I’ve described a little about the geology of the area, and alluded to it on other sites. At least in our neck of the woods, we don’t have much evidence of the geology, because it’s been covered over by meters of clay and soil washed down from the Appalachians. Much of the land here has up to 10-15 meters of soil on top of the real rock formations that we have.

There are places though where the rocks of the area can be seen, and that’s along the “hollow” that has formed with the little creek that runs about 300 meters through the property. On either side the clay and soil rise steeply to the 10-15 meter elevation that most people see and live on.

The creek winds through the bottom of this hollow, and many are the undercuts and washes where part of the creek can actually disappear a bit under a bank and re-emerge later downstream.

My bobcat readings tell me that bobcats den in hollow fallen trees and rock crevices. I’m not sure if they would like a wet place like this, but I don’t think Gene should be investigating it so closely:


It’s in the creekbed itself that some of the underlying geology can be investigated. We don’t have pretty roundrocks, I’m afraid, we have hard blackened quartz rock. It’s too hard and brittle for sculpting, although if you smash one open, the white inside tells you that the outside has been chemically transformed, presumably by contact with the water.

It’s not even the kind of rock where you might find well-formed quartz crystals, although a bit north of here you can find those. It’s likely that you can find garnets embedded in the sand that washes and sorts itself down the creek during times of plentiful rainfall.


Notice how blackened the above quartz creek rocks are, compared to the rock still on land below.


I suppose you could say our groundwater is hard, but it’s not due to calcium or magnesium like most hardwater - it’s due to iron, and that, I guess, is what causes the blackening on the outside of the rocks.

Our well water is the same. The well goes down 180 meters before it accumulates enough water to produce adequate volume at the house. It’s great water, but if you let it sit overnight, you see a very fine reddish-brown dusting at the bottom. I would guess that in the low-oxygen water that comes up the iron is reduced as Fe(II), and that as oxygen from the air gets into the water after emerging from the tap, the iron becomes oxidized to Fe(III), i.e., rust, and that that’s the fine dusting at the bottom.

For several years we’ve been trying girdling of trees, instead of simply cutting them down where we’ve had to. When you girdle a tree, you cut a 2-3 cm ring out of the bark at the base of the tree, all around the trunk. This severs the phloem, which lies in a thin continuous sheet just within the corky part of the bark, and just outside of the xylem, the woody majority of the tree.

Because you haven’t severed the xylem, the water taken up by the still-living roots can still be delivered to the leaves for a time. However, sugar made in the leaves cannot be transported to the roots, and the roots, and then the tree, eventually die. The idea is that by girdling the tree dies upright and then can serve as a snag until it finally falls over. And the damage in falling by a slowly disintegrating, much lighter, desiccated tree would be less, although unpredictable. To the right is a tulip poplar that was girdled two years ago. Saturday’s winds knocked it over, or it would have been knocked over if it had not fetched up against the hackberry branches. Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)

You can see the old girdling cuts just above the break. What’s curious here is that it took less than two years for the tree to disintegrate enough to fall. What’s even more curious is that it limped along for a year after having been girdled, still putting out leaves last year, although by this spring it had died. Look at that nice crop of what looks like oyster mushrooms growing out the right side of the trunk. This could be a sign of what’s happening - the girdling cuts allow infection to enter the tree much faster than if it had just died a natural death. This has been the case for loblolly pines and sweetgums that we’ve experimented with. In two years, they’re down.

So even if it were only for that reason, that the trees don’t stand for more than a couple of years after girdling, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the strategy. There’s the problem of an unpredictable treefall, although not much danger of that. There’s the issue of what seems to be a rather lingering, slow death, although I’m not much driven by this concern (it strikes me that the same thing essentially happens when you fully cut down a tree - the roots have a long, lingering death).

I’ve noticed that dying or very slowly growing trees often accumulate an increasing amount of ectosymbiote in the form of lichen or moss. I suppose it’s a commensal sort of relationship - the lichen benefits, the tree doesn’t care. Here’s what the tulip poplar looked like in the upper 1/3 or so of the tree. In this case it’s a thick coating of old man’s beard lichen. Healthy tulip poplars grow much too fast for lichens to get a hold on the rapidly growing and shedding bark. Lichen and moss growing on trees doesn’t mean they’re sick - they may also be very slow-growing. But finding it on a fast-growing tree is probably not a good sign.

HA! I just noticed that yesterday’s Pure Florida post also got into girdling.

Here’s a game everyone can play.

Go to Google (did I really need to link that?), and click on images. Put in your website name - I put in +"sparkleberrysprings.com" , and suddenly there’s 2,580 thumbnails that take me way back.

Not that I, or you, were unaware of the ability to do this, but it’s an interesting way to see the site, and for others to see it who might not be so inclined to pore over the writing.

2.75" of rain yesterday, quite a nice cool and blustery day.

Nothing like getting up in the morning, getting some coffee, and discovering that the computer is complaining about the LAN not working with the unhelpful hint that a network cable is unplugged. Fortunately the usual advice worked: unplug the power from the router, then plug it back in.

This is a simple recipe that yields a few days of an interesting diversion. It’s just your basic bread dough wrapped around a filling of choice and baked.

Dough (LEFT): 2c hot water, 1 tbsp sugar, 2 pkg yeast. Mix and let sit until bubbling. Stir in 4c bread flour (I added a cup of masada corn flour as well this time). Knead until elastic and let rise an hour or two in a warm place.

Filling (RIGHT): While the dough is rising, make the filling. Whatever you want. This time I used a cup of hydrated chicken TVP (always trying to find some way to make textured vegetable protein attractive) highly seasoned with mustard, herbs, pepper, garlic, and Glenn chopped up an onion.


Punch down the risen dough and knead a minute longer.

LEFT: Pull off a small wad of dough and flatten out in the palm of your hand to a shallow cuplike shape. Put a spoonful of filling into the dough. My tendency is to use too much dough making a big roll with only a tiny center of filling. Don’t let this happen to you. Try getting by with the minimum amount of dough.

RIGHT: Fold the dough over the filling and seal the edges by pinching.


Accumulate on a cookie sheet and then into a 450 degF oven they go for about 15 minutes.

But before we get to that: regarding armadillos. Do bobcats eat armadillos? Yes they do!. And by the way, here’s one of the most information-dense sites on bobcats I’ve come across, for Wisconsin.

Microenvironments abound everywhere - small places that are isolated in some way from their immediate surroundings and provide a significantly different environment. Perhaps moister, shadier, or maybe just the opposite, you find things there that you wouldn’t find elsewhere. The scale of a microenvironment can be fairly macro, as in the ones below, but a microenvironment might be a just a few centimeters in size, perhaps created by the presence of a lichen or moss-encrusted rock. It might be the underside of a leaf, slightly more humid, shadier, and cooler, just the place to support a fungus that leaf mites might find delicious.

A microenvironment might be terrestrial, or it might be aquatic (except of course when it’s not.)

In a way, microenvironments are a kind of a cheat, since you can find them everywhere. But as a concept, they open up a world of thinking and observation of the tiny places, rather than the large expanses.

Here’s something nice:


Gene and I came across this individual, pretty little Gentiana saponaria late in the hike on Wednesday, after the camera memory card had been filled up, so I went back down yesterday to photograph it. I’m pretty sure it’s Soapwort Gentian, or Harvestbells. How brave of it to wait until well into the frost season to begin flowering! If you knew how many times I’d tried to grow various gentians, you’ll know how excited I was.


USDA Plants Database tells us that there are 35 species of gentians, well-distributed all over the US, so wherever you are you probably have some. Georgia has 5 or 6 species. All are native.

The Gentian above is a single plant, and I’ve never seen one along the little creek before. Where did it come from? Clearly I’m going to have to walk up the creek again to see if there are any more. It’s nestled down at the base of the small bog that has formed over the five years since I dammed Troll Rock to divert the creek flow. I’ve resurrected the photograph below from the above post of early March. The little boggy area is within the red ellipse.

Click pic for crosseyed stereo images (Instructions)


This little microenvironment, sheltered on two sides by a rocky bank and fed by a little trickle emerging from beneath my dam, has come to support quite a number of species. Even a week ago the phantom crane flies of late May were still about. I discovered and Glenn identified the delicate Leersia virginica , White Cutgrass, a few weeks ago. And it’s the site of a high density of Downy Lobelias. And now this popping up, as if out of nowhere.

It’s just back of this point and upslope a bit where the Northern Red Oak fell last year. The rootball itself has become a microenvironment, literally supporting the despised Princesstree, not long for this world, but also a discovery of Houstonia longifolia, Longleaf Summer Bluet, which I have not yet written about.

The rootball is about 2.5 meters tall and 4 meters wide. Those rocks imbedded in the lateral roots are way too big for me to carry!


The crater that was left behind is fairly rocky, clayey soil, and is receiving its second season of leaf litter now, plus an input of debris washed down from the slopes above. With the treefall clearing out several other smaller trees the area is now exposed to more sun than before. Southern ladyferns and Christmas ferns have begun to populate the crater, as well as a few pilewort types.


The rains are coming and should be heavy today and tonight. It always remains to be seen how accurate the forecast will be but it looks good at the moment!

Roger and Vicki uncannily predicted the events of yesterday - botanizing. Vicki even correctly prognosticated the photography. I hit a sort of milestone too. Without realizing it I filled up the entire 250MB card with 131 photos before I was ready to return.

I spent too much time loitering around the house and by the time I was ready to sneak off, Gene had tracked me down and was ready to go.


My first thought was - oh no, don’t do this, Gene. I had a different sort of stealthy hike in mind and no hike is stealthy with Gene around. Then too there’s the issue of encouraging him in going off by himself. But he does love to go and he’s quite the agreeable companion. And I am safer with him around - not because he’s a ferocious protector by any means but because we’re constantly talking to each other which makes for a good alert system for any hunters nearby. So I relented.

One of the items on the agenda was to harvest seed from a number of plants. Down to Goulding Creek, one of my targets was this one, previously reported as a new discovery on June 30 when it was flowering. On that date the wade up Goulding Creek was much more comfortable; yesterday in 55 degF air temp and after three frosty nights it was a bit colder.

It’s Hypericum gymnanthum, Claspingleaf St. Johnswort. It was growing on a little peninsula formed by detritus and debris accumulated on a log fallen into Goulding Creek. It won’t be a permanent feature - at some point we’ll have rains heavy enough to wash it away, but it’s nice to think of its seeds floating downstream and establishing the plant elsewhere.


Naturally at the point of drying my feet and putting my shoes and socks back on, Gene chooses the moment of my standing one-legged in the air to profess his undying affection, stropping against my leg again and again.

A bit farther along Goulding Creek I ran into this fellow, the inspiration for the title of the post, resting atop the Crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis.


It took awhile to identify him, but finally on page 78 of Bugguide I pegged him. He’s a Gold Moth, Basilodes pepita, one of the Owlet Moth family, the Noctuidae. I was very pleased to look him up in the Lepidopteran Host Plant Database and confirm that his hostplant is indeed Verbesina. Apparently the single generation of caterpillars consumes flowers and seeds, and then overwinters. Aren’t the internets wonderful?

That was one of at least two major finds; the other will have to wait until later. In the meantime here’s a view down poor old diminished Goulding Creek, complete with stereo options:
Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)

It’s Fall Break here at UGA, a gift from our conversion from quarter system to semester system six or seven years ago. Granted it’s only two extra days but as fate would have it, it turns that my final responsibilities for the week were discharged last night and now an endless-seeming five days stretches before me until Sunday night. As well, it just happens to be the one week in the month where we don’t have firefighting meeting on Thursday night.

What will I do?

We’ve concluded that the mystery plant a couple of posts below was indeed Princesstree, Pawlonia tomentosa, a true thug. Ontario Wanderer was right - Glenn found a photograph that showed that juveniles do indeed sport toothed leaf margins.

A couple of months ago Glenn and Gene and I were canvassing plants along Goulding Creek and ran across a tall, flowerless plant that we had not seen before.

It was and is a rather homely spindly plant growing on Goulding Cliffs, almost out of reach, but yesterday it was flowering and the flowers are blue! Blue flowers always catch my eye:


The bracts and receptacle also look very nice from the side, although the developing fruit sets are pretty homely after the flowers are gone.


One of the odd things I noticed was that there was milky sap:


There was another thing that bothered me for awhile until I realized - there’s no disk flowers! All the florets are ray flowers. If you look at the first pic above you’ll see that although the florets are NOT arranged in a ring, as in an aster, each has its own long ray petal. And there is no yellow or tan round disk in the middle, as in plants of aster or sunflower.

I think I’ll throw this out as a puzzle, rather than identify it at the moment. What do you think it is?

Those of you north of us will be amused to hear we’re awaiting our first frost of the autumn tonight. It’s to be a windy windy day as a front moves through and mows down quite a few organisms in all Kingdoms. Actually I think out here we probably had our first frost last week, and a number of trees are showing colorful evidence of that, but it wasn’t mentioned in the mainstream media, so.

I’m beginning to think October ought to be Lobelia Awareness Month. Glenn went out for a few hours yesterday, canvassing his favorite haunts and snapping up quite a few things of interest, including these. He’s done a very good job with the camera lately, and especially with the goldenrods which can so easily blend in with the browning surroundings. I’ve mentioned how nice it’s been to walk up the creek and see the lobelias flowering on the banks in such profusion, and it’s good to know they’re in profusion elsewhere in the area.

The one on the left may be L. syphilitica, Great Blue Lobelia - we’ll have to supply the actual identification later.

The one on the right may be L. puberula, Downy Lobelia, a single individual among a great many other plants in the area Glenn was looking at.

What we’re calling Downy Lobelias (right) have this habit of facing all the flowers off to one side. They don’t emerge that way though - if you look closely, the emergence of the flowers from the peduncle (stem) are whorled around the stem just as you’d expect. No, the flowers seem to orient themselves in one direction after forming.


I would have thought September to be Goldenrod Awareness Month, but they are really late this year, I think. As for Awareness, be Aware that Goldenrods are not allergenic!

(It’s worth pointing out that Europeans in the know will shudder at the below photos. What is a very good plant to have here, is an alien invasive there.)

What I’m guessing is Solidago canadensis, Canadian Goldenrod, or perhaps Solidago altissima, Late, or Giant, Goldenrod. It’s our “House Goldenrod”, I suppose you could say - the most common one around here.


And one of the nice “wand-like” goldenrods, probably S. speciosa, but it could be S. erecta.

We allow one of our neighbors to hunt on the property during deer-hunting season. He has a deer stand constructed just over the hill to the northwest. Yesterday he reports:

Believe it or not, about 8 AM a bobcat trotted past (nearly under) me while on the treestand. There is no question what it was, frame about the size of my dog but much less mass and coloring was textbook. It gave me a brief look-over and trotted off toward the hunting lease.

In other news:

Spurred by a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences, there’s been quite a bit of reportage on declining honeybee populations and efforts to increase the populations of wild bees. Anything that gets people thinking is good, but you’ll notice that the main rationalizations for maintaining bee populations is, of course, to pollinate agricultural plants that eventually become food for humans.

John Nielson (NPR: Morning Edition, Oct 19; and ATC, Oct 18 ) has
two stories both listed on this page. I think it’s the Oct 19 report that gets into wild bees and is really very good.

Jeff Young, Living on Earth, has a piece “Protecting Pollinators”, and an interview with one of the authors of the NAS study. Go here, scroll down a page, and read or listen to it.

And the Oct 23 edition of the New Yorker has a very interesting article on the peronal quirks that led to the writing style of Charles Darwin, “Rewriting Nature”, as viewed by Adam Gopnik. Unfortunately I cannot find an online version, but Literacity summarizes it here.

I think that I shall never see
A tree that so perplexes me.
With a range of characters very unique,
It’s surprising it’s caused such a very large pique.

Leaves opposite, simple, not nearly entire,
Rather dentate, with size to which giants aspire.
Unfortunately Tilia, with leaves large and toothed,
Has alternate branching and so lacks the proof.

Viburnum molle captures the prize
Of showing everything but the leaf size.
We’ve long since shot down the Princesstree
Since its marginal teeth we simply don’t see.

Catalpa too has pretty big leaves
But they’re also entire, and we can’t be too pleased
That it has lots of fuzz on the parts of the plant
That is lacking in ours, and so we just can’t.

The only real candidate left on the list
That fits the pattern that must exist
Is the Wild Hydrangea, H. arborescens,
Or maybe one of its obscure relations.

We spent last night talking and blowing up pics,
And trying to figure precise minute tricks
That might give us a clue. So we really wish please
That the couplets would chill on their vast jargonese.
Just come out and say: "Gosh! It’s got really big leaves!"

Time again to cast a query into the Internets and reel in the wisdom.

The fallen Northern Red Oak of several posts last year left behind quite the uprooted rootball, standing 2-3 meters tall and as big around. Numerous plants have established little habitats on the rootball itself and within the crater left behind. We’ve identified some of the species and several have been pleasant surprises, seen nowhere else.

This one, however, has us baffled:


The leaves are enormous - a foot or so long and as wide.


The tree or shrub has grown nearly 2 meters in a single season, so it’s a fast grower. The large leaves and weedy growth strike me as evidence of poor character. I might have thought Princesstree (Paulownia tomentosa) except that the leaves are toothed and not fuzzy - of course we would not be happy if it were this invasive alien.

And the leaves are oppositely arranged.


Any recognition or ideas?

Some good points were made about the portrait of the October days in yesterday’s post.

The cloudy day was indeed “B", and the clear day was ”A".

As FC pointed out, a lot depends on what “cloudy” meant - in this case it meant heavy overcast with potential rain (as opposed to overcast because of haze). Indeed, on the third day (not shown), yesterday, we had rain all day long, and what a wonder that is. As I drove home late last night in near 70 degF temperatures, the moisture in the air was condensing into heavy, dense fog over the relatively cool ground. Always a fun adventure.

The days were Oct 15 (clear, A) and Oct 16 (cloudy, B), close enough together and there weren’t any major fronts moving through to otherwise change temperatures.

Mark and Roger were thinking along the same lines with clear days and nights. Daily temperatures here in October will rise faster and higher during the day, but (somewhat as in desert areas) will lose that heat into space quickly at night, causing lower nighttime temperatures. A cloudy layer will insulate from that heat loss and our nighttime temperatures don’t fall so far.

However it became clear that a lot of this has to do with where you are and what time of year it is. We can actually be hotter on a cloudy overcast day in the middle of summer than on a clear, dry day. And I imagine that in much more northern climates a cloudy night can in fact be very cold indeed during the winter.

It’s a major point of frustration here in the winter that when it’s cloudy with the potential for snow, the temperature never drops quite low enough. It invariable hovers just above freezing, cooling slightly and then warming again as freezing moisture heats the air just a wee bit. As a result we very seldom get snow unless the confluence of cold fronts and hanging moisture are just right.

At least we don’t get snow now. In the late 60s and early 70s (when I lived in Oakwood GA a little north of here), and then again in the late 70s and early 80s (after I moved to Athens), we got some spectacular snows and ice storms, but only once since 1991 has that happened.

The following masterpiece depicts the temperature rise during the course of the morning into its decline in the afternoon on two recent October days. One day is cloudy and the other is clear. Which is which?

(And no, FC and Pablo, it’s not allowed to look at weather reports or check back to recent Niches posts )


Oddly, when I plot the temperature rise as a % of the full range of temperature for that day, the two curves look very similar. Of course they go from bottom to top in the same 0-100% range - that’s why I did it. But I didn’t expect the slopes to be so close.

I was shocked to glance at the thermometer early on Saturday morning and see that it was 34 degF. It was 33F on Sunday morning. The temperatures do later rise into the 70s on the sunny days we’ve had for the last four weeks, but the cold mornings surprised me. They didn’t *feel* that cold.

Still lots of insects around though I imagine they have to sluggishly come to temperature before they can move about much.

The Anglepod Milkvine outside the kitchen window is coated with orange aphids - perhaps Aphis nerii, Oleander Aphid, or maybe A. lutescens, Milkweed Aphid. Both plants are in the same Apocynaceae family, and so is Anglepod. The plants in this family fortify insects with the nasty milkweed and dogbane chemicals that give them disagreeable flavors to predators.

Armies of what are probably Eastern Yellowjackets, Vespula maculifrons, are out in force. These had warmed up well and were scouring the anglepod milkvine along with the aphids, but not bothering them.


I watched the yellowjackets for awhile. They are clearly looking for something but it’s not clear what. There might have been films of water on the leaves and it has been very dry lately. Yellowjackets are carnivorous, but these didn’t seem to be successful in finding food if that’s what they were looking for.

It wasn’t just the anglepod - they were all over the Carolina Jessamine and Glenn saw them searching the River Birch leaves too. He noted that they only looked over the upper surface of the leaf, never the lower, and I agree.

They’re getting cranky though, and desperate. The end is in sight for them, and their depredations during the warm, plentiful months won’t see them through the winter. Their time is over and soon, perhaps as soon as Nov 7, they’ll be history!

If we have it it’s mostly in the form of pots and five gallon buckets and a couple of cleverly positioned carts. Neither of us has ever been much for pink flamingos.

We do have two metal sculptures that we like a lot.


This one has been around for a long time. It was created by Steve, pictured a few posts below, for Habitat for Humanity. The organization had solicited contributions of bird houses for an auction, and when I saw it I told Glenn not to come home without it. We won’t talk about how high the bidding went except to say that it went on for a long time.

It’s Steve’s concept of Baba Yaga’s Hut on Fowl’s Legs. Baba Yaga was the Russian witch who flew around in a mortar and pestle which doubled as a grinder for the bones of small children she picked up in her travels.


And yes, it has housed any number of chickadee, titmouse, and carolina wren nests.

Glenn was returning from a faculty retreat a couple of years ago and, passing through Commerce, stopped at a small establishment. The owner welded together simple constructions from junk metal, and this hummingbird attracted Glenn’s attention.

Blue doesn’t exactly strike me as a color of autumn. Autumn seems traditionally garbed in reds, yellows, and browns, and certainly there are falling leaves of all those colors and lots of goldenrod and camphorweed around.

But there are a lot of blue aster types too, and they all seem to be attracting lots of bees.

Here’s one of the Daisy Fleabanes, what I’m guessing is Erigeron strigosus, Prairie Fleabane, a very nice blue variant on the usual white and pale lavender that appears more in the spring and early summer around here.


I thought I had done a piece on Erigeron before, but apparently not. Glenn and I have spent two separate occasions poring over the local species trying to figure what it or they are. The closest we’ve come is that they’re all E. strigosus, although at least two varieties with one keying out to E. strigosus var domiticolor, a rare Alabama subspecies.

Looking at the USDA Plants page on Erigeron, I count 195 species, all native, and most are found the west and midwest US. Georgia only hosts five, maybe six, species in this large genus.


More blue. I was pleased to see this one coming back: Symphyotrichum prenanthoides, or Crooked-stem Aster.

With 87 species all over the US, this newly reorganized genus (many New World Aster species ended up in this and several other genera) is also pretty large and Georgia has 28-34 of the species.

I kept looking for the plant, and right where it is, too, and could never see it. But there it is, right where it was. I was afraid the drought had done it in.


Blue Mistflower, what used to be Eupatorium coelestinum and is now Conoclinium coelestinum has been flowering for a few weeks now. We were suspicious that might become a thug, but so far it’s been pretty well behaved.


This New England Aster, Symphyotricum novae-angliae, just appeared, origin unknown. It’s much larger and less compact that some of the New England Asters we had purchased as plants. The petals are a much subtler blue, distinctly so at a distance, less so close up.


Finally a secret, shameful admission - a nonnative. Nonetheless I have grown to love this patch of chrysanthemums, and the insects are enamoured of it too. I purchased for Glenn one Valentine’s Day three potted chrysanthemums of different colors - yellow, a brick red, and these lavender ones. Only these survived planting into the yard, and have done well and played nicely with others.


Every plant in this presentation is in the family Asteraceae. I could have included yellow in this blue post, and those too would be in the Asteraceae. I can think of one plant flowering blue right now - the great and downy lobelias down at the creek - that is not in the Asteraceae but that’s about it.

Most households, by way of warning to visitors, have their own House Beer, and House Wine:


We also have our House Mammals:


Our House Amphibian:


House Arthropod:


House Milkweed:


House Sedge:


And, of course, the House Shrub :


(Not shown: House Gymnosperm, House Hawthorne, House Aster, House Reptile, House Avian. And of course there’s the House Pest, but we’ve already said enough about that already.)

There’s still a little to do but I’m declaring the Eradication Season over for the year. Maybe I can get my life back now! I still can’t declare us Microstegium-free by any means but the vast implosion in numbers and density of plants this year surprised even me. And too, the realization that the program was possible and has after three years, suddenly, this summer, borne fruit (so to speak).

I’ve said more than enough about the evil plant, so I won’t go into details again here. And I’ve noted plenty about the recovery of natives that should be there, and will continue to do so, but not now. Put “microstegium” in the search box if you want to read more.

Here’s the property map. I’ve boxed in the areas and numbers of plants pulled, which was the vast majority of the effort this year. The green sprackling indicates the areas where glyphosate had to be employed. The unmarked areas are clear of infestation. Although it looks like complete coverage, it wasn’t by any means. Infestations were patchy in the rounduped areas and the affected ground probably amounted to only 1% of the area, or so. Compare to the 50% or more of ground involved three and four years ago, in many places!

Click on the map for a larger image in a new window.


Here are my estimates of statistics over the last four years:

Year	Plants Pulled	Gallons Sprayed	beer consumed
2003	0	140	let’s
2004	0	150	not
2005	152K	160	talk
2006	164K	16	about it

Of particular note is the vast reduction in herbicide that had to be used this year, even though I pulled not many more plants than I did last year. Last year my handpulled area covered about half of what it did this year, not because I got tired of the tedium and resorted to the herbicide, but because the areas not handpulled were too dense to be treated that way. This year all that was possible. 164,000 plants? Seems like a lot, but it’s trivial compared to the millions that choked large areas two and three years ago. Seeds prevented from forming: Maybe a half-billion?

The continued use of 150 or so gallons each year until now was because I continued to expand the scope of eradication, and doesn’t really reflect much about need in areas previously eradicated.

The time involved has been about the same each year - around 90 hours. I should have been more focused this year, working daily for several hours, but I took days off and the eradication extended from August 1 to mid October, rather than ending in early September as it did last year. I suppose something should be said about the cost. Depending on which brand was available, 150 gallons of 0.3% glyphosate cost somewhere around $120-$160 each year except this year.

My memory of last year is of the six-weeks fescue coming up in the fairy ring in profusion. This year it is undoubtedly of wading up the creek, pulling weed good, and enjoying the suddenly numerous downy lobelias flowering all over the banks of the creek.

Next year? Undoubtedly, but I’ll wait til then.

This isn’t the trouble with a capital t. It’s the paradise part, with a capital p, right here in Oglethorpe County. (OK, it doesn’t scan well.)

We took a Sunday afternoon outing to visit two of our friends, Steve and David. It was one of those beautiful, comfortably warm and dry October afternoons that celebrate the end of the hot humid days of summer. Steve and David are, incidentally, among the dozen or so of our decades-old friendships that annually renew and reacquaint during the last week of the year at Jekyll Island. A couple of years ago they purchased some acreage about 15 km north of us in Oglethorpe County and bought an old house and had it moved. Since then they’ve been refurbishing it, a complex and huge task that I’m not sure I would ever be able to accomplish. The amount of work involved is prodigious!


We hiked about their property and took considerable enjoyment in finding quite a nice community of interesting plants, and there’s where the trouble in paradise comes in.

One of my first posts here was of braconid wasp larval cocoons festooning an unfortunate tomato hornworm caterpillar. This seems to happen toward the end of summer here in northeast Georgia.

A couple of months ago I photographed and described the stinging Saddleback caterpillars, which were healthy. On our little hike on Sunday, Steve, I think, came across this specimen:


Definitely not a happy camper. There are a lot of species of braconid wasps, which lay eggs on the backs of lepidopteran larvae. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a different species specializes on saddlebacks. The young hatch and burrow into the innards and eventually become larvae that produce nice little coccoons on the outside, as you see here. The saddleback has become toast by the time the adults emerge, tiny little nectar-feeding wasps that will be searching out even more saddlebacks at some point.

A number of people loved the video described yesterday, but had no idea what was going on. No problem - it’s a delight to watch, regardless. Nonetheless, it’s a coherent story, and I think I’ve pieced it together.

So to augment the post below, but not to present screenshots on the blog itself, as I’m not sure of the propriety of that, I’ve written a 25-step description of the events that occur, as I’ve sequentially interpreted them, in that video.

You can find The User’s Guide to The Inner Life of the Cell here.

We are nearing the point in the semester when “cells” is presented in our big biology course. Students are bored to tears, while for years in my mind’s eye I watch an amazing choreography that I’ve never actually seen but know happens. Finally, something catches what I’ve been imagining with increasing detail all these years, and it does it with dead-on accuracy.

John Liebler of XVIVO, an animation company, has along with his colleagues created this animation. Working closely with Alain Viel and Robert Lue of Harvard University, they attain a near-unimpeachable degree of accuracy combined with lovely artistry. You are one-millionth or less your size, and you are here.



Darksyde at dKos presented us with this link to this most amazing animation. For me, who has seen 15 years of horrible, embarrassing “animations” of cellular activity, this one is an emotional experience.

I subsequently found it in higher resolution at this site. If it’s at all possible, scroll down a bit and view the high resolution link.

It’s an animation of what’s going on inside each of your trillions of cells every moment of every day. You are alive because of this. Glenn and I couldn’t help but watch this over and over again this morning. We recognize descents through a plant cell wall, receptor proteins, microtubules being assembled and disassembled, flagellar construction, circular RNAs being propelled from nuclear pores, and translation and insertion into the golgi. There’s dramatic exocytosis and endocytosis, peripheral proteins floating on a phospholipid membrane sea, a leukocyte squeezing through a capillary wall, and my hands down favorite, shown in the image above, the heroic kinesin trundelling along a microtube hauling a massive organelle. And much much more. I haven’t had to copy and paste this; I recognize everything I’m seeing. And it’s not my expertise. It’s that the animation has been perfectly rendered.

But even if you don’t know of those things, it’s magnificent. It made me cry to watch it. My only regret is that it’s only 3 minutes long.

UPDATE: After some viewing I think that this isn’t just a series of pretty pictures. This is a real story. What we’re watching is the innards of helper T-cell activation. The lymphocyte crawling along the arteriole wall at the beginning has picked up a foreign signal, and has latched onto a macrophage through the T-cell receptors and major histocompatibility receptors. Then we dive into the cell, and the majority of the video shows the synthesis, sorting, and delivery of T-cell receptors, cytokines, and other proteins, and we finish with the now-alerted and activated lymphocyte slipping in-between the capillary wall cells on its way to trouble.

Temperature was 48 degF when I got up!

Not a lot of writing today; just some photos to look back at when January comes around.

We do have one large patch of Swamp Sunflowers, Helianthus angustifolius flowering.


The north side of the house used to be all lawn - at least that’s how the construction crew left it. Gradually it was caused to implode, and now it looks like this from the front deck. The flat 2-D photos below are too busy to make out much, but the stereo images, if you can do them, are much more informative. The Swamp Sunflowers are in the back, and the tall orange flowers are of Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia.
Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)


Moving in a bit gives us a closer view of much of the Tithonia/Helianthus patch. The plant to the left of the birdfeeder is an oakleaf hydrangea that missed its pruning this year. Again, the busyness becomes perceivable information in the stereo images:
Click for crosseyed stereo images or for wide-eyed stereo image. Here are (Instructions for Viewing)

In July, Robin at the Dharma Bums wrote a neat little piece on a robin that they could identify as an individual, because of a deformity, among the zillions that visit them. (Parenthetically, it took quite a little searching to find that post - it was silly of me to try first with the searchword “robin”! I finally pegged it with “survive”, and very much enjoyed re-reading it.)

I’ve often looked at the chickadees and titmice that visit the feeders in droves and they all look alike to me. Not to mention the squirrels and anoles - is that the one I saw yesterday on the same twig? Oddly, the habits of web-building spiders are so rigid that I can usually feel certain that I see the same ones from day to day. But that’s just a location cue. I don’t really recognize the spider itself.

I figure a lot of animals probably *don't* recognize other individuals of the same species, but surely some must, and they must use completely different cues from what we perceive. Mated birds must be able to recognize each other, for instance, and many mammals must also have this ability.

We had a black variant kingsnake that I’d see crossing our private drive once or twice a year, and I always knew the 2-meter guy because of the scar toward his tail. That’s how I recognized his body last year when I found it thrown in the bushes beside the road after someone ran over him on the access road to our place. Like Robin and Roger, I recognized his individuality on the basis of visual cues that I had learned. I don’t even know if “he” was a he or she, despite having picked him up on a couple of occasions and enjoying his cool body looping around my arm, and my gratitude for his gentle docility. Good ol' snake!

A couple of days ago I was “pulling weed” down to the floodplain (and as I told my mother, it’s bound to be my epitaph - “He pulled weed good”, or maybe “He pulled good weed”?). And I came across a box turtle.

I’ve gradually (and appropriately, given the context) realized that box turtles represent a unique opportunity to recognize individuals over many years, as they do indeed live many many years. Some of you know that I photograph any box turtles I come across, and that I have a modest collection. Of photos. So I compared the photos of this poor battered female to the previous ones, and sure enough, I had encountered her in May of this year. She hadn’t moved far she was about 100 meters from the May position. Compare the carapace patterns and scars between the Oct 4 photo and the May 12 insets. In the lower left inset look at the damage done to the front carapace, white last May, and seems to have undergone some change in coloration since then - repair?

Of course, after all this, it did take the help of a photograph to spark my recognition. Nonetheless, I was so pleased if only in retrospect to encounter her again. Since I’ve seen her twice, she needs a name, I think. Sylvia?


Compare that poor scarred female to this one that I found enjoying the cool creek water on Tuesday, as I was wading upstream and, yes, pulling weed good. (I compared her photographs and didn’t find a match with others I’d taken.) The old girl above is probably 15 years old; she was just a little tyke making her way the year we moved here. The one below might be older. Admittedly being wet makes her lustrous, but in general she’s in much better shape as far as the carapace and plastron are concerned:


And she is a female - no dent in the plastron.


The carapace patterns fascinate me - every box turtle I’ve seen is different. Here’s a few patterns recorded over the last year.

Yesterday I was wading upward to the source of the little creek, pulling what amounted to 4000 Microstegium plants and admiring the lobelias, tiny late summer grasses, and taking an enormous pleasure in the variety of other plant species growing on the banks. I also noticed the effects of several years of near-uninterrupted drought.

The creek cuts deeply at the bottom of a long, very wide, and in many places very steep hollow. It exposes the bedrock at the bottom. The bottom is primordially rocky in nearly all places and I realize how deposition washing down from the Appalachians has covered the bedrock with hundreds of feet of clay and soil. The creek itself originates beyond the property line but not far from it. There are undoubtedly “springs”, but the water is primarily squeezed out all along the way from the millions of tons of earth rising up on either side.

When we first moved here, in 1991, we marvelled for years how faithfully the creek flowed, and indeed it has never dried up entirely. But for the last few years, there have been times when it has very nearly stopped. Two years ago I hiked up to the source just to see if someone had built a dam (no one had).

The problem seems to be that we just haven’t had enough rain, and this isn’t a month or two of deficit - it appears to be more along the lines of eight years of deficit.

As I waded up the creek I was struck by the periodic stretches of accumulated mud and stagnant water. I’d step into a stretch and sink deep within gross, anaerobic mud deposits. Bubbles of gas escape and there’s a thin film atop the water in these places. It’s not the sign of a healthy, free-flowing creek.

We need periodic gullywashers to keep the creek clean of accumulating mud, and in the last eight years this has really only occurred once. I wrote about it here, last year. This is what we really need on an annual basis to keep Sparkleberrysprings Creek sparkly.

Here’s a picture of our current rainfall this year. The red dotted line represents the average over many years and the peach river represents the standard deviation above and below that average. Blue, which you do not see, would represent a surplus of rainfall; mustard tells you how far below that mark we are. We almost made it into the lower limits of the standard deviation once this year, but not quite.


Here’s a composite of 15 years of rainfall, since we moved here in 1991. It’s arranged by year. Yes, the panels are tiny, but you don’t need the details - just the blue and mustard during the course of each year in the panels tells the story: Since 1998 we’ve had only two years with just-normal rainfall, 1998 and 2005; every other year has represented a deficit. The hills have been stripped of their normal content of water. And that would appear to be why Sparkleberrysprings Creek is slowly stopping and accumulating mud.

This, in a microcosmic nutshell, is the heart of the debate about climate change: is this 7 or 8-year trend toward 25% less rainfall merely a decadal cycle? Or is a permanent trend?

It may have been cool enough to chill this pretty mantid babe night before last, but she (?) had recovered sufficiently by midmorning to catch herself a snack. I came upon her a little bit too late to identify the victim, but some of it is hanging out of her mouth and there are a couple of legs still clutched in the forelimbs:


I didn’t get the required shots necessary to identify this large specimen with confidence but I don’t see the rings on the coxae and am guessing it’s a Carolina Mantid, Stagmomantis carolina. It could still be a Praying Mantis, Mantis religiosa or a Chinese Mantid, Tenodera aridifolia. Gosh - three genera, all mantids.


Here’s a first for me:

Just a meter away was this resting Scorpionfly, some kind of Panorpa species. Scorpionflies are neither scorpions nor flies. They’re in their own order, the Mecoptera. (Flies, in the order Diptera, have two wings and short stubby antennae; scorpionflies have four wings and long antennae.)

My Audubon informs me that the adults eat rotting fruit, bird droppings, and dead insects, but despite the biting mouthparts do not bite, and despite the scorpion reference, do not sting. The upward curved abdomenal genitalia give them the scorpionfly name. The larvae consume essentially the same sorts of things. These are basically scavengers.

The right panel just shows the long snout that gives the insect an aardvark-like appearance. This above Bugguide link shows that snout very nicely.

Here’s the monthly summary of the climate of the month of September, here in Athens and US-wide.

In contrast to August which had plentiful rain, September was miserly for us in Athens. At least the temperatures were coolish! Here’s a summary, for our area:

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

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 September above or below the average for September over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.


For the first time this summer, much of the country experienced cooler than average temperatures, as much as 4-8 degF cooler in the midsection of the US, and up to 4 degF cooler everywhere else east of the Rockies. For those west of the Rockies, temperatures were a little above average.

The rainfall situation over the US was variable for September. Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


The real anomalies continue west of the Rockies, with miserly rains falling in MO and KS (sorry Pablo!). For the third month in a row (at least, see July), the northwest 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. Indeed it’s clear now that with a developing El Nino, the Northwest Pacific may be getting less rain for several months yet.

For Athens:

After five months of drought, rains were for the first time above average during August but then fell below average in September with 2.11 inches. 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, July, and August our precipitation (generally 4.5" per month average) has been 3.6, 2.5, 2.4, 2.2, 4.2, 3.0, and then a bountiful 5.76 inches in August.

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. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. There’s a lot of mustard in September, which would depict below average rainfall, and the scrawny appearance of blue tells the story of below average rainfall:


A similar plot for the year to date also shows a lot of mustard. We are way behind expected moisture for the year with only 29.48 inches in an area that expects on average about 38 inches by this time.


Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of September 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 no days in September - none! - that were at least one standard deviation above the 17-year average for that day. To compare, last year we had 15 days at least one standard deviation above the average. We’ve had a pleasant September. There were 5 days when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s precisely on target for the average number of below-normal nights over the last 15 years. Except for the below-normal rainfall, it’s been a fairly comfortable month.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update tells us that we have El Nino! And probably well into 2007. Plan your picnics accordingly.

Pablo scored quite a little coup yesterday with his identification and presentation of Beach False Foxglove, Agalinis fasciculata. We’ve also been watching this pretty little annual scroph which we had misidentified as Purple False Foxglove, Agalinis purpurea and only this year realized it is the same as Pablo’s. I mentioned in comments that we have found this little annual mint, probably Trichostema dichotomum or Forked Bluecurls growing in the same area as False Foxglove. Glenn photographed these yesterday. I wonder if Pablo has this in the same area too?

I propose a little experiment and exchange. I’d love to grow the Roundrock version of the Agalinis and compare it to ours, perhaps even attempt some crosses. Perhaps Pablo could send me some seed in exchange for same, and some bluecurl seed as well. We expect the fruits to be ready shortly. What do you think, Pablo?