Walking the Berkshires

Interview with a Blogger

I am flattered to be profiled with an interview today at a blog and environmental forum called My Greenpeace Buddies.  I was approached to share my thoughts as a blogger who writes about ecological matters, among other things, and was happy to oblige. 

Given my strong preference to focus on areas of common interest rather than positions - except in those cases where reason is clearly out of the question, such as where a certain southern African dictator is concerned - the interview goes strongly down the path of being "occasionally nettlesome" but "fairly non-partisan".  I talked about how individuals and institutions change their behavior and some of what is and is not helpful in that regard. 

I suspect this may be the only time that my right-of-center cousin Tigerhawk gets an acknowledgment in this or indeed any environmental forum.  Anything for bilateral relations, dear readers. And yes, I do know the difference between "affect" and "effect"...just not when I wrote out my responses.  Plus, I found an opportunity to quote from The Last of the Mohicans and it wasn't anything about noble savages.  Fellow English Majors can rest easy that my undergraduate degree is in no immediate danger of revocation.  Mugabe's, however, is another question.

Drop in if you like and check it out.

1780 British Sloop of War Found Intact (Except for the Zebra Mussels)

This is a great story.  HMS Ontario, a revolutionary war era ship, has has been found intact at the bottom of its namesake lake.  She went down with all hands in a fearsome gale on October 31, 1780.

The 80ft sloop of war sank with more than 120 men, women, children and prisoners on board during the American revolutionary war in October 1780. Bad weather rather than cannon fire put paid to her. As she was crossing the lake from Fort Niagara a gale swamped her decks and sent her to the bottom.

The following day some of her boats and hatch covers drifted ashore, along with a few hats. A few days later her sails were found adrift. It was a further nine months before six bodies were washed up 20 miles away.

The ship is in deep water, in such an extraordinary state of preservation that two of its windows are still in place and its masts still stand 70 feet above the deck.  It would be in even better shape were it not for the invasive zebra mussels that infest the great lakes, Lake Champlain and ever more US waterways and encrust the wreck.  Canadian author and historian Arthur Britton Smith said;

“If it wasn’t for the zebra mussels, she looks like she only sunk last week.”

And Jim Kennard, who with his partner Dan Scoville found the wreck, said;

"Eight of the 22 guns were on the deck. Some are still in place. You can't see the others because the gun ports are closed. It's hard even to see the ports because the hull has a lot of mussels on it. The most prominent parts of the ship are the quarter galleries, a sort of windowed balcony, one at each side of the stern. That was the captain's quarters."

Nasty things, those mussels.

HMS Ontario, a 22 gun brig sloop, is the oldest confirmed shipwreck ever found in the lakes, and its discovery is an incredible achievement.  It is considered a war grave and though it lies in US territorial waters somewhere between Rochester New York and Niagara, it is still British property.  And the mussels.

Hop to It

Instead of crying in your increasingly expensive beer, time to get in early on the hop revival.  People may cut back in other areas when times are tight, but they are unlikely to give up beer.  There was a time when central New York was the leading hop producing region in the country - 1879 and 1880 yields peaked at over 60 million pounds per year.  Downy mildew, aphids and Prohibition killed the crop, but new vigorous varieties and pest control strategies mean that hops could be viable in the Northeast United States once more.  And now with a worldwide hops crisis, demand could make this a very wise investment.  Some craft brewers are now growing their own hops. 

Doubtless there are processing and quality control issues to work out, but if I had 10-20 agricultural acres, I'd be planting hops (though not the invasive Japanese variety).  And if the market should suddenly become glutted, there is always cellulosic ethanol.

The Weed We Need?

I am used to thinking about invasive species in a negative light.  If the first blush of spring is dappling our woodlands, you can be sure it is not from native ephemeral wildflowers but from the sickly green of Asian honeysuckles, Japanese barberry and overwintering garlic mustard poised to explode and smother. When one of these "botanical thugs" turns out to have a potentially beneficial aspect as well, it is a good reminder that good and bad are not attributes of species but value judgments that we make based on their behavior.

Another sign of Spring in these parts is the emergence of disease bearing ticks looking for their first blood feed of the season.  I picked one up on a lovely walk in the woods last Saturday, and today have the telltale bullseye of Lyme Disease.

At the doctor's office this morning, I learned that in addition to a heavy course of Doxycycline, there is an herbal treatment for Lyme that includes Polygonum cuspidatum - Japanese knotweed.

In his book Healing Lyme, Stephen Harrod Buhner writes;

"The three main herbs [and two supplemental herbs] in the core protocol - andrographis, Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) and cat's claw (Unicaria tomentosa) [astragalus and smilax] - will significantly lower or eliminate spirochete loads in the body (including central nervous system and brain), raise immune function in ways that will specifically empower the body to respond to borrelia infection (such as raising CD57 white blood counts), and significantly alleviate the primary symptoms of Lyme disease - brain fog and confusion, lethargy, arthritic inflammation, heart problems, and skin involvement."

This example of Buhner's prose may be somewhat tortured - parenthesis, brackets and dashes, oh my - but the medicinal potential of knotweed may cause me to reevaluate my opinion of this species.  I was aware that young knotweed shoots can be used in pies as an ersatz rhubarb, but if an 8-12 month course of knotweed supplements helps with Lyme, then we've got plenty of the whole herb growing around here that I'd love to see go into capsules and out to herbalists and homeopaths where it can do some good for a change.

I Sense a Disturbance in the Forest

We've left our forest at Windrock largely to its own devices.  Our family still takes a small amount of cord wood from standing dead trees or blow down, but by and large the wind and the deer and the Hemlock woolly adelgid are the primary influences on the current condition of the woods.  When I walk through these woodlands, as I had occasion to do this past weekend, I carry with me the long view afforded by nearly four decades of personal connection, coupled with a naturalist's eye for the patterns and processes at work here.  The trees and the stones and the thick layers of duff on the forest floor have stories to tell and hold clues to the future.

Everything that grows, thrives or fades away in a  terrestrial habitat or ecosystem can be understood as the result of three powerful influences: geology, climate, and disturbance.  My grandparents' property in Wareham lies on a great smear of glacial overburden laid down during the last ice age.  There are granite erratics like the one that gives the place its name "Windrock", and poor, well drained soils that perk well and feed groundwater to the regional Plymouth-Carver Sole Source Aquifer. 

The woods run down to within sight of the bluff and the bay and tree species change as the wind and the salt air determine which ones can endure and which must remain further back in the company of their taller brethren.  Here you will find Atlantic white cedar and pitch pine and scrub oak and green brier, and in recent decades tangles of oriental bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle vine, but not the white pines that shun the salt and require a bulwark against the wind.  Here, too, are Doug fir and jack pine and even an English oak, for this is not a landscape devoid of human impact. 

While the hurricane and the ice storm and the long suppressed but still feared wildfire have great effect, the forest is neither primeval nor is the best ecological option to blithely let "nature take its course."  Nature does not work in a vacuum anymore.  The legacy of human land use alters everything.

There are stone walls running through the woods.  One of these clearly marks a property line, though the division of  land likely came after the stone fence was laid and not before.  This was open pasture in the 1800s, and sheep grazed the broom sedge that now clumps in the openings near the shore but not in the shade of the trees.  When my Grandparents acquired the property in 1947 the forest was younger, the trees lower, and the species composition different than one finds today. There were many more pitch pines back then: early successional species that require periodic fire to germinate and reduce competition from oaks and other species.  Those few that remain in the woods today have stretched to their maximum heights to find space in the canopy, and none are regenerating. The slow growing oaks - black, scarlet and white - are nowhere a significant component of the forest except in the scrub near the bluff, for they are subject to the predation of deer and are shaded out by fast growing white pine.  The hemlock stands in the forest have suffered under the invasive adelgid onslaught and most of these trees are dead or dying now.  A few sassafras, the odd birch near the barn, a clone or two of invasive locust and some wild holly may been seen, but the rest of the forest is single-aged white pine, and when it goes down in a big wind the blow down can be extensive.

There are places in the forest where there are distinctive mounds and depressions in the soil: cups and pillows that mark where giants fell.  You can tell by their orientation the direction of the wind that brought the shallow rooted trees down, and whether it was a winter nor'easter or an onshore hurricane.  White pine seedlings sprout in these canopy openings.

There are many deer in the woods, and heavy browse lines crop the rhododendrons. There are Cooper's hawks and foxes and eastern box turtles near the forest edge.  There is a vernal pool with polliwogs in spring.  There is room for 4 approval not required house lots on the road at the end of the property if we are unable to conserve it through a conservation transaction with the town and local land trust.  Currently we are hung up on the limited forest management rights we wish to retain.  Hopefully we will navigate this as we have other obstacles and have something to celebrate this summer.   

Curious Stuff to See If You've a Mind To

Seven more wonders...

The Jesse James Feather Duster of Death

The World's Largest Sundial

The Lethal Chandeliers of Ružica Church

The Underwater Lost City of Dunwich

The Malevolent Mermaid of the Buffelsjags River

The Mangrove That Ate San Diego

The Bowes Silver Swan (and Mechanical Fish)

Cabinet of Curiosities #1- PT Barnum Edition

"Quite a lotta
Roman terra cotta
Livin' lava from the flanks of Etna
Statuary
Ride a dromedary
See the Temple tumble and the Red Sea part.

McNamara's band
The fattest lady in the land
A pickled prehistoric hand
A strand of Pocahontas' hair
Crow and Sioux
Who're going to
Be showing you
Some rowing through
A model of the rapids on the Delaware...

...One iguana
Snakes and other fauna
Got no bearded lady but we're get'na
When you duck out
Take another buck out
Run around the block
And see a new show start."  Museum Song: Barnum

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Cabinet of Curiosities, the blog carnival the celebrates the stories behind the notable stuff that clutters up our lives and living spaces, and most especially those oddities of natural history, relics of bygone days,  mementos, talismans, specimens and ephemera that you and I have kept for all these years.  It's just an old jar of sand unless you know that it came from Utah Beach, so here is your opportunity to say why it matters - at the very least why it never made it into a dumpster long ago. 

The name of this carnival comes from the Curiosity Cabinets of Renaissance Europe, back when there were many wonders unknown to science whose boundaries had yet to be defined.  Aristocratic accumulations filled entire rooms with natural (and supernatural) history specimens and later formed the basis of many a prized museum collection.  Some were actual pieces of furniture with many shelves and drawers containing items both fabulous and bizarre.  These collections offered opportunities for comparative analysis across what we now would think of as many academic disciplines: ethnography, geology, natural history, archeology, botany, art history, and many others.

Of course, there is an element of P.T. Barnum here, along with serious inquiry into the nature of all things.  Submissions to Cabinet of Curiosities are not limited to those wonders we have in our own collections but the fantastic and unusual we have encountered elsewhere and that are suitable for a virtual wunderkammer.  P.T. Barnum's Museum functioned this way, as in latter years did Ripley's.  My Aunt Peggy got inspired and sent me this:

"What comes first to my mind today is the gravestone riding around in the back of our handyman's pick-up. He did some work recently for a fellow moving on from his farmhouse to a long term care facility. The farmhouse is to be rented, and our friend John couldn't help but mention to his employer that every time they stepped off the front porch they landed on someone's headstone, being used as part of the front walk." Oh God yes," was the response." We can't rent the house with that thing there. Throw it in the woods."  John decided instead to try to find out about it's rightful owner. He thinks it is a stone provided by the military. It reads as follows: 

                                                              Clarence Thomas

                                                                   Delaware

                                                              PVT  52  CO

                                                         152  Depot Brigade

                                                               World War 1

                                                       December 13 1890

                                                            March 14 1956

In John's opinion this was the stone of a black man, hence the Depot Brigade, as African Americans were not allowed into the regular army in the first world war. It is in good condition, and shows no sign of being hit by tractor or plow, as can happen around the Eastern Shore of Maryland. John's got a military buddy looking into the matter, and someone else who might look on the Net. Until he comes up with some more information, John will take care of it, keeping it near, in the back of his truck."

This is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind for this Carnival.  There have been some grand submissions, some that appropriately enough defy easy categorization, so without further preamble let us draw back the curtains and see what wonders lie within!

Apple's Tree features a remarkable assemblage of chronometers as the proprietor asks; " "What time is it?"  The point of Apple's post is that these are not timepieces in the usual sense but touchstones to other times and people and even though most of them don't work she can't bear to part with them.  She writes; "I have actually worn both of the ladies pendant's. The older, smaller one belonged to my great-grandmother, Charlotte Hollington Berry Sanders. She was always called Lottie. This watch is very special to me because I was named for her."  I had a Great Aunt Lottie myself, and know just how she feels about this sort of stuff.

Denise Olson at Moultrie Creek has a gem of a post which in true wunderkammer fashion manages tocombine elements of the fantastic and the mundane with this post about the alien signal receptor the blog administrator has constructed from a collection of antique glass; a bottle tree.  "Glass insulators originated before the Civil War with the advent of the telegraph. Something was needed to keep the wire from grounding out against the wooden poles and glass was the answer. There were all kinds of insulators developed over the years. Although there is a large community of collectors, most varieties are a dime a dozen these days - including all of mine. I still love them - the shapes and colors add interest to a displayed collection of bottles and a touch of nostalgia."  Nature and art combine to transform a "dime a dozen collection" into something marvelously strange!

National Geographic has been nothing but a cabinet of curiosities, and now that it is available on the web as well as in its signature yellow covered magazine we are treated to the sort of exotic specimens most of us do not have on our mantle pieces.  Mark Silver's Mummy Hair Piece was nominated for this carnival, and the picture at left (credited to the Hierakonpolis Expedition) is a 5,000 year old hair weave.  Mark writes; " The hair extensions were woven to the mummy’s real hair were … also her real hair. She must have grown it, cut it off, then had it woven back on for a  little hairdo height. (Big hair was really popular in 3600 B.C.) The weave woman also dyed her hair with henna for color that really lasted – we’re talking millennia!"

Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi is curiosity central, and Terry Thornton had many possibilities to blog about for this carnival, ultimately settling on Mola and Voodoo and my cat Hattie.  The pillow is not what it appears to be.  Says Terry; "My friend was told by members of his family that the image on the mola was no doubt voodoo --- that it honored black magic --- that it was probably devil worship! Their objections were so strong that my friend moved the mola from place to place and finally decided to be rid of the object causing his family so much concern --- so he brought the mola and presented it to my wife and me."

George Washington slept here, there and everywhere, and apparently there is hardly a spit of sand between New York and Maine where the Pirate Captain Kidd failed to turn a shovel.  Janice of Cow Hampshire tells us a tale from 1823 of hokum and hooey that nonetheless got the good folks in Antrim New Hampshire digging for Kidd's buried treasure around the shores of a local pond.  "This noted pirate was executed in London, May 24, 1701; and his plunder was seized, consisting of sixty-two pounds of gold, seventy-one pounds of silver; and various bags of diamonds and curiosities. But this was considered only a fraction of what he had, and he was said to have buried here and there immense treasures for future use...Some way the rumor got afloat that he had borne a part of the gold into New Hampshire, and buried it on the shores of Rye pond in Antrim! Somebody started this as a practical joke. But it was talked over, and taken up by fortune-tellers, till one and another went to hunt for the treasure."   P.T. Barnum, indeed!

There is a reputed gateway to Hell in Stull Kansas, according to Blue Skelton Productions.  Evidently not to be missed on your next cross country roadtrip.  "These days, I would not recommend sneaking into the Stull cemetery.  Without the Church, there really isn't anything that exciting to see.  Plus the Sherrif will toss you in the clink if they catch you.  They used to be pretty cool about the whole thing and would let you off with a fine and a couple days served but I'm not sure I'd risk it these days...the cemetery is located off the highway, you can't miss it."

My own contribution to this first edition of Cabinet of Curiosities is a post about this gavel, which was used by my Aunt Het the suffragist at a National Women Suffrage Day event in 1914. There are a few other items of Votes for Women memorabilia in my family archives, but this one really stands out.  87 years after the 19th Amendment became law in America, this gavel is a reminder of the effort it took to bring that about.

David Gregg at Rhode Island Natural History Survey had an epiphany when contemplating the fiendish form of the invasive water chestnut seed.  He suddenly realized afunny thing about trapa natans: a seed pod had successfully invaded a museum collection he had once encountered wired into a display of native American arrowpoints.  "Now you can just imagine the person, around 1920, probably some handyman on the Haffenreffer farm, who was charged with wiring up an appropriate museum display out of a shoebox full of arrowheads and other stuff. Using the idiom of the day he dutifully imposed the expected scientific orderliness on the points, scrapers, awls, and knives. But he was certainly stumped by the water chestnut seed he found among them. Like many, many archaeologists before and since, he punted and wired it up in the top middle of the board, where it is undoubtedly displayed as a “ritual object,” central to the otherwise comprehensible material world arrayed around it, but to outsiders fundamentally mysterious."

The Jungle Trader alerts us to the problem of counterfeit shrunken heads.  "Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and nonhuman replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear."  I shall certainly bear that in mind.  It rather calls to mind a bit of doggerel by the late, lamented Flanders and Swann: 

"We're frightfully House and Garden
At Number Seven B,
The walls are patterned with shrunken heads,
Ever so very Contemporary!"

At any rate, these are the submissions I received before the carnival deadline and I am delighted by the response.  The next Cabinet of Curiosities will be the 17th of December here at Walking the Berkshires and subsequent carnivals will appear on the third Monday of the month.  Anyone with an interest in hosting a future edition is more than welcome to contact me.  Now it's time to run around the block and see a new show start.  This way for the Egress!

Yet Another Reason to Fear the Phrag

Phragmites australis is one of the known thugs of the invasive plant world.  I have personally spent many seasons in the field combating the spread of this species in sensitive habitats and know it to be a fearsome adversary.  The introduced strain of this giant reed has out-competed native Phragmites in eastern North America, altered species composition and wetlands hydrology, and created virtual monocultures in the habitats it infests.  It has all the hallmarks that make a plant species an effective invader - vegetative propagation as well as by wind dispersed seeds, thrives in disturbed areas, able to leap spatial gaps - and now we learn that it has another arrow in its bristling quiver.

Phragmites uses chemical warfare against its neighbors (GWB, take note).

"Harsh Bais, a plant biologist at the University of Delaware, and his colleagues grew native and invasive forms of Phragmites in aquatic labs, from which they collected substances secreted by the plants. They found both invasive and native Phragmites produced so-called gallic acid, a chemical humans use to tan leather. But the invasive plant released the acid from its roots at much higher concentrations than did natives.

Once exuded into the surrounding environment, the toxin targets a structural protein called tubulin found in the roots of neighboring plants. The protein keeps plant roots intact and helps them grow straight in the soil.

Within 10 minutes of exposure to the toxin in the lab, the tubulin of a marsh plant started to disintegrate. In 20 minutes, the structural material was gone.

'When the roots collapse from the acid, the plant loses its integrity and dies,” Bais said. “It's like having a building with no foundation—it's on its way to self-destruction.'

The study is detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of Chemical Ecology."

CWCID: LifeScience

Real Estate Gets Real

Tired of subdivisions named after former habitats now buried beneath new impervious surfaces?  Do housing developments named "Farmstead Hollow" or "Whispering Pines" stick in your craw?  Thank goodness for truth in advertising.  The new active adult residential development that is going up on ten acres near the Blackberry River in my town certainly stresses the attractions of the Berkshires to our north - though not actually in our working class community - but it also named one of its three housing types for one of the dominant vegetative features of this landscape that is bound to persist even as we continue to bulldoze and build.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce "The Barberry", a housing style named for one of the most pernicious invasive shrubs to bedevil this region and often associated with unimaginative residential and commercial landscaping?  Aptly and honestly named, I look forward to this trend continuing in the future.  Anyone for "Bittersweet Haven" or Euonymus Estates? 

Various and Sundry Carnival Bells and Whistles

I hosted the 56th History Carnival at the beginning of the month here at Walking the Berkshires.   

The next day the weekly Carnival of the Insanities featured my modest little post about an Icelandic museum devoted to male mammalian genitalia.  That post, btw, caused a perfect storm of linkage for this blog, nearly tripling daily readership on the same day that I hosted the History Carnival.  Note to muse: more salacious stuff.

The Carnival of Genealogy #31 was at GeneaBlogie and all about family myths, false paths, and the joys of unraveling same.

September 10th saw the monthly edition of the Outdoor Odyssey Blog Carnival, where you can learn how to make your own hammock, while today I am greatly looking forward to sinking my teeth into the 88th edition of Tangled Bank hosted at Behavioral Ecology Blog.