It seems that dry weather follows us - no sooner do we leave Athens than deluges are received, and we have yet to experience a nice day of rain or thunderstorms here. That may change today and tonight. But to this point it’s been unrelentingly warm and sunny.

Bike rides are ridiculously easy, with differences in elevation no more than a foot or two. It’s simple enough to cover twenty miles in a day, whereas a seven-mile ride at home can be exhausting.

The northern tip of the island, occupied on its east side by a nearly-enclosed salt marsh, is a favorite early morning ride. The bike path winds about the salt marsh on one side, with the road on the other, far across the marsh.




Friday afternoon took us to the south end of the island and back. The picnic area encloses two large freshwater pools. A few years ago when Glenn accompanied the plant taxonomy class on a spring expedition here, this was a favored location. Glenn was down practically wading in the pool when the faculty member in charge saw him and suggested that he might not want to be quite that close to the water:


This year there was an unusual upwelling of water in the center of both pools. None of us can recall having seen this before.


I encountered this little group of wading birds on yesterday morning’s trip to the north end and the salt marsh. They weren’t too disarrayed by my presence. There’s a Louisiana Heron (or maybe a Little Blue) in the midst, hiding between what I thought might be Whimbrels, a kind of curlew, but these are a bit bigger than that and have dark upper wing surfaces. The only thing that really fits is immature White Ibis. I’m certainly no expert when it comes to shore birds, though!




Yesterday afternoon Bill spied a Redtailed Hawk keeping an eye out from the top of a tree close to the beach. It eventually tired of us:

We did make to Jekyll, yesterday afternoon, in the middle afternoon, the first to arrive of course since we were as always the first to leave. Just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, the continental kidneys become visible:


The drive down, which I’ve detailed before, is full of interesting, alarming things, but this is one I’ve noticed for a few years, a little unsolved mystery.

Just on the other side of Odum, on Hway 341, is a 1.6 mile stretch of fencing that rivals the Hatch Nuclear Power Plant for security:


Periodically, there are gated entrances to houses, possibly five or six in total, all with a common theme.


Horizontal force bars? Check. High security gate? Check. American flag?
Check. Best wishes for the season? Check.


I’m not sure whether the one above, or this one, has the most curb appeal. What do you think?


Finally, you get to the end of the stretch along the main highway, the fence does an abrupt turn, and runs some unknown course up the side road. Presumably it eventually boxes in what must be a huge several-square-mile area. Whatever happens, when it happens, these folks aren’t going to have to worry about a thing.


The cottage we rented doesn’t have DSL or cable, but Jekyll is generously covered by wireless. It has to be accessed though, and Glenn discovered that that can be done over the cell phone, assuming you’ve subscribed. It’s a modest though not insignificant cost, and we won’t keep it beyond this trip, but basically you just plug the cell phone into the laptop and it does all the connecting and upload/download work. That, of course, is why I got a cell phone.

Today is to be spent in preparation for our exodus. Why would one clean house before one leaves? I don’t know, but we always do.

I’ve put together maps from a few sources to identify the locations of possible conservation areas, in more detail. This is a further development of a recent exhortation. I’m using mostly Georgia-oriented references but as in the previous posts point out that more progressive states probably have even more information available on the internets. You just have to find it.

From the Potential Conservation Opportunity Areas (PCOA) map that I obtained in greater resolution, I captured Oglethorpe County, and expanded it until it merged reasonably well with my highly cosmetized versions of the county DOT map (now downloadable from this genealogy website. The first link is strictly for Georgia and the second includes DOT county maps from a number of states. I layered the two and came up with this map.

(It’s linked, as are the others, to larger versions but this one in particular is fairly large - 838kb.)


I’ve boxed in four areas that are close to us, to further define the properties in and around these areas. To do this I used the Oglethorpe County Tax Assessors Page, and this too is only for Georgia. In fact, I see that not all counties in Georgia are represented, a result of trying to locate the webpage for a resident of another county far far away.

I’ve only placed these as thumbnails, since they’re probably only of interest to me. On the left is the box #1 marked in brown. This is sandwiched between a county road and US 78, and consists of four properties. The largest property is over 800 acres, about half the 1600-acre total represented by the four parcels. None of the parcels is owned by any resident indivual, and two are owned by “Trusts”. This latter is fairly common to find here, and the same trust generally owns lots of properties, often quite large in size, and scattered throughout an area.

One interesting feature is that these properties, as well as the following sets, are located just outside of a town that we’d call major for this area (it has the one traffic light in the county).

The middle thumbnail is another brown area, #2. It’s north of Hway US 78. There are twelve properties that seem to comprise this area, amounting to about 1500 acres. Of the actual human beings who seem to own four of them, two are residents. The remainder are owned by timber companies, limited partnerships, and trusts, with out-of-town addresses.

The last thumbnail is intriguing. It shows two areas, southeast of the first thumbnail a bit. The blue area of nearly 1200 acres is actually owned by what seem to be real live human beings with an address there. The 1000-acre yellow area is simply identified as “Educational Inst”, with other information unknown.


So what does all this mean, and how can it be used? For us personally, it identifies a few locations and contacts where there might already exist nuclei of native species of concern. The discrete property associations suggest that there may be neighbors (we call anyone within 5 miles a neighbor) who are engaged in conservation already. If we had tons of money, we might buy a property next door and enlarge the area of conservation.

Since we don’t have tons of money, we go with what we have, which apparently isn’t much at all according to the PCOA indicators. Gray area, indicating natural vegetation patches with core area geater than 100 hectares (247 acres), constitutes a lot south of Us (we know who that is, too), but there are no indications of species of concern here.

When in doubt, always read the instructions. The PCOA map came with a word document that describes the methods used to identify all these areas (all this available through the PCOA page).

One set of data used in identifying potential spots was “a natural vegetation dataset derived from 1998 Georgia Gap Analysis Program landcover data and FRAGSTATS software which quantifies various metrics for contiguous patches of natural vegetation.”

A search for the 1998 GAP analysis revealed that the results come from Landsat imagery. This was augmented by aerial photography within each ecoregion, “conducted over four days: October 31, November 1, 2, and 3, 2000. During fall color change, this time period allowed individual tree species to be more easily distinguished.”

That would explain the gray regions, for instance, plus all the others, but not the data that colorize the regions in terms of species of concern. For that a different analysis was used:

The weighting scheme described above was also used for this subset of the species of concern. These predictions of habitat for terrestrial vertebrate species of concern were based on range maps and habitat within the range that was deemed suitable.

Notice that the assessment was made in terms of “terrestrial vertebrate species of concern”, *not* plant species of concern. Here, for instance, are the several vertebrate models used to evaluate species of concern. It’s clear that there’s a *lot* on this website that I need to explore in more detail, but the lists themselves are fascinating to scan through:

Amphibians
Reptiles
Birds
Mammals

Also, it seems that “species of concern” doesn’t mean that there *are* species of concern present (nor that there aren’t in areas that do not appear on the map). It just means that they *could* be present, in order to indicate areas that might be potential conservation areas. Further,

The high-ranking patches can be considered potential conservation opportunity areas in that although some significance to the biota within a patch is expected, nothing is known of the conservation attitudes of the owners of the lands represented by the patches at this stage of the analysis. Conservation opportunities would exist at the areas represented by these patches if the landowners were interested in any of the wide variety of land protection options available to them.

I had thought, but clearly this is not the case, that those discrete property boundaries might indicate that some of the data came from individual reports of owners or others, but apparently not. Much of the gray and colorized area must be identified of special importance from the diversity of tree cover. I’m still not clear how one large area of gray (such as south of us) doesn’t fit the criteria for habitat that would be good for species of concern, but again it might be that the gray areas didn’t accumulate enough points during the analysis of vegetation cover to give those areas credibility in sheltering species of concern.

So that brings us to our own area, all in white. Apparently we don’t make the cut because there are no areas that lump together to make a 100-hectare block. I can see this, mostly. Our 40 acres (16 hectares) clearly doesn’t make it by itself, and it’s generally separate from other areas by all kinds of junk: pastures, pig, chicken, and turkey farms, human habitation, pine plantation, and so forth. While clearly a presence, and undoubtedly harboring species of concern, it falls below the level of resolution.

I’m surprised, though, to see some areas not present. Bicycling the backroads southeast of us, especially in the area of Bull Bray Road, it seems to me that there would have been considerably diverse vegetation, along with the absence of human habitation for many hundreds of hectares. Much of the northeast blobs of gray do fall in that area, so maybe the vegetation cover doesn’t qualify as being as diverse as I would have thought.

I do think that it’s a very neat analysis, and I particularly like the combination of data from disparate sources that led to the map, that in turn I used as one of a set from several sources to produce something meaningful to me.

Or whatever you happen to be celebrating. I hope the kids didn’t get all you fathers and mothers up as early as we used to, and that the repast turns out just fine.

I suppose this is among my very favorite Christmas tunes, by the incomparable John Lennon, of course. It turns out that I was, in retrospect, inspired by the Dharma Bums. I’ve never imbedded a youtube, so let’s see if it works.

A few days ago I elaborated on Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From A Catastrophe”, and it was just by coincident that I was halfway into a reread of Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature” when Pablo mentioned it in comments. I’ve finished that now, and am a short way into Alan Weisman’s 2007 book, “The World Without Us.”

Sounds like depressing reading, and I suppose there is that aspect, but on several levels it’s turned out to be a uniquely entertaining and informative trio. For me, at least, the choice of material and the sequence of reading has been very clarifying.

All three authors are writers and journalists, and the basic subject matter certainly overlaps. All three are perceptive and very well-informed. And all three write very well. Then there are the differences.

Kolbert’s writing is probably the least reflective and most objective, which is not to say the most factually reliable - all three are that - nor the least engaging, by no means that. I’d say she’s deliberately and consistently elected to maintain a fairly distinct line on the side of objective explanation and observation. She pretty much stays on that side of the line, away from personal insertions and reflections, and I think there’s considerable value in that.

She also has the advantage of being more timely, compared to Bill McKibben. Her book, published in 2006, is very nearly up to date, while McKibben’s “The End of Nature” was published in 1989. Therein lies the fascination in the reread, 20 years after his New Yorker series appeared.

And there’s another difference - Bill McKibben weaves an equally formidable factual knowledge about a central thesis: the end of nature. By that he doesn’t mean a literal end to nature, but rather a replacement of wild nature with an artificial one increasingly and overwhelmingly manufactured by humans. He exemplifies this at regular intervals, usually (but not always) from the vantage point of his home in the Adirondack Mountains: the notion of never finding a place to walk where human footprints have not already trod, the fantasy of isolation during a walk in the protected forest shattered by the sound of a chainsaw, and most loomingly, the entire atmosphere of the earth altered by the activities of humans.

The fascination comes in his relation of the events of the 80s, seen from the vantage point of the first decade of the 21st Century. Time and again the connections are made, the predictions pan out, and his hopes however slim appear not likely to be realized.

James Hansen, who has figured so prominently recently as the outspoken NASA climatologist, censored and harrassed by the Bush Administration, appears with his global climate models for the first time.

The destruction of the ozone layer is a major point in the book - it was in the late 80s that the phenomenon was explained and the chlorofluorocarbon culprits identified. The story is wearyingly familiar to those of us now preoccupied with greenhouse gases: an Administration (then Reagan’s) that trivializes the concerns with a prescription for hats and sunglasses. The reaction of chemical companies to the Montreal protocol that banned CFCs: it would devastate the economy and cause the loss of millions of jobs (it didn’t). What doesn’t parallel, of course, is that CFCs were banned, in industrialized countries at least, and that some recovery has been noted, while the pumping of CO₂ into the atmosphere has not only not diminished, but has ever-increased, exactly according to predictions made in the book. The then emerging demands from developing nations for emission-producing conveniences and luxuries is here, now, right on schedule. McKibben’s slim hope for a change in basic human attitude and behavior has not been realized twenty years later.

And as for that, McKibben’s main point that basic human nature must change if there is to be much hope, lies in his examination of two extremes. On the one hand, the notion that literally everything must revolve about humans, human needs, and human comfort: he understands this, as do we all, but gently rejects it. On the other hand, the equally extreme (to some) notion that no human is more important than any other organism. While he doesn’t fully accept this, he clearly feels that some acceptance of this “extreme” is of critical importance if basic human nature is to be changed.

Other issues prominent in the 1980s, and of major importance in “The End of Nature”, raise their ugly heads once again. They seem to be things we no longer hear much about. Not, I’m afraid, because they’ve been solved, but probably because they simply no longer get much attention. Acid rain. The effects of the then-emerging gene technology. The transformation, by gradual demonization, of Earth First! and similar ecological organizations into “ecoterrorist” organizations.

And then are the things that we now seem to think that we have just thought of in the last few years. McKibben has a considerable section on mitigation vs adaptation. It was all the rage (literally) a year or two ago when it seemed that for the first time, people began talking seriously about adapting to a changing climate rather than attempting to reduce the emissions that are doing the changing. Yet McKibben was talking about this 20 years ago - it’s a central feature of his section on gene technology.

The rereading of “The End of Nature” brought repeatedly to my mind the saying - “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But inevitably there have been some things that McKibben understandly couldn’t have predicted, though he addresses them.

He couldn’t have known how *quickly*, and in this year, how radically, the Arctic summer ice might have disappeared. He couldn’t have predicted, as we have only just discovered, that ocean acidification might result in the destruction of phytoplankton in the photic layer (although to his credit he recognizes the essential nature of that very important mechanism for moving CO₂ out of the atmosphere). Only in one sentence does he anticipate worldwide coral death (but he does see it). He does spend a lot of time talking about drought in the lower and middle latitudes. While it hasn’t really quite hit our media yet that this is as much a problem as fiercer weather (which McKibben also talks about, twenty years ago), drought is going to become an issue.

He had no inkling of a number of other alarming things we are now uneasily watching. However, he did see, and at a time when the vast majority of us were just waking up to the fact, that greenhouse gas emissions were to be instrumental in an increase in global temperatures and that this would be the paramount issue of our civilization. Family values and gay marriage aside, of course, but then he couldn’t see how important those issues would become, either.

“The End of Nature?” By all means reread it, or read it for the first time. Get a sense of the things we knew then that our media has allowed us to forget, the things we suspected then that are coming alarmingly true, and the things we didn’t know that we now are becoming aware of. And, for bonus points, if you can read for content, get a sense of the same denialists then, who have found new fodder now, and are playing at their old games.

I really can’t yet evaluate the third book, by Alan Weisman. But even shortly into it we have yet another entirely different approach delivered by Weisman’s clever wit and style, another difference among these three authors.

“The World Without Us” is as much about climate change and environmental degradation as the previous two, but that’s a given, not something that we must be convinced of. Instead Weisman takes us on a trip analyzing the permanence and impermanence of human construction and influence, by disappearing us from the face of the earth in an instant.

So far we’ve encountered invasive plants and the immediate impact of subterranean groundwater in New York City, and the remains of Europe’s only remaining primeval forest. Colonies of chimpanzees in Africa. The periodic invasions and retreats of glaciers and ice ages promise to have a big impact.

This book, highly promoted, has its own website, by the way. The multimedia page is particularly interesting. What a shame that at least some of the marvelous paintings weren’t included in the book itself.

What emerges from the first two books (and I can’t speak yet of the third) is the stark and overwhelming difference between climate change through the emissions of greenhouse gases, and everything else. Among the latter, and McKibben states this most directly, we were *able* to give up CFCs, and thereby solve the ozone problem (perhaps). We *rejected* the use of DDT, and so mitigated its devastating and long term effects on a number of disappearing species. But no one in the comfortable West is going to *willingly* reduce their consumption of energy, and it’s unfair in any sense to expect the vast majority in developing countries, now poised to up the ante by huge magnitudes, to forego these luxuries when we in the West do not. The emissions of greenhouse gases then, pose a problem unlike any other ever faced (or failed to be faced), and with effects that may even now be unavoidably catastrophic. That is what he was saying then, twenty years ago.

By now you’ve probably heard about the 1/75th chance that asteroid 2007 WD5 has in impacting Mars at (currently) 10AM EST on January 30, 2008. (The 6AM EST figure in the latter link has apparently been updated.) It’s a small asteroid, only about 150 feet in diameter, so would produce only a mile-wide crater. Still, it would be the first observation, so far as I know, of an impact of an asteroid on an earth-like planet. It would undoubtedly be the object of intense study for months, and continued observations will refine the orbit and reassess the chances from now until then.

(By the way, the discovery of 2007 WD5 on Nov 20 of this year, is fairly typical of near-earth objects. When you hear that asteroid X will or did come close to the earth (or Mars), it’s probably because it is newly discovered. What this means, of course, is that the 5400+ asteroids already in the NEO database have already been screened and discarded as immediately hazardous. It’s the ones they’re just discovering that they don’t know about until then, and they typically discover them just as they’re passing close to earth. Like this one. The inferences should be obvious. Thought you might like to know that.)

Happy Winter Solstice, that cusp in time when day lengths either begin to get longer if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, or shorter if you’re in the Southern. It’s the reason for the season, so party down.

In honor of the Winter Solstice, I repeated the hot day observations I made last August, over a period of four days this past week.

This will probably amuse those both south and north of us. Those in the south will need to point out how *they're* able to go around in shorts and bare feet, and those in the north will look at the temperatures and smile indulgently. It’s true that our winters are mild, but winters nonetheless!

These four days almost succeed in depicting a familiar, repeated winter cycle. Clear, cold weather gradually builds to clouds and warmer conditions, resulting sometimes in rain, and then accompanied by a swift, windy front that returns us to fair, cold weather for a few days. It’s one of the reasons we seldom get snow - when it’s cold, there’s no moisture. When there’s moisture, it’s too warm. Only when our usual winter cycle is interrupted by a blessed unexpected event does cold and moisture coincide.


One of the goals now, as then, is to compare our home temperatures with those in Athens, taken about ten miles away. There’s always the caveat of systematic differences in measurement devices, and so forth, but I think the switching back and forth of Athens and Wolfskin relative to each other denies most of the possibilities of systematic explanation.

As was true last August, there are consistently repeated differences between the two locations, and they are quite similar. Out here we get a larger range between lows and highs, and generally get cooler at night and warmer during the day. We also cool off considerably faster in the late afternoon. This is most pronounced on clear days and nights, but even yesterday when the temperatures were just a wee bit different and generally flat for most of a 24-hour period the same pattern is seen. Pretty remarkable.

It’s also rather neat to see how quickly temperatures begin to increase upon sunrise, at a time when it’s hard to see how the direct effect of the sun’s rays could be that pronounced. Temperatures generally peak out here around mid-afternoon on fair days and the beginnings of the drop in Athens usually occur an hour or so later.

That difference in temperature between Athens and Wolfskin has quite the comfort effect. It can be as much as ten degrees difference on summer nights, which is the difference between sweltering in Athens and comfort under a ceiling fan out here. And who cares about the sometimes five degrees difference during the day? It gets *hot* during the day, period.

Similarly in the winter. Who cares if we get five or ten degrees colder at night? It’s *winter*. But that period of a couple of hours during a winter day when it’s usually sunny and five or ten degrees warmer is pleasant.

I guess I should continue doing this for some randomly selected continuous period of a week or so several times a year. After ten years, assuming “business as usual”, I’d predict the differences will become smaller, as we begin to look more and more like Athens.

I suppose that this isn’t a very Christmassy post. Certainly it isn’t full of glad tidings and good will to all men. But it isn’t Christmas yet. Just wait.

It is the time of year when I sit down and engage in about the most consumer-oriented activity I partake in, which is to order or otherwise acquire a number of books and DVDs that have attracted my interest over the past year.

I’ve just finished Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From A Catastrophe” (I told you this wasn’t going to be Christmassy). It isn’t my first acquaintance with Elizabeth Kolbert - for several years she’s been at the top of my list of journalists who do a very fine job on environmental reporting. I first encountered her in 2005, with her series of climate change articles in the New Yorker that eventually became the basis for this book, and glad I am that they were compiled since I will no longer have to go searching through stacks of New Yorkers to find them. Published in 2006, with an Afterword written in July 2006, it is perhaps 18 months out of date. Much has happened in the interim, but her book is fairly prescient on these latter events, including the increasingly uncomfortable awareness that things are getting very rapidly out of control on the climate change front. She writes for instance, on the matter summer ice loss in the Arctic in 2005 and before, but could have had no idea of the massive loss this year.

And that’s the subject of this book. Kolbert does a fine job in presenting a very complex set of scientific findings, political reactions, and deliberate obfuscations. She does it in an extremely readable way, which is consistently her style. Mostly, she undertakes, as an admitted non-expert, an extensive education that a sorrowfully few number will attempt, and then lets us know what she’s learned.

The book begins off the coast of Seward Peninsula in Alaska, and recounts the litany that we’ve all become aware of - rapidly rising temperatures, melting permafrost, and inundation of coastal island communities. After a chapter on the mechanics of greenhouse gases, and the history of their discovery, the remainder of the first half addresses glaciers in Iceland and Greenland, and changes in (primarily) animal behavior and migrations. The very nicely told mosquito story (Chapter 4: “The Butterfly and the Toad”) was new to me. My summary is unfairly brief, for throughout Kolbert acquaints us with the scientists on her travels who are witnessing, researching, and documenting these events, and her interviews with these witnesses are the strongest features of the book. The remainder of the book zeroes in on what is, right now, the early stages of action and reaction, or as is painfully clear, the lack of it, primarily by the United States under President Bush.

Chapter 7, “Business as Usual”, introduced me to the concept of “stabilization wedges”, an easily digestable unit of measure that describes what we need to prevent the further emission of a billion tons of carbon per year through 2054. It’s kind of important, since it gives us an idea of how many “wedges” might be needed, and the effort to which we have to go. The best scenario (*not*, unfortunately, “business as usual”) suggests that we will need seven wedges to hold CO₂ levels constant at today’s level. Kolbert describes Wedge Number 11: Solar Power. This wedge requires photovoltaic arrays with a surface area the size of Connecticut. We need six more such wedges.

This excerpt, also from the Chapter 7: “Business as Usual”, provided a little food for thought, for me. She’s relating a story about Robert Socolow (who with a colleague also came up with the aforementioned stabilization wedges notion):

...professor of engineering at Princeton who had recently become codirector of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a project funded by BP and Ford, but he still considered himself an outsider to the field of science.

Talking to insiders he was struck by the degree of their alarm. “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,” he told me when I went to visit him at his office shortly after returning from the Netherlands. “And, in most of the cases it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But in the climate case, the experts - the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice cores - they are *more* concerned. They’re going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’”

The Bush Administration knows well this peculiar, complaisant flaw in the American public, and has taken full advantage of the sluggish, science-phobic American majority. Its seven years of shameful passive-aggressive response to climate change is epitomized by Paula Dobriansky, the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, and mouthpiece for the Bush Administration. I’ve taken her to task before, myself, and in various comments, and was excited to see that Elizabeth Kolbert had the opportunity to interview her. We’re in the lion’s den now, Dobriansky and her colleagues have been consistently *the* Bush frontpersons for thwarting any global effort to combat climate change.

But perhaps I was wrong. Maybe Paula Dobriansky is an honest, hardworking mouthpiece, winding her way with skill toward a goal that we all hope to achieve. Well, she’s hardworking, anyway, but isn’t much more enthralled with hardball interviews than is her boss. Let me know if you can make any sense of what she’s saying.

From Chapter 8, “The Day After Kyoto:”

...Dobriansky began by assuring me that despite how it might appear, the Bush administration took the issue of climate change “very seriously.” She went on, “Also let me just add, because in terms of taking it seriously, we have engaged many countries in initiatives and efforts, whether they are bilateral initiatives - we have some fourteen bilateral initiatives - and in addition we have put together some multilateral initiatives. So we view this as a serious issue.” I asked her how, then, the administration justified its position on Kyoto to its allies. “We have a common goal and objective,” she replied. “Where we differ is on what approach we believe is and can be most effective.” A few moments later, she added, as if expanding on this statement: “The bottom line here is, in grappling with a serious issue, we believe we have a common goal and objective, but that we can take different approaches.”

The remainder of our brief conversation followed much the same lines. At one point, I asked the undersecretary if there were any circumstances under which the administration would accede to mandatory caps on emissions. “Our approach has been predicated on: we act, we learn, we act again,” she said. In response to a question about how urgent the problem of stabilizing emissions was, she replied “We act, we learn, we act again,”, and in response to a question about what would constitute a “dangerous” level of CO₂ in the atmosphere she said, “Forgive me, I’m going to repeat myself: we act, we learn, we act again.”

Gobbledygook. Kolbert got fifteen minutes and thirty-five seconds of her promised twenty-minute interview and then Dobrianky’s assistants whisked her out of the room. That’s probably why she was never able to tell us about this “approach we believe is and can be most effective.” But I do know that “we act, we learn, we act again.”

In the Afterward, with regard to the Dec 2005 UN Framework Convention in Montreal, Kolbert, covering it, relates:

When the discussion turned to initiating talks on a post-Kyoto treaty, the chief climate negotiator for the United States, Harlan Watson, literally walked out of the meeting. At a news conference in Montreal, Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky was asked how she would answer “those in the United States who are saying you are not doing enough?” She responded - amazingly enough - “We act, we learn, we act again.”

The Department of State keeps transcripts of their minions' speeches and press conferences. I actually found this one, and you too can read it here. Yes, Dobriansky actually said that. Again. In a nutshell, that phrase encapsules my greatest nightmare. Except, of course, that it isn’t a dream and we won’t be able to wake up from it. Honestly, I don’t know how these people can live with themselves.

The reason I bring all this up is because of the events of yesterday, when the Environmental Protection Agency denied California and 16 other states the right to set their own emission standards from automobiles, standards more stringent than those that Congress just limped in with. The EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson doesn’t want to see a patchwork of effort. Just wait, he says, the federal government will take care of this.

Predictably the automakers are pleased with the EPA decisions:

Automakers praised the decision. “We commend E.P.A. for protecting a national, 50-state program,” said David McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. “Enhancing energy security and improving fuel economy are priorities to all automakers, but a patchwork quilt of inconsistent and competing fuel economy programs at the state level would only have created confusion, inefficiency and uncertainty for automakers and consumers.”

In case you missed it, the Bush Administration has abandoned the passive-aggressive approach that has served it so well for so many years, and which was sharply noted at the Bali Conference a couple of weeks ago. It’s now on the aggressive track: there is no way it is going to allow anyone to accomplish anything in the arena of climate change while it is in office.

I did some searching for interviews with Elizabeth Kolbert over the last couple of years since the publication of her book. Though she’s a popular speaker, it seems, there isn’t a whole lot. Here’s an interview with her from the National Resources Defense Council, and another one at Huffington Post. I was disappointed that National Public Radio hasn’t used her expertise and experience more. We can only content ourselves with this 40-minute April 2005 Talk of the Nation panel that includes her.

Ah. Still, only April of 2006, but a good interview of Kolbert by David Roberts of Grist. Scroll upward to begin, as I link to the full thing.

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve probably run across reference to Audubon’s release of the 2007 State of the Birds. With a quarter of North America’s avian species in decline, it’s not hard to believe that 10% of bird species will be extinct by 2100.

Audubon’s unprecedented analyses of forty years of bird population data from Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey reveals alarming declines for many of our most common and beloved birds. Since 1967 the average population for the common birds in steepest decline has fallen 68 percent, from 17.6 million to 5.35 million. Some species have nose-dived as much as 80 percent and all 20 birds included in the Common Birds in Decline report have lost at least 50 percent of their population - in just four decades.

Of the 654 avian species native to the continental US, Audubon finds 178 species (and 39 in Hawaii) that are “in need of immediate conservation help.” You can find lists of these species at Audubon’s 2007 WatchList page.

Since I had observed a Cerulean Warbler (these are so unmistakeable even I can identify them) this past spring, I selected to review that from the above link. This species receives a yellow status flag - declining or rare - rather than the red flag which indicates species “declining rapidly and/or have very small populations or limited ranges, and face major conservation threats.” Cerulean Warblers have declined 4.5% per year since 1966, and would therefore be at about 25% of the population 30 years ago.

Cerulean Warblers (according to the Audubon page) are migratory,flocking to the Andes and forests of northern South America, while breeding in the eastern half of the US. As a species requiring two homes, they’re in double jeopardy. Their winter grounds are disappearing through coca and coffee bean farming, and their moderately demanding requirements for breeding grounds here are disappearing through urban encroachment. Here they require mature hardwood forests with open understories, and so it’s neither surprising that they’re having difficulty nor that I happened to spot one. The hollow that runs 1000 feet along SBS creek, with its mature deciduous oaks, tulip poplars, beeches, and its diverse understory, is exactly what they need.

That brings us back to my "managment post" of a few days ago, since other parts of the property are *not* exactly what they, and others, need. Surely we can do better.

To accomplish this, I needed to first identify the problem, which is a poorly managed area low in plant and animal diversity. I then had to figure out what was suitable modification, which should be gradual and yet not too gradual, and should result in a higher diversity of plants, in particular, and as quickly as possible. How to prepare for it, and then how to achieve it is the key, and it seems to devolve upon opening the area up to sunlight and to remove nonproductive plants. I’m being informed by a vast amount of information on the internets. Let me share it with you.

Here is small portion of an extraordinary map of potential conservation opportunities in Georgia, and I start with this because we’re always looking for resources of plant species. I found it on the Department of Natural Resources Conservation Opportunity Areas page, and obtained a higher resolution version from one of the folks who produced the map. (At that website is also a word document detailing how the map was produced.)

The red square indicates our area, and you can see a blowup of that along with legible legends by clicking on the map.


Much of Oglethorpe County is given over to agricultural development, soon to give way to suburban development, and I suppose we could indicate all that area in white. But there are certainly some interesting patches here and there. The map doesn’t show relatively small areas of conservation, including easements and other private protection initiatives. It divides by way of color codes into natural vegetation occupying more or less contiguous area and further divides by the presence of species of concern. (Plant species, by the way.) The yellow patches in the lower left corner constitute the Oconee National Forest. In south Athens-Clarke County is the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, another conserved area.

What this map doesn’t show is urban encroachment - the white areas sort of imply it. Athens-Clarke County, for instance is now largely nothing but urban and suburban space. My guess is that information of this sort is available in one form or another, wherever you live. I happened to find it on our state’s Department of Natural Resources site.

Even if you can’t find that, you can go to a site like this one to at least identify the ecoregions that are imagined to exist. Clicking on that third map and holding the mouse over the pinkish region over northeast Georgia shows us to live in Ecoregion 231, the Southeastern Mixed Forest Province, with a modestly detailed description of climate and major plant and animal species. Another link from this site goes to the US Forest Service’s description of the ecological subregions, which are similarly numbered.

That site also includes information on Canada, but the full link does not work. A higher level URL gets you to the top level page at the National Water Research Institute site.

Yesterday I mentioned another resource that might have analogs available to you. I’ve been using this fine list of Flora of the Oconee National Forest for some time, and as I mentioned yesterday, have adapted it to excel now. The tags I placed allowed me to produce a subset spreadsheet of 265 local plant species found in oak-pine and pine barren environments. I’ve placed that excel file here. These would include the species I’d target for acquiring and planting.

If you have a national forest, or even a large or national state park near you, it’s likely that someone has gone in there and done a plant species count. It’s just a matter of finding it.

One of the reasons that all the above are important is that they give you an idea of the native species, especially of plants, that you’d find in an open understory. These are the very things you want to plant, so you have to get them from somewhere. The easiest thing is to visit similar areas and judiciously harvest seed to use in planting nuclei that will then spread. It’s a longer term strategy but has the advantage of providing a broader range of species than you might find otherwise.

It might surprise you that Georgia has a fairly active set of wildlife conservation programs that fit in with its wildlife conservation strategy. Part of this strategy is to provide incentives to get private landowners involved in private protection and management. The incentives include modest contributing monies toward management for a set period of time, as well as free expert advice and in some cases, assistance.

If Georgia, not the most progressive state in the union, has incentive programs, it’s likely that yours has even better ones.

Here’s an example of a (large - most backyards don’t have a visitor center!) backyard sanctuary (pdf). It has all the elements that you’d want to incorporate into a larger program, especially forest margins for cover, and high plant diversity (yes!). Water is certainly a nice feature to provide. Even a small thousand-gallon lined pond as a cistern would work well in a smaller project. (Make it deep, though, three feet at least, to keep deer from wading.)

This pdf, from UTK, emphasizes grasses. Consequently it goes into controlled burnings in management, and use of native grasses. The easy way, quick way to provide a grassy habitat is to clearcut and then plant commercially available grasses. These may not be the most suitable for the area, and they may not be clumping grasses. Clumping species do not spread by runners, and so do not cover the ground, thereby leaving space for other forbs. Conventional running grasses may look nice, sort of like a lawn, but tend to take over and do not really produce the seeds of high food quality.

The Alabama Cooperative Extension System provides this management pdf, which serves for me as more of a template. It lists a lot of important native plants that provide food and cover. Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), which we have in abundance, is said to provide food for 240 songbird species. At the very beginning it shows an early succession forest much like ours, and points out the low diversity of the poor understory and highly shaded conditions.

From the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service comes this fire management pdf, which points out the advantages and disadvantages of using fire to keep secondary succession under control. The very first photograph (and a later one) illustrates a main point that is relevant to our situation. It doesn’t do much good to use fire unless you have pines (in this case) that are quite large, and it doesn’t do much good if there’s a lot of smaller unthinned understory trees to begin with. Without mechanical thinning, especially of undesirable hardwood saplings, the canopy will still be too dense for light to get through and the advantages of fire will be unrealized.

This turns out to be our scenario, whether or not we choose to use fire occasionally. The large loblollies mostly stay. Their canopy is high enough, and the trees are spaced far enough apart, so that sunlight is not prevented from reaching the ground. The loblolly canopy, by the way, is also where our red-tailed hawks nest, and we don’t want to interfere with that.

In comments to the earlier management post, Bill asked:

Your thoughts on predicted dynamic between animal and plant kingdoms, once you attain your objective? [I’m now slowly transitioning to a what-will-it-take-to-preserve-the-indigenous-avian [and migratory] perspective.]

In partial answer to that, the first thing is that this will be, of necessity, a gradual transition. Like the strip-harvesting strategy designed to preserve tropical rainforests, there will always be attached unmanaged area for refuge as adjacent areas change.

The second thing is that the disturbance will be fairly low key. Initially I am simply thinning out undesirable sapwood of relatively small but highly dense growth. I’ll leave behind larger trees well-separated from each other, as well as smaller desirable ones (dogwoods, maples, oaks). I’ll begin planting nuclei of grasses, forbs, vines, and certain species of trees. (The easy way to do it would be to clearcut and plant some rapidly spreading grass, but that would be a mistake, I think.)

That will be where the first dynamic begins to play out - our eternal war with the deer. Much of what I plant will have to be initially protected, but many of my choices will be deer-resistant (nothing is deer proof). The avians that are now there, the red-tailed hawks and various songbirds, should be unaffected, both because of untreated refuge areas adjacent, and because the “undesirable sapwoods” hypothetically have little value to them other than cover.

In a few years, as grasses and forbs begin to take hold, I’d expect the dynamic to become much more interesting. There should be more species and numbers of avians, smaller mammals, and reptiles, and predatory avians should have better hunting. I’m certainly aiming for an environment suitable for quail and other ground-nesting birds, but that may be a result out of my reach, both for reasons of the relatively small coverage area and perhaps the difficulty in maintaining a diverse open woodland. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it but the initial strategy seems to be a sound, sine qua non one, that leaves a good deal of flexibility ahead of us.

A few days ago I wrote a "managment post", and there have been some very worthwhile questions and comments that I want to attend to. I had intended to do that today, but in one of those odd quirks of the internets made a discovery that preempts that particular post.

For some years I’ve been using this fine list of Flora of the Oconee National Forest. It has very useful information on habitat for over 600 species of plants that live in the Oconee National Forest, just south of us. The Georgia Piedmont habitats that we share are so close together and similar that it provides a great informational nucleus for identifying and locating plant species that are intrical to our area. I’ve imported it into excel and restructured the habitat designations so as to be able to sort according to habitat and create subsets of the list.

I had imagined the author, Marie B. Mellinger, to be a young grad student who had done the work as part of her degree requirements. So I googled her name and was surprised and a bit saddened to find this tribute, from Buzz Williams, director of the Chattooga Conservancy, to her. As the post says, she died just about this time last year, at the age of 92. She seems to have spent much of her life accomplishing in a great many ways the things I have come to admire the most. I didn’t know that until now, but now I do, and that’s the point. Now, you do too.

Here’s another post, from the New Georgia Encylopedia, by Scott Merkle, who references her knowledge of the Franklin Tree, Franklinia alatamaha. (Yes, *alatamaha*, not “altamaha”, the river. That’s a bartramism.) Even I know something of the story of the Franklin Tree, but there’s even more here.

At the bottom of this page, you’ll find a photograph, taken five years ago.

(Parenthetically I also note that the New Georgia Encyclopedia may be my next newest favorite site to peruse - it has a great page on Oglethorpe County, including history of our own hometown, Arnoldsville.)

This reminds me of similar losses - of Wilbur Duncan, UGA Botany Professor Emeritus, who wrote numerous valuable guides to wildflowers in the Southeast, and who I remembered here.

There’s Dan Tenaglia, with whom I never had the opportunity to have a conversation. He was killed earlier this year in a bicycle accident. But anyone who searches for particular plants is going to run across his Missouri Plants and more recently his Alabama Plants websites. Those sites are simply constructed in a way that makes sense to just about anyone. They offer a range of beautifully photographed plants and plant parts that are extremely helpful, not just in identification, but also in getting a sense through the writing of how much the author loved what he did.

Not to be maudlin - these were all people with a passion - one that I share of course, which is why I notice. And I now know (of) a great many folks with similar passions, writing about them, promoting them, and creating a powerful plurality of acknowledgment that even as little as ten years ago would have gone unnoticed. You know who you are. Your footprints might well have been bulldozed by the tender mercies of the mainstream majority. Now that’s not possible, and any future soul who delves enough to encounter your work is going to meet you again.

Just a bit earlier, googling Marie Mellinger’s full name got six hits. Drop the “B” and you’ll get 309. Today I add to that. It’s all to the good.

These oyster mushrooms of
Dec 11 still look remarkably fresh a week later:


Amazing that nothing has so much as nibbled at them. Other patches are showing their age:


I’ve kept a close eye on the Soapwort (Gentiana saponaria) of Nov 24. It retained its blue color for at least three weeks, but now has only the smallest hints remaining. Down there, the ovary we hope is swelling with developing ovules:


The fallen red oak featured a few weeks ago strikes again, this time in a mildly naughty way. I’ve made the image a thumbnail so you’ll have to decide for yourself whether to look at it or not. I swear I did not set this up.

Mark was right - a southwest to northeast band of considerable rain moved over us from the early evening last night until morning, dropping 1.5 inches. With temps in the low 40s, it actually feels like our sort of December here. The wind is picking up now and will be substantial all day.

One of my winter projects is to extend the creation of open woodlands in a two or three acre area that I began a couple of years ago, and are marked below as “#1 and #2”, in yellow. The olive green rectangle shows the extent of area I’m keen on opening up, but note that we could do this gradually increase this to a ten-acre area of similar character to the east and northeast.



To preface, I’d like to give a warning that we’re talking about cutting trees down here. They’re small trees, mostly undesirable species, and so densely clustered that even the desirable species will not do well. But a few posts in the past have revealed that there are readers appalled at the idea of cutting down any tree - it’s a notion I myself have had to get used to. Unfortunately, with forest managment you have to get rid of a lot of trash, not all trees are equal, and to enhance and ensure the desirable ones you must get rid of those not desirable.

I’ve watched a few efforts along the way, in the last few years. We could simply clearcut the whole area and begin anew with a vast disturbance. This isn’t to my liking, as it not only imparts a large shock but also demands continual upkeep in terms of mowing and/or burning. I’ve been thinking in terms of thinning.

This post is just a description of the area. I’ll add links to forest restoration (and there are huge numbers of these) in a future post. I’m dabbling with lists of plant species that abound in this northeast Georgia Piedmont area, and winnowing them down as suitable to this particular type of terrain, and those will appear later.

It’s a curious space, and has occupied my thoughts for several years, ever since my father said “you know, this could be better managed.” Unlike the mature oak-beech forest along the creek much below this, this area is only a few decades removed from highly disturbed. It would probably be classed as an oak-pine, pine barren, or (especially) disturbed area. As the contours indicate it’s about five feet lower than the surrounding area, except on the southwest side - a sort of narrow dry inlet or bay, a long bowl set into the upland terrain. It’s in a later successional stage from what we imagine was a highly disturbed state, maybe cotton farming years ago. You might have thought that, over thirty or forty years, detritus would have rendered the soil fertile and with much topsoil, but pine needles seem not to be the best compost. There is only a thin layer of humus atop a fairly hardpan substrate.

Now, loblolly pines dominate, some quite large but probably only three or four decades old. I suspect these won’t become ancient monarchs - the soil is such that they don’t penetrate the soil much and topple over in winds. The problem here isn’t the mature pines, so much, it’s the high density and low diversity and nature of the few hardwood species that are beginning the next stage. I’d like to circumvent this nonproductive stage.

Here’s a view from Field #2, northeast into the area that I’m thinning. The foreground is Field #2 itself, which I thinned extensively three years ago.


I’ve marked the more mature loblollies with green dots, and it’s only the ones in the foreground. There are probably at least 5x more of the same in the background that cannot be seen. The vast majority of the remaining young trees are densely packed sweetgums, followed in slightly less congestion by water oaks less than five year old water oaks. Here and there is the occasional red maple, tulip poplar, black cherry, and dogwood. Other than muscadine grape vines there’s virtually nothing else, plantwise.

Here’s a view to the north, showing the five-foot terrace that rims the bowl. You see only the tiniest part of the area here, but that’s what it’s like on the 3/4 surround of this basin. The driveway runs along this narrow terrace, about 500 feet, and then there’s another five-foot slope above that, to the grassy corridor along which the power line runs.

Looking southward from a point just inside the area I’m now working on, across the Field #2. Again, the green dots indicate the loblollies as far as can be clearly seen. I’ve left any dogwoods, red maples, hawthorns, and of course the large loblollies are not something I care to tackle, though I have removed secondary pine growth. While it hasn’t created an actual open field condition, it has resulted in an area that gets considerably more sun through the much reduced canopy. I’ve retained about 20% of the best-looking mast species, particularly water oaks and cherries. Unfortunately the cherries tend to be diseased, and the water oaks densely clustered. I haven’t been aggressive about the actual planting of anything up to this point - the grasses evident in the above photos have found their way on their own, and are generally the kind we want to see there. They’re still in a tentative state, but I expect next summer they’ll really take off.

What I’m doing right now is perusing plant species for more aggressive planting of this area, particularly of soft and hard mast species that aren’t so abundant right now. We can surely come up with seeds and plantings, and this year the winter Jekyll trip will be to garner some of these and begin to get them going.

The ultimate goal is to open up the useless canopy, and establish a grassy, shrubby refuge underneath a sparse canopy that offers food, habitat, and cover. At the moment it doesn’t appear that we can guarantee stability of the habitat, without mowing or fire, but that larger strategy is still something I’m thinking about.

Today is the last day of Fall Semester finals, and I’m effectively on vacation for the next three weeks. I have some clear plans to be productive, some unavoidable planned relaxation ahead of me, and a considerable amount of free time that I’m looking forward to.

The Geminids were something of a bust for us, although occasional glimpses of clear sky suggested there was considerable activity. I spotted several very bright obvious Geminids, but we were mostly under a cloud cover with only occasional breaks.

To top it off we only got a bare drizzle of rain, unmeasurable, but welcome during our Thursday training session last night. With the 60-70 degF temperatures, the turnout gear is rather warm, something I wouldn’t have expected for mid-December.

Rain is promised for tomorrow though, and the high today is around 61 degF, sharply descending to upper 40s over the next couple of days. Normal highs should be around 55 degF, with lows in the mid 30s. Haven’t seen that for awhile now. La Niña, again, and every indication is that this will continue on into the spring.

Although we’ve known for months that this was almost certain to happen, it was confirmed this week that our fire chief, Mike, has sold his house down Wolfskin Road and will be leaving us for Michigan in the next month or two. After a long association with the US Navy, and several years here at the Navy School in Athens, the latter is shutting down as a result of the closures announced a couple of years ago. Consequently his job ends there, and he and his wife have elected to return to the north part of lower Michigan, where there’s sixteen inches of snow on the ground right now.

It’s a significant loss, though we certainly wish them well, and they are going to have a hell of a lot of fun in the north woods. Mike has been chief for just over a year, and has brought a lot of enthusiasm and excellent managerial skills into our little VFD. I think we’ve benefitted enough from his example to carry on with just a hiccup of a glitch, but he’s certainly going to be missed. Though he accomplished a lot of things in his year, increasing our training sessions from once a month to once a week, and along with the new chief Ed actually making those sessions fun and extremely productive, has to be his most obvious legacy.

We’re starting to gear up here for our annual pilgrimage to Jekyll Island, for the week straddling the New Year. That has always been accompanied, for me, by a degree of anxiety on leaving home, but this year is different. I’m actually looking forward to it early on, rather than gradually enjoying it as it unfolds. I have a number of things on my agenda, for one thing, and the smaller group that is involved this year is suggestive of a more relaxed atmosphere.

We have a minor, 20% chance of some rain later today, but will probably only get enough clouds to mess up the (remembered!) Geminid Meteor Shower tonight and tomorrow morning. Temperatures will be lower now, only 70 degF. In the end we only broke records on Sunday and Monday, but we came within a degree of doing so on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I’ve seen a few of these flitting about over the leaf litter in the last couple of weeks, but not closely enough to photograph, or really, even, to see exactly what they are.

Ichneumon Wasps, I’m guessing. This one’s ovipositor is longer than her body. If you’re looking for a challenge, learning how to identify the 3000-6000 North American species in the Ichneumonidae ought to occupy you for awhile. It’s probably safe to say that each species specializes in parasitizing a few host species - larvae of beetles, horntails, sawflies, lepidopterans, so you could add that to your list too.

Early in May, I photographed (and Bev identified) an ichneumon with antennae that had the more typical white banding. This one does not. Except for some of the more distinctive species, even Bugguide does not try to get to species level. They classify the submissions according to color combinations, though. This one would be under “black with red abdomen” (and yellow legs, no antenna banding, I’d add). There is a possible match here, though it is unidentified further.


You’ll get a fine view of the diversity of the family by looking through the excellent photographs of mostly unidentified individuals, here at Tom Murray’s Ichneumonidae Photo Gallery.

She was fairly nervous, so I couldn’t really get close enough for good photographs. The thumbnails below variously accentuate other features.


This one had an inch-long body (and then of course, the ovipositor), so she was a fairly large individual. At this point she was grooming herself, so I was able to get a little closer, but then she was half-hidden by an intervenening leaf.

The ovipositor isn’t really meant for stinging, but with its extremely sturdy construction and intent she would probably try to do so if disturbed, and probably could inflict a painful stab. Her ovipositor is evolved from the same structure from which wasps and bees evolved stingers, after all. A species with an ovipositor this long may be interested in examining trees for underlying larvae of horntails. She’ll then drill into the tree itself (did I say sturdy construction?) and lay an egg in the larva. You can guess the rest.


Is she out of her element, here in December, foolishly encouraged by warm temperatures? I’d guess not - we have certainly had cool days, and some quite cold nights, for us. This is probably the right time of year for her.

The last thumbnail was as good as I could get of her face.

We’ve now broken high temperature records for two days, by several degrees. We plan on doing the same today and tomorrow, and maybe even Thursday.

Although we haven’t had any rain, the warm temperatures during the day and relative cool nights have resulted in dense fog in the early morning. This must have some kind of moistening effect, although things tend to be dry by noon. Of course that water does come from somewhere, including the already dry ground, so it’s questionable as to how much the net good is. Still, much of it must come from ponds and creeks in the area and so the fog is acting as a dispersal agent in the absence of rain. Can’t complain about that! (Note: this is the kind of thing we expect in October, not December.)

It may be that fungi that penetrate relatively intact dead trees aren’t so worried about external humidity, but for whatever reason large patches of Oyster Mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus, have made an appearance, and once again, on the Northern Red Oak treefall.


These mushrooms are six to eight inches across, so quite large indeed. Tom Volks writes about Oyster Mushrooms and their lookalikes, among other things, in an Oct 1998 entry. There’s always the possibility that these might be something else, but I’d be surprised.





An inspection of our poor creek, which apparently hasn’t suffered enough insult this year, demonstrated that we seem to be hosting at least one inconsiderate, idiot hunter:


I’ll spare you the closeups. I suppose it could be a natural death, but given the lack of skin or other ornamentation, it’s unlikely. The hunter thoughtfully left it half in and half out of the creek.

Organismally speaking, it’s pretty quiet around here, as would befit winter were our daytime temperatures winter ones. But for the next three days or so we’ll probably break records for highs - upper 70s in the middle of December.

So I’m reduced to turning over logs. Yesterday netted a nice slimy salamander, and then turning over one rotting log revealed these:


I’m a little puzzled. They aren’t mud dauber nests, of course, judging from the shape. If they were afixed to a surface well above the ground I’d say they were potter wasp nests. But they’re effectively underground, and the orientation of the cells and entrance would be horizontal.


None of this says they’re not potter wasps, but it is an unusual place to find them.

The shape and construction isn’t quite right either. The images of mason and potter wasp nests I’ve found convey unanimous agreement on a much more vaselike presentation, complete with neck. Of course the neck might have broken off, but my little pots show an opening that doesn’t look jagged as if it were broken through, but rather constructed as an opening, with smooth edges.

Here’s an image page of an exquisite Eumenes potter wasp pot, at Bugguide. And this series, also by Lynette Schimming, shows the rearing of a brood of potter wasps.

I don’t find much further indication of alternatives, unless these are miner bees (and that link, btw, has a very nice description of miner bees). The photograph there shows pots resembling what I’m seeing, and the choice of nesting site would be much more in keeping. However, all the other miner bee photos I’ve found show more of a burrowing action, rather than the building of an external structure.

Whatever the solution to the mystery, we can be assured that terrible things happened here.

The fallen northern red oak of a few days ago did yield one other phenomenon - these large, 6-10 inch outgrowths. There are at least eight of them along the length of the trunk:


The fallen tree no longer looks so verdantly green now, btw. The lack of rain has everything brown and shrivelled up.

The outgrowths are quite pretty on the outside, convoluted and shiny smooth brown. I couldn’t quite believe I’d missed them in the last couple of years had they been a part of the tree itself, a burl, for instance, but it’s not out of the question.


I did pop one off the tree, without much difficulty. The first thumbnail shows the attachment side along with two black moist tunnels. The second shows some sort of larva disappearing into its tunnel.

I did saw open the mass, and the inside is as punky and undifferentiated as the attachment side promised (third thumbnail).


So it’s not an outgrowth of the tree itself, but a fungus taking advantage of the huge supply of cellulose. These are the fruiting bodies, and large, hard ones they are. And like littler fleas on bigger fleas, a larval arthropod of some kind taking advantage of the fungus fruiting body itself.

I realize it’s a bit early to remind everyone but my track record on remembering to do so closer to date isn’t so great. So don’t forget the Geminids meteor shower on Thursday night/Friday morning (Dec 13/14).

This page has a good locator description and very nice historical background on the meteor shower, destined someday to vanish forever. Unlike the source of most debris trails that cause meteors, trail comes not from a comet but probably an asteroid.

Unlike the Leonids and Perseids whose radiants rise very late, the constellation Gemini is well up in the east by 10pm (anyone’s time). You’ll recognize it easily as bright red Mars sits just about smack in the middle of it right now. The meteors appear to come from that direction.

Best times are usually after midnight, since at that your position on the earth is now looking forward into the trail, rather than backward - the meteors are coming straight at you. Well, not really.

That reminded me of the Gemini space program in the 1960s, the second of the three main programs that began with Mercury and ended with Apollo and the landing of humans on the moon. Gemini was the program that among other things tested and practiced rendezvous of two spacecraft, so that each mission required not just one but *two* near simultaneous launches. The tricky rendezvous was necessary since later the Apollo capsule and the Lunar Lander would have to perform that same maneuver prior to “translunar insertion” (remember that?).

Mother and Dad got me all the little model kits for these spacecraft. A lot of it is probably just seeing success and planning for a goal through the veil of memory but the space program seems so different, and less *possible*, now.

(BTW, Mark, I got three sendings, including the preferred barred owl ringtone, ordered two days ago. I’m now ready to shock and awe.)

I’ve mentioned that two of our firefighter colleagues and I have taken up bicycling. None of us is much interested in the usual sport aspect of it, but rather have bikes with fat tires and we don’t wear fashionable clothing either. Unlike the other bicyclists around here we avoid the main paved roads and prefer the gravelled or dirt backroads that receive little traffic.

Unfortunately my schedule doesn’t overlap very well with theirs four days of the week so I’ve taken to making an hour or two day trip at least two or three times a week by myself.

I’m not especially enthusiastic with the perverse aspect of loading a bike on the car and driving three miles in order to ride bikes, and that’s what we have to do since we’re all about that distance apart. On my own, I can explore directly from my house without having to drive.

Our 0.75-mile neighborhood road isn’t a problem, but the main Wolfskin Road is, potentially. It receives fairly heavy use since it runs between US 78 east of Athens and Watkinsville south of Athens and is therefore a convenient bypass around that part of Athens. It’s therefore somewhat dangerous, but there are certainly bicyclists who use it regularly anyway.

Wolfskin Road runs left-right at the top of the map below, and I’ve outlined today’s route in black. The big black dot (#1) at the left shows where we normally meet, and from there we have a variety of choices - Blacksnake Road above is a pleasant 7-mile trip to the end and back, and then we can proceed along a back pasture to Lois Lane and down to Hutchins-Wolfskin for much greater opportunity. (The black dot marked #5, btw, is Wolfskin VFD. The numerous polygons are individual parcels of land. “U" means unimproved, ”H" means a house exists.)


On my own, I bike in along a 0.75 mile stretch of Wolfskin Road at the upper right on this map, so it’s only a short distance that I have to travel to get to some nice quiet riding. The first mile along OMR is fairly level, but OMR deadends at the Hutchins-Wolfskin Road (another long dirt road that traverses east-west between Wolfskin and Highway 77), and in either direction there become some serious hills. A short distance along OMR (#2):


The fenced area you see above is a small cemetery (#2). There are several of these dotting the immediate area. I don’t know anything about them and I didn’t take a close look at the occupants of this one. I bet someone who reads this blog knows, though!

One of my occupations during bike rides is to scan for roadside plants. The county mows, and sometimes sprays herbicide, along Wolfskin Road, but generally doesn’t mess with these backroads and you can find some nice stuff growing opportunistically. As you can tell from the above photos, the predominant forest is loblolly pine. There are not many residences along most of the stretches of these roads, and much of the property in the area is owned by a single individual (his property is all in gray, here), held mostly for future development, I imagine. The grass to the left is one of my favorites, and I was glad to find a considerable patch of it along Hutchins-Wolfskin as it heads down toward Barrow Creek to the east. It’s a Threeawn Grass, one of the Aristida, and there are 38 species in the genus, all native. I think it’s very attractive with its long awns. Georgia is home to 10-13 species, quite a few of which are threatened or endangered.

I don’t think there’s actually a residence along this large (blue) tract of land that I’ve marked #3, but there are cows in this pastoral interruption of dense loblolly planting. Way further back, off the map, should be a large pond and a couple of creeks running toward Barrow Creek. Of course you have to be careful about going offroad, especially this time of year.




I could have kept going on Hutchins-Wolfskin eastward down to Barrow Creek and back up (it’s a long, steep hill both ways) but decided to turn back west and ended up at Bulloch Road (#4).


Forks like these usually provide nice opportunities for roadside plants, and there’s some nice Splitbeard growing along here, along with a number of Eupatorium and Partridge Pea.

I’ve gone over to the dark side, with the rest of you.

Of course, like the rest of you, "I’ll only use it for emergencies."

And now it’s time for the monthly summary of the climate of the month of November, here in Athens and US-wide. With 2.35 (official) inches of rain (!), our November was practically normal, for a change. We had some warm and cool days and nights but nothing particularly extreme. How was yours?

November highs were only 1.2 degF above normal, balanced by lows 2.6 degF below normal, all within a comfortable standard deviation.

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


This one is easy to describe. The eastern US was a bit cooler, as was the Pacific Northwest. Most of the rest of the country was a bit warmer, especially the southwest at 4-8 degF higher than average. The Southwest continues the trends from October and earlier.

From the (click through to the monitoring maps from the left sidebar) National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


In contrast to October’s precipitation patterns, the vast majority of the US experienced deficits of rain amounting to 25-50% of normal. This is probably a reflection of La Niña conditions in the Pacific (see geek chatter below).


For Athens:

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of November in Athens. As usual, the black dots are for the 15 years 1990-2005 (black dots), 2007 (green line), and 2006 (red line).


There were 8 days in November at least one standard deviation above the 17-year average for that day, compared to an average 5.3 days significantly above average in November. The nights were balancing, with 6 much cooler nights when the lows were at least one standard deviation before the average low, compared with an average 5.1 such nights per November.

How about rain? Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of November. The red line is the average over the last 18 years, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas would mean significantly above-average if there were any, but that’s a laugh. Mustard areas are significantly below. Athens claimed 2.35 inches of rain (same as October!) but out here we got 3.25 inches, compared to the normal 3.3 inches of rain in November. That’s the first time we’ve come close to approaching a monthly average since last December. That amount of relief kept us within the standard deviation most of the month, but still well below average.

(I should point out that Atlanta only got 0.96 inches of rain in November. True, their water supply doesn’t depend on the immediate local rainfall, but it must be debilitating nonetheless. It’s also odd to compare the difference in rainfall in the three locations so close together.)


Of course, the rainfall accumulation for the full year is important, so here it is. November’s rainfall allowed us to maintain our two standard deviations below normal for the year to date, and continue the receipt of only 57% the average rainfall over the entire year. Over the last two years, we have received 71% of normal rainfall.


I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks. For us it shows declining rainfall over the next three months, and increasingly anomalously warm temperatures. No snow again, this year.


Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update: This is the fifth month of La Niña conditions in the Pacific, and NOAA expects a moderate event continuing well into 2008. That means a warmer and drier winter in the southeast. Go to the La Niña Extreme Event Risk figure to see what it might mean for you.

One of the curious things about the declarations of an El Niño or a La Niña is that they aren’t made until well into the event itself. For historical purposes, as made clear by NOAA’s updates, declarations aren’t made until the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) has stayed beyond a +/- 0.5 degC index over a three month running mean. November may do it - the Sep-Oct-Nov index isn’t up yet. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been feeling the effects - impending and increasing La Niña conditions have been observed since late spring and early summer.

Finally, and I mentioned this earlier here, NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2007, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own. Very neat.

The other day, in this post, I was surly and rude in my review of the work by Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty on anthropogenic biomes. I did admire the google maps but did not otherwise rise to the level of civility that I like to maintain. I addressed the institutional press release more than the content of the work, and that was unfair.

The authors sent me a pdf of the paper itself, "Putting people in the map:
anthropogenic biomes of the world", and asked if I would post the following as a comment. I asked if they would prefer it added to another post making a second attempt at a more reasonable assessment, and they were agreeable to that:

Hi Wayne,
Thank you for taking the time to flame our recent work on Anthropogenic
Biomes! (just kidding- no offense taken.)

We have two responses.

First, anthromes are not intended to replace biomes, they serve as an
alternative view of the biosphere that includes humans. We do state this in
both our EOEarth topic and paper. Conventional biome systems are still very
useful.

We heartily agree that nature has tremendous value for its own sake.
On the other hand, we also feel that basing nature conservation on the view
that only ecosystems untouched by human hands are worth conserving is not
going to serve us well in the long-term.

We address this in detail in our post at the EarthForum entitled:
"Conserving Nature in an Anthropogenic Biosphere"

We are looking forward to your further comments- and it would be great if
you could join in the EarthForum blog on this too.

Thank you again for your contribution.

Best wishes,
Erle and Navin

The paper makes the strong point that anthromes are not intended to replace biomes, and after reading it through I understand much better the points of the paper. Briefly, Ellis and Ramankutty are augmenting conventional biomes designations to reflect the types of disturbances and encroachments by humans. Their contention is that with unregulated growth, humans now intercept and consume one-third of terrestrial net primary production, are causing global extinctions, and are altering climate. Human influence must be taken into account, since it is now affects the majority of Earth’s land surface, with wild ecosystems diminishing rapidly.

The paper itself is (I believe) currently embargoed until its publication, so I hope I’m not crossing any lines here.

To produce the augmentations and anthromes, the authors divided land surface up into 5 arc-minute grids (86 square km at the equator) and assigned each a large set of descriptors that include within a wild class and a population density class: human population, land use, land cover, and many others. They then performed a cluster analysis to identify natural groupings of descriptors. The results are the maps that can be viewed with Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and also in GIS (Geographic Information System) format.

Here, for instance, is a section from the Google Map version of north Georgia, including Atlanta and Athens. Click on the map for a considerably larger version. The pink and red colors indicate urban and dense settlements, and rainfed mosaic villages anthromes. The majority shades of green surrounding the red and pink blocks are various combinations of residential and populated rainfed mosaics and irrigated cropland, and populated forests.


A conventional biome designation for our area would be "temperate forest", or deciduous forest, along with a description of the non-human aspects of that biome. Of course you could get more detailed - our biome could be further subdivided into associations: "oak-hickory temperate deciduous forest", but again little or nothing might be said about the human influence that modifies the ecosystems of the area.

You could spend hours going over the color coded figures in the paper. Figure 2 is a set of bars that correlates conventional biomes designations with anthropogenic biomes - it is essentially a summary of the results of the clustering. So, for instance, there is a bar in Fig 2b that identifies “grasslands”, a conventional biome designation, and above it is a bar that is divided into sections sized and color coded as to anthropogenic use: populated rangelands constitutes more than a third of this bar, followed by residential rangelands and remote croplands, with all the other 17 anthrome designations also indicated by colored sections.

Figure 3 provides a conceptual model and places broad categories of anthromes on a logarithmic scale, structured by presentations of the actual data: population density, land use (forestry, pasuture, buildup, ornamental, etc.), carbon emissions, biodiversity (native and introduced), and more. It’s an extremely graphic and persuasive figure, particularly when you take into account the logarithmic scale.

In the end the authors argue that the usual parameters that go into describing an ecosystem: biota, climate, terrain, and geology, should be augmented with additional factors that include population density and land use. It is not, as I hastily described it, any sort of seal of approval, but rather a recognition that must be taken into account if ecological modeling is to give meaningful information.

There’s a great deal more to the work than I’ve described, and the figures really must be viewed to appreciate them. There’s much more at the Anthropogenic Biomes website. The paper is in Frontiers of Ecology, and a PDF can be read by scrolling down to the Nov 26 entry on this page.

This year, I’ve come across two box turtles (Terrapens carolina carolina) in my ongoing documentation of our very local population. I encountered #7, a female, June 14, and then #8, the fourth male, on September 4. Neither had been encountered since I began documenting my discoveries.

Yesterday I came across this one, not so far from the house, a bit east below the parking area:


#9 is a female, and she’s dead. She’s not one of the ones I’ve seen previously. I thought it was strange to find a box turtle still out and well after our first frost. She’s probably been dead for several weeks, judging from the state of decomposition.


I’ve found a number of box turtle remains that were the result of predation, but that’s clearly not the case here. Scanning through websites concerned with terrapen mortality, I find that roadkill is a major contribution, and predation another. But there are also a number of diseases, especially respiratory ones, that hit box turtles kept in captivity, and perhaps this is the case here.

It’s also not hard to imagine that this extremely dry and hot year has been stressful on critters, especially reptiles. I suppose box turtles must get a certain amount of water from plants they eat, because for months there simply was no water available to those in upper territories.