Nature Archives

Contrasts

Nature, Politics
Mar 18, 2019
1 Comments

Today is the birthday of Grover Cleveland, the nation’s 22nd president from 1885 to 1889 and its 24th president from 1893 to 1897, who was born in 1837 in Caldwell, N.J.

Among all US presidents he scored high, if not highest, in integrity, honesty and independence. As a democrat he fought against corruption and protectionist trade policies. He is supposed to have said this:

“I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/18/this-day-in-politics-march-18-1223872

On my hike yesterday, out and up in the Eastern Gorge there were plenty of mild breezes. The hot air emanated somewhere else in Washington DC. But that was not the only contrast that came to mind.

Here I was, amidst indescribable beauty, strong enough to tackle a considerable climb, some of it in snow, accompanied by one of my most cherished persons on earth, discovering the first wildflowers

Columbia Desert Parsley: *Lomatium columbianum*

and digging into a sumptuous sandwich during a picnic on a sunny if cold meadow.

All this while others are too afraid to eat anything that is not coming out of a vending machine for fear of poisoning, put behind bars, harassed and violated by people out for revenge. I am specifically referring to Ramsey Orta, a friend of Eric Garner, who filmed and later posted a cell phone video of how Garner died in a police chokehold. Orta has been in prison since 2016, and is fearing for his life in retribution of showing police brutality. I cannot independently assess the validity of the claims, but the article has taken hold in my head since I read it last week.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18253848/eric-garner-footage-ramsey-orta-police-brutality-killing-safety

On March 3rd, 2015, Orta’s cell block was served a meal of corn, cabbage, bread, juice, and meatloaf. He didn’t touch it. He’d fallen ill a few times after eating the food at Rikers and was convinced he was being targeted and poisoned.“Eat, inmate,” a CO commanded, banging Orta’s cell with a baton. The guards were all standing too close, watching too intently as the others ate. This kind of attention was unusual. He saw others from his cell block staring down into their meatloaf, forks frozen in midair.

Court documents filed six days later alleged that the prisoners had suffered and continued to suffer from “nausea, vomiting, pain, dizziness, aches, headaches, stomach/intestinal pains, dehydration, diarrhea, nosebleeds, throwing up blood, diarrhea with blood, and/or an overwhelming sense of illness.” The symptoms were consistent with human consumption of rat poison, and when the tainted meatloaf was finally tested, the results found that the blue-green pellets visible in the meatloaf were brodifacoum, the active ingredient in rodenticide.

Not the kind of country Grover Cleveland envisioned. And one that seems just fine for those currently at the helm. As I said, contrasts.

Playing Hide and Seek

Nature
Mar 13, 2019
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If you find yourself at 101 Park Ave, Midtown, Manhattan please go into the newly opened American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog (I bet their dogs’ names aren’t Fido either but consist of hyphenated classics…) and send me some pictures. Unfortunately that still deprives me of heading straight for the touch-screen monolith in the museum that matches one’s photo with the dog breed one most resembles. What would I be? Care to comment?

My dog has been playing hide and seek with me for much of the day, curiously with me being assigned the role of seek exclusively…. the subsequent exhaustion allowed me to read but one article I want to share, if only for the photographs contained with in it.

New York’s New Museum of the Dog Is Serving Canine Realness Extravaganza

Really, go read for yourself, if only to enjoy the smiles the author’s clever puns bring to your lips. And I quote: It’s stuffed to the brim with oodles of poodles and painted Pomeranians. But are these pooch paintings Pugcassos, or just plain Shih Tzu? Blame it on my fatigue after walking several miles in the rain, hail, sun and everything in between, but I find that funny.

Yes, you cat people, read it too. The critic has something to say about cats as well in the realms of “serious” art. And is nicely snarky about the museum at large. In the meantime I’ll put up some photos of the amazing changing skies today

and the vegetation that hid enough birds to keep a German short-hair pointer happy in perpetuity. And only occasionally back in view.

And here is Frank giving his poodle lecture (alas cut off in the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mQSf4QOwxw

and the poodle’s reappearance on Overnite Sensation, one of the first albums I ever bought. :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIrr624DFY0

The Return of Winter

Nature, Poetry
Mar 7, 2019
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And just like that, it snowed again. Covering the Hellebores, the bamboo, the whole of the backyard. I am very fond of Hellebores, also known as Christmas or Lenten Roses, their origins explained by lots of different folk tales.

A different take on them can be found in Darwin’s writings. No, not that Darwin, but his grandfather (as well as Francis Galton’s), Erasmus. Erasmus Darwin was an English physician, one of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, a natural philosopher, physiologist, abolitionist, inventor and poet in the late 1700s. He was beyond fascinated with the newly revealed research and subsequent taxonomy of plants devised by Linnaeus.

Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants, a long – eternally long – poem, which was a popular rendering of Linnaeus’ works, as well as the Economy of Vegetation, and together the two were published as The Botanic Garden.

Finally a way to talk about sex! Even if in the disguise of the propagation amongst plants. So many poetic possibilities!

Here is the bit about Hellebores:

And here are some of his explanatory notes:

Clearly he anticipated natural selection in ways to be explored and confirmed by his grandson 60 years later. And the colors now vary, from white, to pink, to the deepest of purples. Which is not true for snowdrops, which have stayed in their wintry camouflage forever.

I’m throwing some other garden sights in for good measure. It’s all too beautiful!

Music today two lesser known but distinct recordings of Schubert’s Winterreise. One from the 1950s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMImz94Lb78

And a newer one from some years back:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh1Ky7gj4vw

Up and Down

Music, Nature
Mar 6, 2019
7 Comments

The weather is echoing the mood – from spring in the air, sun galore, take- the -downjacket-off temperatures to snow on the ground with rain, sleet, and wind in-between.

Let’s focus on spring and good moods. And Kulning. What’s that, you ask? It’s what comes to my mind when I wander on Sauvie Island, happy, looking at the first signs of spring off-set by the snow covered mountains. Stare at the cows, and admire the birds.

Kulning was the traditional singing of Scandinavian women herders. “Less than a century ago, Sweden’s remote forests and mountain pastures swelled with women’s voices each summer. As dusk approached, the haunting calls of kulning echoed through the trees in short, cascading, lyricless phrases. Though often quite melodic, these weren’t simply musical expressions. They were messages intended for a responsive audience: wayfaring cattle.

Kulning was a surefire way to hurry the herds home at the end of the day.“

Susanne Rosenberg, Professor of folk singing at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH), head of Department of Folk Music and member of the Academy of Music is an expert on kulning. She has been a pioneer in both rediscovering the older Swedish style of traditional singing, as well as using it in new artistic environments, involving cooperation with Sweden’s foremost contemporary composers.

Accoding to her research “the vocal technique likely dates back to at least the medieval era. In the spring, farmers sent their livestock to a small fäbod, or remote, temporary settlement in the mountains, so cows and goats could graze freely. Women, young and old, accompanied the herds, living in relative isolation from late May until early October. Far from the village, they tended to the animals, knitted, crafted whisks and brooms, milked the cows, and made cheese—often working sixteen hour days. Life on the fäbod was arduous work, but it was freeing, too.” Women alone, making a lot of noise. My good mood continues.

Not that I dare to scream out like that – the birding community on Sauvie would declare me finally mad rather than a wizard woman of the Northwest….

But even swans have been seen to respond to kulning – unless they approach you hoping for breadcrumbs.

Jonna Jinton, in the link attached above, is currently riding the wave, and making pretty you-tube videos re-introducing the ancient art.

The serious music, combining old and new, can be found below. It’ll preserve the good mood for the entire day, even if I see the first snowflakes mixed with icy rain when looking out of my window.

Photographs are from Sauvie 5 days ago.

Ways to reminisce

Literature, Nature
Jan 30, 2019
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When I read the passages posted below I was moved on so many levels. Moved by the pervasive sense of home-sickness. Moved by the way wit is used to defuse nostalgia. Moved by the display of fabulous teaching – who will forget the names of the birds and their sounds after seeing them placed in these snarky contexts?

The author is Liam Heneghan who is a professor of environmental science at DePaul University, where he also co-directs the Center for Nature&Culture. The piece below was published here:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/memories-of-irish-birdsong-1.3765719?fbclid=IwAR3gRIetTqrp9eqce9xtfg-WQQ8bVm42AJO0Z-e8xExeMdaSNI-XERyge_A

Before I get to it, let me mention that he also wrote a well-received book on the ways ecosystems are described in children’ literature. Here is an excerpt from the TLS review: Those familiar with Tin Woodman in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Ents in The Lord of the Rings or the Once-ler in Dr Seuss’s book The Lorax may well have learnt something about the spiritual and economic value of trees, or at least the deeds of the brave but usually unromantic eco-warriors who protect them. As the zoologist Liam Heneghan argues in his new book Beasts at Bedtime, ecological themes and nature lore have long been deeply embedded in children’s bedtime stories.https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/let-the-wild-rumpus-start/)

Today’s photographs are not necessarily matched to the birds named in the passages below – they were taken in recent weeks in these parts, true US musicians all.

Memories of Irish Birdsong

By Liam Heneghan

1. My mother once saw the chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs; in Irish: “Rí Rua”) take a shit on Grafton Street and she scolded him. He just kept repeating his distinctive call “pink, pink, pink, trup,” over and over again, but you could kinda tell that he was mortified. Good bird, really; had trouble later with the auld drugs, and got very stout. Died way too young. In the eighties, those birds had a string of great hits.

2. I worked one summer on the Cork Train on the food trolley. A young fella with me in the kitchen car was really into the skylark (Alauda arvensis, in Irish: “Fuiseog”). He could play skylark’s famous guitar riff on his knock-off Les Paul (you know the one, it goes “chirrup… chirrup, trrrp”). Claimed the skylark did not play a real Gibson either. I will never forget that little detail; I lost touch with that kid later on.

3. Back in the day, I’d hear corncrakes (Crex crex; in Irish: “Traonach”) along the Co Mayo coast all the time. They are a rare breed now, of course; almost extinct. Once when I was pushing my bike up a laneway I saw the corncrake standing with his sister outside a cottage. He must have thought I had looked at his sister funny, as he snarled “kerrx-kerrx” at me and started to fling his droppings. I was told afterwards that the whole family was mad. Brothers all musicians in America.

4. I heard the wren (Troglodytes troglodytes, in Irish: “Dreolín”) play in An Béal Bocht on Charlemont Street Dublin back in 1986. Small fella, drab feathers; mainly sang in hedges. It was almost Christmas time; when he finally sang his big hit “check…, check, churrrrr”, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Very Christmassy. Then they passed around a can, collecting for “the lads north of the border.” They were different times, back then, that’s for sure.

5. Every summer in the mid-80s, I’d pitch a tent in a field by the River Flesk in Killarney. Right beside the Gleneagle Hotel. Back then, the woodcock (Scolopax rusticola, in Irish: “Creabhar”) was blowing up. He’d fly in from his perch in the oak woods and appear there on Friday evenings, flying high above the mainstage groaning and whispering ‘pissp.’ “Roding” is what the birders call it. The fans went wild when he swooped down and ate earthworms. You can never really tell what some people will think is cool.

6. My father and I took a trip up in Gweedore in the early 90s and he tried to strike up a conversation with the Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus, in Irish: “Droimneach beag”). Big bloke, wore a heavy sea-worthy jacket. I’d seen that bird play all the seisúns in pubs in the area. My dad let out a very plaintive ‘peep, peep, peep’ and then anxiously flicked his head from side the side. But the gull either didn’t understand him, or perhaps he thought he was a herring gull. My dad muttered something under his breathe, but I did not quite catch it.

7. When I moved to New York in December 1987, I avoided Irish birds as best I could; they made me homesick I suppose. Once I was on a “2” train going up to the Bronx Zoo and spotted the starling (Sturnus vulgaris, in Irish: “Druid”) fly on at Times Square. She used to busk at the Dandelion market on Stephen’s Green. Sold jewelry on the side, condoms too. It had been snowing heavily so she had ice packed hard on her toes. Starling slipped, swiveled and fell onto an old woman’s lap, called out “chackerchackerchacker” and laughing like it was the funniest thing. Everyone on the subway car just ignored her; she’s just put out her new album.

8. You will consider me nostalgic, I suppose, but the music those guys were making in the 1970s was rawer, more radical, really. I once heard the fieldfare (Turdus pilaris; in Irish: “Sacán”) in a park in Dublin sing one glorious note, just a single gawddammed note, sustained it for an eternity, as if he really did not give a shit. But you could really feel the emotion in it. I dated his sister back then, but told her I didn’t want to meet her garage band loser of a brother. I regret that now; those guys became huge in America.

And here are some Irish musicians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBATrLRWySg

Beware, Arachnophobes

Nature
Jan 14, 2019
1 Comments

This week I’ll explore some topics outside of politics. It will improve my sanity, and, judging by the volume of emails received last week, also that of my readers.

I’ll start with flying spiders. Now that should put your mind at rest…. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/raining-spiders-brazil

If you look at the link attached above, you’ll see a video of a sky that seems to have spider raindrops or snowflakes, 1000s of them, come down. It is a phenomenon associated with particularly hot air. (Climate change? Nope, not going there today.) Before you cringe in disgust, listen to the really amazing facts associated with these spiders.

First of all, they are tremendously good for the environment, because they devour insects and pests. (Which reminds me, so are ducks. They are increasingly used to replaced toxic pesticides in rice farming – check it out here: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-43588774/dumping-pesticides-using-ducks-instead)

Secondly, they are amazingly social – out of 40.000 species of spiders there are only 23 that form communities, and parawixia bistriata is one of them. They basically curl up in a tight ball in the trees during the day

and then come out at dusk to weave giant, connected, invisible nets where they hang out waiting for dinner. A colony can have up to 50.000 individuals with females outnumbering males at a high ratio. If there is enough wind, the nets break loose and get carried, spiders and all, across the sky which makes for the illusion of raining spiders.

And before you comfort yourself with the thought that all of this happens between Panama and Argentina, I have news: ballooning spiders have arrived in Texas. (Maybe they could stand in for the wall, building an elongated web along the border? I forgot, no politics. My bad.)

The good news: they are not poisonous, and they are exceedingly small (otherwise they’d be too heavy to float in the air) so that their bite, if it ever happens, is no more harmful than a mosquito’s.

The fascinating news: individual spiders do not only travel with the wind, but use flight by electrostatic compulsion, reaching heights of over a mile and many more in distance.

Every day, around 40,000 thunderstorms crackle around the world, collectively turning Earth’s atmosphere into a giant electrical circuit. The upper reaches of the atmosphere have a positive charge, and the planet’s surface has a negative one. Even on sunny days with cloudless skies, the air carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter above the ground. In foggy or stormy conditions, that gradient might increase to tens of thousands of volts per meter. Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. And spiders can increase those forces by climbing onto twigs, leaves, or blades of grass. Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.

The whole argument can be found here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/the-electric-flight-of-spiders/564437/

Nature will never cease to amaze me. And here is a little something to commemorate the spiders’ victims:

Photographs are of spiderwebs found in the Northwest woods.

Walk About

Nature
Dec 28, 2018
2 Comments

I know I seemed all over the map this week, no discernible shared topic among the blog offerings, none of the usual weekly theme. Upon closer inspection, however, they were tied to the typical year-end deluge of thoughts about what mattered, what could have been different, and what I am grateful for.

By no means a comprehensive list, but: Music and art mattered, as did friendships and my photo gigs for diverse organizations in town. There could have been more traveling and fewer surgeries to make it a different year. I am, however, content and above all grateful for learning new things each day, still being able to read and think, with lots of time to do both. And being able to walk about in nature where everything else becomes so inconsequential.

Beyond my personal view on 2018, here is what 16 historians claim will be in future history books (spoiler alert: it ain’t good….)

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/28/what-will-history-books-say-about-2018-223561

Join me, then, on my walk that I took yesterday. So much coming and going, so much noise, the air was filled with it. None of it as pearling as Liszt’s piece, Sermon at Assisi, that I chose for today, a piece that I tried to fall asleep to when my mother played it in the room below my bedroom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20f-bYmi62E

The geese were but noisy,

and the herons had the squeakiest voice imaginable, in great contrast to their visual elegance.

Even the pintail ducks were full of songs, obviously confused about what season it is.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKU42FkOd2o

And the kingfisher was cackling, as if he was making fun of me, for my end-of-year contemplations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTFxIF5FY-Q

Here is Schumann’s Bird as Prophet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HQ9yxiDLSM

The place I chose is half way to the coast, Fernhill near Forest Grove, an old water recycling plant area that has been converted into a nature preserve, with local volunteers keeping it up, replanting it, making sure it is ecologically attractive for many of the migrating birds. A wondrous place.

Three Versions of Nature

Music, Nature
Dec 26, 2018
1 Comments

I just love it when people have clever ideas that make me laugh but also speak to a deeper issues. This was certainly the case when I came across the work of Anne Percoco, who got her inspiration to create an imaginary herbarium from floral images printed on the packaging of every day items.

Drawings of Fantastical Flora Adapted from Advertising

Percoco: “These range from abstract little leaf icons used on packaging to indicate the product is eco-friendly in some way, to leaf and tree-shaped, chemical-laden air fresheners, to fake Christmas trees, which are abundant this time of year. Once I started looking for them, I saw them everywhere.”

Why observe real nature when you can look at a fake one? Alluding to nature to sell products seems to work, never mind that it is a cleaned-up, stylized, concocted one in many cases. The art work makes us think.

In itself it’s inventive, indeed, but so are the names the artist gives her specimens – that alone must have been a hoot, the latin cat and dog included (check out the silhouettes taken from pet food bags.)

For my Philly and NYC peeps: here is where you can catch the exhibit if you’re up for a trip to Jersey City…

Parallel Botany: The Study of Imaginary Plantscontinues at Casa Colombo (380 Monmouth Street, Jersey City) through February 26, 2019.

——————————————————

I just despise it when people have clever ideas that make me cry but also speak to deeper issues. Tears of envy, I hasten to add – for want of traveling the world. SF based Photographer Beth Moon did so for 14 years to capture images of the oldest and rarest trees on earth. For me the work draws attention to what we are putting at risk with our absence of environmental protection – in an interview she seemed to be more keen on documenting what is before it decays, but who knows…https://mymodernmet.com/beth-moon-interview-ancient-trees/

The outcome is stunning work, in b&w duotone for the trees photographed during day time and in color for the same or similar trees at night. These are analog, not digital prints, extensive work with palladium added in the darkroom, requiring real skill in addition to the eye she has.

Nocturnal Photographs of the World’s Oldest Trees

Fake nature, real nature: Liszt’s imagined nature shall complete the trio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6VHPJZdSJIh

Feux Follets are the ghostlike sparks of light you see on the ground in the moors and forests of Northern Europe. Images today are from an older series of that name, where I combined my photographs of German trees with lights of sorts.

Hanukkah in Miami

Art, Nature
Dec 6, 2018
0 Comments

The Miami Art Week this year runs from December 3 -9. I won’t be there, so I’ll miss out on press releases that try to answer questions along the line of what’s the point? “Slowing down and paying attention to the art,” we are told, which makes me laugh. I guess that is a good thing. Also a good thing: I am not a gallery worker.

https://hyperallergic.com/416445/gallery-worker-glimpses-art-basel-miami-beach/

An even better thing is taking Miami in, prestigious fairs or not, when you manage to escape the crowds of hanger-on’s. I was there some years back during Hanukkah and had a blast; the city is a mecca for street photography, the graffiti impressive and the angular nature of much of the architecture augmented by the stark, glazing light.

As is typical for me, though, the best parts were the nature experiences, whether at the Fairchild Botanical Gardens, or during a day hike with a guide in the mangrove swamps.

Close encounters with the local wildlife, alligators, iguanas and all, made it into the journal titled What to tell my imaginary grand children,

and a sense of gratitude for all those incredible sights made it into the journal titled Heuer’s life rocks.

Note how much pattern there is in the landscape.

Between red tides and rising sea levels those excursions will soon be a thing of the past, so instead of “Slow down and pay attention to the art,” my advice would be: “Hurry up and pay attention to the landscape.” Photographs today are a placeholder for just that.

Below is a guide to the cornucopia of art offerings, for those who are on site.

Your Concise Guide to Miami Art Week 2018

Things to be grateful for: Nature

With Thanksgiving coming up, I will devote this week’s musings to things I am grateful for.

As so often, that puts nature in first place, particularly the nature that surrounds me where I live, a place of astounding beauty.

That is true even if – or perhaps particularly if – you can’t see it very well, since in November it is often shrouded in mist.

I now know to call it mist, since I looked up the difference in definition between mist and fog: they both are ‘Obscurity in the surface layers of the atmosphere, which is caused by a suspension of water droplets’. They differ, though, in the range of visibility: By international agreement (particularly for aviation purposes) fog is the name given to resulting visibility less than 1 km, however the term in forecasts for the public generally relates to visibility less than 180 m. Mist simply has a lower density of water droplets and you can look farther than 1000 meters.

And in case you also want to know the meaning of haze, another visual phenomenon: it is a suspension of extremely small, dry particles in the air (not water droplets) which are invisible to the naked eye, but sufficient to give the air an opalescent appearance.

All this, of course, stands in benevolent contrast to the horrors of air pollution and smog created by the fires in California. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/air-quality-california.html

From the article: The precise biological mechanics of how people develop chronic lung problems, while not fully flushed out, lie at the intersection of two seemingly disparate scientific areas, immunology and environmental study.

Immune cells that respond to foreign particles douse the particles with toxins, among other tactics, to destroy them. But an intense event like extremely poor air quality can prompt such a strong immune response that it can throw the body’s delicate network out of balance, particularly in people predisposed to asthma or allergy.A vicious cycle can begin where each time a person experiences even small, related stress — like smoke — the body overreacts, leading to constricted air flow and intensifying the risk of heart attack and stroke for some people.

Researchers say that climate change leads to this kind of ill health through wildfire, but also through prolonged pollen seasons, dust storms and other events that affect air quality.“We’re setting up a tipping point in the immune system that leads to more inflammation and disease,” said Dr. Sharon Chinthrajah, a pulmonologist and allergist at Stanford, speaking of the way climate change has put increased pressure on human defenses. “California,” she added, “is being reset to a new reality.”