Be warned: today’s blog will read like the back of a cereal box, or the kind of placemat factoids meant to keep the impatient kids at bay in restaurants. Then again, you might be dying to start your Friday with new information on snowshoes for birds.

Really, there are some astonishing facts out there about animals in fall, preparing for winter. Seasonal cycles can affect all kinds of things from reproductive and metabolic activities to migration, hibernation and coat changes.

Here goes:

Q: Why do bears hibernate?

A: To drive those of us stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night into fits of envy…. did you know they can “sleep” for up to 100 days without peeing? And of course without eating or drinking, slowing down their entire system during food  shortage time, snug in whatever den they found.

Q: What is an existential difference between bees and wasps?

A: The former survive hibernation, the latter all die except for the queen. Invertebrates such as mollusks, myriapods, crustaceans, arachnids and the insect family all hibernate – who knew.

Q: Who are the true living dead?

A: Frogs! They often cannot dig deep enough to be protected from the cold under the leaves when hibernating.

“And yet the frogs do not die. Why? Antifreeze! True enough, ice crystals form in such places as the body cavity and bladder and under the skin, but a high concentration of glucose in the frog’s vital organs prevents freezing. A partially frozen frog will stop breathing, and its heart will stop beating. It will appear quite dead. But when the hibernaculum warms up above freezing, the frog’s frozen portions will thaw, and its heart and lungs resume activity–there really is such a thing as the living dead!” 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-frogs-survive-wint/

Tell me that is not fascinating.

Q: Do all animals slow down in fall to prepare their bodies for the onslaught of winter?

A: Nope. Deer, boar and bats are seeking mates in fall, elk and moose becoming particularly aggressive.

Q: Why do mammals and birds change color to white in late fall?

A: If you answered: “camouflage in the snow,” you are partially right. More interesting, though, is the fact that white fur, lacking pigment, has more space in its hair shafts. When air fills the empty spaces, it traps the animal’s body heat and provide insulation from the cold. Birds experience a similar benefit when they fluff their feathers, trapping pockets of air close to their body for added warmth. Many animals go through molting, shedding their fur for a generally thicker version. Many of these changes are triggered by length of daylight, not temperatures. Think about the effects of climate change – you’ll go white to escape predators and then there is no snow…..

Q: Heard a bird lately?

A: Probably a robin, they never shut up. The rest of them do, though, since there is no longer a need to call for a mate, or define their territorial borders. And many migrate to warmer climes. Which is also complicated by climate change because many who used to fly south now stay in different territories, upsetting the natural balance in the food chain. Never mind that some of the migrating birds now also have routes open to them through previous permafrost territories that allow them to come to new grounds – bringing with them viruses that we previously did not have to face. Bonus fact: some birds are carnivores in the summer, herbivores in the winter.

And here is one of my favorites: in winter, some grouse dive-bomb head first into powder snow. Completely submerged, their heat creates a sealed dome, forming their very own igloo. Before that, in September, they grow extended scales on their feet, practically functioning as snowshoes!

Thoughts of grouse, particularly sage grouse, were triggered by seeing small patches of sagebrush this week (Have never been able to photograph the birds themselves). Large sagebrush patches are required for their survival, since they shelter the birds and are the one and only source of highly nutritious food during the winter. This puts ranchers, builders and conservationists in conflict – although in Oregon they found a compromised approach that seems to have helped the birds stay off the endangered list. That is until the Trump administration came along and eyed changes….

https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-ranchers-conservationists-biologists-debate-sage-grouse-plans/

See them in action in eastern Oregon below the music video that is dedicated to them (although from an initiative in Wyoming. Same different.)

Here is the sage brush in fall  – photographs are of sagebrush landscapes in Oregon and Nevada.

260 miles east of Portland lies La Grande, a small  town of 13.000 or so people nestled in the Grand Ronde valley, in the eastern foothills of the Blue Mountains. Median income is $39.000 a year, and 91% of the population is white, 1 % black, 4 % Latinos 1.5% Asian and the rest Hawaiian. It was settled in 1861 by immigrants coming along the Oregon Trail

who (violently) displaced the  Native people of the southern Columbia Plateau from the Umatilla, Nez Perce, Cayuse tribes who used the valley to harvest camas root and other plants and to hunt, fish, and trade.

The city grew in the 187os during the gold rush in Idaho and eastern OR, with miners buying up the agricultural produce delivered by La Grande’s farmers. During 1884 the railroad came to town and with it a large Chinese population who stayed on as successful business men after having worked the mines or the railroad. Practically all of them were driven out by a mob in 1893, which looted and burned their businesses and homes, forcibly removing the men and marching them to a railway depot to send them “back home.”  If you wonder about the current politics of some in the place, look at who attends the “freedom Rallies.” This spring Dana Loesch and Sheriff Clark were the guest speakers at a Freedom Rally in a state where Trump won 28 of 36 counties and Republican Greg Walden hopes to hold his power in District 2. The one who voted 99% of the time in line with Trump’s positions, that Walden.

https://www.hcn.org/articles/politics-as-oregons-midterms-approach-divided-sides-dig-in

A small liberal arts university is one of the major employer in La Grande, the only one east of the Cascades, and has brought a lot of focus on culture to the region. Most of the tourist traffic, though, is devoted to outdoor activities, including hunters, campers, mushroomers, birders, cyclists, skiers, snowmobilers, and snowboarders.

Count me in on the outdoor tourism. On Tuesday I visited the 6,000-acre Ladd Marsh Wildlife Area, a popular destination for birdwatchers and hunters, and the largest hardstem bulrush marsh in northeastern Oregon, five miles south of La Grande. I really had meant to capture the beauty of the place, not to harp on politics again, so you are perfectly justified in just looking at the photographs. Fall after an intensely dry summer has left his mark in gold, yellow and ochres,

dust blowing everywhere.

Even the bullrush ponds were largely dry, just a few puddles left, attracting the first migratory birds (which will in the spring, when water is back in the marsh, number in the 1000s.)

What’s with the pelicans? They follow me everywhere!

Sand hill cranes

Wild antelopes settled under the irrigation lines or close to them, in hope of water. So did the birds and live stock.

Only the sunflowers gave up.

Music today is accompanying a compendium of images of those who lived here before they were driven into reservations. I do not know the source of the music, or the source of the photographs, but thought we should remind ourselves of our history.

Sunflower fields are a gift of fall – particularly for those of us who like to photograph. The colors, the strong forms, the way they attract wildlife all make me visit them again and again. They also seem to elicit a lot of associations from poets, composers, film makers and so on. (My generation will remember Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Sunflower if only for Mancini’s saccharine musical score that was whistled across all of Europe in 1970.) I’ll spare you.

For a poem I chose William Blake’s Ah Sunflower, because it reflects autumnal transience in better ways than I could possibly offer.It also gives me always a kick to read about something that looks like 8 simple lines and then learning what they could possibly stand for. Or, more precisely, how scholars fight over potential meanings. Is the Ah a sigh? Of delight? Of surprise? Of pity?

Your guess is as good as mine, or, come to think of it, probably better than mine. I say this because I was also completely clueless when it comes to the symbolism of the sunflower (again, offered by scholars): a “fallen” human, or persistent love, or frustrated love, or lost innocence, or corrupted love, or poetic imagination, or spiritual yearning, or all of these?”  Oh, (sigh of irritation) the things I don’t know. Here is Wikipedia to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah!_Sun-flower

Attached below are Benjamin Britten’s take on the poem

and a Ginsberg reading of it.

I’ll stick to photographing them…..

There is a decided smell of fall in the air when walking early in the morning, hints of russet and smidgens of gold in the scorched landscape, and migratory birds starting to appear. I feel, so far, none of the melancholia associated with fall, just plain relief that the heat is over and the rains have come.

During antiquity the Greeks coined melancholia from the words melas and cholé, blackness of the bile. They thought an overabundance of this black bile poisoned you and it was associated with the fall months, the astrological signs of libra, scorpio and sagittarius. If you look up the definition it speaks of deep sadness or gloom. During the middle ages melancholia was touted as one of the deadly sins, to be defied with prayer and willpower. During the romantic age with the emerging celebration (if not cult) of “geniuses,” people took recourse to Aristoteles’ writings, who claimed melancholia was the precursor of mania which enabled all kinds of glorious deeds by philosophers, artists, poets and politicians…

The combination of depression and mania is of course known to us as bipolar disease and indeed, many famous people are said to have lived with it, including Florence Nightingale, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe,Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Vincent van Gogh, Buzz Aldrin, Edgar All Poe, Jimmy Hendrix, Graham Greene, Alvin Ailey, John Ruskin, Edvard Munch and Gustav Mahler to name just a few in no particular order. If you Google it, the list is overwhelming – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_bipolar_disorder

but the real statistics includes of course many more non-famous than famous people: the World Health Organization considers it the 6th leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting up to 30 million people.

Well, no gloom on this end and no glorious deeds either, even if it is the time of year that has me listen to “fall” music, which often has a melancholy tinge, focussing on the transient nature of things. The only thing I want to think about in terms of transience is that of our current political landscape after the outcome of the November election…but that doesn’t keep me from pulling up my fall play list!

Let’s start with the oboe, with its perfect melancholy sound  – there is a full album with works by French composers dedicated to that instrument, played by one of Germany’s major oboists  – principal oboist at the Berlin Philharmonic – Albrecht Mayer. It is called Bonjour Paris. (And you are better off listening to the clip from it attached below with your eyes closed, because of the inane posing in front of major landmarks.)

Here is Fauré’s Pavane, Op.50  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlsTEgb4FSw

And here is a crisper version with no visuals arranged for oboe and piano this time.

Photographs from my walk last Friday. The pelicans were a true surprise, they are not typically seen in these parts.

And the buzzards were waiting to hear the end of the Manafort story….