarize drivers with both systems. Groceries employed both pounds and kilograms, ounces and grams. And then when Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 all of that came to an end. Indeed I recall that it was a minor issue during the campaign and that Ronald Reagan used it as a sneer concept to further isolate his opponent. Yes, we still hear daily temperatures quoted on the radio in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, but it seems to be a spinning of the wheels in which we will never hear temperatures stated *only* in Celsius.

Consequences to the US economy (which is all that matters here): I can think of two just off the top of my head. In 1999 NASA lost a $125 million Mars Orbiter because engineering teams failed to communicate in one system, an inexcusable mistake. That $125 million spread over five years could have paid for a complete conversion. It’s my understanding that millions of dollars are lost every year because of conversions that must be made during trade from metric to English, and vice versa. And of course I spend a lot of time, and so do students, beating this dead horse, and that will go on year after year, a microcosm of useless expense in time and money that you can multiply by millions. Others that you’ve heard or read about? How about your car? Does it report speed in *both* km/h and mi/h?

The ironic thing is that it is so easy to become “intuitively bilingual” in the use of metric. And so few Americans are willing to make the effort to do it. Meanwhile people outside of the US cope consistently in a friendly fashion with what amounts to an arrogance on our part, much I suppose as one would cope with a hypochondriacally sick little brother (or as I increasingly begin to think, the elderly, eccentric, and maliciously difficult spinster grandaunt that many suck up to because they hope for part of an inheritance when this dowager finally bites the dust). I was struck once again by this when Bev (Canada) kindly used English terms in comments here. I’ve noticed over 30 years that foreign visitors are always gracious about the difficulty in having to adjust, and that they always, as they should, mention it in an equally kindly, gracious, and pointed manner that should make all Americans feel ashamed for their intransigence.

You’ll find an interesting history of metric in the US here.

The first word of the title is: more

Our “Big Gully” is a marvelous feature that I always steer people toward on our walks. It’s a wonderful microenvironmental habit. Still, this feature really should have a different name. Grand Canyon East? The Georgia Rip? Suggestions solicited!

I’ve described it before, on a bright winter day in January of this year, and then in an infrequent but dramatic rainy period, the “watershedding” post of a year ago last March.

It seems reasonable to portray it now, at the end of summer in all its greenery. I’ll lift a few pics from previous posts for comparison, and there are stereo images linked at the top of most of the pictures.

The gully is 3-4m deep at its head and becomes shallower down the slope until 50m downslope it emerges at ground level just above Sparkleberrysprings Creek. Here’s what the mouth of the gully looked like a few days ago, when I finished removing the thousand or so Microstegium plants growing within the gully:
Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)


In comparison, last January:
Click pic for crosseyed stereo images (Instructions for Viewing)


As you can see, we have rocks too! They’re just not round.

About halfway up the gully, and it’s about 2.5m deep here, a very large sweetgum straddles the gully. Here’s a look up toward the head of the gully.
Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)


Notice the extremely large, muscular stress wood that has developed from the primary and secondary roots to keep the tree suspended as the earth beneath it was washed away. Years ago, probably when the ground was still at tree level, someone used the young sweetgum as a fence post for barbed wire. The protrusions you see aren’t artificial, they’re where the barbed wire emerges, encysted, from deep within the tree. The barbed wire is especially apparent in the stereo pics (vast amounts of detail become apparent when viewed in stereo).

The tree acts as a host for a very nice stand of Decumaria barbara, Climbing Hydrangea or Woodvamp. You can see a bit of the vine, especially in the stereo pics.

The base of the tree is about 1.5m above the bottom of the gully. The tree itself surely can’t be more than 40-50 years old and I’m sure it didn’t start itself in midair, so the gully is a fairly recent formation. There’s evidence at its head that rocks were dumped to prevent erosion (clearly didn’t work). This gully acts as the conduit for drainage during heavy rains from perhaps 10 acres of land above it. The earth here must be quite soft.

As we v e r y gingerly duck beneath the tree heading up the gully toward the head, we look back at it. Someday this tree will come down, but not today, we hope. It would hurt. A lot.
Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)


I don’t have a comparable view from last January from within the gully, but here’s a view from above, from a similar direction:
Click pic for crosseyed stereo images (Instructions for Viewing)


Finally, the view from 18 months ago in March, after days of rain. (The "watershedding post" I mentioned above has a number of what I consider to be these dramatic photos.) I used to be very satisfied with the quality of the photos from the Nikon Coolpix 990 I was using at the time (before it died, and was declared by everyone we asked for repairs to be a throwaway, a $1000 throwaway, imagine!), but the difference in this one and the above photos taken with the Nikon D70 I now use is very apparent:

The first word of the title is: over

Happy Days are here again.


The data are for Athens, of course, and I’m sure we’ll still have some hot days but I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The first word of the title is: the

Here’s the monthly summary of the climate of the month of August, here in Athens and US-wide. It preys on my mind that I can’t find comparable graphics that encompass all of North America, but as always anyone anywhere is invited to comment on their observations of weather this summer.

Here in the Southeast the drought has broken. Here’s a summary, for our area:

June was a study in contrasts for Athens; July was simply been hot and dry, and finally in August we had couple inches of rain above the average for the month.

And now, the details:

From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this August above or below the average for August over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.


For the first time this summer, much of the country experienced more or less average temperatures, less than 2 degrees above or below average over the month of August. Much of the Southeast, however, was 2-4 degrees above normal, although given the previous three months it *seemed* cooler.

For most of the country east of the Rockies, rainfall was average to above average. Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


A few regions in the mid-Atlantic, the northeast, and the northern midwest received 50-75% normal rainfall, but the real anomalies are seen west of the Rockies. For the second month in a row (at least, see July), the west has received way lower than normal rainfall. Robin and Roger can tell you all about that. And according to this drought assessment, the northwest cannot expect much relief during the month of September.

I’m still not getting why this for the West. It must have to do with prevailing winds and sea surface temperatures in the Northeastern Pacific but I haven’t found any discussion of it. Perhaps others know. It may also be connected with the recent hypoxic areas off the coast of the northwest states.

UPDATE: Well, I did find this, from the Climate Prediction Center:

In the United States , an anomalous upper-level ridge-trough pattern, characterized by above-average heights in the west and an amplified trough in the east, was evident during much of July. This pattern contributed to exceptionally warm surface temperatures in the western U.S. and southwestern Canada , with departures in many areas exceeding the 90th percentile of occurrences (Fig, E1). It also contributed to below-average precipitation between the ridge and trough axes, with area-averaged totals across Pacific Northwest and Northern Plains regions in the lowest 10th percentile of occurrences.

Monthly precipitation totals were generally above-average within and downstream of the mean trough axis, in the Gulf Coast region, and in the Southwest U.S. monsoon region. Area-averaged totals in the Northeast exceeded the 90th percentile of occurrences for the second consecutive month (Fig. E5), while totals in the Gulf Coast region were above average for the first time since September 2005. In the Southwest, above-average monsoonal rains were associated with the persistent upper-level ridge over the western part of the country.

MarkP might be able to explain it better. My reading is that there has been a persistent high pressure area camped over the northwest states and that that has prevented moisture and cold fronts from moving through and producing rain and cooler temperatures. Now there’s the *why* of it, and I don’t know that. Here in the southeast such high pressure areas are seasonal in the mid to late summer, and our misery is caused by the meanderings of the Bermuda (Azores) High that moves over the Eastern US and traps heat and humidity, but blocks off cold fronts that would produce rain. Perhaps there is a seasonal thing there in the Northwest that has simply lingered much longer than usual?


For Athens:

After five months of drought, rains were above average during August. June, our only month that came close to normal, would have been very dry, but the drought was broken only by last-minute reprieve of several inches of rain. For Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, and July our precipitation has been 3.6, 2.5, 2.4, 2.2, 4.2, and 3.0 inches. Monthly averages of 4.5" are expected for our area.

In August we had 7.0" rain here at the Sparkle, and 5.76" recorded in Athens, well above normal. (As MarkP has noted in previous comments, our localized thunderstorms can cause widely varying rainfall amounts in places just a few miles apart.)

So far we’ve had 27.37" of rain this year, and on average over 80 years might have expected 35" by this time; that’s a 25% deficit for the year to date. Plant growth seems to be recovering somewhat, after the excess rainfall for the month, with grasses in particular responding quickly.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens. The red line is the average over 80 years of Augusts, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. There isn’t much mustard, which would depict below average rainfall, and the vast amounts of blue tell the story of above average rainfall:


We’re so far behind though that the accumulated rainfall for the year has just made it back into the standard deviation peach region.


Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of August in Athens. As usual, the black dots are for the 15 years 1990-2004 (black dots), 2006 (green line), and 2005 (red line).


In the end there were 8 days in August at least one standard deviation above the 17-year average for that day. There have been 5 years with that number or more of much hotter days and 11 with fewer days since 1990. There were 3 days when the lows were at least one standard deviation before the average low, and that’s fairly normal. For us it’s been a fairly comfortable month.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update tells us that the ENSO conditions continue to be normal but the sea surface temperatures in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific are rising and there’s a 50% chance of an El Nino arising and lasting into 2007. We’ll just have to wait til The Month of September to know more.

The first word of the title is: the

UPDATE: Yes, the movie is Contact, and the book of the same title is by the late Carl Sagan. Rather than go into everything here, which would involve SPOILERS, I’ve written a little review here.

I pulled down an old book and read it again. Some people say they never reread books. I do. Rereading old books is like meeting old friends. You rediscover and learn new things you missed before. I’m not exactly a sophistocated person and am fairly easy to please.

Making a movie from a book can’t be easy - I’m sure it’s not. Books are intricate and movies must throw out a lot, they must telescope characters, they must omit what I might consider to be crucial things. A book-to-movie is sure to disappoint some and baffle others.

A movie was made out of this book. I was very sorry to see that the last two pages were omitted, an omission that deeply disturbs me, as it more than anything else was intrical to the book and still sends shivers up my spine when I reread it. It would have been so simple to have included it, and the several scenes beforehand that fortified it. Thereby, it would have fulfilled the book’s author’s full intent in writing the book. I suppose the movie’s producers thought no one would understand it, but had they done so, the movie would not only have been good, it would have been profound. They took the easy way out, and screwed up royally.

Even so the movie itself, despite all its various faults (and especially despite my own pet peeves), was very strong and had many merits. The heroine herself may well have rescued much of the movie for me. I admit to a general admiration for this actor.

Not only do I think you should you name that movie, and the book of the same title, but you should also identify the crucial last two pages of the book that were omitted from the movie. For extra credit, you might explain the title of the post.