The First Annual Blogger Bioblitz is now over, after up to 9 days of observing, recording, counting, and writing. I have at least one more post to go up, but probably not today, and then it’s time to sit down and fill in the spreadsheets.

I think it went very well, judging from the blogs and the google discussion group, and the photographs that went up on Flickr.

And there seemed to be good interaction resulting in help in identifying species by those who know for those who didn’t. I certainly benefitted from suggestions and identifications made by several folks.

It was sufficiently laid back and open-ended that it was easy to fulfill at my own pace, which didn’t quite rise to the level of my own plans.

I didn’t, for example, do much in the way of counting. When you find two representatives of a species of jumping spider, and they’re located 300 feet from each other, how do you estimate the numbers in an acre-sized area?

I also neglected photography, at least, of whole swaths of animal phyla and avian and mammalian classes. Part of this was the time of year, perhaps, and the state of our weather right now (hot and dry). It’s certainly a part of it, for the weather to turn out to limit numbers and species of organisms observed, and it could be completely different next year.

But if there were a change to be made, I think it might be good to reconsider the time and timing of the event: First, it might have been a bit early for folks much farther north of us.

Second, though no expectations were held on what people had to do, or how many days they had to participate, the event strung out for nine consecutive days (April 21-29) was relentless. I can see how it might have been intimidating to contemplate.

I see two possible solutions that could address both of the above problems:Keep the consecutive days, but start later. Maybe May 1. Or,

If it must be chained to National Wildlife Week, beginning in mid to late April (and it seems to me that the National Wildlife Federation didn’t exactly go out of its way to welcome and promote the Bioblitz), then start then, but have it only on four sequential weekends, Saturday and Sunday. This would allow Mon-Fri for reflection and writing, and lengthen the period from a week to a month that participants could observe changes in their site(s).

These problems, if that’s what they are, were very minor to me, but may have been larger to others. Otherwise the whole thing went off very well indeed, and caused me to plan and write and record and think in a different sort of way.

Just a quick and dirty - I *almost* took the telephoto down this morning, and then decided *naaah*. Which was probably for the best anyway, since the insect photos would have sucked.

In any case, we do have animals here. A quick walk to Goulding Creek:

Sudden Scarlet Tanager. He was 40 feet up in a Tulip Poplar but at least he was on the *other* side of the morning sun from me. How red he is! We see Summer Tanagers frequently, but a Scarlet in full red is a rare sight, at least for me. He’s on his way to friendlier, cooler climes to breed.





A red bug. I will have to add the proper identification later. He was very coy - playing hide and seek between the grass blade.


Again, proper id later, but it’s certainly one of the two or three skippers I know.


Waiting for breakfast, a robber fly of some sort.

Part 1

Saturday was Day 8 of the Blogger Bioblitz. After 3 days of relative inactivity, I decamped to the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, with my friend of 30 years, Bill Thompson, for a several hour hike through the nature trails.

You can find a little history of the Bot Gardens here, and even Wikipedia has an entry, in which it lists the formal gardens. That entry is somewhat out of date, looks like. The International Gardens are fascinating and occupy a huge landscape well constructed with winding paths, bridges, and even an impressive artificial stream that feeds a large carnivorous plant bog on its way to a water plants garden. However the mentioned Rhododendron Collection and Rose Garden have fallen into considerable disrepair, in fact that entire area, which includes the Annual and Perennial Garden looks like a stepchild in thrall to a wicked stepmother - nothing has been done with it in quite some time. We spurned the usual target of most people - the Conservatory and the gardens surrounding, but did make our way through the Shade Garden, which has an impressive collection of viburnums, azaleas, and magnolias. And we passed through the Native Plants Garden, which has an equally impressive collection of trilliums, solomon’s seal, lilies and other natives. I won’t be including those in my ultimate list, as those weren’t things we saw on the woods hike. Indeed, I won’t be including anything observed that I or anyone else has planted, regardless of where it comes from.

We joined the White Trail, which is the most extensive and variable of habitat, at the bottom near the Middle Oconee River:


At this point, 8:00 AM, there were several birders wandering about, but for plant people, the trail along the river isn’t the most interesting. Privet (Ligustrum sinense) abounds, and there are aggressive efforts in several large areas to remove it. Poison ivy is extensive along the trail, which doesn’t bother me at all. Microstegium can be seen coming up here and there. However there are some very nice, very large Box Elder trees (Acer negundo) overlooking the river, and I noticed extensive populations of Crownbeard (Verbesina occidentalis) emerging from the areas where the privet eradication efforts are underway.

The river part of the trail beelines along the bank for about half a mile, and then abruptly moves steeply upward into higher elevations. Vaccinium, which as Sparkleberry (V. arboreum), abounds on the sides of the trail, and was in flower. Several unknown plants were observed that I still need to identify. It was here that I began to see Northern Red Oaks, White Oaks, Scarlet Oaks, and Black Oaks that were in full leaf, unmarked by the early April cold spell. As we made our way up and down it became clear that low elevations were affected; higher elevations were not. (Of course, at home, all elevations were affected.)

One oddity that I still haven’t figured out was a short stretch of Hophornbeam, Ostrya virginiana, that had these weird clusters of dense growth high up in the branches. It reminded me of mistletoe, but it wasn’t that, it’s just how it clustered. It could be the result of growth after the cold snap, but the trees did not otherwise seem to have been affected by the cold. A plant parasite? If anyone has an idea, let me know. It was only in the Hophornbeams that we saw this.
(Glenn says plant tumors. This is possible. Plant tumors can put out dense aggregates of otherwise normal vegetative growth.)


Here and there were little patches of Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens), poking up through the leaves. And while this was (probably unintended) in the Native Plants Garden, I also saw it fruiting in the woods. We’re still not sure what it is, and comments are welcome (last two thumbnails).

UPDATE: In comments, Steve K. identified it as Viola tripartita, and it certainly looks like it. Thanks for that!


There was one section of the trail, down low near a small creek, with all these blue flags around - dozens of them (first thumbnail). After some examination it was clear that they were all marking Wild Geraniums (Geranium maculatum), second thumbnail. We do have a colleague who has a particular interest in Wild Geranium flower structure and genetics, and it is quite possible that she has marked this population.

The second pair of thumbnails were of a single discovered specimen of Alumroot (Heuchera americana). I was rather pleased to have spotted this.


We’re no more than halfway through the hike, and about to emerge from the woods onto a broad powerline cut.


It could be considered intrusive, but I really don’t mind that much. In the past the cutting beneath this line was extensive and frequent and that *was* intrusive. More recently the power company has been more cooperative, cutting less frequently and harshly, and so there’s quite an interesting array of plants in one of the sunnier areas along the trail. In fact it was here that we found our only insect on the entire hike, a Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia), and a first for me.


Although animals were seldom seen (we did flush one Great Horned Owl who skimmed off silently through the woods, and a couple of Gray Squirrels) there were the periodic interruptions of joggers. These were very serious exercisers, complete with medical devices pasted all over their bodies, and were by now quite deep into the woods, so you know they were serious. I’m of slightly two minds about this - on the one hand, I’m certainly glad they’re enjoying the woods, although clearly to virtually no extent at all - they’d never have stopped for anything. On the other hand they surely drove ten miles to run, and they did kind of shove you off the path. With one exception, the guy who came upon us suddenly and veered off the path himself, crashing through the plants and squashing who knows what.

More later.

Unfortunately a couple of Very Important Projects and an Emergency Situation came up over the last couple of days and interfered with getting out and doing stuff. Of course after I dealt with them they turned out to be Not Very Important and hardly an Emergency. Someday I’ll learn to defer action until I’ve been asked twice, thereby requiring Proof of Significance.

And, too, the promised storms and rain of Thursday never materialized. We had, literally, only a few drops, not even enough to wet the ground. That was very disappointing.

But this morning I’ll be going out to the State Botanical Garden to hike around for a few hours.

I have been listening to birds in the home area, and continue to hear pileated woodpeckers and great crested flycatchers off in the woods. And yesterday I saw briefly a Rose-breasted Grosbeak investigating the feeder, a first here.

I’m still trying to figure out the salamanders, and I’m not sure what I’ll do on the excel sheet except get down to family level, I suppose. Here’s a couple of aquatic individuals found on two separate days in two parts of SBS Creek. Not very good pictures but they do show the zigzag-like tail:




Actually it looks like it might be an Ocoee Salamander, one of the Duskies, Desmognathus ocoee. This Discover Life page shows a photograph of a similar salamander, and give the range with its southernmost point just two counties north of us. The SREL page also shows a photo of an individual with a similar tail pattern.

At this midway point, I took the day off. If there is to be a post today it will come later in the afternoon.

In the meantime:

Laura, Somewhereinnj gave me a good laugh last night by quoting and reminding me of the Ultimate Curmudgeoness, Dorothy Parker, when she said of spring:"Every year back spring comes, with nasty little birds, yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants." - Dorothy Parker
To which I might add, heard somewhere, but appreciated in the same twisted sense:"You know spring is here 'cause the saps are running." - unknown, but not me. I merely promulgate.
I’ve had quite a bit of help from Bev of Burning Silo and her friend David Shorthouse of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta in the matter of identification of spiders. This has been quite a nice interaction and many thanks to both. I will be shortly making some corrections and attributions in the posts of the last few days.

Tuesday was Day 4 of the Blogger Bioblitz. I’ve been guided a fair amount by what I see in the blog posts of others during the Bioblitz period. While I’m keeping my records of various things seen and heard, not all of it (by far) makes it into my own blog posts. And I’ve chosen, for my own selfish reasons, to zero in on small areas in this relatively small piece of property, as much to do a survey of a small area as anything else. I’m considering making a trip to the UGA State Botanical Gardens and taking a hike through the various trails to get a look at something else in the area. It’s not that we’re impoverished, by any means, but what we see here is only the teeny tiniest part of what’s really out there, even in the small region around Athens, GA.

Yesterday was more or less a hike up Sparkleberrysprings Creek, but as it turns out most of my observations and photos were centered in the rectangle designated Bioblitz Day 4 on the following map:


Since the stream flows to the upper left on the map, this is obviously somewhat uphill from the Goulding Creek and Mayapple Forest sites of the last three days, but it isn’t much higher in elevation. However the area around the creek is wetter than Mayapple Forest, and the entire site, with a few exceptions, is more closed in by a canopy than Goulding Creek, and therefore much shadier. Here’s what the site looked like last December when I took a panoramic view of this area:


It’s far more closed in now than it was in December, even with the unfortunate dropping of the White Oak leaves earlier in the month.




Now - birds. I haven’t done much photography of birds and need to take a day to concentrate on that. I’ve been listening, but my listening skills are hit and miss. I’m enjoying the Barred Owls, which I’m *finally* hearing now, thank goodness. And the Great Crested Flycatchers have arrived in the last few days, so I’ve been enjoying their “phweep! phweep!” calls as they sing their fool heads off. Our Eastern Phoebes are all over the place, and of course there’s the Red-tailed Hawks that are a permanent fixture here. One of the problems is that except for the nutty Carolina Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, Carolina Wrens, and Cardinals, birds in a rural environment, if I may generalize, are far shyer than when they’re in generous urban surroundings. Thus I see Bluejays, of all things, only at a distance, and they flee when they catch sight of me. Mourning Doves are calling, and I hear Pileated Woodpeckers and Red-bellied Woodpeckers all the time. Turkey Vultures are a common sight way above, as are Crows moving through the area. Whippoorwills have been calling in the early morning and late evening, but no Chuck-will’s Widows as yet - they will come later. I’ve seen American Goldfinches, already in their bright yellow garb, and the occasional warbler, but what it may be eludes me.

Yesterday’s Plantae:

The canopy in this area is defined by several species of large trees. Most dramatic are the six large and old American Beeches (Fagus grandifolia) that I’ve written about before. This is also part of the upper half of SBS Creek where the odd shaggy White Oaks (Quercus alba) are situated, and there are some large and old Tulip Polars (Liriodendron tulipifera) as well. Quite a few Northern Red Oaks (Quercus rubra) complete the upper canopy, and when all are in full leaf it is a very shady, moist area indeed.

Lower canopy consists of shrubs a few feet to 10-20 feet high: Painted Buckeyes (Aesculus sylvatica), which I’ve mentioned before, abound all along this stretch of hollow. Pink Azalea (Rhododendron periclymenoides) is abundant along the creek itself. Flowering dogwoods (Cornus florida) and Eastern Redbuds (Cercis canadensis) are frequent lower canopy trees. And then we have the occasional Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum), and there is another small patch of Smallflower Pawpaw (Asimina parviflora).

Some examples of understory forbs that I ran across yesterday, and I must augment this collection in a more detailed survey. From left to right, row 1:
First two thumbnails: When Glenn saw this, he said “What are shamrocks doing here?”. Well, ok. They’re Violet Woodsorrel (Oxalis violacea), and they’re in flower though declining now. Unlike a lot of oxalis, they have purple flowers and relatively broad trifoliate leaves (there might be a tetrafoliate lucky leaf somewhere in there, I suppose). They are particularly happy along the banks of the stream, but also can be found in drier, upper sites. This was a patch of several hundred. The leaves can be bright green like this, but they can also be a darker green shot through with gray highlights. They’ll disappear in a few weeks, and so they are a real spring ephemeral. I’ve transplanted some - they have wonderful tuberous roots that make this ideal - and they do well for a year or so, but they seem to be very picky about where they live and if they don’t like it, they’re gone after that.

The third panel is a thumbnail of Uvularia sessilifolia, or Sessileleaf Bellflower. Yesterday I presented a photograph of a related plant, Uvularia perfoliata, Perfoliate Bellflower. The way the leaves are simply attached without a petiole, or clasp around the stem, respectively, tells you what they are. And that’s the value of meaningful specific epithets: “sessilifolia - attached to the stem directly, without a petiole; and ”perfoliata" - clasping around the stem.


These three panels here are of Prenanthes, or, generally Rattlesnakeroot. I noticed these many years ago, and it took quite a few years until I figured out what they are. I think these are probably all Prenanthes trifoliata, or Gall of the Earth. But Georgia does hold 5-8 of the 18 US natives, so one or more could be something else. They dot the landscape with their emergent two or three leaves that never get any more abundant. They’re one of those curious examples of plants that I’ve never seen in flower at this site. I’ve transplanted some around the house and they produce rather nice sprays of brown-greenish flowers there, very late in the summer, but never where I find them. Deer? Too shady? Who knows.

The leaves are extremely variable, and so that’s why I present three thumbnails, to show that variability.


Animalia:

The event of the day was what is probably Twinflagged Jumping Spider, or a near relation, Anasaitis canosa. Thanks to Bev and to David Shorthouse for their input to this identification.


I found the above individual high above the creek cavorting about the leaf litter, and we had a merry time playing hide and seek. But a little later, 500 feet away, I found a second individual of the same species right at the creek bank. A couple of extra thumbnails here:


Another merry wanderer was what I think is close to Forest Wolf Spider (Gladicosa gulosa), which I chased around the leaf litter near the creek. These were the best photos I could get:


Wandering about the upper slope above the creek was this easily recognized true bug, Largus succintus, sometimes called Red Bug, or Largus Bug.


And just above the creek, and certainly NOT in an orchard, was a web spun by what I’m calling Orchard Webweaver, Leucauge venusta. Quite a medley of colors, this is a “large-jawed spider”, and is in the same general group as the tiny translucent spiders I found under the buckeye leaves at the Mayapple Forest yesterday.


Last but not least, or at least not insignificantly, and not at this site at all but crawling on the front deck, was this Forest Tent Caterpillar, Malacosoma disstria. Now we have lots of Eastern Tent Caterpillars, the related M. americanum, but this is the first time I’ve seen this one. They’re both native, but bad citizens, thugs, and do cause a lot of damage to plants. One interesting thing I learned is that the population of Sarcophage Flies explodes during the time these make their appearance. Flesh-eating Flies of this family deposit their eggs in insects, and apparently some like Tent Caterpillars. After scanning some of the Bugguide photos and info on sarcophage flies, I need to re-evaluate the “first Tachinid fly” I found down to Goulding Creek a few days ago - it looks like (eyes wide apart) it may be a Sarcophaga.

Monday was Day 3 of the Blogger Bioblitz. Monday was also a full day of work so I only had an hour or so to check back to the previous two sites surveyed on Saturday and Sunday. After reading through all the fabulous reports on insects elsewhere, I decided to check more closely on our own. It’s surprising how few there are to be obviously seen, and I had to look closely.

At the Goulding Creek site I saw a ladybug, not pictured, and this fine wasp. At least I think it is a wasp. Its antennae seem a bit too long for a fly. But on the other hand there’s a flylike way the way its head is screwed onto its body. I haven’t had time to scan through Bugguide for its identity, and that’s unfortunately true for the presumptive tachinid fly and spiders below. So if you have clues, please mention them! Both the ladybug and this fellow were prowling about on the young Crownbeard (Verbesina occidentalis) which has in previous years also been the site of unidentified insects.

Also on the Crownbeard was this nervous little fly, which I presume is my second Tachinid of the blitz:


It was very nervous about the flash. Odd, since most insects don’t pay much attention to it, but it responded and flew so quickly that many of the photos were simply blurs. Here’s a few thumbnails showing a few profiles. It certainly was interested in that frass, coming back to it again and again.

Back to the Mayapple Forest, and spiders! But first, a plant - this is Perfoliate Bellwort, I think - Uvularia perfoliata. It’s a monocot, ostensibly in the Liliaceae, but that family has been broken up and that might have changed. Georgia is lucky enough to have all the Bellworts, and this one is easily recognized by its long, ovate clasping leaves. The flower, as befits its name, is an elongated, yellow, bellshaped one. Most of the plants I’ve presented here are flowerless, but that’s the consequence of conforming to a certain time period for a survey of as many plants as I can find. Ordinarily I’d choose the time, and like everyone else, that would be when a plant is in flower. There’s something of a skill in looking at a flowerless plant and trying to guess its identity, but that situation is something we all encounter 95% of the time. So there’s some value in pointing out the vegetative features that orient one to a plant

There are remarkably few obvious insects in the Mayapple Forest, and little indication that anyone has been doing any chewing. Turning over the leaves of Pawpaws, Wild Geraniums, and Mayapples netted nothing. But on the undersurfaces of the leaves of many of the Painted Buckeyes were these tiny spiders, which I presume are a Flower Spider of some kind. They were translucent, very small - less than 5mm body length, and they did build a web of straight, uncrosslinked strands that they scooted under, between the bottom of the leaf and the web itself. Interesting that they only inhabited the buckeyes - I found none on the other plants in the area. I present a number of thumbnails below the photograph here.

Last but not least, and emerging in a messy web between buckeyes, spiderlings!

I spent too much time on writing up Saturday’s results on Sunday, so didn’t give this the attention it deserves. I may go back especially if the weather changes.

The site I visited on Day 2 of the Blogger Bioblitz was what I call Mayapple Forest. We actually have four sites on the property, two rather small and two quite large, where Mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) grow. This is one of the large ones.

Here’s a map of the area. Mayapple Forest is just a 300-foot walk up that roadcut from the Goulding Creek site I surveyed yesterday:


Here are photographs of the site itself, and because of the large volume of pictures, these are thumbnails. You can get a larger image, in a new window, by clicking on a thumbnail.

From left to right:
Walking from the west, from the relatively open floodplain, you walk into a much more canopied area. The roadcut is obvious, though it certainly doesn’t look fresh. On the left is a dry creek, and then a 4 to 6 foot terrace.

A little farther into the forest, and the aforementioned dry creek.

Up the terrace on the left, and there’s all the Mayapples!


The upper canopy consists of a couple of dozen Northern Red Oaks, Quercus rubra, with a couple of Tulip Poplars thrown in. Six of the red oaks are over 2 feet in diameter with the rest at least a foot in diameter. Up to this year they have provided the moderately deep shade that this area enjoys.

This year may be different. The cold snap I analyzed a few days ago resulted in the loss of leaves from nearly all the Northern Red Oaks, White Oaks, Post Oaks, and Blackjack Oaks. There is no evidence yet of regeneration, and this is how much of the canopy throughout this thousand foot hollow looks. I have a request into a forestry neighbor on his take on this, and what he predicts. I can’t imagine this being the status quo until next year, or worse.



Again, I’m going to have to delay the rest of the post until after noon, sometime.

UPDATE:

News from the forestry scientist neighbor of ours: He’s been watching that too, and added that blueberries were devastated as well. He does say that the affected trees should put out another crop of leaves, but may be delayed because of our extremely dry weather. MarkP in comments a few posts below (and recall he’s about a hundred miles northwest of here) had been observing all this stuff, and reflected my concern that he hadn’t seen any leaves re-emerging on oaks in his area either. I suppose we shall wait and watch. Thanks, John!

Animalia. Animalia was scarce on Sunday, at least in this area. Part of the problem is that I was taken up with the plants, and the other part is that despite a decent recent rain, it’s still terribly dry around here. I doubt if that’s going to change much through the rest of this week.

As always, though, Eastern Tiger Swallowtails waft through on their way to parties elsewhere. This pair was actually in midair, and so the photo was a catch as you can sort of thing. Females can have a dark form, and I presume that’s what’s going on here, though for all I know it could be some kind of interspecies trucking.


Plantae, though, in this area, are fairly diverse, though individuals of each species may not necessarily be abundant. The most populous of three or four species tend to occur together, according to our resident Geranium maculatum expert, and so I have included them together. They comprise the understory shrubs and forbs:
From left to right, first row:
The Mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) will be gone in a month or so, and are for the most part past flowering, but here is one hanging on. Each plant in its second year produces one flower. You know it’s in its second year because it has *two* large leaves, rather than one.

Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum is not always so abundant but seems to do well wherever Mayapples are.

And Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) is to be found on the ground, and if it’s lucky, creeping up through the trees.

Overlooking all this are the intermediate shrubs, Painted Buckeye (Aesculus sylvatica). And they really are past flowering. One of the first understory shrubs to flower around here, and offer returning hummingbirds something fresh and homemade.



The painted buckeye and poison ivy above are to be found elsewhere, of course and so are two ferns:
Christmas Fern, Polystichum acrostichoides, is very abundant, and produces large masses of outgrowths in shady or semishady, reasonably moist areas.

Similarly for the much smaller Botrychium virginianum, Grapefern, or as it is sometimes called, Rattlesnake Fern. This one is producing a fertile leaf, which will not do photosynthesis but rather will make spores.

This unknown species of Viola, which is quite a good citizen and produces these frosty, somewhat variegated leaves, has already flowered. Unlike the above, we tend to find this one only in the Mayapple Forest. If anyone knows what it is, please let us know!

The pretty little white flower is of an iris, “Blue-eyed Grass”, Sisyrhinchium angustifolium, probably. Mostly the flower is blue, and can be found along the creek banks in the shade. This one happens to be white, though.


Finally, at the lower end of Mayapple Forest is a Pawpaw Patch. This is Dwarf Pawpaw, Asimina parviflora, aka Smallflower Pawpaw. This is not the cultivated species, A. triloba, but did survive the cold snap whereas our planted cultivars lost all their leaves and flowers. This colony appears to all be clones, and therefore infertile with each other, but we talked about that a couple of years ago when I did some cross pollinations.


That was Sunday. Today, Monday Day 3, I revisted the Saturday and Sunday sites checking for insects. That will have to wait for tomorrow.

Quite a number of photographs going up at the National Wildlife Week Flickr Pool. Look through them while I’m writing this post.

Back again!

I’m going to write this in bits and pieces during the morning. Here’s the site I chose to begin Day 1 with, the lowest point on our property, Goulding Creek. It’s in need of survey throughout the year, and particularly now since it was the area most affected by the Great Flood of 2007. That link is a second posting of the aftermath and refers to the initial post of March 2, when the flood was raging.

The point isn’t to belabor the flood, but to remind everyone that it suggested great changes in this area. Large amounts of sand were cast up on parts of the banks, and considerable erosion washed away a great many organisms. The creek bottom was scoured clean of silt and debris that had been collecting for years. And so it seems reasonably to begin the bioblitz with this survey.

Here’s a map of the area:


I centered myself on a point where an old roadcut intersects Goulding Creek. Goodness knows how long it’s been since that roadcut, which meanders uphill to a point just south of the house, was made, but its effects and existence are still evident. I surveyed along the east and west banks about 20 feet on either side, examining the bank itself which is the start of the floodplain that I did not examine. And I waded up and down the Creek about 20-30 feet.

Here are photographs of the site itself, and because of the large volume of pictures, these are thumbnails. You can get a larger image, in a new window, by clicking on a thumbnail.

From left to right:
View west, across the intersection of Goulding Creek with the roadcut and onto the other side. Several large trees have fallen over the years, creating a blockage and several sand islands that often sport considerable interesting growth. The area on this side of that point is full of large rocks that themselves are a substrate for some small interesting things.

View east, along the roadcut and into the floodplain.

View northeast, upstream along the east bank of the Creek. This is one area where large amounts of sand have accumulated. Years ago, we called this area Goulding Beach, but hasn’t deserved its name in a long time. Now it does, again.

View south and downstream. The left bank is relatively high, about 10 feet above stream level, which is why we call it Goulding Cliffs.


Next up, Animalia! As a teaser, here’s arguably the best find of the day, which I will post in its entirety. It’s a Twin-spotted Spiketail, I think, Cordulegaster maculata - an Odonata, of course. There were several of these flitting about the roadcut depression, and one landed on an Allium (wild onion) long enough to show off its very startling, pretty blue eyes. A first for me.


Animalia! The Animalia were not really cooperating, I’m afraid, other than the exciting dragonfly above. I did a little rock turning, and heard but did not see, a great many birds. I’m afraid birds are likely to get the short end of this deal from me, unless they come right up and beg me to take their picture. There were several nice Turkey Vultures observing me from far above.

From left to right, first row:
Cicindela sexguttata, Six-spotted Tiger Beetles, engaged otherwise on a rock. I’ve been watching these for the last three weeks - they love the hot sand and rocks, but seem now to be thinking about the future. There was a third one of these scurrying about the love nest, trying to get into the action. A very easily observed and identifiable Coleopteran!

Lycosa rabida, I think - Rabid Wolf Spider. Despite the name, these are rather tiny hunting spiders, and I don’t know why anyone would think their bite is dangerous, if indeed they can bite humans. They’re everywhere on the forest floor, in all locations. They scurry aside as you pass, which is fortunate since if they didn’t move you’d never see them. The front pair of black legs, and the double dark striping down the cephalothorax and abdomen are good things to watch out for.

A Tachinid Fly, Order Diptera, Family Tachinidae, possibly Genus Tachina but no amount of scouring through Bugguide helped me to get down to species. No matter - I love finding these guys and netted several equally unspecified individuals last year. They’re all quite different, and if you can get them still, as this one is, resting on a Southern Lady Fern, photogenic. And of course they’re important insect predators, too.
Second row, l-r:A Red-spotted Purple Butterfly, Limentis arthemis form astyanax, with its wings up, which shows the red spotting. There were a half-dozen of these puddling on the moist sands of Goulding Creek. There were also a number of Tiger Swallowtails, but I didn’t get photos of those.

Same species, same individual in fact, but with its wings down.

The sole Chordate, Green Anole, Anolis carolinensis, sporting himself shamelessly. He was a permanent fixture on the branches of a downed black walnut. They’re one of our very few lizard types. Go west, if you want lizards!





Next up, Plantae!

Last, most copiously, but least in the minds of many and yet most importantly as nothing above would exist without it is the diversity of plants. Unfortunately most of these are not flowering, but the ones I present in photograph are abundant at the moment, at least. They dictate the basis of everything that’s here, and the photographs I do present will hopefully be those that serve as identification helpers. Glenn helped to remind me of quite a few of these that I had forgotten and that he has spent a couple of years identifying to species.

First, and with no photographs, the canopy. This section of Goulding Creek is fairly open, with trees that are not very old for the most part. Here’s a list:Black Walnut, Juglans nigra: quite a few of these, and I imagine they exert a fair influence due to alleopathy. Walnuts are probably the best-known example of a plant influencing through their chemical secretions what grows under them. Tomatoes don’t, by the way.

Tulip Poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera: not a large number - we get into those on the floodplain and higher elevations, but there are a few.

Box Elder, Acer negrundo: a fairly important tree in this tiny spot, as it holds in the soil and shades the understory directly along the creek.

Carolina Buckthorn, Frangula caroliniana: Oh well, it’s here. Not in quite the masses we find at higher elevations, but it’s here.

Sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. Same thing - the trees are small down here at Goulding Creek, but ominipresent.

River Birch, Betula nigra: I was pleased to find a single very large tree growing within this zone. There are several others along the smaller creek that runs into this one.

American Sycamore, Platanus occidentalis: a single large tree, and we can probably be grateful for that.

Silverbells, Halesia tetraptera, a new discovery and probably Common Silverbells, eight small trees holding up the banks of Goulding Creek.
That’s the upper to medium canopy in this spot, and it surely changes as you move away from Goulding Creek. Here’s what we find growing closer to the ground right now:

Lower Plants: These are some of the seedless vascular plants - fern types, from left to right:
Adder’s Tongue, probably Southern Adder’s Tongue, Ophioglossum pychnostichum. This is more prevalent on the floodplain above the site but some encroachment is found into the Goulding Creek site. A single leaf and then eventually a snakelike fertile leaf make Adder’s Tongue easy to identify.

Netted Chain Fern, Woodwardia areolata. This is fairly common along the creek bank.

Meadow Spikemoss, Selaginella apoda. Barely noticeable down at the very bottom amidst all the higher plants - looks like a moss, but it isn’t.


Then we have the forbs - higher plants, but low to the ground. Among those that are most predominant are some that I haven’t presented here, but have here, two weeks ago. Sweet Cicely Osmorhiza claytonii, and Beaked Corn Salad Valeriana radiata, which are very dominant at the moment in these woods.

A number of grasses, monocots, and sedges are appearing now, and have a great effect on stabilizing soil in this unstable area. Here are two grasses:
Cypress Panicgrass, Dichanthelium dichotomum. I have a feeling that this is an important erosion control plant, especially since as a grass it grows in both shady and sunny locations.

Fowl Mannagrass, Glyceria striata. Grows in considerable profusion, and has very nice drooping flowers and fruits. I wonder if birds like it?

Left to right:


Finally some dicots, and these aren’t nearly as many as we’ve been working on, but they are fairly common. Left to right:
Devil’s Darning Needles, or if you prefer, Virginbower, Clematis virginiana. I was a little surprise to find these growing along the banks of the creek. In the full sun, the leaves are purplish, but in shade they would tend to be green. This is a wandering, climbing plant that you could have a little too much of, but easy to recognize.

Spotted St. Johnswort, Hypericum punctatum. A lovely compact plant, and you can never have too much Hypericum.

Crown-beard, Verbesina occidentalis. And am I glad to see it. I was afraid that it might have been inundated in the flood, since it grows very low on the bank, but these small plants are pushing up through the deposited sand and will come to dominate this area in the next few months.

Two in one: Virginia Creeper babies, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, and some kind of Spleenwort Fern Asplenium species. Virginia Creeper is everywhere, but it never seems to be a problem here (I’ve heard it’s a real pill in other places). Once it starts climbing, it will produce berries beloved by birds, and it certainly helps to stabilize the soil.


I haven’t presented the odd little legume Desmodium, the several mints, nor the sedges or rushes. We’ll just have to understand that they go into the excel file.

Today’s the first day of the Blogger Bioblitz. It’s not by any means to late to get started, either. Do you think I didn’t wait until Bioblitz Eve to begin thinking about what to do today?

Photography isn’t going to be hard, and nor is poking around and keeping my eyes out. I’m even planning on taking a book and just sitting for awhile to see what ambles by. What’s going to be hard in many cases is identification. For that, Bev at Burning Silo has laboriously gathered set up a Links for Identification Page, leading to collections of links. That’s going to be invaluable.

So get your camera charged up and a little notebook, and good luck!

By the way, I know that horseshoe works since immediately after I found it in SBS Creek yesterday, I turned over a rock and found this baby:

She’s cute as a button, isn’t she? I shall call her Thumbelina. I can’t count this little find, since it happened yesterday, but Bev has kindly taken a look at the photos and sent a couple of references that show how complicated identification is going to be. This one was under a rock in midstream, where she’s not supposed to be. Perhaps she’s not one of the burrowing crayfish, which reminds me that I need to set up some pit traps today, or maybe even do a little digging of some burrows. I’m guessing that there are people who can just take one look and know what it is, but I’m not one of them. The dichotomous key (and for South Carolina) is daunting. All those little pleopods (what I call “swimmerets”) seem to hold special significance, with tiny differences amounting to different assignments of species:

Anyone wanna take a guess?

I’m not convinced of my tentative identification of Wednesday’s “Slimy Salamander”, Plethodon glutinosus. Having kicked the habit of not doing so, I spent awhile yesterday kicking over rotten logs and turning over rocks and uncovered three more specimens of the mystery 'mander. This shows more of the patterning and color of the underside:


All three, as was the first one, were found well away from water, and under logs. I couldn’t detect anything I’d have described as slime that can’t be removed from the skin. Then I ran across this page, Caudata Culture, which has numerous photos of the P. glutinosis complex of species and subspecies. Some of these photos, especially of P. savannah and P. kiamichi, both within Georgia, are very close, and not impossibly out of range. And the latter species clearly sports four toes.

The head seems quite large. From the photos, I count 12-13 costal grooves ("ribs", between the front and rear legs). These were 5-6 inches, and as Bev noted, the tail is quite long, as long as the body proper.

The rear legs have four toes (see below), and Discover Life would have me believe that it’s Four-toed Salamander, Hemidactylium scutatum, but I don’t find many photos that resemble it. Most of the colors are way off, tending toward reddish in photos of this species.

Some alternatives:

From Snakes and Frogs, this page shows a Southern Gray-cheeked Salamander (scroll about 1/3 of the way down - the image is quite large), Plethodon metcalfi. Audubon doesn’t mention this species at all. Clemson Experimental Forest herp page refers to P. metcalfi as “Jordan’s Salamander” - in that photo the spotting on the back is much more extensive. Clemson is only a couple of hours drive from here, in Northwest South Carolina. However UGA’s herp page refers to “Jordan’s Salamander” as Plethodon jordani, with a photo that is not very evocative, and has nothing on P. metcalfi. The Clemson site has photos of P. jordani, and they do bear a resemblance to ours. I know UGA and Clemson are rivals, but *silly*!

Another specimen from yesterday:


Then, while walking the creek, I found this large (4-5 inch) salamander under a rock in the water flow of the creek itself:


The remarkable thing is the translucent pink body with indistinct spotting that covers all parts, even the toes. I’m flummoxed by this one, and wonder if it could be an immature of the terrestrial form of the mystery 'mander above?

The toes - none of the pink salamander photos showed the toes perfectly clearly, and if there’s a fourth one, it’s very short:

But not your usual Velvet Ant or Cow Killer, easily recognized by its thick plush fur and large size. This one is quite a bit smaller, less than 5mm, and was scurrying over and under a particular leaf.


This is apparently a velvet ant of the Pseudomethoca genus, rather than the aforementioned Dasymutilla. Velvet ants are, of course, solitary wasps, not ants. Like others in the Mutillidae, the females are wingless, the males are winged. The female lays an egg near a wasp or bee burrow, and the larva invades and consumes the victim’s kids.




NOTE: While the Quantaray 70-300mm telephoto can give superior images to the 28-135mm Sigma workhorse, don’t use flash on auto light setting. It creates a low-contrast, poorly delivered image.

This is one of my selected BioBlitz areas, the floodplain above Goulding Creek. Sometime on Monday, this young tulip poplar was snapped at the top by the gusty winds that day. We had a number of other treefalls, but I found this particularly odd - there seems to be no reason why the tree should have snapped off 15 feet up. Notice that the second growth of leaves had already begun to replace those killed by the cold snap of ten days ago. Too bad!

I have a reluctance to go tearing up and pushing over fallen logs, and really haven’t used that as a way to find and observe organisms. Yesterday, in view of my plans to participate in the upcoming BioBlitz beginning April 21, I decided to get over it. *That* log looked like a good one, so I turned it over:


I’m having to guess a Common Garter Snake, Thamnophis sirtalis, and at about 9 inches long, probably under two years old. It’s the first one I’ve found here, mainly because as a non-log-turnerover, I would have only run across it before.

It wasn’t happy about being picked up, and delivered a little bite, which was not very noticeable. But my students last evening got a bit of a thrill through the photograph, through the eeuuuwwws, especially when I related that I had gotten bitten. I mean, bitten: by a nine-inch garter snake? Pulleeze. “You’re a strange man, Wayne,” said one. Well. I don’t think so.

But what’s that to its immediate left? I didn’t notice that until I’d looked at the photo later, and so it’s quite out of focus:


It may be a Euryurus millipede, also described here at Bugguide.

The second log sheltered this possible Slimy Salamander, Plethodon glutinosus, tentative identification on the basis of photo and range. I didn’t do the best test, to touch it, so can’t confirm that it has the typical mucilage-like slime that you can’t get off your fingers, and which gives it its specific epithet. The white spotting, though, is not so evident in this one as it is in most photos.


Corrections are always welcome!

You’ve heard it before, and it’s always been as I’ve promised: I’m belaboring this particular point for the last time, I’ve milked it for all it’s worth, don’t worry . Though do recall that this blog is intended also for documentation and that I worry things until they’re in shreds, but also hope that others take note of things worth observing.

For those who hang on, here’s something nice:


That’s the first impressions of recovery from March 1 flood that deposited tons of sand atop the banks of Goulding Creek. Grasses, mints, ferns - all coming back, and maybe a few surprises.

Now to the topic at large:

One of the warnings we continuously hear about climate change is that we will witness more extreme events. Most people think of these in terms of devastating hurricanes, droughts, and lethal heat waves. Others, more sophistocated, realize that apparently contrary events can also occur - odd spring blizzards, floods - you know, those events that prompt denialists to cry “so much for global warming”.

I suspect that catastrophe can be subtle, and while I don’t think that the leaf death I’ve posted on in the last two posts will turn out to be a catastrophe, due to the regenerative nature of plants, it was startling. When you see a large population of several species of trees completely die of their spring leaves, and point blankly at the sky, yeah, it’s startling.

On Sunday I posted a meticulous eye-balling of the plants that had and had not succombed to our cold temperatures of April 6-8. While our temperatures were certainly tame compared to those farther north, keep in mind that plants (in particular) are adapted to the places they live, and so however mild our extreme might seem in comparison, it was extreme for us.

So I decided to take a look at the last 17 years of daily spring highs and lows, to determine just *what* might have been so extreme here.

For a portion of the calendar spring months (March through May), here’s a portion of those data to date, for our low temperatures. As usual, the river of peach (and there will be no peaches from Georgia or South Carolina this year, by the way) indicates the average and a single standard deviation above and below the average, for those 17 years from 1991-2007. The black dots are individual dailies.

The plot looks a little complicated because I found three other years in the last 17 that came close to duplicating our events this year, 2007. Ignore them, to start with, but zero in on the red patches inked in above and below the line - those are the high and low extremes for 2007 (click on the image for the full spring sequence, opens in a new page):



While 1992, 1993, and 2003 had low temperatures in and about this period, they were either much earlier, or were NOT accompanied by an unusually long period of extreme warmth prior to the unusual cold. That’s what makes 2007 unusual, and it’s what I hypothesize is responsible for the large oak-leaf death in at least four species, plus a few others.

Here’s a table that summarizes these four years. 2007 is unusual for its much longer period of warmth, encouraging growth, followed by a several-day period of unusually cold temperatures, the catastrophe, I think. But it’s not just the cold nights on April 6-8 (and following) - it’s the unusual 17 days of almost uninterrupted warmth prior to that too, something the other years lack. That’s what I mean by “catastrophe can be subtle.”

Year	Prior Period of Warmth	Subsequent Period of Cold
1992	2 days 18-20 March	2 days 2-4 April
1993	3 days 7-10 March	4 days 12-16 March
2003	13 days 21-29 March 1-5 April	5 days 30-31 Mar 7-11 April
2007	17 days 19 March-5 April	6 days 5-11 April

Only in 2003 was there a similarly long period of warmth, followed by a cold snap, and unfortunately I was not being observant of conditions of plant growth at the time.

I should also note that 1992-1993 followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which resulted in a lot of odd, cooler weather globally.

Here is the similar plot for spring high temperatures, just to be complete, and it is presented similarly to the spring lows above:


In January I presented for our area a comprehensive summary of temperature and precipitation changes over the past 110 years. I noted that winters (Dec-Feb) have increased in warmth over the last 35 years, with spring temperatures increasing secondary to that. It strikes me that even though spring temperatures may not be so spectacularly perturbed as winter temperatures, we may be facing a trend in which increasing warmth during both the winter and spring habituates many species of plants toward being much more susceptible to the common and expected, though unpredictable, cold snaps.

If this is the case for us in the southeast US, I suspect it will be far more the case in the north. More northern plant communities may be more resistant to cold snaps, but perhaps not if they’re preceded by long periods of unusual warmth, warmth that can fool plants.

No, it’s not cold now, but it was last Saturday night - a 120-year low. Today I’ll augment yesterday’s post on the results of that. But first:

Could it miss?

Not this time!

1.6 inches of rain, last night. Everytime I woke up it was raining. Can’t beat that!

Yesterday I put Gene in the house and closed all the doors, in order to do an uninterrupted, leisurely survey of the cold-bitten plants along SBS Creek. Unfortunately Maxwell decided, in a rare moment of companionability, that *he* was going to go too. I hadn’t planned on that. *All* the cats say - oh boy, *let's* go! Then 15 minutes later they realize they’ve overreached and what a ruckus we put up with.


At some point I calculated that a cat must move twice as many legs five times more to cover the distance a biped humanoid travels. That’s ten times as much energy, but of course it’s for an animal that masses less than 1/10 that of said biped. I really don’t think that there’s any reason to have to put up with all these hoots and honks of complaint (for that is Max’s peculiar cat language), but there it is. So it goes.

This is a followup to yesterday’s post. I particularly wanted to see if there was a correlation in White Oak susceptibility that coincided with bark character (you’ll recall that we have some particularly shaggy white oaks). None such was found - all the white oaks were severely affected.

I covered our 1000 feet of SBS Creek, from its southernmost point to its confluence northward at Goulding Creek. I eyeballed trees more than 1.5 feet diameter, for the most part, and determined their condition one week after two nights of 29F and 27F temperatures. I surveyed about a hundred feet one the east side only of the creek, so it’s a very long 2.5 acres, or so.

Severely affected (all leaves dead and brown):

White Oaks (Quercus alba, shaggy): all 19 severely affected
White Oaks (Quercus alba, not shaggy): all 24 severely affected
Red Oaks (Quercus rubra): 19 severely affected, 9 not affected (I may also be including Quercus velutina, Scarlet Oak, here).
Post Oaks (Quercus stellata): all leaves dead
Blackjack Oaks (Quercus marilandica): all leaves dead
Tulip Poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera): 44 severely affected, 37 not affected, 15 variably affected
Redbuds (Cercis canadensis): all leaves dead
Crape Myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica): all leaves dead
Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron radicans): all leaves dead on aerial plants; ground plants not affected
Pipevine (Aristolochia macrophylla): all leaves dead
Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis): all leaves dead
Pawpaw (Asimina triloba, purchased): all leaves and flowers dead.
Princess Tree (Paulownia tomentosa) based on one speciment, all leaves dead. Well, can’t be all bad, then.

Variably affected:

Azaleas (Rhododendron species, which I dassn’t identify on pain of conniption): Flowers dead prematurely. Leaves ok. No, not on the Piedmont Azaleas. Leaves gone.
Serviceberry (Amelancier arborea): Flowers dead prematurely, leaves ok.
Japanese Maples (Acer palmatum): two horticulturals somewhat affected.
Carolina Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens): Leaves certainly aren’t happy.
Crossvine (Bignonia capreolata): Aerial vines show some damage, along with flowers.
Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida): leaves ok, flowers on some plants may be damaged prematurely.

Can’t tell (no leaves yet; flowers may be affected):

Pignut Hickory (Carya glabra)
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra)
Dwarf Pawpaw (Asimina parviflora): leaves not emerged, flowers may be dead.
Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum)
Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia): ground plants ok, aerials not yet producing leaves?

Not affected:

American Beech (Fagus grandifolia)
Hawthorns (Crataegus spp.): at least three species
Southern Crabapple (Malus angustifolia): already flowered, fruit may be affected.
Chinese Crabapple (Malus hupehensis): already flowered, fruit may be affected.
Viburnums (Viburnum spp.): at least three species, one of which is Burkwood horticultural
Black Cherry (Prunus serotina)
River Birch (Betula nigra)
Water Oak (Quercus nigra)
Silky Dogwood (Cornus amomum): by the way, look - a nonfeminine specific epithet!
Boxelder (Acer negundo)
Red Maple (Acer rubrum): and another!
Aesculus pavia (Red Buckeye)
Aesculus parviflora (Bottlebrush Buckeye)
Aesculus sylvatica (Painted Buckeye)
Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua)
Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana)
Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica): Damn!
Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)
Trilliums (Trillium cuneatum and T. catesbei)
Woodvamp (Decumaria barbara)
Shrubby Hypericum (Hypericum prolificum)
Mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum)
Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)
Carolina Buckthorn (Frangia caroliniana): Damn!
Chinese Privet (Ligustrum sinense): Damn!


In addition to the above, I should note that I did not see sticking out like a sore thumb any problems with various ferns, grasses, or other low-lying phorbs.

As I thought about this weather event being a sort of a cusp, it occurred to me that any degree of severity would probably be a cusp for some group of plants. This one though distinguished some plants (Quercus and Liriodendron, particularly) as possibly encompassing degrees of susceptibility. The timing of the event was important too - earlier, and any or all of those plants on the “not affected” list at this time might have been vulnerable a couple of weeks ago.

As I mentioned yesterday, at least for the trees that were affected (white oaks, post and blackjack oaks, some tulip poplars) I doubt if this is a major problem. They have enough energy to put out a new crop of leaves from lower buds - they may look strange (they do now, very sad) as the growing tips will probably be dead. I worry about the pipevine, though, which may have to start all over again from the roots. That would be unfortunate, as I was hoping for Pipevine Swallowtail fodder this year!

Oh look - today is the 900th post!

UPDATE: see the next post for more details.

A few days I suggested that the effects of our cold wave of last Friday and Saturday nights, when the temperatures got down to 29F and 27F respectively, were negligible. The last few days I’ve been evaluating, and drawing conclusions to the contrary.


Now a couple of degrees below freezing is certainly not cold, but for most trees here, leaves were well-out, and flowering occurring in many plants. The cold seems to have been at *just* the right level for noticing differences in susceptibility, even between individuals of the same species.

The other thing about being at this threshhold temperature is that it’s probably variable over the 100-foot elevation differences over the range of the property. So it doesn’t do to compare tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) near the house to those down to the creek, 50-100 feet below. However comparing two trees side by side showed that one on the left was fully damaged while the one just 20 feet to its right was not:


I need to spend some time checking out the White Oaks (Quercus alba), which also showed variable damage, and we already know there are bark structure differences, not that those traits need be correlated:


Similarly the creek population of Rhododendron periclymenoides, Pink Azalea, was in full bloom and I haven’t checked on how well they weathered the cold, but the flowers of R. canescens, Piedmont Azalea, quickly withered and dropped in mid-flowering.

Mostly it’s the oaks that seem to have gotten zapped. Our Blackjack Oaks (Q. marilandica), Post Oaks (Q. stellata), White Oaks, and the couple of specimens of Oglethorpe Oak (Q. oglethorpensis), had their initial leaves all crisped. I wouldn’t have thought the very common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) would have had trouble but they too got severely zapped. Pawpaws (Asimina triloba and A. parviflora) were in midflower, with the former leafing out earlier, and they got zapped.

On the other hand, Dogwoods (Cornus florida), Sweetgums (Liquidambar styraciflua), Hornbeams (Carpinus caroliniana), Beeches (Fagus grandifolia), and various Red Oak group species seem to have had no problems.

Had we not had such warm temperatures so early in March, encouraging early leafing, the cold snap probably would not have had this effect. I admit to being less of an observer in past years, but can’t recall anything quite like this.

In the long run this should probably prove to be no problem, except for the fruit production this year. Already alternative leaf buds are breaking out, so it’s not like it killed the trees. It won’t do the honeybees any good though, if the Tulip Poplar flowers were in the process of forming, since that species is their main honey tree in this area.

I actually didn’t want to write a piece on Kurt Vonnegut, and I still don’t. I’m not certain why, except that his powers of observation and his wit leaves a warm feeling in me that I don’t want to go away. But he died on Tuesday night, and he probably knew he was going to at least a year ago - he was like that.

Yesterday I surfed through the internets and, as usual in cases like this, continually ran across the posts: Kurt Vonnegut, RIP, again and again. RIP? Why couldn’t someone who felt the need to express this sentiment write it out in its entirety - Requiescat in pace, or even just “Rest in Peace”. How nice that would have been, had they taken the time, but no. It's: Kurt Vonnegut, RIP.

Not that Vonnegut would have cared. Vonnegut wanted everyone to say “And now he’s in heaven”, so they could all get a good laugh. And with apologies to Rita Mae Brown, I imagine that Vonnegut might be saying, “Now I’ll *really* raise hell”. The ultimate curmudgeon, and I think, the ultimate American patriot.

It’s odd, but I haven’t read every book ever written by Vonnegut, not by far, but I have read some. “Sirens of Titan”, "Cat’s Cradle", Breakfast of Champions". Never read ‘em. What a treat I have in store, as though I’ve been saving it up, and now I’m fixin’ a feast.

I thumbed through what I do have, and I couldn’t find “Slaughterhouse-Five”. I know I had it at one time. I realized that it was one of the ones eaten by termites, long ago at Oconee Street, and suddenly I think that would make him laugh. So ok, I’ll write about how much I enjoyed him.

I didn’t read Vonnegut for his storylines and plots. I read him for the delight of his words. I’m not so well-read, and so it would be foolish to suggest that Vonnegut invented all his cleverness without help from giants. It’s quite possible he did - and if you *are* well-read, do tell me who those giants might have been.

Here’s something that delighted me. It’s from “Slaughterhouse-Five”, and I actually found it on the internets, since my copy was eaten by termites. It’s stuck with me for many years, somehow, as hilarious:

"Billy heard Mr. Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down. Rosewater’s bedsprings talked a lot about that."

“Slaughterhouse-Five”. Certainly as bizarre a novel as has been written, in which Vonnegut’s alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time” and experiences every moment of his life at the same time. He knows everything that will happen to him from his birth to his death - it’s all the same. I saw the remarkably well-done movie in the mid-70s, after reading the book, and was captivated by, of all things, the firebombing of Dresden, an event that POW Vonnegut actually survived.

I have three copies of his book of short stories, “Welcome to the Monkey House”. Now how did that happen? All those short stories are early works, but every one is precious.

It’s likely that many will know of “Harrison Bergeron”:

"The Year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Noblody was better looking than anybody else. All this equality was due to the the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General." (1961)

Who, as you may know, will be the Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers.

And then there’s the title story, “Welcome to the Monkey House” ( 1968 ), which is so full of rich humor that I hardly know where to begin. The theme is overpopulation, and the heavy, poorly tuned hand of the State. Everyone has to take pills that make them nerveless below the waist, to prevent procreation, and which have the property of turning their urine blue. Seniors are wooed to the Howard Johnson Suicide Parlors, and there are Foxy Grandpas who only go to tease and flirt with the Virgin Hostesses, who are determined to lure them into euthanasia. How about this:

I did not sow, I did not spin,
And thanks to pills I did not sin.
I loved the crowds, the stink , the noise,
And when I peed, I peed turquoise.

I ate beneath a roof of orange;
Swung with progress like a door hinge.
'Neath purple roof I’ve come today
To piss my azure life away.

Virgin hostess, death’s recruiter,
Life is cute, but you are cuter.
Mourn my pecker, purple daughter -
All it passed was sky-blue water.

I think you can probably see that Vonnegut didn’t pull his aim, whether at the left or the right - he was an equal opportunity skewerer, and yet he did it with a gentle though dark humor.

There’s “Miss Temptation” (1956), which is an extraordinarly sweet story that will make you cry.

There’s the very clever “Next Door”, in which young Paul is left alone while his parents go to a movie. Unfortunately young Paul gets involved in a possible murder next door, possibly by some kind of a floozy, an assault that the frantic floozy has bribed Paul to forget about. Paul’s parents return home, and his mother confronts him:

She brought out the ball and held it under Paul’s nose. “Now would you mind telling Mommy what we have here?” she said gaily.

The ball bloomed like a frowzy chrysanthemum, with ones, fives, tens, twenties, and lipstick-stained Kleenex for petals. And rising from it, befuddling Paul’s young mind, was the pungent musk of perfume.

Paul’s father sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?” he said.

Paul’s mother rolled her eyes. “Tabu,” she said.

“More Stately Mansions” (1951) is probably one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read, and it’s only twelve pages long. And yet, at the end, the most pathetic character, Grace, despite her delusions, is suddenly revealed as the most resilient.

There are two wonderful, funny, science fiction stories: “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (1950), and “The Euphio Question” (1951), but I will leave you to enjoy those.

There’s the very odd, very compelling “Deer in the Works” (1955), about how an interviewee at the Ilium Works in Troy, NY, loses his opportunity for a job.

There are many stories in this book but certainly the sweetest of all is “Adam” (1954).

One of the things I like about “Welcome to the Monkey House” (and I reread it every few years, with great joy) is that I feel completely comfortable with this amazing variety of writing, though it is half a century written. I’ve read James Thurber, and Shirley Jackson, and all I could think was that everything I read was so dated that I simply could not relate to it, and it spoiled my enjoyment. Not so with Vonnegut’s early stories - he wrote about things that matter all the time, and didn’t distract with the currency of the era. Somehow he knew how to do that, and the stories play well even now.

I gather that Vonnegut’s later work got considerably panned. I can’t imagine why, except that people were looking for a good story, and let’s face it - storylines were the lesser part of what Vonnegut wrote. He had ideas that the story might be a vehicle for, but he also had words that were put together in a way that is completely entertaining. If you couldn’t see the latter, then of course you’d pan it.

I’ve read a lot of sneering about “Galapagos” (1985) which I actually very much enjoyed. It was because I savored the knockout passages and the idea of the ultimate lack of fitness of “big brains”, an evolutionary trend that leads to the narrators of the story, a million years down the line. In the present, an Ecuadoran ecotourist voyage is about to set out for the Galapagos Islands, when the apocalypse occurs, and our tourists are the last humans left on earth. One of those tourists is Mary, a high school science teacher, and we see what “big brains” can do to you:

Mary had also taught that the human brain was the most admirable survival device yet produced by evolution. But now her own big brain was urging her to take the polyethylene garment bag from around a red evening dress in her closet there in Guayaquil, and to wrap it around her head, thus depriving her cells of oxygen.

Well, now how can you not continue with something like that?

NPR All Things Considered had several tributes to Kurt Vonnegut yesterday - they’re all a little disappointing, and can be found here. Some are better than others. I found Neal Conen’s very short piece to be fairly good, and at least there was the reading by Vonnegut from “Slaughterhouse-Five” reveals his ultimately gentle voice. Morning Edition also weighed in, but overall I thought NPR’s tribute approached pablum. A shame, but at least they tried. Between Anna Nichol Smith’s daughter’s father, and Don Imus, CNN never had the first mention of Vonnegut’s death.

I can’t find it at the moment, but Wednesday morning’s NPR also brought a tribute from Gore Vidal. I had mixed reaction to this.

Now, I’ve very much enjoyed reading Gore Vidal (you go, girl) over the many many years since I was in college, but for entirely different reasons. Vidal is a modestly intellectual leftist, we can be sure, but other than his clever writing has little sense of humor, and is cold and cynical. What you *don't* want to do is to listen to him talk. You want to run away screaming - please don’t let him talk. No matter how friendly or learned the question in an interview, his words always roll trippingly, contemptuously, down his nose. He’s like the opposite end of the political spectrum from William F. Buckley, Jr., but they could be brothers. They both sound like erudite, aristocratic, jaded snobs, bitter old men who know better than anyone else. Their voices impeach them.

Not so Kurt Vonnegut. It’s very clear (see here, and therein, and here too, for more) that he was tormented and saddened by what he saw as the degradation of a fine, idealistic United States of America, into a vacuous, senseless, materialistic mess presided over by psychopathic personalities. I cannot refute him. His soft, perplexed, but mischievous voice has always sounded like that of “A Man Without a Country”.

Got home late last night and Glenn had an interesting story to tell. He won’t tell it, but I will.

He’s teaching Plant Taxonomy this semester and as a result stops at many of his favorite places to gather a few plants for the day’s lecture or lab. Yesterday afternoon on the way home he stopped along the edges of town to collect some grasses for the Poaceae section of the lab.

Now this is an area we’re both familiar with. After all, we lived just a couple of blocks up on Oconee Street for twelve years saving the bulk of our salaries so we could buy land and build a house. And so we’re familiar with this terrible intersection of our neighborhood street with the very busy 4-lane that constitutes Oak Street. I’ve written about this recently.

So Glenn, in his fluorescent orange vest, which we wear out here to alert idiot hunters, and which he wears in town to alert idiot drivers, was innocently collecting his Triticum aestivum, Lolium perenne, and some species of Bromus when he hears this SSCCCREEEEEEECHHHHHH of brakes and looks up to observe a CCCRAAAAAASHHHHH on the very busy 4-lane Oak Street. Here’s his quickly doodled summary of the scene:


and here’s the map from the aforementioned post, since the above scene might be a bit difficult to unravel from the above:


Not that all that matters, but what transpired is something of a lesson to me, since I would have been inclined to just slink back into my car and driven off. Not Glenn.

Glenn observed that Car 1 had not noticed that traffic had slowed considerably as they and it made its way west along Oak Street. When Car 1 finally noticed it was too late to stop, and applying brakes quickly caused it to swerve into the eastward flow and hit Car 2 headon. That was the crash. Fortunately there were no injuries, but on that busy road with oncoming traffic at rush hour in the afternoon, there was potential mayhem.

Glenn stacked his grasses, recovered his crutches, and carefully made his way out onto the road, where the occupants of Car 1 and Car 2 cowered in their vehicles. (I’ve seen this too - at an accident, invariably, people refuse to get out of their cars and move to a safe zone.) Glenn, waving his crutches in informative patterns, quickly established direction of traffic flow around the vehicles, which occupied one and a half lanes of road.

He then rapped on the hood of Car 1 with one crutch and yelled - “get out of the car and onto the sidewalk”. He had to do this several times as the occupants desperately tried to ignore this crazy person, jabbering on their cell phones all the while. Finally the driver rolled down the window and replied, “But I’m talking on my cell phone.” Glenn responded, “You are in danger sitting here in the middle of a busy highway. Get out of the car and move to the side of the road. You can talk on your cell phone and walk, I’m sure, since you were probably driving and talking on your cell phone before the accident.”

Now Glenn is extremely mild-mannered, but on those occasions when he says “frog”, you hop. The occupants of Car 1 finally exited the car and Glenn escorted them to safety off the highway, continuing to direct traffic. A similar scenario ensued with the occupants of Car 2.

Glenn continued to direct traffic while the useless perps and victims of the accident continued to make cell phone calls at the side of the road, never bothering to try to help. Police arrived 20 minutes later and Glenn handed over Incident Command, but continued to direct traffic until the police had done all the paperwork. He did get a thanks from the officer on the scene.

Glenn relates that quite a number of occupants of passing vehicles, now slowly moving, gave him a thumbs up and seemed delighted by the crutches as signal flags. He also said that there were no small number of drivers who attempted to ignore his signals and barge through against his direction.

Glenn assures me that he found a safe, protected spot to situate himself for directing traffic. I’m a little skeptical, but accept that. And of course he has no authority whatsoever, but from what we’ve learned, getting those people out of their cars and to a safe zone was probably the best thing he could have done, regardless of what insurance companies might think. Sitting in the middle of a busy highway where a huge semi or tanker (possibly driven by someone on their cell phone, not paying full attention) can come along at any moment is not a good idea. I don’t think that it’s a particularly good idea for just anyone to take charge like he did, but he knew what he was doing, in large part because of training. And it turned out to be a good story that informs me that it’s possible to help in an emergency.

Today we have the promise of a 60% chance of rain, which looks entirely possible from the maps, and indeed we have already had a small amount during the early morning hours. This will be welcome, since we’ve only had 0.1 inches since Mar 1.

With great difficulty I left the cuddeback wildlife camera viewing Troll Rock from above for three days, and brought in the card yesterday. *Ten* movies! Wow!

Advice: when you set it up, don’t include a nearby shrub that might blow in the wind. Nice movies of nearby shrub blowin' in the wind, but without answers. At least I know the exact times that the wind was blowing above a certain effective speed on Sunday, April 8. Lemonade!

On Monday, I presented what I thought was a Darner odonata, without checking carefully. Bev, in comments, identified it as a likely Clubtail (Gomphidae), and gave the useful information that eye position and separation are good ways for placing dragonflies as to family, at least.

It’s good news, since I had watched for Clubtails last year but saw none. Of course I had “learned” to distinguish them but in the course of the odonataless winter have become rusty and forgotten all that. Seasonal Memory Disorder, perhaps.

For the last few weeks I’ve been noticing some “upland” dragonflies, far from any source of water. I imagine dragonflies can range far inland, but had not been able to photograph any of these. Whether this one is one of those I can’t say (although it was rather far from water), and it only presented one opportunity for a photograph. Fortunately I had the 70-300 lens on and didn’t have to get close to get a good photograph of its eyes.


The brick red stripes across the eyes are striking! I’m guessing this to be a Common Whitetail (Plathemis lydia, bereft of its white tail. I notice that I had photographed this last July. While Whitetails don’t have to have the distinct coating of white on the dorsal of the tail (and one of those two photos is of one that doesn’t), those two also have clearly different wing patterns, something I apparently didn’t take note of at the time.

The one yesterday matches the white-tailed one in terms of wing patterns. Looking through the Bugguide page on whitetails, I see that the wing patterns are fairly variable and could encompass yesterday’s take.

The other thing is that I haven’t seen Whitetails this early - last year’s photographs were taken in July, although I recall seeing them up to a month earlier than that.

Of course, yesterday’s might not be a Whitetail, but the above comments still stand!

Up until the last three or four days, we’ve had unusually warm weather, and the insects have been taking full advantage. Even now, when the nights have been flirting with the freezing point, the days have been sunny and the insects attracted to the warm golden sands of Goulding Beach.

We’ve seen these before: Six-spotted Tiger Beetles, Cicindela sexguttata, and they’ve been everywhere the last couple of weeks. Fairly common and easily spotted east of the Rockies, but not, apparently in the Gulf States. However, as Bugguide tells us, there are 109 species of Tiger Beetles in the family, so there’s probably one near you:


A lot of them are trailing each other like this:


And then there was this presumptive Darner, Family Aeschnidae. At first I thought it might be a Harlequin Darner, which I have noted here before, at this time last year, but no, the markings are distinctly different.


I’ll have to spend some time on Bugguide looking through some photos, but must get moving for now.

UPDATE: Bev id’d it as a Clubtail, Gomphidae. I’m still going to have to spend some time on Bugguide looking through photos!

Last April, just a week off, I mentioned spring weeds, and included chickweed, bedstraws, deadnettle, and vetch. None of these, except perhaps the vetch, bother me particularly, although I will eventually (and I see that I have a week) root them out of some beds that I really don’t want them in. Some, like chickweed, are edible and perfectly usable for salad material, but other than sampling them in situ I haven’t made a practice of it.

Yesterday we went down to Goulding Creek, and while Gene seemed disinclined to join us, Urchin did. Urchin is a fine, perpetually happy cat, with medium long golden fur, and he joined our little community about three years ago. He didn’t bother with the usual negotiations, hanging around more and more and longer and longer - he just barged right in. One night just about around this time, he made his first appearance: he knocked at the door and went straight to the cat food closet, and was very polite about asking us to fill a bowl before we got right down to talking about all the reasons why he would be an asset to the community.

We figure, as well always do, that he’s about a year older than from when he appeared. Now why do you think that is?

He certainly has nice britches:


Like all cats on a hike, he’s a talker and a complainer, and he really really wants to know when we’re going to go back. However he did find Goulding Beach to be the perfect place to take a roll in the warm dry sands:


Yes, that orange is Glenn, and how interesting to see that there quite a few plants coming up on the deposited sand from the deluge on the first of March.


The crownbeard (Verbesina occidentalis) has successfully poked through the foot or so of that sand and is making its spring appearance. It won’t flower until it’s a meter or two tall though, and that will be mid to late summer. We were talking about weeds and somehow got sidetracked onto Urchin.

All these weeds, and I should really say “weeds”, are things I suspect many in the eastern US will, or already are seeing. If not these, then others like them. Each one is in a different family, and all are fairly dominant on the terrain at this time.

Here’s Valeriana radiata, or Beaked Corn Salad. There are quite a few species of Valerianella, and some may be arriving near you at any time. Note that this is not the Valerian officinalis of sedative roots fame. That’s a European species, although it’s in the same family, the Valerianaceae, which has resemblances to the carrot family, the Apiaceae. Corn Salad is a native, and an annual, and probably has fairly miniscule roots. The pre-flowering leaves though are apparently edible.

You can identify these by the tiny tiny flowers in umbel clusters, and the opposite entire leaves and dichotomous (two-fold) branching. They’re pretty short plants, and the only thing you might confuse them with would be some of the Euphorbia spurges, but they flower later in the summer and have milky sap besides.

The second “weed” was growing right alongside the Corn Salad above, and because of the umbels of tiny white flowers was hard to distinguish until you got right down on it. The key is the highly dissected fern-like leaves. This is Osmorhiza claytonii, Sweet Cicely or Clayton’s Sweetroot. Hmm, I was sure I had blogged on this one before as a non-native, but USDA plants makes it clear that it is a native and I sure don’t find it on the blog! What a nice surprise! My edible plants book says that it is probably best as a spice - either the ground up roots or the fruits. It’s in the Apiaceae, that family that so many butterflies love, but which also includes Poison Hemlock and a few other real nasties, and I’d be fairly careful about that.

As I said, the distinguishing feature is mainly the finely dissected leaves, but knowing the Carrot is in this family, you knew that already. And the great little spray of tiny flowers.


Our final “weed” of the day is a chickweed. Now normally chickweeds are nothing to get excited about - our Stellaria meadia, a nonnative and quite obnoxious species is, however delectable in a salad, quite the annoyance. But this is Stellaria pubera, Star Chickweed, or Giant Chickweed, because of its much larger flowers. It’s in the Caryophyllaceae, that strange “Pink” family that has somehow produced a pigment that is unique in all flowering plants.


This is the first patch of this species I’ve found here at SBS, and it’s pretty exciting. The five petaled flowers (yes, five - the individual petals are merely lobed very deeply into what looks like two) are quite large compared to the evil S. meadia, and the plant actually looks like a plant, and not a true weed. We won’t be eating these for salad.


Now go forth and tell us about your weeds and “weeds”, as they appear.

One of the best seminars I ever attended was given by a little old man* in the early 1980s. His topic was variegation, and his interest was in collecting and observing plants with different patterns of leaf colors, in particular. He was a good biologist at the anatomical, physiological, developmental, and molecular levels, and a fantastic showman.

The other day I was enjoying the mayapple forest with its attendent wild geraniums, violets, and poison ivy. I was reminded of his talk when I ran across this leaf:


You’ve probably seen things like this when looking closely at leaves of many plants in a group. Barring fungal or bacterial disease, and there was no sign of tissue destruction here, the white patch is a somatic mutant sector, and we’d say the plant is a chimera, composed of two (or more) genotypes. (Actually most organisms probably *are* chimeras - women certainly are - but in this case we can actually see the effect quite vividly.)

One of the reasons the fellow’s seminar was so good was that the topic of variegation is a broad one, and he had considerable knowledge of several levels of plant biology that let him address the interest of any member of the audience. Plus he had tons of slides of just about every variegated plant you can think of, and many you can’t, and that appealed to everyone. And so we have to also address a few levels of plant biology in order to understand what’s happened here.

For this I’ve made a couple of figures with mine own two hands. You can find alternative figures, more sophistocated, and a more sophistocated explanation too, here.

The drawing below shows a shoot tip of a plant, and this is appropriate because plants grow from their tips. The center of activity is the apical meristem, a block of rapidly dividing cells, and there is an apical meristem at the tip of each shoot and root. The apical meristem spins off the several cells that will develop into leaves, and it does so in an orderly fashion as the shoot grows upward. I’ve crudely shown seven leaves developing here, from the fully developed leaf at the lower left, #1, to the barely visible clump of cells on the top of the shoot dome that will become leaf #7.


The second thing to note is the colors in that drawing. There are three sorts of layers of cells in a leaf: L1, L2, and L3. The colors show where those layers are. L1, the outermost layer, forms the epidermis. I’ve colored it yellow because the chloroplasts in the L1 layer never develop and so it’s colorless. (L1 also includes guard cells that open and close the stomata, the plant’s breathing holes, and those DO have developed chloroplasts and so are green.)

L2 and L3 form the layers of tissue within the leaf itself, and that’s what you’re actually seeing through the colorless epidermis when you look at a green leaf. And note that the margins of the leaf contain only L2 cells.

Here’s another view, including the cross-section of a leaf, that helps you visualize where those L1, L2, and L3 layer cells are:


Here’s the leap: in a very young primordial leaf, there are just a few cells supplied by the apical meristem. One of those cells will go to divide and divide and produce all the cells of the L1 layer, another will produce all the cells of the L2 layer, and so forth.

Mutations can and do occur when cells divide, and just spontaneously. The mutations can affect any of the thousands of genes that inform the plant, but the ones we’re interested in affect pigments, and especially chloroplast development. Chloroplasts, of course, are those special organelles that perform photosynthesis, and they contain many colored pigments that allow them to do this.

Even in normal plants, not all cells produce functional chloroplasts - roots, for instance, would be silly to bother with that. A functional chloroplast contains chlorophyll, which is green, and a number of other colored pigments. So if a plant’s cell does not make functional chloroplasts, the cell will be colorless (and that’s what the L1 epidermal layer is all about). The L2 and L3 layers are green (and other colors) because they *do* make functional chloroplasts.

Imagine that a mutation interrupting chloroplast development occurred in a cell of the oldest leaf in the first drawing above - Leaf #7. It’s fully developed, so won’t show much of anything without a microscope to show that one mutant cell.

Imagine, though, if a mutation occurred in one of the earliest cells, such as in Leaf #7, the youngest leaf. All cells deriving from that mutant will also be mutant, and the entire leaf will show the effect. So, for instance, if the original cell of the L2 layer lost the ability to make chloroplasts, so would all its descendents. The leaf, when developed, would be colored only by the L3 cells, which might make it a lighter, more virescent or yellow-green, than normal. And there might be white margins around the leaf, because the margins are made only of L2 cells.

And mutations can occur at any intermediate stage of leaf development. So going back to our original mayapple up there, it clearly is not all white, so the mutation did not occur to one of the first cells, but rather to one a bit later on, and a patch of white resulted.

One question though, would be: Why is the patch completely white, if there should be *two* layers of cells, L2 and L3. It should, at best, be yellow-green, but not totally white. Here’s a closeup of that mayapple leaf:


The first explanation is that two simultaneous mutations occurred in the L2 and L3 cell ancestors, but that beggars the imagination. The explanation might come in the lighter yellow-green region that you see between the white patch and the normal dark green. That region is what you’d expect the white patch to look like. What Glenn and I discussed has probably happened is that an invasion of the normal green layer by the mutant layer occurred and so all the normal green layer cells were crowded out. So the white patch consists entirely of the mutant cells in all layers.

And with the clue that L2 forms the margins, and that the margins are white also, the mutation must have been in the L2 cells, and not the L3, which has been invaded and replaced.

Here’s another mayapple and its patch. It’s a much smaller patch, and occurs only at the tip of the lobe. We can see that the mutation must have occurred at any even later time in development than the larger patch in the photo above:


All that stuff above refers to dicot plants (and there’s a lot of variability in how leaves develop even within the dicots). Monocots, like grasses and onions and lilies and irises and palms and such, develop differently.

Here’s Acorus gramineus var “Ogon”, or Golden Variegated Sweetflag. It’s actually a European species, but shows the very different patterning of variegation you get in monocots:


The stripes of yellow and green are formed because cells in a monocot grow in side-by-side files to produce the length of the blade. That’s a common type of patterning to see in monocots.

Finally, another dicot, and we seen this one before. It’s Silver Spangles, Lamium maculatum.


This is an established cultivar, so the entire plant shows the variegation, unlike my mayapples, which would do quite poorly if their entire single leaf were white. Here the mutation looks to affect the L2 layer, which makes most of the spaces between the veins white, while L3 cells clustered about the veins are green.

And that brings up a question - how do you propagate a chimera? It’s unlikely that the mutation has affected a cell that leads to the flower, so seeds won’t contain the mutation.

If an entire branch of the plant shows the mutation, then you can snip off the branch and try to root it. Then the entire clone coming from that rooting will show the mutation, and it can be propagated and sold to make you millions of dollars.

However, if (like in my mayapple) only a portion of a single leaf is affected, you must resort to tissue culture. Culture of the cells of that part of the leaf, and regeneration to make a new plant, *may* contain the mutation in all parts of the plant (lethal for that poor mayapple though). And we have done tissue culture, and it’s a worthy topic, but not this time.

*UPDATE: all morning Glenn and I have been scouring our brains trying to remember who that “little old man” was. Out of the blue, a few minutes ago, Glenn shouted “Irwin Greenblatt”. And I said, “Yes!” And memories poured in - a maize geneticist at Yale University, at least in the early 90s - the variegation thing was a spinoff, a hobby in a way, but so magnificently carried off! I asked Glenn, at the moment of his revelation, “Didn’t that feel good?”, because when it happens to me that a vague, long-neglected memory emerges, it always does so with a feeling of distinct euphoria. No reply. Oh well.

Irwin Greenblatt would probably be in his 80s by now, if he’s still alive.

Things seem to be working now, but for several hours from at least 4AM this morning the blog was inaccessible and so was our ISP’s login page. As some of you have noticed, this has been a periodic problem in the last few weeks, and since we frequently log in to the ISP itself, have noticed it even more frequently.

I did get a problem input page, finally, after numerous attempts to log in, and was able to submit a problem input. I went through the emails I’ve received at these times from Robin, Bev, and others, and that info combined with my own provides times, URLS, and observations that should help the ISP to resolve the problem. Things cleared up just now and I was able to submit that info.

So thanks for your emails about this - they provided an excellent database that I was able to pull together.

We’ve been with startlogic as our ISP for almost three years now, and they’ve been exemplary in their reliability. I’ve had no complaints during that time, and I have none now - just want to help them to resolve the problem.

The hummingbirds are here: April 1.

Tuesday night’s cuddeback, trained on a likely hole, yielded no pics. Abandoned hole? Yesterday afternoon I placed it viewing along SBS Creek, also watching a hole. We’ll see, in a few hours.

In past years I’ve noted a “greening” point - one of those days when you wake up and look outside and all of a sudden everything is vivid green. Last year it was April 8, and this year I was so struck on April 2, a few days ago. This was immediately after a mild rain, yet even the 0.1 inches received seems to have had an enormous effect. I do believe that with more rain the greening point would have occurred two weeks earlier.

At any rate, things are green! The redbuds, which appear in purple smokes in the understory before most trees are leafed out, are winding down, and the dogwoods are peaking right now:


I don’t know if I’m going to get around to it, but now would be the perfect time to get a dogwood count on 40 acres. They’re luminescent against the now-emerged canopy and understory tree, but things are starting to close in.

We had a surprise thunderstorm on early Tuesday morning, around 2 AM. I was awakened by considerable lightning, thunder, and wind, and a tiny amount of rain. It was enough to knock a tulip poplar over.

Tuesday afternoon, driving in, I was taken aback by a jet black squirrel scampering across a neighbor’s lawn. Our squirrels are gray squirrels, and I’ve never seen one that looked like it had been spray painted black. It appears to be a fox squirrel in its black phase, and it truly did look like the second photograph down. More on Sciurus niger here. Not to be mean, but gray squirrels are a dime a dozen. This one was spectacular.

Yesterday’s hike netted a huge discovery, Silverbells, growing along Goulding Creek. There are at least a dozen of these small (less 10-20 feet) trees, and they were sporting large clusters of their white bell-shaped flowers:


How amazing. I’ve walked this area many times (it’s photographed in the March 2 post on the flood) and have never noticed these plants. Glenn suggests these are probably Halesia tetraptera var tetraptera, or Common or Mountain Silverbells. The other possibility is Halesia carolina, or Carolina Silverbells. The latter is very much restricted to the southeastern tier of states, while the Mountain Silverbells extend a bit further north.

Silverbells are in the family Styracaceae, which is a fairly small family of plants found in China and North America. As far as I can tell, silverbells are the only genus in North America. Halesia monticola, Mountain Silverbell, is quite a large tree, up to 30 meters, but is found north of here in the Smokey Mountains.


There are even some remaining fruits (visible in the first pic above, at the upper right) from last year, and I’ll have to mark the trees and collect seeds if they’re still present. The classification is “in flux”, according to Weakley, and we get conflicting classifications from our bible, Radford, and USDA Plants. The fruits may help. What fun!

Insects are now everywhere - I’ve seen at least three species of dragonflies in disparate environments, and have run across Six-spotted Tiger Beetles in several locations. Also at Goulding Creek was my first introduction to a Red Admiral Butterfly (Vanessa atalanta), a lone early emergent flitting nervously and settling virtually nowhere.


Finally, a sighting of a cranefly, or “how to perch in a patch of grasses using all six of your very long legs”:


This could be, judging from wing patterns, Tipula subgenus Yamatotipula, according to Bugguide. A closeup, unfortunately not showing the genitalia, which seem to be important in identification:

First, a preliminary report on the cuddeback wildlife cam.

Every morning has netted some kind of animal photographed during the night, but not a flashcard filled with troops of animals moving through the area. I’ve trained the camera on a different area each afternoon, and then checked the results the next morning. I’m setting up the camera to take one high resolution still, followed by a 30-second video.

ADDITION: I should make this point to specify that the camera is not filled with dozens of photographs *without* animals. Had that happened, I’d know that the cam was being responsive, but was failing (for whatever reason) to capture the images in time. That’s not happening, and that’s good. So I get two photographs, and both have animals. That just says that we *don't* have troops of animals moving through the 100 square-foot area of detection. Now we can argue about whether the cam should be able to detect farther, and image farther, but at least it’s not failing in its currently limited range.

Sunday afternoon I set up the camera to observe the Kat Sematary, and picked up two sets of photos/videos, both of deer, on Monday morning. Boring, although it’s the major comeon from the cuddeback company (don’t miss that buck!). Instructive though - we had some small amount of rain in the late evening and the photos were distorted from the film of water that accumulated over the lens. One was of a closeby deer, apparently alarmed by the “noflash” and whipping its head toward the camera. The associated video showed it moving out of the field of view, and then back in, to start sampling the elderberry. The photo/video was odd: nothing but white could be seen, with vague movements and seconds of clear view, but no detail in the video. I concluded it was a deer pressed right up against the camera.

Yesterday’s harvest, from the cam trained Monday night along the little creek, netted a raccoon clambering up the banks of the creek. This is also what the infrared “noflash” gives you - basically a black and white image:


The video of that was successful too, showing the raccoon scampering up and out of the field of view, but only lasts for five seconds so I won’t bother with posting it.

The main fundamental problem I’m seeing so far is the same one that Karen at Rurality encountered with her purchase a couple of years ago: the time delay between detection and the taking of the photograph (or video). I don’t think this is the same thing as the “camera delay” which simply sets the time for taking the *next* photo. On the other hand, unless it’s in the specs, I’m not sure what the delay is between detection and the taking of *this* photo. It seems to be significant.

And if you have both the photograph still taken, and video enabled as I did, it looks like the minimum of 1 minute camera delay applies between the taking of the still, and the beginning of video. The camera will take its higher resolution still, but the video will not begin for that minimum period of 1 minute. Surely that’s not necessary, and surely the delay could be set for less than 1 minute, but no, apparently not.

The secondary problem I’ve encountered is simply one that I need to accept and work with - the detection range for the motion/IR sensor is about 10 feet. So the camera is just not going to work unless a warm-bodied animal moves to within a semicircle area 10 feet in front. Well, I can deal with that, but would like to see a more sensitive detection range.

Everytime I bring up the cam, I devise a few experiments to check out what I saw in the photos/videos taken the night before. So for instance, when I noted no photos taken on one night, I took the camera into the laundry room, shut the doors, and tested out the infrared detector and resulting video. Works very nicely, but I also noted that the “noflash” consists of a rectangular array of about 4x10 red LEDs, which *all* light up during the time of exposure. I presume that at least some animals could see that and be disconcerted. Nonetheless, the images, however they are in black and white, are excellent and image far beyond the 10-foot detection range (as you can see in the raccoon photo above).

I do need to map out that detection range, both for night, and for day. Knowing that limitation is what you need for successful observation. So yesterday afternoon I trained the camera on an animal hole that I hope is being used. We’ll see in an hour or so. (Unfortunately I strapped the cam to the only tree close by, and it was being used as a prop for what looks like a couple of poison ivy vines.)

I’ll leave you with the photo on the right, as evidence for some of the interesting events of last night, taken with a conventional camera this morning. More on that, the greening, a jet-black squirrel, and other things later. Alright - let’s go down and see what happened last night.

Sunday, was of course, the day for the rest of us, the fools. As a member of that group I take little notice of this day, though as a 17-year-old I might have clutched at my chest, wheezed out “heart attack”, and then after 911 was there and I was on a stretcher, laughed and shouted out “April Fools!”. Funny? No, not any more, but we don’t have to get into that, 34 years later. I do believe my sense of humor has improved, but my sense of sharing has not.

I actually had an idea, but waited too long - it’s the same lack of attention that got me into trouble with revelers on St. Patrick’s Day a few weeks ago when I wore orange. (Hey, you live in the woods, you’re a fool *not* to wear orange.)

There are surely more to take note of, and so feel free to do so. I nominate two (or three) for truly inspired efforts this year:

Our own Floridacracker still won’t admit that he hasn’t plumbed water and found oil. He really does think we are fools! (And maybe we are.)

Rigor Vitae has a scrumptious article on Assassin Dock, and they aren’t admitting anything either.

Finally, this brought back memories, and while I don’t think it was any better, really, than the above two presentations, National Public Radio has a larger budget. Take a listen then, to The Belly Button Removal Fad, to which we were alerted on April 1, 2000.

It’s made complete by the ATC Letters on the next day, in which we find that 17-year-old Brittany was the producer for the Joke. Really, after 7 years, when you still remember something like that and use it as a standard that others have smartly arisen to, you know they’ve done good.

Some people are clever, it appears, every day of their lives. They were put on this earth to entertain the rest of us. Did you find any?

Alright, here’s March’s weather. But first, a few observations, because I’m getting a little worried on several fronts, and I’d guess this constitutes a Force Four Rant:

1. With the exception of March 1, we had no rain in March, along with April probably the most important month of the year for the upcoming growing season. Now if I were simply ranting at Force 1, this would be the equivalent of saying “my! it’s close! How odd for March.” But I’m speaking with the bulk of 18 years of close observation, with numbers, behind me, and a century past that too. We may be headed into a La Nina. That means drought and heat for us here in the Southeast US. (What does it mean for you?). It’s the half-dozenth La Nina since 1998. I’m confused. There’s a good bit of chatter about global climate change leading to a permanent El Nino, but that’s not what I’ve been seeing. Hmmm.

UPDATE: We were really hoping for a good rain, Sunday and last night. 80% chance! What we got was less than 0.1 inches, after 31 days without. Oh well!

Have a good Monday!

2. A few days ago I wrote a little piece criticizing a stinker of an article on climate change. Yesterday I found this one, which isn’t itself a stinker, no, it’s actually not bad at all, but does bring up a point, and then like all others, misses the main one significantly.

Fill a glass to the brim with water. Now add a couple of ice cubes. What happens? I don’t think I have to tell you, but keeping adding ice cubes until you’re convinced - we wouldn’t want anyone to think this is a trick or anything. The point is that the ice doesn’t have to have melted in order to overflow the glass. (For those who like to invoke pack ice, we’re not talking about a glass of ice water with cubes already in it. We’re talking about Greenland and Antarctica where the cubes are sitting atop land. Just wanted to make that clear.)

Now think about every single article you’ve ever seen or probably ever will see about the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. There has been a disturbing number recently, addressing the issue of lubricating liquid water under the ice sheets but journalists aren’t making the connections. The media all (including the above link) miss the point. Ice doesn’t have to melt to raise sea level if it slides into the oceans. Count all the joules you want, and take into account all the “forcing” you wish - it’s *not relevant* when it comes to liquid water lubrication and sliding.

The problem with the above article is that it recognizes just about everything, but does not connect the dots, as we’re so fond of saying nowadays. The whole point of the research, and again, this isn’t the first notification of this phenomenon, is that there is a lubricating film of water *beneath* the ice - jigatons of ice - and that it helps the ice to slide. We don’t know a huge amount about glacier flow, but we do know that underlying liquid water is associated with the flow rate of gigatons of glaciers above it. Yet is it a part of IPCC’s predictions? Well, no. In fact, their latest, as sophistocated as it was, took not at all into account the potential for ice sheet melting (let alone sliding), neither on Greenland, nor on Antarctica.

Connect the dots, people, and don’t think that you’re ok if all we have to worry about is mere *melting*, as driven by gradual changes in global temperature, those slow lazily warming summer days. What we really have to worry about is a continent-sized sheet of mile-deep *solid* ice breaking off into the ocean. And that is driven by what’s happening beneath the ice, and (for those who love to cite more snowfall at the poles in denial of global warming) the *weight* of the frozen water above. Instant sea level rise. And do our media heroes bother to ask the very people who know the geography and geology, and whether a few hundred or thousand cubic miles of ice could slide into the ocean one day? Duh!!

Criticize and demand more of your media, and have a great Tuesday!

3. We had an El Nino in winter 2006-2007, but that’s changing, as I mention at the bottom of this post. El Ninos drop more water on our part of the continent, but it didn’t happen this time, not enough to matter. And as I point out below, we’re apparently moving rapidly into a La Nina, which is generally expected to lead into more drought and heat.

I suppose this is a repeat of #1 above, but have a nice Wednesday anyway!

4. Ok, there’s no real #4 - just though I’d mention that Glenn seems to categorize my posts in terms of a Rant Force Factor. I don’t know why - I seldom actually rant, and I always apologize for it (I’m sorry). The previous “stinker article” probably hit the level of a Rant Force 3 for Glenn - he said he got through 1/3 of it. This first half here probably tops a Force 4, and Glenn probably won’t make it through that. Force 5? I’m not sure I’ve done it yet. Should I try for it?

Have an excellent Thursday!

Onward for our March report. Here’s the monthly summary of the climate of the month of March 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.


You might recall that February returned us to more or less normal winter temperatures, but all that changed in March. Practically the entirety of the US portion of the North American continent has experience the higher-than-normal temperatures that we also saw in January and the prior December. Even we noticed it here, with 4 degF temps on average above normal, and we’ll talk about the rainfall later.

With a few exceptions - Texas, and some patchy areas in the north, much of the US portion of the continent received much less rain than expected, particularly the Southeast and West US. This is disturbing for us (Rant Level 1), who would expect even a declining El Nino to deposit more than the usual amount of rain. Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


For Athens:

There’s no doubt at all that March was an extreme month. From the extraordinarily high temps (officially we broke one 120-year record, unofficially I’d say we broke three) to the lack of rainfall (despite the deluge on March 1), March was simply amazing. I’ve mentioned “the greening” before, and I think it occurred a week or two ago, but it’s hard to tell since at the same time there’s browning of spring vegetation due to heat and dryness that I don’t recall ever seeing before.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of March. The red line is the average over 80 years of Marches, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. The Athens data (3.98 inches) indicate that we ended up well below average, despite the deluge on March 1, since we have had no rain since then. Add that to the rest of the winter, as I’ll show below, and we’re well on the way into a drought (and on the heels of what should have been a nourishing El Nino), headed toward a desiccating La Nina.


Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of March in Athens. Unlike February, where we vacillated back and forth, March is very clear, especially toward the last half of the month. We broke century-long temperature records officially on Mar 25, and my observations 10 miles away from the official site is that we broke records on two other days, although they don’t recognize that. Did you hear the media proclaiming all this during March? I didn’t think so. 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 an incredible 14 days during March above the 17-year average for that day. And not just above the average, but above one standard deviation for the average! That is way different from the 5.4 days above average temperatures we might normally expect to experience during March. There were only 3 nights when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s compared to the 5 average low nights, but hell - what’s left when the rest are above average?

Geekstuff:
This is important, and I suggest that you keep track of it by bookmarking
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update. It tells us that sea surface temperature anomalies have plummetted in the equatorial Pacific, and that the winter’s El Nino hasn’t merely returned to normal but may turn into a potentially deep La Nina. What can you expect from a La Nina? Depends on where you live, of course - here in the Southeast US, we’ll expect hot and dry. Explore the site and let us know what you expect!

It’s probably time to update last fall’s 17-year summary. These are tiny panels, but the tiny details aren’t important. Blue means surplus rain, above the average, and mustard means deficit rain, below the average. The peach is the region of one standard deviation above and below the average for this period of time.

What bothers me is that aside from 2005 when we were above average, and 2003, when we were *just* above average, we’ve been not just below the average for the year, but below the one-standard deviation mark for the year, since 1999, with the exception of 2002, when we were merely below the average. Now this period of time encompassed at least three very deep and close La Ninas, but that’s what’s headed for us now, apparently.


And finally, despite the deluge on March 1, here’s the accumulation of rain for the current year 2007. I didn’t include this one the last couple of months, but it’s time to start doing so now. We are way below precipitation for the year, flirting with the one-standard deviation mark already:


Have a nice week!