Yesterday, as I mentioned, was the first day of this year’s Microstegium eradication. I had thought I wouldn’t bring this subject up again for another couple of weeks but then yesterday I covered a whopping area, about 1.5 acres, south of the house in and around the Fairy Ring down to the Kat Sematary. After 2.5 hours of pulling I finished that and had pulled a little over 1200 plants.

Something didn’t seem quite right, so I checked last year’s records. The calendar shows that the same area took me 7 days to finish, at about 2 hours each morning, and I ended up with 31,000 plants from the same area. Last year I didn’t finish it until Aug 17, and that was only a small part of what I had left to do.

Five years ago when I started this there were literally millions of plants, way too many to pull, and the same the year after. Now, in Year Five, there’s only 2.5% the number of plants as last year and it took me about 1/6 the time to remove them. Even though it’s taking me six times longer to pick a single plant , that’s very good news.

Could it have been this year’s weather that had to do with this? I compared rain accumulation between 2006 (purple) and 2007 (green). Essentially the same pattern of rainfall - severe drought:


So a difference in rainfall can’t explain it, nor can monthly temperature averages - the differences between last year and this year pretty much average to zero.

I ran across the little experiment that I started and described last September. I had left (or not) patches or singletons of Microstegium in various states to propagate or not.

The results are pretty simple - there were no plants at all in this area. Nothing came up from singletons or patches left undisturbed, and nothing came up from the area of the relatively dense patch that was completely removed.

I have two interpretations of this:

First, the viability of the remaining seeds may have just declined below a percentage that that experiment failed to leave behind. They are said to have a soil bank viability of 5-7 years. Over an acre that once held millions of plants you might still have a few seed that are still viable, giving rise to this year’s plants that I pulled yesterday.

Second, and I noticed this in pulling yesterday, the distribution of plants may be important to fertility. Last year’s experiment was among plants that were fairly scattered, nothing like the huge dense stands of the plant from years past. And this year the plants that I saw were generally isolated. If there was one then there might be two or six others within a couple of feet, but in only one case did I find a patch that had a hundred plants in a ten-square-foot area. I suspect that there may be a minimum density for good fertility, something that might have compromised (but still explain) another part of last year’s experiment.

Now there could be one other explanation that I coincidentally brought up a couple of days ago - a falling water table. That could mean that despite the similarity in rainfall between 2006 and 2007, through July, the soil surface is drier now than it was then. However I doubt that a falling water table, within one year, would cause much of a difference in surface soil that is much more affected by evaporation into the air and rain falling upon it - the water table is just too far below the surface anyway, probably tens of feet or more. Once I get to the floodplain and lower areas, I can test this idea - there should be little difference in populations from last year if that’s the only explanation since the soil will be sufficiently moist regardless of water table.

So I’ll be thinking about how to modify and repeat last year’s experiment in a place that might be more conducive to germination and growth, and to perhaps leave larger stands picked or unpicked.

All weekend we had a 50-60% chance of thunderstorms, and all weekend we waited through the day. Periodic storms did move through Georgia, but always to the north or south of us. Last night, about midnight (well after chances had decreased to 20%), three storms moved across us over a 2-hour period, dropping 0.8 inches of rain. Every little bit helps! Quite a celebration with a continuous barrage of thunder and lightning.

Most of the lightning was cloud to cloud, judging by the long sequence of ripping and rolling thunder that moved from one part of the sky to another. There were, however, a couple of ground strikes that must have come within a hundred feet of the house, and I’ll have to go looking for them today.

I was pleased to find this colony of Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum spp. I’d discovered it growing up the bank of Goulding Creek some years back, and then it seemed to get choked out by the Microstegium and disappeared. Now it’s back!


Those whitish leaves are not an artifact of the lighting. The upper leaves really are whitish. The scales or tiny hairs that cause that coloration must be lost or diluted as the leaves expand and mature, since lower leaves are wholly green.


The family affiliation with the mints, Lamiaceae, is apparent from the opposite leaves and inflorescences, as well as the shape of the flowers.


As to *which* species of Pycnanthemum this is, we’ll have to figure that out. There are about 19 species in all, not all of which show the white leaves. All are natives, most are southeast US, and there are 15 candidates in Georgia alone. This one could be P. albescens, but it could also be one of several other possibilities.

Always interesting to me is that while 18 of the species are found no further west than Texas and states a little further north, there is one species completely isolated in California. How did it get there? (No, it wasn’t taken there by people, since then it would have been one of the 18.)

Speaking of the Microstegium vimineum, Year Five of the eradication effort starts today. I see last year I started around July 27, so this is just about right. I’ve been scoping it out all summer and while there are a few larger infestations left, it’s mostly a matter of singletons and sparse colonies. The vast majority of plants this year must have come from seed that were no less than six years old, and that’s getting into the upper range of reported longevity. The downside is that my eradication efforts have culminated in a strong selection pressure for plants that come from seeds with long-term viability. If there are genetics involved, then that means it’s particularly important to prevent these from going to seed this year!

In the 22 years that we’ve owned the property Sparkleberrysprings Creek has never stopped. Sometime last week it did. The spot of water in the foreground is the end of the flow, and for the remaining 500 feet to Goulding Creek, the lower 40% of its full length, it is now dry. Above that point there is water in the bed, but it is not flowing except a trickle or so in a few places. I interpret this as meaning that the input of water is now less than the loss by evaporation or draining into the ground.

I suppose you could call the source of water for the creek “springs”, but the water really squeezes out of the steep slopes along the creek’s upper 50%. So for at least 22 years, that reservoir of water has been sufficiently above the creek bed to pour into the creek and keep it flowing. Now the level of soil moisture must be below the creek’s level, so that the water just isn’t squeezing in anymore.

This is a fairly significant event. It will take quite a bit of rain over a long period of time to recharge moisture levels to the extent that the creek is not susceptible to flipping from wet to dry just because of a few months of poor rainfall.

I’ve walked up and down Goulding Creek, into which SBS Creek pours, and within a mile up and downstream ours is the most significant addition to the watershed (neglecting the dam that forms Lake Oglethorpe). This is a microcosm of the watersheds that empty into larger creeks all across our area. Ecologically, that’s why I say it’s a fairly significant event.

But there’s more - in our county there are a lot of folks who depend on their water supplies from dug or bored wells, which don’t go down all that deep. If this is an indication that creeks are running dry, generally 50-100 feet below the elevations that most people live, then a lot of folks are going to be running out of water now.

A look at the total annual rainfalls over the last 87 years recapitulates our 9-year drought. The straight slightly downward point red line is a linear fit; the red peaks and valleys are a 5-year moving average:



I’ve added my interpretation of the five major periods of excess or deficiency following the first 29 years of normalcy. Our current drought is as severe as the 1949-1957 drought, and more so than the 1978-1988 drought. The latter looks more severe along the moving average but the involved years were about half and half above and below normal, rather than so skewed as in the other two periods.

I suppose one good thing if you believe in the predominance of cycles is that it would predict that we are nearing the end of this drought for another ten or so years. We’ll see.

Brief findings while wandering the roadside yesterday:

An uncooperative robberfly of some sort. Scanning over Bugguide’s Asilinae produced no close matches to the bold black and cream striping on the thorax, and then I checked some of the other subfamilies. This one seems to be Hanging Thief, Diogmites misellus, in the subfamily Dasypogoninae. I notice that I photographed an identical specimen exactly two years ago. This is much more slender, delicate, and ectomorphic than most of the robberfly species I’ve seen this year:


Glenn stopped by WVFD Station yesterday afternoon and found this poor Imperial Moth Eacles imperialis fluttering about in its last stages. Bedraggled as it is, it’s still fairly magnificent. Apparently there are quite a few color morphs. The larvae are quite indiscriminate, feeding on a wide variety of tree species, and it’s not at all surprising that we would have them around.


And then there was this startling discovery, which alarmed me for a few seconds until I saw the stuffing coming out of the back.

Matters of Responsibility have kept me close to the house for the last week or so. By the time I’m free it’s been hot and humid, and a bit warm for wandering the woods, and so the living world has been circumscribed. I’ve been enjoying reacquainting myself with the more mundane world of satellites and therefore you must suffer.

There are, however, some satellites that you must simply love for their brilliance and steadfastness. Among these for me is the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, one now of a number such. TRMM appears in my skies as one of the brightest satellites you’ll see. At 45 feet from side to side and 15 feet long, it’s not hard to see why:


TRMM was launched Nov 28 1997, and as the name indicates was designed to observe rainfall in the tropics. Lately this has been of some importance. It has also been instrumental in gathering data and photography on extreme events, only the latest of which has been the unusual rainfall in Texas.

Its orbit is very nearly circular, and it stays 400km above the earth at all times. It doesn’t quite follow the equator, but rather strays above and below it by 35 degrees, its inclination and by chance very close to my latitude. This means that every 90 minutes there is the possibility that it will be directly overhead, and so in the dusk and dawn when that happens I’m able to see it moving brilliantly from west to east.


Contrast that with the Hubble Space Telescope, another favorite sight to see. It also has an equatorial orbit, but it hugs the equator a little more closely. As a large satellite it’s also quite bright but when it appears in our skies it’s much much further to the south:


I’ve mentioned these two satellites and their near-equatorial orbits for a reason - they’re the ones that you see moving from west to east. But there’s a whole slew of satellites that follow *polar* orbits, in a north-south direction, and one of the first that I learned was Seasat:


A polar orbit is good for a lot of things - mainly as a satellite moves all the way around the earth in 90-100 minutes, the earth has turned beneath it about a fifteenth of the way and so on its next orbit the satellite passes over new territory, quickly covering the entire earth.

Seasat was launched June 28 1978. It was a sort of a prototype to TRMM above, designed as a feasibility study on the use of satellites for the global monitoring of oceans. It was meant to operate for a year or two, but the power system failed on 10 Oct 1978. It’s still up there, though, and it’s rather large also, more than 30 feet wingspread and 6 feet long. It’s height above the earth is nearly twice that of TRMM’s, 750 km, and it moves more sedately across the sky taking 100 minutes to circumnavigate:


One thing you quickly notice is that satellites that move in an east-west direction almost always move west to east. Very rarely you might notice one moving east to west, in a retrograde orbit. West to east is the usual direction, because launching toward the east adds about 1000 miles per hour to the satellites velocity, due to the earth’s rotation in that direction. To try to launch otherwise means you have to spend energy equivalent to 2000 miles an hour to overcome and supersede that rotation of the earth.

The OV series of Orbiting Vehicles, launched mainly in the late 1960s, had a plethora of missions. The dozen or so OV1s had such retrograde orbits. OV1-8 is no longer with us, but was large and dramatic in shape:


If you spend any time at all outdoors at night watching the skies, you are probably going to wind up seeing some apparently inexplicable things. My sister and her husband related a stargazing incident in which they suddenly seemed to see a star burst and expand in brilliance searingly. My guess is that they saw an Iridium flare, although it could also have been a meteor coming directly at them.

And then there are people who are naturally surprised to see three satellites flying in formation, just a small distance apart from each other, apparently. Although no one but the military knows what the military calls them, they’re referred to as NOSS satellites, for “Naval Ocean Surveillance System”. There have been three generations of them since the mid-70s, so there are probably a dozen or so triads up there. Mostly they’re fairly far out and dim, but occasionally will flare much brighter and if one does probably all three will.

You’ll have to do some planning to see the truck-size communication objects that are placed in orbit 23,000 miles out, above the equator, ten times farther than the low earth orbiting satellites I’ve mentioned. These are geosynchronous satellites that orbit at the same angular speed as the earth and so they theoretically stay at one position above the earth’s equator at all times. Practically speaking, the earth isn’t perfectly round, and those mass anomalies cause the satellites to drift back and forth. There are many many of them now, so that that “belt” is heavily occupied. They’re required to have onboard engines now so that they may park in a dead zone away from all the others at the end of their lifetimes.

A geosynchronous orbit is one way of doing it, but less and less useful if you live high in the northern or southern hemisphere. If you were lost and had no idea what latitude you were at, you could probably tell it by the angle of satellite dishes. Here, they’re all pointing down the sky, southward, at a 55 degree angle, because that’s about where those satellites are in the sky. Farther north they have to point closer and closer to the southern horizon.

The Soviet Union, situated mostly at too-high a latitude, came up with another solution - the Molniya-style orbit. A Molniya communication satellite has an orbit that goes about 12,000 miles out, where it moves slowly and sedately above the northern hemisphere, and then it plunges in to within a few hundred kilometers of the earth at high velocity over the southern hemisphere. This keeps them, 95% of the time, lazily above the northern hemisphere. Of course because they plunge to earth and back every 12 hours or so they are temporary and will eventually reenter the atmosphere and burn up, usually over Antarctica or the Southern Ocean. Hard to see they are, since when they are close enough they are moving *fast* and usually much to the south.

In a way it’s somewhat an acquired taste to delve so deeply into the mechanics of all this, and I’m sure some would see it as an impoverished interest, perhaps with a reminiscence of a sputnik-style sinister taint. The engineering, physics and geometry are vastly appealing, though, if those things appeal at all. To the voyeurs who watch them and try to figure them out, they’re convenient puzzles; big, expensive toys.

NPR’s Climate Connections ( reviewed here ) this morning was worth reading or listening to here (audio not available until mid morning). It features Nigeria’s natural gas flares - like oil companies everywhere, Nigeria simply burns the natural gas that accompanies oil production. The story states that the practice, which has a lot of other negative impacts, places Nigeria as the number one producer of carbon dioxide in Africa south of the Sahara.

As the article states, the wasteful burning of natural gas adds around 0.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year. This amounts to about 0.1 gigatons of “carbon”, compared to the 7+ gigatons of anthropogenically produced carbon, total. That 1.4% contribution is not all that great, I suppose, but it is one single source. Entrapping and actually using the natural gas would not eliminate the emissions, since the natural gas would still be burned and end up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but it would at least eliminate the other problems mentioned by the NPR article. And it wouldn’t seem so damn wasteful.

I note that Nigeria did say in 1984 that it would have the problem licked by 2008. Wanna take any bets?

Not that anyone in the US should be picking on Nigeria.

I did run across this DOE webpage detailing sources of greenhouse gases. It seems fairly honest until the last statement regarding Figure 6. At that point I don’t think it’s playing fair ball to produce a bizarre graph that as far as I can tell projects carbon emissions scaled to millions of $1997. That seems to be what they’re referring to as "carbon intensity": it’s a ratio of projected emissions to projected economic activity. Is it noteworthy that: “The U.S. is projected to lower its carbon intensity by 25 percent from 2001 to 2025, and remain below the world average”?

“Carbon intensity” has much more connection with the *rate of emission*, and much less to do with the absolute emission. A lowering of carbon intensity by 25% does not mean that the US this year will contribute 2 of 8 total gigatons carbon, and in 2025 will contribute 1.5 gigatons. It just means that the US *thinks* that it will become more efficient at making more money using somewhat less carbon. It may well be emitting *3* gigatons of carbon in 2025, but is crowing over the suggestion that it *could* have been emitting 3.8 gigatons. Well and good, but not what most people are going to think looking at that graph and accompanying conclusion. “Carbon intensity” should be thought of as a bookkeeping trick. It’s the absolute emissions that are important to what most of us value.

Finally, there’s the aspect of reliability: that graph relies not only on a projection of technology, which may not happen, but I would be willing to be that it also depends on the assumption that the economy is going to be simply fantastic eighteen years from now. It is doubly suspect for that reason.

Given that that very paragraph admits that the US places 25% of all emissions into the atmosphere, it seems to mean that this was the only metric they could find where the US looks good.

I finally figured out how to modify the configuration php file to transmit only the first 100 or however many words I wish to appear on RSS feed. It was a fairly obscure setting, of course. I tested it and then changed it back, mainly because....

Karen made a strong argument against it. She’d rather see the whole thing on her newsfeed. I’m ambivalent either way but just had the feeling that there was something impolite about putting the whole thing on.

More concretely, there’s the tease aspect that Karen hates so, but that has the (to me) positive aspect that people have to actually click on the blog and come here. More importantly, putting just 100 or so words at least makes it harder for rebloggers to completely rip off the work.

Any ideas on this? Preferences?

From Weather Underground’s Discussion Page:

Upper low continues to spin over the middle Atlantic...with surface cyclone just off the Atlantic coast. This latter feature will be of little issue to US...but intermittent impulses riding down the back edge of the upper low will provide enough lift to trigger off showers and weak thunderstorms despite the stable air left in the wake of saturday’s cold frontal passage. Easterly flow at the surface combined with lower thicknesses aloft will also produce generally cool temperatures for this time of year...but said easterly flow will also complicate matters by bringing in maritime airmass with potential low-level moisture.

This was particularly a problem yesterday as early morning rainfall and daytime significant cloud cover really cooled down high temperatures for north Georgia.

It wasn’t a problem for me, I can assure you. Yesterday the temperatures *just* broke 70 degF once, in the late afternoon. Slight drizzle on and off during the day. Very unusual weather, but very welcome.

And it wasn’t predicted at all - temps were supposed to be in the mid 80s and that prediction never changed. Even the update this morning, with predictions again for the mid 80s says “today will be about the same temperature as yesterday.”

Take your pick, then.

While the 70 degF figure will make it in to the monthly average, there’s no way to indicate that it was a record-breaking daytime low, which I’m sure it is. The low and high for each day is over a 24-hour period, so lows are generally assumed to occur at night, and highs during the daylight hours.

I’m not so inclined to post cute cat pics, so this is a cat psych pic. Why do cats like tiny boxes so? It’s probably an aspect of the same phenomenon regarding defined surfaces, like magazines or computer keyboards.


(UPDATE: I’m playing around a bit with the rss feed configuration today. If it looks different, that’s why.)

The upside: Fire Chief Mike and his wife Jackie had the firefighters over for barbecue last night and a fine time was had by all. We’ve seldom gotten together in a social setting, so although we all know each other fairly well, there’s been something lacking in that component. It was pleasing to see that we enjoy each other’s (others'?) company in situations outside of the working one. I talked to my parents on Friday, I guess it was, and mentioned the Thursday training and the Saturday bbq and Mother commented: “you really like your firefighters, don’t you”, and I had no difficulty in saying “yes indeed I do.”

The downside: this may be baffling to those who don’t own their own website, but:

I keep an occasional eye out on bandwidth usage on our site, and when it gets to the point that usage is about 1/3 of capacity 70% into the month, I start looking at the logs. Last year we purchased a substantial additional amount of bandwidth in anticipation of the need. This year we look back and it seems that we could do this every year again and again, to no effect that brings us benefit.

You might recall the voices.gardenweb.com drama in May of 2006. Well, vigilance in the matter of bandwidth informed me of that at the time, and although things are a little less clear now, it’s obvious enough that there are strange goings on.

So here are some drains on bandwidth usage that I’ve noticed:

Image Searches:

I use StatCounter to keep track of “unique visitors”, primarily to the blog. It’s relatively useless as a general indicator of usage, other than this: in the last few months the number of hits from folks simply doing image searches through google or other search engines has skyrocketed to more than 95% of all hits on the blog.

Now I actually don’t have any problem with that - I just have to remember that that’s what it’s all about. I chose to put images on my blog, and by this time, with several thousand annotated photographs it’s inevitable that I’ll get a lot of hits from folks searching for images, who never return. I do the same thing, and very seldom return to any particular site (but not always). This component of bandwidth is something that I think is to be expected. (I do think maybe google should pay some kind of user’s fee, actually. Somehow they’re making money siphoning from me. It’s complicated, but somehow not quite right.)

I’m going to be lazy and NOT arrange this in a table, but the numbers should be easy enough to follow. Don’t pay attention to that silly statcounter tally on the right hand sidebar. That 100,000+ in the last three years doesn’t scrape the surface, since we set it to only count a hit once from an IP, and then not again for an hour from that IP. At one time we thought that was honest. But we had half a million actual page hits in each of April, May, and June. *That* is what the big boys who are sucking up advertising promote, and they’ll tell you that. I know that’s a less than a day’s worth of hits for those big boys. Still, it’s a little mindboggling to me when our bandwidth averages 15 gigabytes over the last three months, triple what it was at this time last year:

Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
Jan 2007 8904 27641 99575 220276 4.58 GB
Feb 2007 13379 32081 87102 225536 5.66 GB
Mar 2007 16679 38546 122022 309464 7.80 GB
Apr 2007 32470 58603 201187 587443 13.48 GB
May 2007 33833 62030 191137 650328 16.27 GB
Jun 2007 31725 56370 162484 570318 14.53 GB
Jul 2007 18797 32306 68520 386058 11.47 GB
Aug 2007 0 0 0 0 0

What explains this? Well, the image searches, for one thing, and possibly that search engines fail to deliver up a single page and instead deliver up a whole month’s worth of posts at one click. It’s hard to tell. Note the decrease in June. That seems to be because I banned myspace.com.

Some other oddities that seem to be sucking up bandwidth.

Odd Discussion Forums:

Our ISP’s log is more informative than the statcounter log. Why, for instance, should 2.4% of my bandwith come from forums.overclockers.co.uk? I go there, and find that I must register to read the site. Same with at least a dozen such forums - all nondescript generic frontpages that have absolutely no connection with my interests. You must register to further discoveries, and yet they’re draining a total of probably 15% of my bandwidth. I don’t even bother thinking about it anymore - get rid of them.

Livejournal and Myspace:

These of the better known masspop sites, another 15% seems to be coming from livejournal.com and myspace.com. Again, checking out the individual journal pages on livejournal nets me no information at all - there’s no reference, there are no photographs, it’s all a mystery. I think I can assure you that no one from either of those sites has ever actually showed up here.

I actually registered, and subsequently de-registered, on myspace.com just to see what was going on. Mostly it’s photo theft, and my goodness gracious, can those folks get hot under the collar when they find that all they get is the antihotlink.gif image? When they notice anyway - myspace is filled with users who have a front page (apparently that’s all there is at myspace.com) that takes forever to load even on a fast download - they just keep adding and adding and adding, mostly stolen stuff. I mean, even *I* know that it’s best to keep no more than a few posts on a front page. That’s what archives are for.

Why would spartanedge.com and spartanburgharley.com account for 1.5% of my bandwidth this month? You can’t tell from going there - there’s absolutely no clue at all. 1.5% may not sound like much, but when I look down the list of those sites, the myspace and livejournal sites, and the various mysterious “fora”, are adding up to half my bandwidth.

So I went through the list of anyone sucking more than 1% or so of my bandwidth and I banned their IPs.

This is probably pissing in the wind. I suspect I’ll have to ban whole ranges of IPs to achieve anything. And it has the added problem of backfiring, but I’m going to see how it works. I suppose that if I’ve inadvertently banned anyone who actually comes here you won’t see this, but do let me know so I can correct it.

I’ve left newsfeeds alone, I think. There’s the matter of scintilla.nature.com, which comes really close to the matter of voices.gardenweb.com in the sense that they haven’t asked permission and have only the minimal amount of linkage to my blog. They don’t, however, hotlink or put the full post up, and so I’m going to just watch that for the time being.

I’m honestly not complaining here, at least not so much. I’m a bit bewildered, mostly. I’m projecting from data last year at this time, this year, looking ahead to next year, and wondering - ok, where is everyone, and what is this going to lead to?

Karen at Rurality mentioned having spotted a satellite passing through the Big Dipper, and I commented that if she could specify the time, I could probably identify it for her. She did, and I did. After explaining in comments below how I’d done it, I decided it should be elevated to a post.

Anyone who watches the sky for any length of time is likely to spot a satellite moving across the sky from horizon to horizon. Sometimes they’ll fade out, sometimes quite quickly, and there’s a reason for this - they’ve moved into the earth’s shadow and the sun is no longer reflecting on them. Most people will wonder what it was that they saw, but it’s an idle moment and passes soon enough. There is, though, a fairly large community of satellite observers who take it farther than that, and for several years I did too.

The number, varieties, and behaviors of objects in orbit are mindboggling. Karen had noted that her satellite was reddish in color. Sometimes this can be due to atmospheric effects, but given that hers was 84106B, not a satellite per se, but an SL-12 rocket booster launched in 1984 to place the real satellite Cosmos 1603 into orbit, it’s likely that the rocket was actually painted red. Many of the objects visible from earth are rocket boosters still in orbit - those are guaranteed to be large and reflective. The working satellites they deliver are often (and now trending toward being) small and nonreflective. The exceptions are quite interesting: the GPS satellites that are 11,000 miles up are often very large and can be seen traversing on an east-west track very slowly. Even farther out are the geosynchronous satellites, used for communication, that stay above the same point on the earth at all times. These often flare spectacularly. Invisible most of the time, sometime around midnight just before entering or just after leaving the earth’s shadow, they’ll catch the sun’s rays and will flare to a remarkable brilliance every second or ten.

There are two ways to identify satellites you’ve seen, or look up the evening’s passages and then look for them at the right time.

The easiest way is to use the Heavens Above website, and enter your location’s coordinates, or select from the database of sites nearest you. You then get a list of objects that appear during a certain time period. The list gives the direction of rise, the maximum elevation in the sky, and the direction of setting, along with times for each of the three pieces of information. Although they don’t present you with a skymap, so far as I can tell, you can with a little skill generally figure out where to look.

There’s a good bit more you can do with that site - check out the Iridium satellite flare schedule for your area. For this you need to enter your exact coordinates since the flares change in intensity when you get even a few miles away from the configured location. It is a simple way to amaze your friends - walk out at the right time, point to the right place in the sky, say abracadabra, and presto - a magnificent -8mag flare in the sky. And there’s also an excellent ISS prediction schedule that you can look up for passages over your area. The International Space Station is a very fine bright treat.

Heavens Above has a database of only most of the brightest satellites. For those that are fainter, perhaps requiring binoculars or a telescope to see, or for more detailed info on what’s going on, you really need to download one of the many satellite tracking programs. For this you’ll have to download the “two line elements” for the current crop of 10,000 or so satellites. Ten or fifteen years ago, this wasn’t possible - now you can get TLEs through numerous websites. They all originate with Space Track, which itself requires registration. Here’s an explanation of what the numbers in the TLE mean.

Here’s a TLE for a rocket booster that was scheduled to decay (reenter the earth’s atmosphere and burn up) on or about July 16:

DELTA 2 R/B(1) (Decayed 2007-07-16)
1 30585U 07004F 07197.31732292 .09605445 -17362-4 33332-3 0 1980
2 30585 022.0810 053.9106 0056530 307.3589 209.6501 16.36260027 22149

Each of those numbers indicates an important celestial element, plus a few other pieces of information, that identifies the satellite and its predicted position at any time. Practically the elements must be updated every few days. And speaking of decays, watching for them is in itself a worthy project. Although I’ve never seen one, a decay is much different from a burning meteor - much slower and if large, basically, a fireball in the sky. Space Track also predicts decays, and depending on the size and a host of other factors, you might see such a thing.

The Visual Satellite Observer’s Home Page has links to currently available software. I use SatSpy v4.0, but SatSpy is no longer available as far as I know. Its developer got discouraged by the pirating and hacking into the ownership key, and discontinued it. Which is unfortunate since it is a truly fine and easily used piece of software.

I’ve mentioned Satspy before, when I presented a view of *all* tracked satellites in orbit. The details differ, but here’s what you generally get out of a satellite tracking program:

You should get a graphic that shows what satellites will be visible to you within a certain time period. For this morning, I put into Satspy a 30-minute period, and it arranged the list in terms of decreasing brightness - the brightest at the top. The x-axis is the time and the colored lines indicate what range of times the satellites will be visible. Green means well up into the sky, yellow means somewhat up into the sky, and red means it basically traverses the horizon and not very far up at all.


By clicking on a horizontal bar, you can get a skytrace of the satellite and where it passes. The green shows where it’s visible, the red shows where it’s passed into earth’s shadow and becomes invisible. For Karen’s object, I just generated a list of all satellites appearing over Birmingham between 8:45 and 9:15pm on Wed night, and then generated a sky trace to see which above a certain level of brightness passed near the Big Dipper. And so this is Karen’s object, and at the upper right it shows how it passed close to the Big Dipper about a third of the way up to the top of the sky.


A good satellite program will show you even more than that. Here’s the orbit of that particular object, passing over Birmingham at that time:


The circle shows the places from which the object was theoretically visible at that time. The yellow portion of the orbit is in sunlight, the red portion is in the earth’s shadow. To the right side of the encompassing red curve is night, the left side is day.

Just for fun, here are three satellites and their orbits. XMM is a European X-ray observatory, launched 10 Dec 1999. It goes out 100,000 km (about a quarter the distance to the moon), and then comes back in to its perigee of about 21,000 km. I’ve added Vanguards 1 and 2 (yes, *those* Vanguards of 40+ year vintage - they’re still up there). Most low earth satellites will be found in that tiny region that the Vanguards are located within.


Satellite observation is a fascinating way to waste time. For several years I spent hours each night observing with binoculars and telescope. Two interesting accomplishments: the observation of the tethered satellite TIPS. These are a pair of objects held together by a long thin tether and it was a fine thing to see them wheeling about each other in the eyepiece of the scope.

(How do you observe satellites with a telescope? Well, with my very basic though large dobsonian, it’s actually very easy. With a different program, Skymap, I can get a very finely detailed track of a satellite. I just follow that track on the map until it passes near an easily identified star, say Betelgeuse at 21:44:40. I then train the scope on the star a few minutes before hand, and sure enough, at 21:44:40 the satellite passes closeby. I then manhandle the scope, moving it along with the passing object. It takes a little skill, but I’ve seen fragments that are probably little larger than a piece of notebook paper that were several hundred miles away. Amazing.)

And then there was Chandra, the X-ray telescope, whose orbit, like XMM’s, goes about a third the distance to the moon and then sweeps in close to earth before heading back out again. Chandra was not visible without a telescope. On a now-defunct protoblog, I wrote at the time (Feb 2000)

The Chandra X-Ray Telescope has been a kind of El Dorado for me since I got my 12.5" scope in December. I’ve been trying to observe Chandra since then. Chandra has a very eccentric orbit with a period of 3809min and an apogee 1/3 the distance to the moon! While the period is 2.6 days, it is really only accessible to us in the south US once every 2-3 periods. Between this matter of a week between possible sightings, the presence of the moon every two possibilities, and the 50% or so of days with cloud cover this time of year, not to mention that until now Chandra hasn’t really topped 10 degrees above the horizon before moving more than 20,000 km out, I just haven’t been able to see it. But this morning was different.

This morning was pleasantly cold, about 25F, and very clear, despite the possibility of partial clouding. I had used Skymap Pro and the latest elements to locate Chandra’s earliest convenient appearance at mu Hydrae, about 24 degrees above the horizon, at 5:10 am EST. At that point it would be 18,800 km away, past its perigee at 10,400 km and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see it. In fact, scanning south of the nice red mu Hydrae, I found it moving north at 5:05 am EST. It passed mu Hydrae at 5:07:30, 2.5 minutes earlier than predicted by SkyMap Pro. It was probably at a magnitude of 8-9 or so, quite bright in the 32 mm eyepiece. It took about 70 seconds to traverse the 1 degree FOV. No flashing or flaring was evident; it was a slight yellowish color.

Spent the next 90 minutes watching Chandra move up through Hydra, past nu Hydrae, through Crater, and into Virgo. By the time it passed the line between Zavijava and Zaniah at 5:49 it was pretty much on schedule and about 23,800 km out. It was taking 126 seconds to traverse 1 degree FOV, and was only a bit dimmer really, maybe mag 9. By the time it passed magnitude 5.8 K0 TYC 887-570-1 just to the east of Vindemiatrix it was 6:32, 30,000 km out and still visible at mag 10 but nearly washed out by the dawn.

Now that’s something that will make your day, or mine, at least!

The front deck constructions are proceeding. We have ten fine boxes constructed now, and the soil and gravel has been scraped up, mixed, and loaded into the boxes as they are set atop one another. There was enough soil scraped to fill all the boxes except four inches of the 6' x 2' x 1' box (not seen). Only a corner at the left of the photo is visible of one of two long boxes laid in the corner of the work deck area.



Things are a little further along than these photographs would indicate. At this point I need to dig a long drainage trench and then I’m just about ready to start bring sand down from the pile. That will be spread level to a depth of 2 inches and then the flagstones can be arranged atop.

Clearly this is not an efficient use of surface area, as each triplet presents growing surface equivalent to a single bottom box. We’re giving that up in the interests of drama. But the whole setup is modular, and so can be broken up and used separately if we grow weary of the current setup. We can even transfer the boxes to the stand alone deck and erect a plastic enclosure for use as a temporary greenhouse during the winter, if we want.

The boxes have no bottoms. Rather, I cut groundcloth a little oversized, and then put it down inside a box before adding the soil mix. That’s just to keep the soil from washing out the bottom into the next tier down.

They’re mostly planted in our two favored tomatos - Rutgers and Romas, and in basil. It might seem that we’re a bit behind in getting tomatoes out, but in fact we easily have two growing seasons worth of summer here and replanting is often done.

In some ways it’s almost unseemly to mention this, but only almost. So I should probably note that the first post to this blog occurred on this day in 2004. A couple of months ago I wondered if I was going to be able to manipulate this one to also be the 1000th post, but it’s only #985. A simple calculation will show that on average I’ve taken off about one day in ten. Well, I never intended to write every day; there are some days I just don’t feel like it!

It *would* be unseemly to go after some kind of word count. The blogging software I use is rather primitive and doesn’t supply that kind of statistical information. I admit that I did spend a short time searching for websites that might analyze a blog and offer an estimate. Fortunately I was unsuccessful and the temptation to be unseemly was taken out of my hands. Say, a million words by now? Some of them actually reasonably good, and sometimes even in long strings at a time!

There aren’t many nonphysiological or nonprofessional things that I’ve done so consistently as this for so long a period of time. It surprises me a little to look back at this flood of verbiage encompassing so many subjects. I’m not at all surprised at how I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I could have accomplished if I’d Had a Plan and Really Applied Myself. But then I never had but the vaguest of intentions of any sort of concrete goal.

I suppose that if there were some sort of goal it would be the documentation of the biota and conditions on our forty acres. I’ve always come back to that for the bulk of the writing, but I’ve certainly strayed many times. There have been the occasional book, movie, or Great Person reviews, a once-in-awhile recipe, nondescript fluff, the firefighting stuff, the weather and climate stuff, the periodic results of my programming hobby, and the fortunately infrequent rant on some obsession or pet peeve that always leaves me feeling a little guilty afterwards.

There are things that I’ve done that I probably wouldn’t have had I not started this blog and run into like-minded companions. In 2004 it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to start watching and documenting insects. I’m not sure I would have made a consistent effort at documenting even plants, the original limited mission that began before the blog. Perhaps I would have gotten into photography, but the results would have been about like that of keeping a private journal read by no one other than myself. I stopped using semicolons, too.

Speaking of which, I once kept a private, daily, written journal. That lasted for maybe three years in the late 1990s. It was some kind of self-imposed therapy at the time. It gradually palled that without some kind of discipline from the outside there was a constant accumulation of personal private stuff that even I became bored with. Writing a blog is much more interesting. I started out with the naive notion that I would write for myself and no one else, but it became inevitable that I would to at least some extent write for others as well. That mildly public feature with its minor but significant restrictions on content and freedom of too much expression is important. It is, I think, that discipline that elevates the quality of blog entries over those of a private daily journal.

So it’s only natural that I’m grateful to those few dozen stalwarts who have suffered me so far. Some of you are invisible but I generally know who most of you are. Regardless of visibility, all keep me relatively honest, at least somewhat circumspect, and act as the air brakes on the logorrhea! Thank you all!

I got this all pieced together and then discovered that I had previously observed this butterfly in mid June 2006. This one wasn’t so interested in me as last year’s was in Glenn:


This is a Hackberry Emperor, Asterocampa celtis. It’s distingued from the similar Tawny Emperor by the large eyespot on the dorsal forewing, which Tawny lacks.


As implied by its name, the larvae feed on leaves of Hackberry, Celtis occidentalis, and we certainly have plenty of those! They’re a common understory plant, a moderately small tree, a “trash tree”, as Phyllis refers to them, but they’re an all-in-one species in terms of lepidopteran food and groundcover. They also have the distinction of growing under Black Walnut trees, which famously exude an allelopathic chemical juglans that inhibits the germination and growth of a great many other plants.

The Lepidopteran Host Plants Database has two pages of listings on butterflies and moths that eat the leaves of hackberries, among them Red-spotted Purple (Basilarchia arthemis), American Snout (Libytheana bachmanii), Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa), Question Mark (Polygonia interrogationis), Io Moth (Automeris io), Cecropia Moth (Hyalophora cecropia), Wild Cherry Sphinx (Sphinx drupiferarum), and a great many more less descript Arctiid, Noctuid, Tortuid, and Geometrid moth species.

With their warty bark, twisted scrubby shapes, and leaves and twigs that develop all sorts of galls, a lot of people would think this a homely tree, but it’s quite the cornucopia to a lot of great insects.

Two years ago the paper wasps, Polistes annularis, were everywhere, a nest in every corner. They inhabited every enclosure - bird boxes and gourds I had hung out for the birds - and in the hot afternoons would cluster outside the enclosure. There they would drip in clumps that never hit the ground. Last year there seemed to be more or less normal numbers, certainly fewer than in 2005. And this year I’ve only seen one or two all year, no nests at all. That’s a repetition of a summer without paper wasps four or five years ago. I wish I had been keeping better records then but though I recall it I don’t recall exactly when. 2003, perhaps.

This year the paper wasps are way down, but the mud daubers, Trypoxylon politum, are everywhere. They’re building nests again, now, after one cycle in the spring, and we all work in the clay in front of the house. They seem to see me as a potential repository for spiders and hover close to me, checking me out. The pipe organ nests abound, this time without the lateral exit holes that signify the older nests. They occupy corners under the back deck that last year and the year before would harbor a paper wasp nest.

Last year, I’m sure there weren’t so many, but my records of such innocuous insects are even worse than of the paper wasps. It’s a shame, because I wonder if there’s a reciprocal relationship. They are at least superficial competitors for space and food. They build nests in the same general places, and they both stuff spiders in their nurseries.

This year I’ve seen only one wheelbug, Arilus cristatus, and that as a nymph early in the spring. Last year I saw literally hundreds. Ladybugs are hardly to be seen. After an initial spring appearance, our stalwart butterflies, Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, Papilio glaucus, and Red-spotted Purple Admirals, Limenitis arthemis, have been gone since early June. Conversely I’ve seen quite a few Sulphur butterflies around, omnipresent since the beginning of spring, and not something I’ve noticed a lot of before. I’ve seen very few caterpillars feeding on plants this year - two years ago various species were all over everything.

How much of this is hard cyclic, that is, driven mostly temporally rather than by local conditions, I can’t say. I’d guess the paper wasp/mud dauber populations fall into the former category. Perhaps the wheelbug populations do as well. Perhaps the butterflies, especially the swallowtails and admirals, have simply gone elsewhere. Doubtless their disappearance has something to do with the dearth of flowering plants in our small environment: the lack of spring rains was very hard on the maturation of those that would be flowering now. And that’s another thing: the drought. Depending on your point of view we’re in our second year of continuous drought or our ninth year of drought interrupted only twice by average levels of annual rainfall. This undoubtedly has a cumulative effect on long-term populations of many species (but can’t really explain apparent cycles of two or three years).

I can’t say, either, how widespread these fluctuations are. Is the paper wasp implosion something strictly local to our area? Or is it at a current low over the broader region of northeastern Georgia?

It might seem that this has been a good year for various species of flies and dragonflies, as I’ve posted on them so many times. But that’s conflated with the fact that I’ve simply taken greater notice of them this year. I certainly can’t say for certain that it’s because they’re in greater abundance.

Longer-lived animals are harder to analyze, but Gray Squirrels have declined noticeably this year, after several years of increasing numbers. Last year they were so abundant that on two occasions neighbors remarked independently about their huge numbers. Their fussing and fighting was constant (the squirrels, not the neighbors). I’ve seen a few squirrels this year, and that’s it. Again, they may have gone elsewhere - last year was the off-year for walnuts and hickories, and I suspect the on-year crop this year was devastated (along with acorns) by the hard freeze in April that occurred during flowering.

When we first moved out here, 16 years ago, it was rabbits that were in abundance and squirrels were never to be seen on and around our immediately location. That has gradually flipped in the years since, although the absence of rabbits is uncertain except around our property.

Deer. Omnipresent. I saw twin fawns gawking at me as I came home last night. Cute, but excessive, and diversity killers. No fluctuation there, unless it’s to increase at a rate, with no end in sight, rivaling that of human beings. Predators. We need predators.

I’ve mentioned earlier the surprising absence this year of calling Barred Owls, noticed as early as late winter. I’ve heard them on several occasions in the late afternoon or in the night, but nothing like in past years. The ones I do hear seem far away for the most part. Red-tailed Hawks, on the other hand, seem to be at normal numbers, judging by the calls I hear. Wouldn’t I expect a larger population of owls and hawks given the large increase in squirrels over the past decade? I should think so, but no.

I’m not invoking or raising the specter of climate change here, other than to mention our ongoing drought. Nor am I suggesting the sinister effects of some toxic pollutant, since I have no idea of this. In fact, I have nothing satisfactory at all to conclude other than this is just the way it is, and that we’ll probably see rebounding populations of all these things that seem so absent this year. It’s a testable prediction, anyway.

On Saturday I was examining the fresh leaves atop the New York Ironweeds, and noticed one set oddly arranged. I poked around gently, and sure enough a little brown spider rushed out, took one look, jumped to the ground three feet below, and scooted under some leaves.

Yesterday I went back, and there it was again, back in *its* plant.


It seems very unlikely that anyone is going to be able to hazard a guess on this one, since it was not to be coaxed from its defensive position here (other than to drop back down to the ground). However, there are some clues - the long front pair of legs and eye arrangment suggests another Thomasid crab spider of some kind. It’s not likely to be the Xysticus seen last week judging from the sparse number of spines on the tibia of the front pairs of legs. But I don’t see anything on bugguide that is reminiscent of it.

The photograph above accentuates the back portion of the spider. The arrangment of eyes in the thumbnail below links to a larger photo that accentuates the front legs.


It seems that I’m fated to discover small brown drab crabs.

In other news, we didn’t get any rain from the 70% chances on Saturday or Sunday, but it was mostly cloudy and the temperatures were relatively cool (90 degF). We’re promised a 40% chance of rain every afternoon for the next week.

It’s been about three weeks, June 27, since we took a close look at the dragonfly population. Then it was Blue Dashers and Eastern Pondhawks, both in the Libelluidae family of Common Skimmers, large, genuine dragonflies. The Hyla Pond is a hotbed of activity now. It’s completely covered with duckweed, something of an annoyance, but both the frogs and dragonflies seem to like it. Yesterday afternoon there were dozens of at least two and possibly three species in constant chase mode. Two of these are shown to the left, linked to a larger image.

The top one is, I think, another Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis. That one is a male, and Blue Dashers probably sort out to be our most common dragonfly over the last three years. But why should that mean that we not have yet another photo of one?


We seem to have a population of two male forms - with and without the dark blue tail tip. It doesn’t seem to be a male-female dimorphism - the link above to bugguide also shows both forms. Males do undergo a color change as they mature and so maybe that’s the explanation.

The bottom one though is a newcomer, and there are a lot of them. From having seen Bev’s observation on July 4, I’m pretty sure it’s a Slaty Skimmer, Libellula incesta, and so a member of the same family. The nearly black face and eyes, combined with the slate-blue body, pretty much give it away.


The base of the wings also lacks the amber coloration that you see in the Blue Dashers.


This one was quite a pleasure to find, another new one for me. It looks to be a clubtail, family Gomphidae. I had a lot of trouble rationalizing species until I happened on Common Sanddragon, Progomphus obscurus. How “common” can be hooked up to “obscurus”, I’m not sure, but it looks to be a very close match.



This one was quite bold and not to be disturbed. It wasn’t partaking of the shenannigans going on over the Hyla Pond, but did find our new flagstone pieces to be the perfect resting spot.

I haven’t remarked on the Cuddeback since early last April. It’s been working though, continuously, since then, and I’ve been setting it up here and there, leaving it undisturbed for a week or two at a time. It captures images periodically, and there is always a reason, even if it’s just the pattern of sunlight on the ground on a windy day. It’s also still on its first set of C batteries, although they are now at 25% and should soon be replaced.

So far the animals imaged have been unexciting, unless you like deer a lot. On the upside, it’s never imaged a human being, other than myself!

For the last two weeks the camera has been set up where the red dot is, in this property map:


Here are four images that the camera has taken at night. The images are highly cropped from 1280x1024 to their current size but have not been enlarged or otherwise photoshopped. The quality seems poor, but that’s because I was greedy and was trying to monitor way too much area for nighttime imaging. The animals below are probably 30 or 40 feet away from the camera and so it does a remarkably good job of thermal sensing from that distance.

The second image is clearly an armadillo, but I can’t figure out what the first one is. Perhaps a raccoon.


Again, not sure about the first one but from its carriage, the second one is almost certainly a raccoon.


This one is uncropped but has been reduced in size from 1280x1024 to 600x480, so more than two-fold area reduction. You can tell where the above animals are wandering from this full photo. The identity of this one is without doubt. Gene is not supposed to be wandering around 500 feet from the house down at the creek during the night. I do get up generally between 2am and 5am, and then open up the house sometime during those hours, but had no idea he was taking off that far. Not good.


This version of the cuddeback is called “NoFlash”. It’s a little misleading because it certainly is using a flash - it’s just a red flash and supposedly not visible to animals. I haven’t been able to compare to the current version of regular flash cuddeback, which also thermally detects and images nighttime animals but uses white flash. I suspect those images are better than these.

And the 30 second .avi movies (shot at 320x240), while very good in daylight, are pretty useless at the distance of these animals at night. (I have gotten some good nighttime images and movies of animals, but the camera was set up to view the ground from a much closer distance, say, less than ten feet.)

Daytime images are generally superb. They are shot in much larger dimensions, 2048x1536. The photo of the deer below, like the one of Gene above (and the camera is looking at the same spot, btw), has not been cropped but has been reduced in size to 600x450, so a ten-fold reduction in image area.

The photo links to a cropped image that has *not* been reduced and should just about cover your screen. Its size is 211 KB.


UPDATE: I think that if I were to do it over again, I’d go for the regular flash version, rather than the so-called “no flash”. There just aren’t any advantages to the latter that I can see, and the regular flash nighttime images are almost certainly superior.

Here’s my rationalization: the “NoFlash” uses red light to illuminate, on the basis that it will not alarm the animals as the regular white flash will. Perhaps. But so what? The only reasons you might be interested in is if there are subsequent photographs (or movies) to be taken at the scene. Yet the “NoFlash” movies are decidedly inferior, so nix that argument. Red light is longwave, and is very fuzzy in its ability to illuminate a scene - you can see that in the first four photographs above. White light is crisp and will deliver a very good initial image. Yeah, maybe it will scare off the critters but what does it matter if the alternative “NoFlash” renders poor initial photographs and then provides impossible movies?

Cuddeback should make these things clear, I think. The “NoFlash” is a gimmick, and steered me the wrong way. That’s not to belittle the Cuddeback technology in other ways - I’m very impressed with the thermal detection at night. But they should have been more revealing of what the “NoFlash” really meant.

Our training Thursday night consisted of something a little different. Generally WVFD trains by itself, but Mike and Ed had the great idea of calling up the Oconee County Fire Department Chief and asking if we could join them. So last night we got into the supertanker and Mike’s truck and took off for Oconee County, south of Athens-Clarke County, about twenty miles, to Malcom Middle School.

OCFD has eight stations scattered about their county, all under one main Fire Chief. Nonetheless they are, as we are, all volunteers. Oglethorpe County, by contrast, has 14 stations, but they are more autonomous, and there is no single Fire Chief over all the departments. It’s likely that will change one day, toward the Oconee County model, but that’s the way it is for now.

Oconee County is also a bedroom community for Athens, with a much larger population size and density. Its departments are commensurately better financed, and also more experienced - they get quite a few more calls than we do, and so a lot more practical experience.



OCFD’s agenda this evening was drafting and nursing, and by now we are old pros at this. Wolfskin set up its drop tank next to OCFD #7’s main engine, our community’s magnificent supertanker backed up, and dumped a couple thousand gallons of water into it. (Everyone commented on the remarkable purity and clarity of our water.) Then we spent the rest of the evening rotating into the amidships control panel and operating the drafting in several different ways.



So OCFD had at least 30 folks there last night, compared to our six (but if you average it out, ours was as good or better a turnout per department as theirs was), and at least a dozen trucks of various shapes and sizes. They were broken up into four groups and hidden about the school, so it wasn’t possible to get a shot of all of them in one place. We were all intrigued by the “Dark Corners” OCFD truck!

If you look at these photos, you might notice something. There’s only a small group of six, in the second photo above, who are wearing full PPE, sans coats, while the rest are in shorts or streetclothing. That’s us, and that’s the fabulous supertanker. Once the preliminary talk session was over and before we dispersed for the actual training, Fire Chief Mike said, firmly, “heads, hands, feet”, and so it’s Wolfskin who’s in proper protective gear. That’s what we do - anytime we’re working with vehicles and equipment we’re in PPE - it’s standard operating guidelines for us, and I think we’re a role model for it. I think I detected a little OCFD envy here and there, that we had the nerve to be so cool as to be so uncool.

(WVFD did not undertake my suggestion to haul out our menopause refresh kits and begin cooling ourselves off. Maybe next time. Or maybe not - it certainly would have cemented our reputation, even though we suppressed our Latin and French pronouncements, and neither Glenn nor I did any botanizing.)

A last few thumbnails. The first two are long range views of two of the other stations - note the ugly brown drop tank in the first thumbnail. The last two are of our own station, and OCFD #7’s Engine 701. Note shorts. Tsk tsk.


The sun was well down by the time we got loaded up and started back, and it was well past dark when we got back to station, called 911, and put the tanker back into service.

In some ways we didn’t get the density of training that we usually impose on ourselves - I have to say that this was the easiest session we’ve had in a long time. But it was fun to participate with a much larger group, and the OCFD folks were very hospitable and seemed pleased to have us there.

A few months ago I used Google Earth to present another “aenigma”, and since this week seems to be my week for being perverse, I’m going to do it again. Google Earth is a fantastic application, but not, unfortunately, for the slow of connection since it is a streaming application. It’s not fair, I know.

This group of islands, and they are decidedly nontropical, caught my imagination when I was quite a young chile. Tales of shipwrecks, a population of 270 or so that are descended from fifteen survivors, seven women and eight men, with only eight surnames, living in an extremely remote location for the last two centuries, were all very provocative to me. I was then, as now, strange in that way.

Forty years ago I read everything I could on these islands, and that consisted of mainly two books found at the public library. Now, with the internets, there’s more information than I could possibly assimilate. You can probably tell that the main island is volcanic. It’s above a hot spot, formed by the divergence of two tectonic plates, and yes, that’s a clue. Because of this the majority of the island, only about 7 miles wide, is steeply sloped and uninhabitable. The northwest corner next to the ocean is flat, though, and that’s where the only settlement (called “The Settlement”) is located.

A larger image of the main island is linked to the first thumbnail below. The island group consists of several others, located less than 20 miles away by longboat. These are linked by the next two thumbnails. The middle one is the home of a unique species of albatross, from which huge deposits of guano derive. Periodic visits by longboat supply the inhabitants with a source of nitrogen by which to fertilize their main crop, potatoes.


I believe it must have preceded my interest, but a volcanic eruption forced the evacuation of the settlement to Southampton, England, where the evacuees found great unhappiness. Though there was some damage from the eruption they were able to later return. The Wikipedia authority tells me that there was no television until 2001, and even now only received from a military station in the Falkland Islands.

Much, much later I discovered genetic drift, and the founder effect. The small number of inhabitants, isolated for two centuries, have by necessity inbred, and many exhibit a number of otherwise rare genetic conditions. One third of the current population of 272 has asthma, for instance, and allowed studies on their DNA. When coupled with the extremely detailed genealogies of the families, a number of genes associated with asthma were discovered. Interestingly, the inhabitants have been guaranteed proceeds from any drugs developed from study of their genetics.

Another consequence of the founder effect - retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that leads to blindness, is much higher in the population than in Europe. The gene was contributed, “just by chance”, by one of the fifteen original colonists, and has, again, “just by chance”, become very common in the population. And though I wasn’t able to locate any information on this, I do recall that “cauliflower ears” is also common.

If you’ve given up, then here’s a charming portrayal of the history of the island by a visitor of near on to a century ago, Rose Annie Rogers.

I had a nutritious post going about trigonometry and figuring out when in the autumn, and cold winter that the warming sun finally peeks into the windows of your well-designed house to add welcome heat. And then I decided I needed to do a little more trigonometry and so despite the sadness with which everyone will view the deferrment of this post, it needs a little more work.

So I think I’ll complain about cell phones, instead. Again.

Now, just to deflect all the rejoinders about how valuable they are in terms of safety, how no one uses them except in emergencies, and so forth, etc. etc., I realize that. I just don’t detect that perfectly reasonable degree of conservative use in my day to day, moment to moment encounters with people. I see people whipping them out at every opportunity, and astonished when someone would complain that any particular situation is inappropriate.

I only wish to mention two items.

The new crop of freshmen is arriving and I have some early summer kids whose parents seem not to have taught them that it’s utterly rude to be text messaging during a working session. Or walking out of a class session to answer their cellphones, not just once, but again, five minutes later. This isn’t anything new for those who teach, of course, but there used to be at least some uncertainty and guilt about doing so. No longer. In both cases I had to ask the student to put the cell phone away and they were genuinely surprised that I would do so.

I think they’re in for a rude awakening when they get a real job thinking they can do this in the middle of a corporate or departmental meeting, and their colleagues and bosses really really don’t like the interruptions and distractions (however those parentally impoverished colleagues and bosses may violate their own judgements).

Maybe I can be of some help in informing them of this pitfall in their future, since their parents didn’t clue them into the etiquette of cell phone use. (Maybe I can also spin my wheels to no effect at all.)

Second: I think I’ve mentioned that it makes me a bit sad to be walking about campus from one point to another and note an ever-decreasing contact with the people around me. I’d put the percentage in the range of 75% who now have a cell phone glued to their ear, and notice absolutely nothing at all around them. Their eyes are blank and empty of any outward soul at all. They see nothing around them. Often a pair may walk together, but they’re each talking on their own cellphones. What the f?

(Inter-rant: It’s not just young students either. It’s adults my age. People who have invited me to physically be present to converse and party. And then leave me sitting there for 5, 10, 15 minutes while they chat about nothing with someone who idly decided to call them. And they answered! Astonishing! I am truly not that boring. And if I am, don’t ask me to drive 30 miles to visit you when I could be perfectly happy enjoying myself at home with my much more communicative cats!)

Now for the positive thing: there actually seem to be people around who don’t compulsively use their cell phones when the moment of opportunity or fear of solitude compels them. Last week I passed two individuals, unencumbered, who actually seemed to be taking note of their surroundings. As I passed, they made eye contact and smiled. It really made my day, as rare as that occurrence now is.

So maybe there’s a cohort among the zombies, of conscious, aware people, who actually enjoy their surroundings and know that a cell phone should not be a crutch.

So now feel free to offer your stories of outrageous incidents, as well as your protestations at my ludditism.

The Wild Blue Indigo, Baptisia australis, that I mentioned in flower in early May has been forming its legumes (pods). The fruits are black now, and if it were dry they’d be rattleboxes we were promised. Or maybe not. I opened up several to check and very few of the ovules developed. There were only a few of these plants in this area, and I’d guess that while they do self-fertilize, they prefer to outcross. With so little variety in the area, fertility is limited. I notice that last August 16 I photographed a cluster of saddleback caterpillars on one plant, so there’s that to watch out for (and watch out for!).

One of the pods was already slightly open, and when I peeled it back, there was obviously something animal inside, though I couldn’t tell exactly what it was without my reading glasses. I took a number of photographs anyway, and when I developed them this is what I saw, a 3mm tiny brown spider eating a friend that it had become tired of:


I think this is probably a crab spider, Xysticus spp. This individual is upside down in this photograph, with the cephalothorax oriented outward toward us. You can, with some difficulty, make out the arrangment of eyes, and that looks to be a match for this species. And (better seen in the thumbnail below) there’s the dorsal striping on the cephalothorax.

As for the eyes, I would have concluded them to be the “hexagonal” arrangement of a lynx spider, rather than the “two rows of four” arrangment of a crab spider, but can rationalize the latter. The flattened, rather than the humpy cephalothorax, as well as the very long front two pairs of legs puts me more in the mind of a crab.


I doubt if the spider was actually hunting inside the pod. I imagine it hunts outside, and then just used the convenient crevasse of the slightly open pod to drag its prey for a bit of security. Or so it thought.

Karen at Rurality asked if we were getting any of the rain they’re seeing in the Birmingham AL area. As of now we are not, but that low is pushing eastward and at 4AM we’re starting to get some sprinkles.

Which is all to the good, though we’re not desperate yet. It is going to interfere with a project begun a few days ago though. (I notice, btw, that Bev is in a similar construction mood.)

Last year I posted a "before and after" series of photos of the house area between 1991 and then 2006. It referenced this composite of then and now, of the driveway and path down to the house.

Although we have long ago gotten up most of that hideous gravel, we’ve lived with the frontyard area between the kitchen deck on the left, and the large uncovered workdeck that Glenn built a few years ago.


Now there’s nothing particularly wrong with that middle space, it’s just sort of boring. So we decided to make some changes.

First up was to scrape up and sort the top 3-6 inches of layering down to the clay, and begin to shape the clay surface for flagstones. Since we’ve been annually layering the area with woodchips, there is quite a rich loamy soil once a little pulverized clay is mixed in. This resulted in three large piles of relatively gravel-free mix, background, and in the right foreground, one big pile of gravel-rich mix.


The area is roughly trapzoidal in shape, and perhaps 20 feet from the steps that run between the ponds to the beginning of the path that takes off around the north side of the house, say about 200 sq feet. Years ago we put in a 4" corrugated, perforated pipe that runs below and parallel to the front stoop, collects excess water, and shunts it around the side of the house. But I will probably have to dig a trench lengthwise and fill with gravel and sand to augment that.

I finally put my analytical chemistry training in sampling to work. By tossing shovelfuls of a gravel-soil mix onto a conical pile, the gravel rolls to the bottom and the soil stays on top.


If you know cats, then you know that they are irresistably charmed by defined surface areas. The temporary path between the piles is a cat magnet. They are very enthusiastic about all this, and wonder when we’re going to put in the bathroom.


Glenn went down to a Lexington landscaper and selected and bought a pallet of flagstone. We’ll gradually bring it home and lay it atop the sanded surface, but that will have to wait for a week or so. While I’d love to be able to do this with our own rock, it just isn’t suitably shaped or composed. The reddish and gray coloration of this stuff will swuit us very well.


We don’t want the area to be entirely flagstoned - that might be dramatic but would be equally boring, so we designed some planters that will dot the area, breaking up the flagstone, and allow us to grow herbs and such in a more controlled, deer-protected location.


This is the first tier, at 4' x 4' and 12" high. At a nominal 2" thickness it’s probably overkill but will keep the CO₂ frozen for at least twenty years. There will be an appropriately smaller, 12" high square that will be rotated 90 degrees and set upon this lower one, with its corners at the midpoints of the lower one, and then a third tier similarly rotated and set upon that. That third tier will be 2' x 2', and also 12" high. Plantings will go in the large corners that are revealed by the rotations.

The thumbnails below show the placement of this first one, fronting one side of the house deck, and there will be another placed about where the gravel pile is in the first thumbnail. There will be a third planter placed where the dirt pile in the foreground of the second thumbnail sits.


Of course if it does rain, we’ll just have to sit and think about it.

Continuing on the great snake from yesterday: she (we’re sure she’s a she, and hopefully gravid), stayed on her island into mid-morning, and then when I got home around noon had left. However I did find her laid out along the rim of the pond. She took to the water the moment she saw me.

Glenn noticed that she seemed to be a little damaged. She’s missing most of her tail, right up to the anal portion. I thought maybe it might be a sexual trait, but can find no photos that show this abrupt truncation; all red-bellied water snakes seem to have graceful long tails. The absence of scarring is odd, though. Perhaps the loss occurred in early childhood?

Not that she has much to worry about now, except from humans or dogs. At 36-39 fat inches, she’s at the top of her food chain. I imagine even an owl or hawk would move on.

For what it’s worth, the snakeskins of two years ago had fully intact tails, although the size was about right.

BTW - I took a couple of prints of the photos to WVFD business meeting last night and showed them to The Unknown Firefighter. He took a look and said “Nerodia erythrogaster. Not much meat on their bones.” I continue to be amazed and heartened by our Wolfskin Polymaths.


In recognition of Liberty Libby and President Solomon, tell me who this funny woman is and what she’s up to, or you don’t have a credible hair on your political butt. No fair peeping!

A couple of years ago we repeatedly found shed snakeskins at the edge of the Bufo pond. It was suggested at the time that it might be a red-bellied water snake, and so it is, Nerodia erythrogaster. Probably waiting for a bullfrog to hop up onto the island.

In the world of bad witches it’s comforting to contemplate the flies.

This one was encountered in the early morning before I had my contacts in. I had to rely on automatic focus on a hyperactive insect, and so these are probably the most unlovely photographs I’ve posted. Nonetheless I do so because of the interesting nature of this fly.


This is, I’m fairly certain, is a Tiger Bee Fly, Xenox tigrinus. There are two species of Xenox in the US, and they used to be in the genus Anthrax, but have apparently been moved.

Bee Flies are in the family Bombyliidae, and if you’re acquainted with such things you’ll recognize that name as similar to the genus name for bumblebees, Bombus. Bee flies are distantly related, by virtue of being in the same superfamily, Asiloidea, to Robber Flies. Unlike robber flies which as adults are predatious, the adults of bee flies feed on nectar. But their children are parasitic, choosy about their victims, and in this case at least that’s what makes them good witches.

I’m going to have to try to get some better photos of this very handsome fly, with its extremely prominent venation, but for the moment all there is are these, which I include for documentation purposes:


While it’s an extremely good witch, it brings a mixed message. It’s here because we have a perennial problem with carpenter bees, but on the other hand it lays its eggs in the entrances to carpenter bee tunnels. Its larvae are parasitic on carpenter bee larvae, and that’s certainly a very good thing.

Carpenter bees are more than merely a nuisance if you have a house of wood construction. Twice a year they fly, hover in their hundreds, and burrow into the wood to create their nests. We’ve tried several approaches to controlling them - quite a few years ago, the chemical approach, which we abandoned after one season. Tennis rackets are a very satisfactory approach, and on my more vigorous days I could dispatch a couple hundred. But at the same time I felt that I was merely selecting against the genotypes that hover less than a few feet above my level, leaving the higher flying genotypes to enrich above my reach.

So I was cautiously pleased to discover that we now have a population of these guys. Surely they would not be present had I continued the chemical treatment approach, which was not only noxious, but basically ineffective. And while that may yet become a necessary form of control, I’ll give the tiger beeflies a chance.

June was a month of contrasts for many of us, especially between Texas northward, and the Southeast.

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

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



The temperature anomalies in May persisted in most places in June, though the unusual south Texas coolness in May extended northward into Nebraska and adjoining states. This was also reflected in unusual rainfall in this part of the country. Florida and the Northwest Pacific continued to get cooler than normal temperatures by 2-4 degF. The rest of the country continued to receive warmer weather although not quite so severe, 0-2 degF, as in May for most places. Higher temperatures, 2-6 degF, were seen in and around the Rocky Mountain states, the Great Lakes, region, and most of Alabama, Tennessee, and northwest Georgia.

Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, below is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US, in June. It was the south-center of the country that received above-normal rainfall, up to 100% or more than usual. Southern California, and of course the Southeastern states, were anywhere from 50-100% below normal, continuing a trend that has persisted for months now.

Tropical Storm Barry and remnants brought some relief from the wildfires of April and May to north Florida and south Georgia in the first couple of days in June, but did little for the rest of us here.



For Athens:

June continued the extremes of dry weather we’ve been experiencing since the beginning of 2006, if you wish to be kind and open-minded.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of June. The red line is the average over the last 18 years of Junes, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. The green line, and the extensive mustard yellow, shows that we are continuing in the drought that has been our lot since the beginning of 2006, and the trend in less-than-normal rainfall that we’ve seen here since 1998.


I should say here that while Athens reported 2.17 inches of rain in June (55% of normal), we in Oglethorpe County east of Athens only received 1.4 inches (35% normal). Since I consistently use Athens data rather than my own much less extensive historical data, the plots will reflect Athens conditions. For the year so far then, Athens has received 15.7 inches of rain, which is 60% of the normal 26.2 inches. The effects of this on vegetation, gardens, and watering restrictions, are evident everywhere.

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of June in Athens. We never broke a historical record in June this year, but we came within a few degrees several times. As usual, the green line is for this year, and the red line is for last year, 2006. The blue line declares the historical high temperatures for each day.


In the end we had 16 days during June above the 17-year average for that day. That is more than 3 times the average 5.1 days of signficantly hotter weather experienced during Junes since 1990. There were 5 nights when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s just about average compared to the 5.4 low nights in an average June. We may not have broken daily high records, but we did for extended time subjected to unusually hot (and dry) weather.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update: After sea surface temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacific dropped below normal in March, they returned to normal state in April and remained that way throughout June, perhaps slightly below normal. Indications are still for a La Nina to develop in the next 1-3 months, and that will mean higher than normal temperatures and continued lower than normal rainfall.

Most of the plots at the ENSO discussion page actually look to be considerably below normal, but NOAA does not declare a La Nina until the ONI (the Oceanic Nino Index) has dropped below -0.5 for three consecutive months. Thus we might actually be experiencing conditions, but they are not formally recognized as a fully developed situation. That at least is as close as I want to come to trying to explain why we are experiencing the effects of a full-blown La Nina when one hasn’t even been declare. Makes me wonder what the next few months hold for us!

Since Friday we’ve had anywhere from 50-80% chance of rain. Friday afternoon and evening thunderstorms and then again Saturday afternoon and evening thunderstorms developed all around the state, but nowhere near us. Each day we were under severe thunderstorm watch from noon until 9pm and nothing happened. Things were looking pretty bleak yesterday too, until about 7pm when it got very busy:


Weather Underground produces great maps, I think, updated every ten minutes or so. Those little square in the figure above are lightning strikes - the size indicates how long ago the lightning strike occurred.

Gene and I sat out on the deck watching the sky for the next few hours, offering encouragement. We had no help from the frogs and toads, who are just plain tired of The Month of June. Along about 9pm the sky was aflicker with constant lightning and then at 10pm it started *raining*. Actual rain!


(That’s another thing I like about weather underground’s presentation, you can zoom in on a local area.)

It went on until 1am, and the rain gauge says 1.25 inches by this morning. That’s the entire amount we received all June. The temperatures are to be in the low eighties, and after days of 95-100 degF afternoons, that’s fine by me.

A preview of The Month of June:

As you know, I compile the high, low, and mean daily average temperatures over a number of years and then compare the dailies for this month to those averages. In June there were an incredible 16 days in which the daily high was at least one standard deviation over the mean for that day. An average number of such days would amount to 5. I hadn’t thought of June as being particularly hot, and in fact we never got close to breaking any historical highs. But the extended number of days above the average (and particularly without rain) was noteworth.

How noteworthy was it? At Glenn’s prompting I calculated the probability of 16 days out of 30 that are at least one standard deviation above the mean.

You might recall from statistics that you can expect about 16% of events to be above one standard deviation (and another 16% to be below). I figured that for any *given* 16 day sequence, the probability of that happening is 0.16¹⁶, or, a very small number.

But we’re interested in any 16 day sequence, and there are surely many possible combinations of these in a month. Once we know that number of combinations we multiply the above small number by that large number and we have our probability.

So how many combinations of 16 events in a 30 day period are there? Internets to the rescue with a nice tutorial on permutations and combinations!

We need to evaluate this:

³⁰C₁₆

which turns out to be: the first 16 factors in 30! divided by 16! and that number is about 1.5 x 10⁸, or about 150 million ways to arrange 16 extreme days within a total of 30 days.

Multiplying the two numbers gives 2.7 x 10^-5, or about a 0.003% probability.

We might be tempted to conclude that a June of this severity comes along only about 1 in 37,000 Junes, but we’d be wrong to conclude that. The mathematics is sound, I think, but there’s a fault in the reasoning, and we’re honest people here even if it puts us at a disadvantage.

What is this flaw?

Who are your heroes, in this age that seems to be bereft of heroes? I did a few searches through my blog and found quite a few, although I might have missed some. Obviously they fall into what some might see as a narrow category, though I think not.

Although I have my own views as to what’s important, there are certainly others. I only ask that your heroes speak to your concerns. (I note I don’t include Al Gore, but I think he’d have to be among them. Sneer if you wish. He’s the only politician effectively addressing an issue I think is paramount.)

Here are some that I’ve mentioned in the very nearly three years that this blog has been in existence:

Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Barbara McClintock, for their abilities to see things no one else could.

Molly Ivins, for her honesty, wit, and love of politics that transcended the usual tendency to dismiss politics as something merely evil.

Carl Sagan, for a lovely story that summarized everything he was all about. The movie ain’t half bad either. You might also remember him, in the bad old 80s, for TTAPS and Nuclear Winter. However the proposal might have been ridiculed subsequently, it was published in Science, and it seems to have had an important role in nuclear disarmament between the US and the former USSR. If you didn’t grow up in the 60s and 70s then you might not have had the fun of hiding from atomic bombs under your desk, and therefore might not perceive the import.

Rachel Carson, for starting an environmental movement that resulted in two things: the realization that humans were doing things that should not be done, and providing the impetus and solution for saving some extraordinary avian species. Sure, sure, she killed hundreds of millions of people.

Isaac Asimov, for writing a near literal myriad of fiction and nonfiction that stimulated my imagination and provided me with knowledge on many fronts at a time, in the 60s and 70s, when there were no internets. A true polymath, who was also kind enough to answer a teenager’s questions.

Paul Crutzen and F. Sherwood Rowland, for showing us that it was possible to reverse an environmental crisis, in this case the degradation of the ozone layer.

There is Thomas Eisner, whom I also mentioned here, for his love of what he does - insects. Loving what you do is something that will suck me in anyday.

E.O. Wilson, last but not least by any means, and cleverly placed last because he’s really my favorite. And also because he clearly loves what he does, and you now know that that is the key to my heart. I will be offering something more on Wilson, because he stands head and shoulders to me above any other of my contemporary heroes. For starters, this Wikipedia article will reacquaint you with him, though it won’t stand in for his marvelous writing. For that you’ll have to read his books, and I recommend as starters “The Diversity of Life”.

There are those, past and present, who are heroes. So. Who are your heroes?