Second post today - do scroll on down to see the fantastic Coral Honeysuckle!

The Cuddeback arrived late Friday, and I probably should have left everything at default, rather than scrambling to make some settings changes and get it mounted down to Goulding Creek. I didn’t know, and it certainly wasn’t clear from the manual how much memory an image would occupy. The answer is that if you have a 0.5 GB flashcard, you can get several hundred images. So I set a delay of five minutes between infrared/motion triggered images, and that was probably a mistake, and it was certainly unnecessary.

Disappointingly, it was clear that there was only one image taken early this morning, down to Goulding Creek, Saturday, as I approached the camera:


He’s usually at the other end of the camera (99.9% of the time) and so you don’t ever see him. Is he really that grim? Is his hair really that gray? (Actually, it is, and hasn’t bothered me since I was in my 20s, that’s a gift from my mother’s father, and it’s the closest to blond I’ll ever be ) Yeah, yeah, but why didn’t he comb his hair before his screenshot?

You might notice that I must have walked a considerable distance before the camera took note of me. I hope, and think, that that is because I set the camera delay. We’ll have to play around with that.

I’m certainly not going to repeat this much in the future, but today I’ve been playing around with the motion detector and then later, the video capabilities. The following two files are around 800kb, they last 20 seconds, and they’re for anyone who doesn’t believe that I can’t go out in the woods without Gene chasing after me.

(I’m just uploading these as they appear - they’re .avi files, and should, according to the manual, be playable by any computer. How I edit them, if possible, I don’t know. I’d be very interested in hearing if you weren’t (or were, for that matter) able to view them.)

First avi This is the Fairy Ring - we took a quick hike down to the creek, and then returned.
Second avi On our way back, picked up the camera.

(By the way, I just heard a couple of barred owls. I’ve been worrying about not hearing them for so long.)

What do you do when you’ve already posted in each of two previous years on a favorite plant, and it’s begging for attention in the third year? When it comes to Lonicera sempervirens, Coral Honeysuckle, I at least can’t resist posting about it again.

I think one of the reasons I like it so much, besides the startling presentation of bright red flowers, is that it’s one of the first plants we “discovered” here, there was only one specimen, and we’ve propagated it around a dozen spots. And it’s done well everywhere. Although it took a couple of years to begin making flowers, it’s old enough now in three sites to dress up the place beginning in early March and continuing through April. It’s not an uncommon plant, but is is hard to spot, except at this time of year. This spring we’ve found a half-dozen or so locations in our part of the county where it’s growing, and will be sampling seed from each location at the appropriate time. And it’s a good citizen, something you immediately become concerned with when it comes to honeysuckle and other members of the Caprifoliaceae.

USDA Plants shows its range as eastward of a diagonal drawn through the center of the US, from Texas through Kansas and Iowa to the Great Lakes, and as far north as Maine, so it’s a pretty adaptable plant.


If I had a nickel for everytime I’ve complained about its foreign relative, Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) I’d be fairly wealthy. Japanese honeysuckle occupies the same range as Coral Honeysuckle, but also extends westward to California, probably a product of deliberate planting as an ornamental, and for deer browse.

It surprised me how many species of Lonicera there are, and how specific their ranges are. Fifty one species are listed, and 18 are non-native. Of the non-natives, the worst are probably Tartarian Honeysuckle (L. tartarica), Amur Honeysuckle (L. maackii), Morrow’s Honeysuckle (L. morrowii), and Sweet-Breath-of-Spring (L. fragrantissima), but all the others are noxious too, just less widespread.

Some geographical regions have their own special species: folks in the northeasternmost tier of states, and presumably northward into Eastern Canada, should look out for various Fly Honeysuckles (L. villosa, L. oblongifolia) and Hairy Honeysuckle (L. hirsuta). West of the Rockies, you have Twinberry Honeysuckle (L. involucrata), and Pink Honeysuckle (L. hispidula) along the Pacific Coast States. There are at least a half-dozen more species with interesting names west of the Rockies - you can take a look at those names and photographs at USDA Plants Lonicera page.

The leaves do a strange thing - they change shape as they draw close to the terminal end of the flowering branch:


Most of the leaves on a honeysuckle are normal, opposite, and connected to the stem by a petiole (C). The most-terminal leaf (A) is perfoliate, that is, the two leaves are fused together as a shield just back of the flower cluster. And the leaf just back of that one (B) is a mixture of A and C.

The hummingbirds should be here within a day or two - maybe they already are, and I need to get the feeders out. But they’re quite fond of these honeysuckles, and later in the summer the forming berries will turn succulent and bright red, very attractive to many birds.

Through Jen’s Invasive Species Blog, a number of other blogs, and a few emails, I’ve learned of the First Annual Blogger BioBlitz, and you can find out more about it at Jeremy Bruno’s Voltage Gate (there are two updates alinked in the text). Jeremy’s blogging brainchild was inspired by National Wildlife Week. It’s also kicked off by Earth Day, April 22, and there couldn’t be a better way to recognize both:

In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, I am inviting bloggers from all walks to participate in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz, where bloggers from across the world will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species - plant, animal, fungi and anything in between - live in a certain area within a certain time.

And be sure to notify Jeremy at thevoltagegate at gmail.com, and click over to register at the Blogger BioBlitz googlegroup that has been set up for the project. All official communication takes place there.

Jen’s also made some fine logos for the BioBlitz and you can get them from the first link above:


I think this is a fine idea, although I haven’t quite made up my strategery yet. The idea is to take any or all days, any given location or locations, and simply note the organisms of any or all groups - plants, animals, fungi - that you see. Notify Jeremy at the second link above, and he’ll accept your observations for updates to a master list configured by location.

There are probably a lot of ways to find your latitude and longitude, if you don’t know it, but one is to go to Heavens Above locater page. I’ve long ago used a GPS to determine the coordinates of various locations here, and that’s another way. This step probably isn’t necessary, as there are plans afoot to accept county/state/country data and convert in-house, but it’s always nice to know your own.

Decide on your area of observation. I can’t decide! A different area every day? The same area on each of several or all days? A mixture of both? I think I should do a different area every day - the span of a week is probably not long enough to see huge differences, and as I really should include plants, a broader area of observation would fit neatly into other plans.

Decide on what organisms you want to identify. Birds? Get out your field guides. Insects? I plan to make heavy use of Bugguide. Photographs? I think so! (And by the way, rumors are that the Cuddeback arrives today!)

Maybe I should start practicing with this 5 cm broad fellow, but I’m either rusty or nothing quite like him appears in my little moth and butterfly guide. Probably some nasty Geometer thing - a looper or spanworm:


It survived considerable blowup, and although a mere glance might earn it only the evaluation of “drab”, a closer look reveals fur, fringe, and amazing spotting patterns on the wings and body:


The main thing though is to have fun with this. Don’t be so ambitious as to become discouraged early on. Take it for a test run. Enjoy. Me, I think this will be a test run in itself for an ongoing project I’ve been planning all winter.

If really bad movies are awarded the Razzies, and really irreproducible science is awarded the Ignobels, perhaps we could have the Stinkers to award to bad science journalism. Ultimately we might even have categories. A science article might simply be impenetrable, although I hardly ever encounter one of these. Yesterday’s was a pretty good example of the only category of Stinker I’ve come up with so far - no information content, and all-around poor and inaccurate explanations. Maybe another category could be Most Jaw-dropping Amusing. If you run across any of these, feel free to alert me to them.

Since the deluge March 1 we’ve had no rain at all, and if I were to suggest Southeast US climate change, it wouldn’t be that there would be no climate at all, it would be that our springs will be drier and drier and warmer earlier. This is a long-term trend, the most significant one in the course of our year, that I’ve documented several times here. April is the signature month for spring.

And in conjunction with that, we have the first of two major pollen releases - for the last two weeks oaks have been releasing billions of male gametophytes and without rain literally everything is covered with a thick yellow coating of pollen. The normally brilliant white dogwood flowers are even yellowish this year. Soon to follow will be the falling of the male flowers, resulting in millions of caterpillar-like droppings.

With the totally dry weather of the last 27 days I’d hoped to get a photo of a fairly dramatic sight, but there’s not been much wind. With a little wind, I could stand on the upper deck looking out through several long avenues of empty space and watch yellow clouds of pollen drifting through the air. Best I’ve done so far is to catch the occasional puff of pollen released when a bird lands on an oak twig.

For me it’s not an allergenic problem (I have very few allergies, so far at least, and they’re mostly to cats and horses. Yes, cats.) But oak pollen is certainly troublesome to a lot of people. Our second pollen release, due in a month or two, will be from pines. Pine pollen is considerably different from oak pollen - it’s heavier, and generally sifts downward quickly. Just by virtue of this alone pine pollen isn’t usually considered to be an important allergen, not like the extremely light oak and ragweed pollen that hangs in the air for a long time.

It probably won’t come as any surprise to anyone that I’m not a particularly avid fan of CNN or its reportage. I’m not much of a fan of ANY of the traditional media during the last decade. But I do have to admit that CNN usually does an adequate if not particularly inspired job of reporting on science. There should, however, be some kind of awards for particularly awful reporting on science.

This unsigned AP article which appeared on the linked CNN page is probably one of the worst-written science-related articles I’ve ever seen.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Some climates may disappear from Earth entirely, not just from their current locations, while new climates could develop if the planet continues to warm, a study says.

While I can figure out what they’re saying here, I shouldn’t have to. There’s something about “disappearing climates” and “new climates” that is like fingernails down a blackboard to me. I’ve never heard climate change referred to in this manner. Media presentation of science is a challenge, but it certainly isn’t helped by making up new, meaningless jargon that doesn’t parse.

Such changes would endanger some plants and animals while providing new opportunities for others, said John W. Williams, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

One of my biggest gripes with discussions on climate change is how some species will benefit, as if this somehow negated the problem that others would not. Kudzu is gonna love it, so we don’t have to worry! I really don’t think that the author meant for this statement to be given the stand-alone importance that it was given, but my beef is with the reporter, not the work’s authors. This particular “duh” statement is even more content-free than others of its ilk.

Using global change forecasts prepared for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers led by Williams used computer models to estimate how climates in various parts of the world would be affected.

Their findings are being published in this week’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The IPCC, representing the world’s leading climate scientists, reported in February that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observation of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”

Tropical regions in particular may face unexpected changes, particularly the rain forests in the Amazon and Indonesia, Williams' researchers concluded.

Nothing particularly wrong here, so in view of everything else we can probably assume that this was lifted from a file article.

This was surprising, Williams said in a telephone interview, since the tropics tend to have little variation in weather.

But that also means temperature changes of 3 or 4 degrees in these regions might have more impact than a change of 5 to 8 degrees in a region that is accustomed to regular changes.

I’m not sure why it would be surprising, since the delicate nature of tropical rainforests has been known for many decades. And it’s been known for several years at least that the Amazon, for instance, has been in a drought with great concerns that even a few years of drought may irreversibly harm those tropical rainforests, converting them to grassland and savanna. Indonesia - same thing, but at least the tropical rainforests there are accustomed to periodic drought because of El Ninos, and so organisms may have some degree of adaptation to fluctuating conditions. Besides the “duh” quotient of the first half of the quoted material, the ambiguity of whether we’re talking about Celsius or Fahrenheit is a problem.

Species living in tropical areas may be less able to adapt, he said, adding that that is speculative and needs further study.

So speculative that I’ve never heard of it, and beside the major point that the vast majority of organisms in any ecosystem is going to be unable to survive a major change in the ecosystem that they are a part of. I suppose we’ll just have to appreciate all the more those other plants and animals that are waiting patiently in line to benefit.

Areas like the Southeastern United States and the Arabian Peninsula may also be affected, the researchers said.

Whoa! I want to hear more about this! But no, all we get is that basically content-free mealy-mouthed assertion - “areas might be affected.”

And they said mountain areas such as in Peruvian and Colombian Andes and regions such as Siberia and southern Australia face a risk of climates disappearing altogether.

That doesn’t mean these regions would have no climate at all – rather their climate would change and the conditions currently in these areas would not occur elsewhere on Earth.

That would pose a risk to species living in those areas, Williams observed.

Besides the last sentence, more “duh” factor, what do you suppose it means that someone would feel the need to address something totally meaningless, like “no climate at all?” I simply don’t have the slightest idea of what that means or why it was written that way. I mean - “no climate at all”??

But wait, it continues:

If some regions develop new climates that don’t now exist, that might provide an opportunity for species that live there, Williams said. “But we can’t make a prediction because it’s outside our current experience and outside the experience of these species.”

Again with the “new climates that don’t now exist.” If that has any meaning at all, it’s an embarrassingly clumsy way of saying it.

Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University welcomed the report, calling it the first he has seen “that not only looks at species extinctions, but also looks at regions where novel climates will appear.”

“While the idea of novel climates may seem like a positive consequence of humans using the atmosphere as a sewer and causing rapid, unprecedented climate change, I would argue that mitigation of our pollution should be an even stronger reaction to these results,” said Robock, who was not part of the research team.

“The potential consequences and how these new regimes will be populated are poorly known, and the potential for new threats to humans through disease vectors could be a real danger,” he said.

I’ll have to look at the PNAS article to fully appreciate what it’s reporting, but I can’t imagine that out of the mountains of information we have on climate change and species extinction that this one is the first to even make that connection, as asserted in the first sentence above. The person who wrote this must have meant something else entirely different.

I can’t figure out whether the second assertion, “that novel climates may seem like a positive consequence” falls into the category of strawman argument, or what. You decide. I can only figure that the writer is trying for the notion that some people think warmer is better. Such people should be placed in a hot room full of polar bears.

The last sentence pretty much sums everything up: combine a lack of appreciation for what we *do* know with a content-free connection that we don’t know what we don’t know, then tie it all up together with a hitherto unaddressed and unexplored invocation of disease threat.

I don’t think I’m nitpicking here, but it does no good to treat yet another assertion that climate change means climate is going to change as if this were a novel idea. Combine that with the (as far as I know) unique jargon of “new climates” and “no climates at all”, and it makes for a real stinker of reporting.

It could well be that the PNAS paper under discussion here is something new under the sun. As I said, I’ll have to look it up when it appears, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to tell from this reporting. I do appreciate that science reporting can be difficult, but this article shows all the evidence of someone who was just putting words down onto paper to do so, just to get it over with.

We are back now, in the land of the relatively sane, after our semi-annual retreat into civilized society where we are inoculated against too wild a response to various civilized madnesses. We went over all these things we were likely to encounter, on the way down: if the person in the bathroom stall next to you starts talking, be aware that he isn’t talking to you. He’s talking on his cell phone! When on 10-minute break between class sessions, no one is going to talk to you. Seventy percent have whipped out their cell phones before they’re even out of the room, and they’re going to wander around like night of the living dead. The ostensible topic may have been Incident Safety Officer, but the subtextual social study clearly targetted cell phone usage this year.

I categorized Forsyth, where the Georgia Public Service Training Center is, and perhaps a little unfairly, as a kind of a pustule on the concrete carbuncle of I-75, but exposure to that is really minimal. The GPSTC is actually a beautiful campus of enormous wooded acreage with buildings situated large distances apart, separated by woods and fields. Our dorm room, however functional (and do they really use old kevlar vests to stuff their pillows with?), came this year with a western view of one of the several ponds on campus. There was turtle action in the evening, and a pair of geese guarding a nest in the foreground wetland grasses:


We didn’t have a lot of time to explore it, although Glenn did spend a couple of hours late Saturday afternoon going over the wetlands attached to it:


At the center top of the first photo above you can just make out a building and tower, the next building over, I think. This is one of the training centers, and gives you an idea of how far apart the buildings really are:


A drive through campus, perhaps going from one complex to another, can net a number of strange sights. That drive is going to take awhile, but you do NOT want to exceed the 25 mph speed limit, not here. This is not *just* a firefighting academy - it is a complex of training centers for every facet of public safety.

Over there is the bombing range, but I suspect they don’t use that during a specialized weekend like ours, at least, we’ve never witnessed any bombs going off. Over that hill are two entangled cars frozen in mid-wreck, and yes, they are there for extrication training. If you’re lucky, you might see a 300-foot plume of flame shooting into the air, and that would be the pressurized container course. Two of our department took that course on Saturday, but we haven’t heard how it turned out. And that road leads to the mock village, where all sorts of terrible things happen to the mock inhabitants.

Over beyond that building, unseen, is the inmates' complex, for this campus is also a prison, primarily for youthful offenders. It’s fairly minimum security, and the inmates do most of the day-to-day operations - they bus tables in the cafeteria, clean the dorm rooms during the day, do much of the upkeep on the campus, and even run the fire station for the campus. You’re not supposed to interact in any way with them, there are lockers in the dorm rooms where you have to lock in all your items before leaving for the day, and handguns and alcohol are not permitted on campus.

There were said to be 900 firefighters from all over the state, and seven of us were from Wolfskin. Our mean and median age, by the way, was 52 - this is probably much higher than that of the cohorts from larger professional departments. Many of them seem barely beyond shaving age. The seven of us didn’t take the same courses, and two were there Fri-Sat instead of Sat-Sun so we weren’t really able to get together much and the Wolfskin festivities were fairly minimal. Kind of a disappointment.

This year, Glenn and I took the same course, which in retrospect was probably a good idea. “Incident Safety Officer” is a two-day complex introductory course that addresses something we as a department don’t really have, and should. The basic message is that all incident responses need to be mounted with restrictions informed by safety and risk issues. This philosophy has now permeated all levels of firefighting response to the extent that the Safety Officer has veto power over the Incident Commander’s plan, though we were cautioned that exercising that kind of power should be wielded with caution, lest powerful personality conflicts emerge.

One of the disconnects that we always feel a little bit of was always in evidence, although the instructors are aware of it and do their best to address everyone’s concerns. Indeed they do a very good job of covering the field for everyone; I have to admit that. This is, of course, that most of the class consists of professionals who train every day and run into incidents all the time. That’s in contrast to us volunteers, who train (in our case) four times a month, and have maybe as many incidents in that time. It’s a huge safety issue, since it’s riskier for volunteers who are not constantly practicing and honing their techniques and responses. The risks for volunteers are higher for everything, but especially driving personal vehicles to and from the station, driving a firetruck to and from a fire, and heart attacks.

The “current issues” section of the course was especially interesting. Wildland firefighting was treated, not particularly well, we discovered, but then we’ve had the 40-hour course last June and in this one instance probably knew more than the instructor (indeed we had a particular bone to pick with him, and Glenn did later, in private). There were emphases on roadway incidents that are particularly important for us, and a section on terrorist incidents. The latter was something that I had a vague set of preconceptions about, but now I realize the potential is somewhat greater than I had recognized, and the complexities of response much more involved.

The potential is greater because the majority of terrorist incidents are domestic, and can involve assaults just about anywhere - family planning clinics, alternative lifestyles gathering places, and religious institutions (their words, not mine) were listed as targets. And the complexities involved included the potential for secondary attacks, once responders get there: a secondary bomb placed at a fire hydrant in one of the Atlanta bombings was actually something that our instructor had encountered. While not strictly an example of the latter, we also went over booby-trapping, and it is relevant in Georgia because of the large number of home-style meth labs that are being encountered. In that case milk jugs filled with gasoline had been tied with fishing line above and hidden by the room ceiling, so that in the event of a fire or discovery, they would drop onto the responders below, and ignite.

Generally, a very productive weekend, but it was a relief to get back to paradise.

I had a good laugh this morning at The Dry Spot’s ode to the Bradford Pear linked to by Jen at Invasive Species Weblog (as informed by Les Jones). I have to agree - “the Paris Hilton of trees” is a perfectly accurate designation.

This is not a Bradford Pear:

The Bradford Pear (Pyrus calleryana, aka Callery Pear) is one of those way-overplanted trees made popular by its rapid growth and promiscuous flowerings. As the poem points out so well, rapid growth has its consequences, and if I could smell I would probably be more offended by its omnipresence than I actually am. As it is, the plant submerges beneath my radar - I just basically ignore it, and soon it will go away. In the meantime there are a great many competitors that can be spied through the woods and from the road. Wild plums are in flower now, and so are species of the genus Crataegus, or Hawthorn. The photo to the left is of a moderately large hawthorn growing above the house. It’s one of at least a half-dozen species on the property. They’ll flower at different times throughout March and April. Glenn did a great job of keying this one out - it’s Rome Hawthorn, Crataegus aemula, one of at least 200 Crataegus species found throughout North America, and one of the 50-60 that are found in Georgia.

The genus is a large one - Michael Dirr mentions the possibility of a thousand species - and that’s just way too many, surely! But no matter where you are, you probably have a few to watch out for, and they’ll probably be local species too, with local common and scientific names. They’re sort of the crayfish of the temperate forests world.

I seem to have hit this one for a photograph at a time of day when it wasn’t being swarmed by wild bees!


I’m going to have to hit Glenn with samples of at least two and possibly three other species that are also in flower on the property.

In other news, this is Firefighter Weekend at the Georgia Public Safety Training Center in Forsyth, Georgia, and a number of us will be journeying the 80 miles or so down. Glenn and I will be taking a 2-day safety officer training course. Forsyth is located on the scenic I-75 concrete and asphalt preserve madway south of Atlanta, and so any reasonable person would hope there will be no posts here until Monday.

We’ve had our most common butterfly - Eastern Tiger Swallowtails - out and about for several weeks now. Yesterday, as I was about to leave for work, this fellow presented himself:


I’ve seen one or two of these each year, for the last couple of years, but chances are I won’t have the camera with me when I do. Yesterday’s encounter worked out well.

Zebra swallowtails (Eurytides marcellus) use pawpaws as a caterpillar host plant, and while we do have a native patch of pawpaws, they’re way down yonder, of course, so I suppose only the wayward butterfly makes its way to where we spend the bulk of our day. But we have planted several pawpaws close to the house, and last year they really took off.

This one is in a particularly pristine state and so I imagine is a “new” adult. Very striking in shape and color!

Saturday night we attended a multiple birthday party for several firefighters, and it was a pleasant fete indeed. Both Phyllis (former fire chief) and her husband Jeff (wildlife biologist) were there and individually I was able to grab them briefly and pick their brains on our local crayfish. It’s kind of fun to be able to approach someone at a country party, inquire about the locally abundant crayfish species, and have both of them start out with: “oh gosh, I don’t remember a whole lot at the moment, but ours are burrowing and are a species of Cambarus.” Now isn’t that charming party talk, and doesn’t it make you feel warm about your neighbors? It does me!

As you’ll surely recall, this all started out with Burning Silo Bev’s introduction to crayfish, which I continued on as an organism useful for biomonitoring of streams and wetlands. I was able to only pose more questions than answers, so hoped to get some from Phyllis and Jeff.

One of the things that struck me was how many crayfish species are listed for Georgia, and indeed it turns out that the family is very diverse in the southeast. Jeff agreed that the extensive list at the UGA NHM is probably a list of bona fide species, and not just a splitter’s dream. He saw no problem with our area basically being numerous isolated cradles of speciation, with each speciating population separated from the others by virtue of being in different watersheds. If so, it’s something that you might see frequently in tropical rainforests, or even more classically on islands, but not so much around here. Organisms tend to be hard to isolate and contain, and populations mix. Perhaps not so with crayfish.

Jeff and Phyllis both emphasized that our species, as well as most others in the southeast, is a burrowing species, rather than epigean. Epigean species are those that you might find in a stream itself, under rocks or vegetation (this site has some interesting observations on surveying and collecting crayfish).

The main parameters that limit us to primarily burrowing crayfish are water acidity and low oxygen levels that our creeks and rivers tend to exhibit. This is probably true for much of the southeast piedmont and coastal plain regions from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and on into Mississippi and Louisiana. (Much of Florida, because of its unique geology and aquifer, is exceptional.)

Acidity is not good for any organism that relies on calcium carbonate for exoskeleton formation - acidity dissolves it. And low oxygen, probably also from the much larger degree of cellular respiration in our nutrient-laden streams, limits what can live exclusively in water. So burrowing is an adaptation. It seems like one good thing that can come of this is that more aquatically inclined invasive species might have a hard time establishing a competing population.

So there seem to be at least two questions: what species do we have? I notice in the above link that the more successful collection method is simply to dig out a burrow, with a 50% success rate. They didn’t do nighttime collections, but suggest that they should be effective, and hadn’t tried pit traps.

The second question is how to evaluate population sizes, and it seems to me that simply counting active burrows in a given area (those with piles of excavated dirt balls) would be a simple and effective way to get a number.

The recent sand deposits left after the Mar 1 flood have led me to believe that the activity of nocturnal mammal predators is very high. Tracks everywhere, especially of possums and raccoons, and they must be successfully catching something. Our creeks don’t harbor large numbers of fish of any great size, so insect larvae, worms, and crayfish seem the most likely prey, which suggests that crayfish do come out of their burrows at night, perhaps.

(The above link is one of the results of a proposed and funded survey of North Carolina crayfishes. That survey led to a nice collection and description of NC crayfishes found here.)

Yesterday’s walk along Goulding Creek netted two fresh sets of tracks which strike me as likely bobcat prints:


After a period without rain, the sand is somewhat loose, but these 2.5 inch (6 cm) tracks don’t have the character of canine tracks. The pads are fuller, and I cannot draw an X cleanly between the pads as can be done with a canine track. Most telling are the lack of non-retractable claws at the ends of the toes, so clearly seen in canine tracks:


The tracks, if feline, are unlikely to be domesticated cats. There’s the size, bigger than any of our felines by a factor of two. But there’s also the opportunity, and the situation is simply that there are few houses around, and even fewer with cats. There is no house with cats other than ours that is less than a quarter mile from this part of the creek. Our household cats at least simply don’t make that kind of a trek and are all too aware of the dangers of going too far from the house. Basically a domesticated cat exhibiting this kind of wanderlust is soon to be a dead cat.

So it’s probably time to put up a wildlife cam.

On Sunday, we decided to have an Adventure, and that’s why we packed a few odds and ins into the car and took off in the early afternoon. We had a Goal, too, and that was to find the merging of the Moss-Goulding-Big Creek watershed with the Barrow-Ellis Creek watershed, down at your lower left in the map below.


Our route could have started off on any of a half-dozen dirt roads bearing south from Wolfskin Road (in red at the top), but we chose to take drop off into Terra Incognita from Lois Lane. Yes, really. That’s green number 1 on the map.

I don’t think that any of our travels this day took us more than seven miles from the house. Wolfskin-Hutchins Road is a pleasant track that winds east-west and dips down into Barrow Creek just before number 2 above. Glenn has identified a number of points within this area that harbor quite a few nice plant communities, the sort that get coated with road dust during the hot dry summers but seem to do well enough. We made a south turn onto Bull Bray Road at number 2 above. Plums are flowering now, and through the pines more than occasional glimpses can be had of Carolina Jessamine.

Half way down Bull Bray Road, we took a right, by mistake, as it turns out, and gradually began to decide that this was a bit too much adventure. There is at least some degree of residentialness to this road, which went on for a couple of miles westward, but it’s the residential quality that typically includes tall flagpoles with Confederacy flags aflying. The last mile of the road became rapidly rougher and logging vehicles were strewn about, in the midst of clear-cut areas. We did make it to the end but ruts were becoming deeper than the tires are high and we were glad to turn back.

It wasn’t a total waste - we did spy and mark several outgrowths of coral honeysuckle along this logging road, and along Bull Bray. And one of our agendas was to locate possible problematic areas for fire truck entry, and this was certainly one. While it’s definitely within the Wolfskin VFD area, it seems unlikely that any of our trucks would make it through any of several points - “let it burn”, Glenn decided.

Most of our time was spent down the road we *should* have turned onto, and subsequently did: Oconee Forest Road. This becomes a National Forest road after several miles, and dips into the northernmost portion of the bits-and-pieces Oconee National Forest. The complexion of the roadside becomes markedly different once you leave the residential portion, at just beyond this point:


It’s likely that this old house, taller than it is broad or deep, is in the process of being restored. It’s also quite common to run into little cemetaries like the one in back. This particular one doesn’t seem to have been marked on any of our maps, which is unusual:


Just beyond this, Oconee Forest Road continues as Forest Service Road 1228, and runs into a barrier beyond which is private property and a hunting hodgepodge. But before you get there, there’s a very nice stretch with switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) growing in a abundance on either side. This, by the way, is how winter grasses look in the spring, in places that don’t get any snowfall.


It was rather nice to come across this sign. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it before. It’s not prohibiting vehicular traffic on the road itself. It’s prohibiting it behind the sign, in the woods, and is therefore referring to various forms of JEEPS and other ATVs:

Since 1228 dead-ended we had to turn around, and then yet again as Glenn discovered he’d left his glasses on the roof of the car way back somewhere. Guess what? They weren’t still on the roof of the car. We did find them though, and I believe I got an admission out of Glenn that if there are few things absolutely guaranteed in life it is this one: if you put something on the roof of a car “for just a second”, it will no longer be there. We took the adjoining 1227B southward in an effort to cross over to our goal at 4. Unfortuntely, we ran into a portion of Falling Creek crossing the road, and while it wasn’t especially deep in water, the mud was deep and the bottom didn’t look substantial enough to try it. I don’t know if our fire trucks would make this ford - certainly not with me driving. With a lighter vehicle, gathering speed would probably work, but not with 2-8 tons of water on the back.

On the map at the top of the page, our goal was another mile or two beyond this ford, as the road ends at the church at the lower left of the map. We had planned to hike from there to the confluence of the two watersheds. However, we did not make our goal this day. Another approach, perhaps, or wait until the creek has gone down a bit.

Glenn was still back at the car, doing some examinations. What is wrong with this picture, 30 minutes after?


Our remaining afternoon was spent going up Bear Mill Road (5) to its joining with Faust Farm Road, where we have two more fords to cross, this time Barrow Creek. We had no trouble with this one:


Nor this one, just a few hundred feet farther west. Notice the downed tree - a wisteria-covered river birch. You kind of have to squeeze around it. I don’t think our fire trucks would have trouble with either of these fords, depending on the weather:


This little intersection is marked by a large pile of neatly stacked rock and boulders, which now have alders and buckeyes and oaks growing out the top of it. It’s puzzling - the only thing I can imagine it’s for is to buttress Faust Farm Road that winds back behind the pile on its way to higher elevations. A nice spot for plant hunting, though!

Jonquils, Narcissus, Daffodils, call them what you will, and I’m sure there probably are “proper” common names, but I juggle my hands in despair over them. Daffodils are not native, but somehow I just can’t say no. Neglecting the possibility of allelopathy, daffodils are pretty and innocuous. They don’t climb trees and they don’t choke out delicate envirnoments. They are generally fine in not-so-nice soils. They make their appearance when little else does, and by the time the bulk of spring flowers are showing up, daffodils are spent and high-tailing it back into the ground.

We actually did *buy* bulbs of various horticultural varieties at one time - yes, we got sucked right into it. Glenn, bless his heart, planted them all in the same place, and so now ten years down the road we’re rather glad about that since it serves to separate the purchased bulbs from the products of Glenn’s subsequent years of penance. In his travels and investigations he has made a habit of digging up a few bulbs from old homesites, abandoned houses, and such. We’ve acquired a few gifts from a couple of friends who do the same.

Of course we have our own “heirloom” daffodil, growing in clusters in the fairy ring and down into the woods, but ours appears *much* much earlier than any of the others, generally late January to early February. And while it looks like the majority of our collection is flowering right now, there’ll probably be some laggards and indeed I know of at least one that I would be inclined to refer to as a “narcissus”. It will flower in a month or so, and is the second of the SBS homesite varieties.

As the sole example of one of the purchased varieties, years ago, here’s what I’m guessing is “February Gold”. Nice enough, but we have a couple of examples of homesite acquisitions that I think are nicer.


Among those gold alternatives is this nice rescue, probably from the railroad tracks in South Athens. The color is more sulfury and the trumpet more nicely shaped than the Feb Golds.




Another set along the same lines - these probably given to us by a friend. They’re not quite “miniatures”, but much smaller than the previous two large varieties. They’re also just on their way out:

This little group flowered for the first time this year, after planting two years ago as a gift from probably the same friend who gave us the above set. They’re unusual in their two-toned color - the petal-like tepals are much lighter, with nice gradations that deepen with age, than the much yellow-orange of the “trumpet”, or corona, (modifications of the inner whorl of tepals, according to Glenn). And they form in clusters unlike any of our others.

I hadn’t noticed until looking at the photograph above how many little friends were congregating around this cluster of flowers:


I think we have four independently derived acquisitions of these white and gold daffodils. This is of a portion of a large planting gifted us by another friend from his yard. He lives in the historic district of Athens, and purchased his house from his next door neighbor’s estate when she died many years ago. She had accumulated quite a few heirloom oddities. Bill thought he was giving us daylilies here, and indeed half the bulbs were of daylilies, but half of them were these unexpected beauties.


And a second of the putative four acquisitions - very similar in appearance but Glenn seems to have obtained these from an old house site in South Athens.

We have a set of purchased “Actaea” daffodils, but they aren’t nearly as nice as this acquisition, again from Glenn’s old house site in South Athens. You’ll see those nice markers on a lot of these plantings. Unfortunately they’re all blank - a product of the “penny wise pound foolish” mentality. There are very few markers that are permanent enough to last the two or three years necessary to finally see what you’ve got. And while we were very careful about labelling all kinds of plantings, we paid no attention to what we wrote with, consequently the sun or the rain or the cold or the heat washed away the writing mostly within a year. Sanford Sharpies, easily available at big box stores, are the thing you want. “Permanent” is good; “super permanent” is better.

My goal yesterday was to locate some denizens that had produced things like this:


These holes, with their attendent cones of rolled up mudballs, are very common along the banks and in the floodplain beyond the creeks. They are, I presume, burrowing tunnels of crayfish, and that’s what I was looking for. To make a short story shorter - I didn’t find any cavorting in either creek, nor under rocks or logs. I’m not yet to the point of shoveling out one of the burrows yet, but I am wondering if the large degree of burrowing is a taxonomic character.

One odd thing: since the flood, and its deposits of vast areas of sand atop the banks, there are in those areas a good many holes similar to the above, but without attendent piles. I’m guessing the burrows remain from before the flood, but are either unoccupied or at least such an entrance or exit has not yet been cleared out. The burrows themselves must be fairly robust to have survived the kind of abuse the flood piled on.

In overturning rocks I did run across a section of creek that had a fair population of at least two salamander morphs. I wasn’t able to grab hold of any of the more brightly colored, yellow-lined examples, but one was sharing the space under one rock in the middle of the creek with this drabber fellow:


There are no external gills, at least none that I could see, and the guys were quite small, 7 cm and under. I’m guessing them to be pre-eft newts, “pre”, that is, to undergoing color change and taking up a year or three of terrestrial existence in the adjoining woods.

One of the common sights, year-round, under moderate-sized underwater rocks are these wormy things, generally 5-8 cm long, so fairly large and noticeable. I would say they’re the most common benthic invertebrate I encounter, but then they’re so noticeable that their frequency is probably skewed by ease of detection:


This one was behaving oddly. In a deeper portion of the creek, I watched it swimming, flattening and undulating up and down from surface to bottom. I eventually caught it in the collander and recognized it for the usual sort of thing. It’s semi-translucent, and the body pulsates regularly from one end to the other, giving the impression that internal organs are constantly in flow.

I’m guessing it to be a cranefly larva. Not the most sensitive bioindicator, nothing along the lines of mayfly, stonefly, or caddisfly larvae, but does require at least moderately clean water. We certainly have plenty of craneflies, and all along the creek are little populations of phantom craneflies that move mysteriously in the nooks and crannies within the banks. It’s hard to imagine a delicate, insubstantial cranefly emerging from one of these gross wormy things.

And, finally, the east-facing side of the long hollow (or crease) is erupting in bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis). This is an annual occurrence and always worth noting. The population in this area has its ups and downs, but this year seems particularly dense. The majority was emerging properly from the rich soil but a couple of them seem to have colonized a large rock or two:


I’ll do a proper count today, all along the length of slope, and I haven’t checked the calendar for the last several years to compare dates of emergence. However I should point out that the bloodroot (experimentally transplanted from this population) I’ve planted in woodland plots close to the house emerged 12 days ago. Bloodroot is particularly nice for dating, since the opening flowers emerge at the same time as the leaves. One day there’s nothing, and the next you have flowers and leaves.


Update on flu: Monday was probably the last day with recognizable fever peaks, the last day of six full days of such. In the two full days since then, temperature changes have been primarily up and down noise ranging between 99 and 100 degF, clearly not normal, but at least not driven by infection. One exception - yesterday’s excursion forced the temp up briefly over 101 degF, but it was transient and soon back down. Yet I suppose it’s why we’re always cautioned not to exert too much: regulatory control is just too tenuous during and for awhile after a week-long incident like this.

Yesterday hit a high of 88.5 degF here, which, if approximated by official Athens temperatures will set a record over the 84 degF event set in 1921. Our March temperatures have been warm indeed, averaging at least a coupla degF over the normal average, and if it weren’t for the lack of rain since the Mar 1 deluge, I’d have expected the greening already, a month early.

It was a little shocking, a coupla days after that deluge, to check the Fire Hazard map, and discover that not only were we in a flood watch, but also in a very high to extreme fire hazard warning.

Bev at Burning Silo has a very nice intro to crayfish up. The great pics show the major taxonomic features and reproductive behaviors you’d expect to see. This is fitting perfectly into my gradually evolving scheme to recognize and evaluate certain benthic invertebrates for biomonitoring purposes. I can do caddisfly cases now, and hopefully crayfish will follow.

We have a lot of crayfish, as evidenced by their chimneys that pop up along the floodplain and banks of the two creeks. At least on paper, it’s unlike that any are the O. rustica that Bev describes as having invaded well beyond their native Minnesota territory. There are some oddities though.

Here’s a checklist of Georgia crayfish species. Wow! What a lot of species, and *every one of them is rare!*. Hmm, and here’s something a little odd - what would probably be a fairly common one, Cambarus latimanus, isn’t even listed!

I’m guessing that the explanation, after looking over the checklist, is that those are highly localized, genetic populations, and indeed any individual range is only one or two counties, it seems. While these populations might be very important indicators for habitat loss, it doesn’t exactly follow that they should be divided up into individual species. That way lies “splitting”.

I’m very much speaking through the the top of my hat here, but it’s almost as if our populations of cardinals were considered a different species than those in Atlanta simply because ours sing a slightly different song. Or I could be completely wrong and due to the isolating effects of small watersheds these really *are* different species by any reasonable criterion.

So I need to get down to it to determine whether our crayfish is the Broad River Burrowing Crayfish, or maybe our own previously undiscovered “Upper Goulding Creek Crayfish”!

Spin Google Earth any way you wish, zero in, and you’ll find somewhere that has something special. Well... there are parts of southcentral Mississippi and Alabama that might resist even the most diligent searches, but.

I’ve heard of this one years ago, it keeps cropping up in my view practically on an annual basis, and it’s a pretty astonishing place. It is unlike all the islands around it. I’ll only say this - it has a quarter the earth’s nickel reserves, a drool-producing fact that practically guarantees that the other 99% of what makes it special will soon wither away.

Yesterday I presented a couple of simplified figures that showed what happened to body temperatures (in mice) when injected with tiny and larger amounts of a purified antigen. I referred to it as an elegant result, and it is, because it is both unexpected and was the first inkling of a complex regulatory system involving negative feedback and control.

Negative feedback is the main way organisms have of keeping things constant. In general it results when the product of a process inhibits the process itself, thereby shutting down the production of that product. The result is a peak and decline, rather than a constant climbing.

You can imagine what might happen if there were no negative feedback involved in fever. Something stimulates the process of increasing body temperature, and the increase just keeps going on and on. But if the product of that stimulation, perhaps heat itself, inhibits the reaction, then body temperature could soar, then drop, then soar, then drop, which, coincidentally, is exactly what we’ve seen.

(There are positive feedback processes in which the product of the process *increases* the process itself. Positive feedback is usually used for one-time efforts that must be accomplished quickly. Labor is one. The hormone oxytocin is released, which causes uterine contractions. The uterine muscles squeezed by the baby stimulate further release of oxytocin, which causes more contraction. And so on, until the baby is birthed. As you can imagine, positive feedback can be *dangerous*.)

Cells in your body constantly display a host of molecules of all sorts on their outsides. White blood cells (macrophages and T-cells, for instance) are constantly sampling the outsides of cells, and so long as the surface molecules are recognized all is ok.

When a virus invades a cell, the cell will eventually display bits and pieces of the virus itself on the outside, and sampling macrophages go a little crazy when they find this. First, they’ll probably kill that cell, either then or later, but the main thing relevant to this is that the white blood cells will release certain chemicals into the body. Some of the important ones: cytokines such as interleukin-1, interleukin-6, and tumor necrosis factor alpha.

Interleukin-1 plays a major role in starting up the fever process, as well as several other things. It percolates through the body, crosses the brain-blood barrier, and latches onto cells in the blood vessels of the brain. It stimulates them to release cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2, yes *that* COX-2).

COX-2 does a lot of different things, but in this case it is the enzyme that runs the reaction in the middle of a set that ends in producing prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). This prostaglandin is the important one that binds to several cell types in your favorite organ, the hypothalamus, and in doing so, resets the body’s thermostat and forces it to achieve a new, higher temperature.

So when you’ve started to shiver and your temperature has begun to climb, that’s what has just happened.

It’s at this point that negative feedback must occur to cause inhibition of the COX-2 enzyme, or perhaps reduction of PGE2 in some other way. I haven’t succeeded in finding what’s going on in detail. But, and just as in the second figure yesterday, the temperature increase is only temporary, and soon drops back down. That doesn’t mean the process is over though, and more rises and drops may occur.

Here’s an example (14 pp PDF) of the kind of work that has been done to examine what’s going on in each of those peaks of fever in the figure from yesterday. Without getting into detail, COX-2 is involved in the first and second peak, but apparently something else takes over to drive the third peak. The mechanism of control is apparently much more complicated than something as simple as “negative heat feedback”, but it is negative feedback, nonetheless.

Here’s another aspect of fever - appetite suppression. For me, this is as dramatic a consequence as a rise in body temperature - I *never* suffer from poor appetite. And yet for the last six days I haven’t found anything appetizing - quite the reverse. Mere contemplation of that untouched sandwich in the fridge makes me want to hurl.

Well, that’s all due to Interleukin 1 too. Remember that it was among the cytokines released by white blood cells when they detect an infected cell. We saw the effect it had in stimulating COX-2, but it also stimulates the release of Leptin from fatty tissues. Leptin is the molecule that is fairly central to suppressing appetite, and thus we have a short answer to that phenomenon.

COX-2 is a central player in a number of other games. It has at least *the* primary role for inducing pain and fever, and is the enzyme that is inhibited by aspirin, and NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). Take aspirin, reduce COX-2 and therefore fever and pain.

COX-2 also makes prostaglandins involved with ovulation. It produces prostacyclin, which is antithrombotic. It inhibits platelet clumping, and causes vasodilation. COX-2 has a cousin, COX-1, which does just the opposite. It produces thromboxaneA2 which causes platelets to clump, and vasoconstriction.

In unexpected roles, COX-2 can cause changes in pre-carcinogenic compounds, like benzopyrenes, such that they are now carcinogenic.

Like all such inquiries, getting started leads you into areas you didn’t know were connected. What follows is mostly from notes taken while reading. I’m not a doctor, nor a pharmacologist, and I don’t even do it as a hobby. I could have gotten something wrong or missed an important point, and there are others far closer to the problems of arthritis and osteoporosis than I, who should certainly correct me if so.

There seem to be two large classes of anti-inflammatory agents: steroids, and nonsteroids (NSAIDs). Steroids are one of the two classes of our normal complement of hormones, and use as anti-inflammatory agents (such as Prednisone) are usually limited to special circumstances. The lack of hormonal activity of NSAIDS makes them more useful at least on paper (anyone who has taken prednisone knows what side effects are). A lot of the earlier NSAIDs cause gastrointestinal bleeding in some people, and so next generation NSAIDs began to appear.

COX-2 is involved in stimulating osteoblast to differentiate into bone cells. This is particularly important as interruption can contribute to problems like osteoporosis. If you recall that NSAIDs (aspirin, etc.) inhibit COX-2, it might seem surprising that anyone would use them in conjunction with osteoporosis, but the reality is that there are a number of things going on that produce and maintain bone tissue, and COX-2 is only one player. At this point I’m not even sure if NSAIDs are used specifically for osteoporosis therapy, or if they are used only in the control of pain, as they are in arthritis.

Most traditional NSAIDs inhibit both COX-1 and COX-2, and recall that COX-1 promotes platelet clumping, while COX-2 inhibits platelet clumping. Recall also that platelet clumping leads to blood clotting, and that under the wrong situations this can lead to heart attack or stroke. For conditions of osteoporosis and inflammatory diseases like arthritis, *nontraditional NSAIDS*, such as Vioxx, were designed. These interfere only with COX-2 and not COX-1.

Vioxx, and a number of other nontraditional NSAIDs, were removed awhile back when it was discovered that users might have a greater chance of heart attack or stroke. It was a major disappointment for osteoporosis sufferers who had just been told essentially the same thing about the earlier and otherwise successful estrogen therapy. Apparently there are some nontraditional NSAIDs, Celebrex, for instance (?), that may not have the undesirable side-effects of Vioxx, but there’s certainly controversy over that. As you can imagine, the presence on the web of discussion of all this is enormous, complicated, and tainted with ulterior business motives. With some trepidation, here’s a short site that addresses a few of these questions with little editorial comment, offers a list of NSAIDs (nontraditional and traditional) and gives a lot of keywords for searching out more information.

I hope everyone in the US remembered to set your clocks ahead. I actually had downloaded a MS patch, a heroic effort as anyone who has attempted to do so on the microsoft website will know. To my surprise, it worked. Now if only it avoids the old update three weeks from now.

I expect this will be the last post on this subject, unless something unusual happens. I was in some hope along about the afternoon of Day 4 (Saturday), that all this was over. The decline in fever was precipitous and maintained, but still that was true two years ago, along about the same time. And as for two years ago, temperatures went back up after six hours of normal. So it looks, remarkably, like the entire progression is going to be duplicated to an amazing degree.


One of the things that the comparison has allowed me to do is to recognize all these multiphasic peaks in temperature. I’ve divided the progress into three phases. The first phase, lasting the first two days, is the most extreme. The second phase, lasting 1-2 days, does not peak as high as the first phase. And the last phase is more low-grade, but appears to last for at least four days.

For at least some illnesses, temperature patterns like this give diagnostic information. How do they happen? Why not just elevate the temp until it’s all over? How does this fit in with the phrase “the fever broke”, suggesting it’s all over?

There are many players at many levels and in many organ systems, and I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail, in part because my understanding is incomplete, and in part because it’s not so important for us at least to understand every detail.

A very neat experiment was performed in the early 70s when mice were injected with LPS, lipopolysaccharides, from a bacterium. LPS is an antigen against which immune systems respond, so it was a simple way to induce a fever. A very tiny amount was injected, and something like this was observed over the next day or two:


The group then injected the mice with a larger dose of LPS. Naively we might guess that the response would be about the same, maybe larger and longer. Here’s what they saw:


This is an extremely elegant result, as its implications have a lot to do with a complex control system involving negative feedback and perhaps many chemical and cellular partners. It’s as if there’s a deliberate effort to avoid too long a period at high temperature.

Since that time, this simple experiment, modified and elaborated upon, has been used to investigate the chemical and cellular partners involved in the chatting that goes on within each peak. The words COX-2, interleukins, and prostaglandins; and the organs and tissues of the lungs, liver, and brain, especially the hypothalamus, all appear in this story.

And the effects encompass not just fever, but also appetite supression, which has been very much in my life the last five days.

For my purposes it addresses the similar multiphasic peaks of fever that I see, though the experiment isn’t done in quite the same way. I didn’t get a single dose, rather with an ongoing infection it’s entirely possible that multiple sites of infection are cropping up at different times. And perhaps that explains some of the lack of congruence when comparing the temperature curves between flu this year and flu two years. But the overall similarity, neglecting minor details, argues that random sites of infection can’t explain what practically screams out to be fingerprints.

And that’s about as much as I can write right now, so there will be another post.

The first potential turning point has now passed with a duplication of the temperature curves of two years ago. The red line in the figure below is the flu of April 2005. The blue line is the current flu.



The dates at the bottom are artificial - I pegged everything to “Day 1/0”, the date of the first measurement. The hours are correct.

The red flu showed a day-long peaking of temperature followed by a decline almost to normal, and that’s what happened yesterday too. I was hoping that at that point it was all done, but what should happen last night? Starting late afternoon temps went back up and continued to do so, plateauing as they are now between 101 and 102 degF. This pretty much duplicates the course of events of two years ago.

For the remainder of the red flu, there was a gradually suppressed harmonic oscillation. I got tired of taking temps after 9 days but clearly wasn’t quite back to normal even then. We’ll see what happens with the blue flu.

The other thing that’s interesting is that these cycles of temperature don’t correlate with time of day, as they do with normal temperature cycling. A large increase can occur at night, or it can occur during the afternoon. Of course, I’m taking aspirin, which seems to have little effect. My guess is that the immune system has taken over with the big guns, the thermostat setters, and doesn’t much care what time of day it is.

As for prostaglandin inhibitors like aspirin - I feel like I should at least test (which I can’t technically do) whether *not* taking aspirin would shorten the length of temperature activity. Perhaps all it takes is an hour or two above 104 degF to make matters right. But sorry - once the temperature gets over 103.4, I get a little nervous. I keep thinking of poor old Tim Robinson Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder.

(For those who think this might be just a little peculiar, you takes your fun where you can get it.)

I haven’t answered comments because I’ve been sleeping most of the time with 102-103 degF flu. It showed up Tue night and quickly got worse during the day Wed. So even though the temps are a beautiful 75 degF outside, I’m shivering and chilled and covered up with blankets inside. And the aching is really bad this time around.

I’ve been reluctant to look at my last bout of flu two years ago, because I recall it being particularly bad. (It really took a month to fully recover from.) Since I recorded all the temperature data, I don’t have to rely on memory. And you’ll be excited to know that I’m doing the same thing this time too.

So until I can put two coherent thoughts together (this seems to be a lucid period), I will only occasionally be trying to catch up with comments!

So how *much* of our generally 49 inches of annual rainfall is received as the result of the remnants of Atlantic tropical storms?

On an annual basis, in the last 16 years, anywhere from 0%(6 years) to around 3-7% (5 years) to 8-18% (4 years). 2004 (NOT the year of Katrina, 2005, when we got 0%) heads the list with a whopping 32% of rainfall coming in the form of *four* named tropical storm remnants passing through our area within six weeks. All of this strikes me as ecologically significant, despite the fact that our closest distance from the two relevant coasts is 300 miles.

Click on the figure for a larger version (wonderful png files are not big):


The above figure shows daily rainfalls in blue lines from 1991 to the present. The yellow circles at the top of certain rainfalls indicate tropical storm derived rainfall. The red circles indicate amounts above 3" that cannot be attributed to tropical storms. The fading red rectangles indicate hurricane season.

The numbers at the bottom indicate rainfall, in inches, due to tropical storms, divided by total annual rainfall for that year, as well as the percent.

I laboriously typed in rainfall amounts for rain days between 1991 and 2007 using the info at this site, my usual for mining this kind of data. I used the wonderful Unisys Atlantic Tropical Storm website to peg storms that meandered within a reasonable distance of us. I compared the dates of closest approach to dates of clustered rainfall to determine how much was due to tropical storms. It might be an overestimate in some cases, but not much of one. The correspondence is very close when it’s clear that tropical storms have an influence on us.

First, we got no rainfall from tropical storms in the cluster of years from at least 1991 through 1993.

Second, there are certainly heavy rainfalls during a single day (ten events in the last 16 years) above 3" of rain that have nothing to do with named tropical storms.

Third, and I haven’t really analyzed this, but you can see it in the paucity of blue regions at the bottom of the plot, there are periods of up to 3-4 weeks without any rainfall at all, or very little. No surprise, but in all those months of data, there’s no full month that doesn’t have at least *some* rainfall, perhaps only 0.1 inches, but at least *some*. One of the problems with artificially grouping rainfall in a category like “month”. It just turned out that such periods never straddled a full month though there were periods longer than a month where there wasn’t any rain. The period from 1998 through 2001 is one such period of way substantial drought - that was the 3-year La Nina.

Once again, I point out that remarkable 4-remnant series in the late summer and early autumn of 2004 - Bonnie, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne, delivering a total of 13.65 estimated inches of rain, 1/3 of our total for that year. Without that input we’d have had less than 30 inches of rain, which would be close to unprecedented, approached only in 1954 with 28.31 inches of rain.

In a trip down memory lane, I went through the early posts in the month of September 2004, just after I started this blog. They’re fun to read. At least three of the treefalls I’ve described in the last two years can be attributed to Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne.

Because I think everyone should know how to spell “miscellaneous”.

A walk along Goulding Creek yesterday yielded these tracks, which are canine and probably coyote. The sand thrown up by last week’s flood is yielding a very nice selection of all sorts of tracks, but no bobcat yet!


Little spring azures are fairly abundant now, and this one was taking advantage of the exposed rocks along Sparkleberrysprings Creek. It was almost exactly a year ago, minus four days, that I presented a better photograph of one. They’re very nervous.


It wasn’t the first butterfly of the season. That one came on Saturday afternoon as we were sitting out on the front deck, and what was probably a Satyr Comma appeared on the Carolina Jessamine:


Yes, I know, you might know the plant under any number of other common names - “jasmine” in particular seems to have derived as a corruption of “jessamine” (and as Glenn pointed out, deliberately amplified by the horticulture industry). That’s why it’s important to know that it’s really Gelsemium sempervirens.

The Comma wasn’t particularly interested in the buds but did appear to be lapping up condensate from the leaves. The camera, unfortunately, was inside charging but the lep kept at it, so after a few minutes I gave up and went inside to put the camera back together. Of course, then it flew away and did not return.

Not photographed well enough yesterday were a robin with one leg and several encounters with Carolina wrens. Robins are *not* harbingers of spring here. They appear in abundance in early to mid-winter, and hang around through spring, then seem to fade into the background. Carolina wrens are omnipresent around the house, but I also see them quite frequently on hikes around the creek banks, where they’re constantly investigating nooks and crannies along the creeks.

At any rate, spring is coming, though with our last couple of subfreezing nights, you might be skeptical.

Thanks to FC and Bev, who have offered suggestions in comments on the matter of nets for sampling for benthic invertebrates. All this time, I’ve been using an old collander for sifting scooped-up gravel . It picks up the larger invertebrates, like caddisfly cases (and take a look at Bev’s very nice case photos) but isn’t very good at consistent sampling and probably lets a lot of smaller invertebrates through. It does retain the rocks upon which tiny mussels might be attached.

And now, a question: how much of our rain during the months of June through October do you suppose is attributable to hurricane remnants blowing through? We’re at closest 300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean on the southeast, and from the Gulf of Mexico south.

(For locals for whom this information should be on the tips of their tongues - how much rain do we get a month, on average?)

On Friday I posted a few pics of the creeks in flood after our little 10-year rain. Yesterday, 24 hours later, I surveyed the same areas. Normal? Or not? That’s the question. Clearly this is not a frequent occurrence, but on the other hand the creek bed seems reasonably designed to handle it. I can only sympathize with the myriads of organisms who did not have a good day. So, to begin trying to answer these questions:

Recall, if you wish, that Sparkleberrysprings Creek (featured later) is a smaller stream that flows through the hollow, or crease, of our property, and eventually joins Goulding Creek, a larger tributary. The map in the right sidebar will help.

For comparison, here’s that composite of Goulding Creek three weeks ago and on Friday (right). Even with this much flow, the volume of water fits neatly into the creek bed (albeit 5-6 feet higher).


And here’s the same portion of the creek yesterday, on Saturday.


The creek has gone down quite a lot in 24 hours. It’s still higher than normal (although in the last five or so years “normal” has been decidedly subnormal, at least to my possibly faulty memory. Indeed, what you see above is what my memory informs me it looked like all the time (minus the event-associated red clay color), up until five or seven years ago). Two things strike me here, the left bank and the right bank, which together show two forms of erosion and deposition going on.

It’s a little easier to see here. This is the creek, a bit upstream from the previous set and looking downstream. It’s on Friday morning, at the maximum level that I encountered it. Again, the bank of deposited sand, *this time* it’s on the near side. And the steep bank, without a 5-10 foot intermediate shelf, is on the far side.


Here it is on Saturday morning.

It’s pretty clear that I missed the most dramatic period of water height, since all that sand was deposited on the near bank before I arrived on Friday. It’s at least a foot of sand, and it now lies atop the plant community that grew on this intermediate shelf. That plant community consisted of quite a variety of sedges, grasses, mints, and crownbeard. How much this represents destruction and how much it represents a building process isn’t clear, but it will be interesting over the next few months to see which plants emerge from under a foot of deposited sand, and which are started afresh from seed carried down with the sand. The far bank in this stretch is quite different (refer to the above two photos). There is no intermediate shelf that stretches back from the creek. Rather the creek has carved a vertical sheer wall extending from the creek itself upward five feet to the level that I’m standing on on the near side. So while the flood deposited a foot of sand and debris when there was an intermediate bank shelf available, it eroded the portions of bank where there is no intermediate shelf. I imagine this has to do with the curves the creek takes and the composition of the soil, as this dichotomy on facing banks occurs again and again as you walk the creek.

The same sort of thing went on, on a smaller scale, up Sparkleberrysprings Creek. This was a section with some of the most abundant growth of Leafy Elephant’s Foot, various sedges, many grasses, and Downy Lobelia.


Finally, Troll Rock, as it was three weeks ago. I’ve watched over the last few years as more and more detritus accumulates, and builds up. A young hornbeam and a wild azalea have established themselves atop the rock, and of course there are quite a few ferns and much moss growing on the rock.

There have been times when I’ve been tempted to take a broom and sweep Troll Rock from head to toe.


On Friday morning, the extent of the change was already clear, although I hadn’t realized it until yesterday looking at the photos.


And then by Saturday morning, when things had calmed down a bit, it was apparent that I wasn’t going to have to take a broom to the rock at all.


I need to find out what the procedure is for releasing water from Lake Oglethorpe, 0.8 miles upstream from our front on Goulding Creek. I did discover that the lake was created at least by 1978. We’ve owned the property since 1985 so the dam and lake have been there since before we’ve been observing. This degree of flooding has happened at least twice since the late 70s (and probably a few other times not well indicated by my list of 4.5"-plus rainfall dates). Given that similar flooding occurred along Sparkleberrysprings Creek, without the benefit of a dam and lake above, I see no reason to think that similar levels of flooding could not have occurred along Goulding Creek before there was a dam and lake upstream. So I see no particular reason to blame overflow from Lake Oglethorpe for that.

I do see a reason to view Lake Oglethorpe as responsible for very low downstream creek levels during times of drought, though. Recall that the upper reaches of Goulding Creek above the lake, feed the lake. The residents of the lake area do want their lake full, which is perfectly understandable, and so shut down the outflow as much as possible. They are careful about this, and the fellow VFDer who keeps those adjustments usually inquires of me as to whether there’s a problem. There’s no doubt though that the degree of evaporation from the surface of a 30 hectare lake is much much greater than it would have been from the former creek, and all that gets subtracted from flow downstream of the dam.

What everyone has been waiting for: February’s weather. I figured Thursday’s rain would be on the order of a ten-year-deluge and that opens up a new area of statistical possibilities, but later for that. At any rate, we won’t have to worry about March, much. We already have our rain for the entire month. Just 24 hours earlier and it would have been added to this month!

Here’s the monthly summary of the climate of the month of February 2007, here in Athens and US-wide.

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


Gone are the vast expanses of oranges and reds, especially in the northern midwest. Instead during February the interior of the eastern half of the US was exceptionally cold in February with that remarkable area south of the Great Lakes experiencing up to 10 degF colder temperatures. Must not be any such thing as global warming, eh?

The mountain states, in constrast, were generally above normal in temperatures, with the Pacific states showing similarly little deviation from February averages.

The temperature trends might be low, but at least they’re not overly warm, and along with the precipitation trends seem to parallel the decline in El Nino conditions in the equatorial Pacific. Bev at Burning Silo suggested the possibility that a declining El Nino might predict stronger spring storms, citing the 1982 and 1998 events. This is quite possible.

Much of the northern half of the country, especially toward the west, got higher than average February precipitation. In contrast, the southern half was well below normal in most places. Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


For Athens:

February didn’t seem all that much colder to me here, but the above plot certainly suggests that we were 4-6 degF colder than normal for February. And when it’s cold, we can receive less than normal rainfall and it doesn’t feel that way. The soil stays moist in a way it would not were it June or July, even though there isn’t rain for a week or two. All of this makes sense, of course, it just explains why drought isn’t so much noticed in winter months.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of January, and that begins the year. The red line is the average over 80 years of Februarys, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. The Athens data (2.92 inches) indicates that we ended up well below average , almost below the river of peach that marks one standard standard deviation.


Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of February in Athens. We cycled back and forth between cold and warm several times, with the last week in February remaining warmer than normal. We approached but did not hit the records for cold in the beginning of the month, and for warm several times during the course of the month. As usual, the black dots are for the 15 years 1990-2005 (black dots), 2007 (green line), and 2006 (red line).


In the end we had 6 days during February above the 17-year average for that day. That is not particularly different from the average 4.5 days above average temperatures experienced during February, and parallels the case for January. There were 9 days when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s compared to the 5.5 normal nights. Again, this is similar to what happened to us in January, in contrast to much of the US.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update tells us that sea surface temperature anomalies continue to decrease in the equatorial Pacific, and that this El Nino appears to be at an end. Return to normal or even La Nina conditions (sigh) is expected in the Northern Hemisphere spring.

Strange, that after very nearly and almost two years, I’d use the same phraseology to describe the event.

If you look at that page, you’ll see more drama than I portray here, but that’s because the rain that day came in the early morning hours and the rain yesterday came, well, yesterday. It was clear from the many pics that I took and won’t regale you with that the cresting came sometime in the wee hours last night, and has been subsiding since. That’s one of the characters - flood stage comes fast and disappears quickly.

Still, you can see from the sand on the bank that Sparkleberrysprings Creek was at least a foot higher sometime last night:


Goulding Creek was, as expected, quite the ruffian. Part of this is due to Lake Oglethorpe upstream opening up its overflow, but still. Here’s a side-by-side shot of what it looked like three weeks ago (left), and what it looks like today (right, as if you couldn’t tell).


A little farther up Goulding Creek. Trust me, this is swollen. Notice again, the sand deposited on the right bank. It was even higher than this a bit ago.

The rain went on and on, and by this morning we’d had 4.5" in our rain gauge, over the last 24 hours.

As soon as it lightens up I’ll be off to gather memories on flashcard, but last night we trudged back from the monthly WVFD business meeting through a river:


I see from the records at my favorite weather data site that this is the fourteenth heaviest rain in a record spanning 117 years:

Date	inches
Mar 1 2007	4.5
Apr 25 1945	4.70
May 26 1959	5.47
May 28 1973	4.48
Jun 4 1967	9.93
Jun 26 1963	5.16
Jun 27 1994	7.34
Aug 13 1940	4.80
Aug 24 1908	4.82
Aug 25 1908	5.60
Sep 25 1956	5.34
Oct 1 1989	5.43
Oct 19 1937	5.40
Oct 25 1913	5.20

One can only imagine what Jun 4 1967 was like, with over nine inches, or the two consecutive days in 1908 with a total of over ten inches. Since we’ve been here there’s been an even heavier rainfall, in 1994, with more than seven inches. I’m sure I must have noticed it, but there was no blog then to record it for posterity.

By the way, I notice that the National Climate Data Center has a fairly extensive listing for free data downloads. I see Rome there, 1971-2000. Not the ideal coverage, but better than nothing! (This isn’t to belittle the efforts of those who collect data, but maybe someone could explain in a simple way for me why the US Government should charge us twice for complete data!)

Tom surveyed the little collection, and sighed. He glanced at the pail of whitewash. Location location location! He wished some of his buddies were around, but they, perhaps sensing one of Tom’s odd little tricks coming on, had wisely decamped.



A few hours later, Aunt Polly emerged from the house like a banshee, long hair pulled into a screaming bun at the top of her head. Tom studied the quivering mass uneasily, and stepped back a bit.



“You Tom!” The white bun screeched. “I love you like you had a quarter of my chromosomes, young Tom, but you’ll be the death of me yet.”

“You’ve used more'n an inch of my patent latex paint and you’re not even Al Gore. Not that he’d care, the hypocritical scumbag, but you’ll make me Mizzurra’s right wing talking point yet. They’re gonna be all over my butt, afore you can say swiftboat.”

Tom backed off yet another step - Aunt Polly could be a little strange at times.

“Don’t worry, Aunt,” he said. “You’re not running for office.”

What *was* Tom thinking?