Walking the Berkshires

Last Week in the LJ

I meditated on the fringed gentian in last week's Nature Notes article in the Lakeville Journal, readable here

with free registration.

...Fall blooming plants fill a fascinating evolutionary niche. They eschew competing for pollinators throughout most of the growing season, serving as welcome nectar sources for migrating butterflies and other species when other wildflowers have gone to seed.   A number of asters, including some of the showiest, also bloom in late summer and into the fall, as do the various goldenrods.

The gentian, though, standing singly or in isolated patches, is nearer to earth than the swaying asters and nodding goldenrod. Poets note its lonely solitude, a lovely sentinel at the ragged end of summer. Victorians invested great meaning in flowers, with the gentian a symbol of enduring hope in the face of certain mortality...

Last Week's Piece in the LJ

My most recent "Nature Notes" piece in the Lakeville Journal can be read here with free registration.

"...Proximity to major metropolitan centers in New York, and to a lesser degree Hartford, has made our land valuable as residential real estate. A renewed interest in locally produced food and concern about the loss of our remaining farmland to nonagricultural uses runs up against the hard fact that the land is worth more in a developed state than as farmland, and is too expensive for new farmers to obtain.  

Meanwhile, Berkshire County is losing population. Connecticut is losing young people at one of the highest rates in the nation.

We have saved many significant lands from development but are unable to maintain them in a condition that will ensure that the very qualities that made them special will persist over time.  Without the resources to care for and steward our fields and forests, they are vulnerable to fresh degradation from invasive species and to loss of ecological productivity..."

In other news, I wrote a magazine story for the latest issue of Massachusetts Main Streets and Back Roads, a free publication and not yet readable on-line, about The Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire.  Big as a millstone and a month in transit from the Berkshires to Thomas Jefferson's innaugeral.  I'll link to it once it makes it to the electronic media stream. 

Today (and 2 weeks ago) in the LJ

Today's Lakeville Journal article, readable at the link with free registration, was all about bioluminescence.  Or faeries and witch lights, take your pick.  I managed to work a bit of Coleridge and Rachael Carson in there, too, and the inspiration, as it always is at this time of year, was the first night o fthe fireflies:

"...Last night at dusk, out where grasses sway in the meadow beyond the garden gate and a wild apple reaches its gnarled limbs to touch the western stars, they all took wing and began their meandering flight. From under leaf and blade, first one, then swarms of winking lights called and responded among the grasses:  “Here I am, come dance with me!” Enthralled, my children and I stood by the garden gate and watched the wisp lights in the vapors swirl and eddy from tassels to treetops..."

Two weeks ago, my piece in the journal was about those spring glories of the swamp: yellow ladyslippers and marsh marigolds.  The season for both has passed, now, but you can read about them here.

Tuning up the Spring Symphony: This Week's Lakeville Journal Article

I has music in mind when I wrote this week's Nature Notes article for the Lakeville Journal, readable here with free registration.

"... What grace notes are lost if they leave us? Do our woodlands remember the chestnut snows of summer that crowned their canopies with creamy white flowers? Is the drumming ground of the extinct heath hen, or the river without Atlantic salmon, diminished by their absence? Or is this symphony played on a scale far beyond our span of years?  With no one left to hear the sound, to whom will it matter when a tree falls in some future forest?"

In the News

A alternate version reprise of my recent Quickenings post appears this week in the Lakeville Journal, readable here with free registration. The on-line version omits the opening Wind in the Willows quote that appears in the print article:

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing..."

Extra, Extra

My latest article in the Lakeville Journal appeared in the April 2nd edition; readable here with free on-line registration:

"...My friend Mark Brown, an avid angler, tells me that we really have no native brookies left in Connecticut, as the indigenous strain has been thoroughly diluted by stocked fish. Not only that, but the widespread clearing of the landscape in the 19th century, accompanied by heavy fishing and the introduction of non-native trout species, further impacted genetic diversity of brook trout thought most of its range.  On opening day in 1877, one fisherman in Salisbury reportedly caught 150 brook trout in Moore Brook: none of them larger than half a pound.

By the early 20th century, a conservation movement spearheaded by dedicated sportsmen was hard at work in an effort to restore some of America’s vanishing wildlife — including the now ubiquitous white tailed deer — and to introduce other game species that they hoped would naturalize. Theodore Roosevelt is the one who is best remembered, but another national conservation leader was Connecticut’s Sen. Frederick C. Walcott, who along with Starling W. Childs established the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk and Falls Village.

Sen. Walcott was a close friend and ally of Herbert Hoover, who deserves to be remembered as one of our great fishing presidents as well as the fellow who saw the bottom drop out of the market on his watch. In May 1940, the two men went angling at George Quinion’s fishing camp on Schenob Brook, just across the state line in Massachusetts, where they released several trout to help establish the fishery.  Quinion noted approvingly that President Hoover was careful to handle the fish with wet hands to preserve their protective coating, and used a barbless hook for his flies... "

The paper also ran one of my salamander pictures, which doubles the exhorbitant rate my services now command from a Hamilton to a Jackson.  

 

 

Today's Lakeville Journal Article

My biwekly article in the Lakville Journal concerns migrating salamanders and vernal pools, and can be read here with free registration:

...On warm rainy nights in early spring, there are certain roads in our area that are littered with hopping, skittering and — regrettably — squashed amphibians.  Volunteers sometimes monitor heavily traveled crossings during the migration and assist the frogs and salamanders on their journey to the opposite side of the road. My children and I look forward to being out one evening very soon when The Big Night arrives, “saving Spotty” and its many relations.

Recent LJ Pieces, and a Comment

The latest Lakeville Journal Piece, readable here with free registration, concerns the onset of Maple Season in our neck of the woods:

" This year, in the final days of February with daylight temperatures reaching the mid-40s, I spotted sap weeping from the drill holes of a woodpecker. I retrieved the buckets from winter storage and scrubbed them to a galvanized shine.  The children and I searched the sunny side of the trunk for another hand-span between faded scars to place the spiles, setting the drill at an upward angle so the sap would flow freely.  Each percussive drop in the pail obeys a particular rhythm — one spile runs faster, one slow and steady — which to me is a soft and comforting music. Given time and the right conditions, nature’s slow accumulations will produce a gallon of sap, or an inch of soil."

Two weeks ago, this piece ran on New England's  weather:

"Today, as I write, there is bright, cloudless, late-afternoon sunshine outside my window. There are no high-riding mare’s tails, no mackerel skies to net the setting sun, but there is a low seam of clouds lurking at the horizon west of the mountains. It could be a cold night ahead without a blanket of clouds, or it could snow before morning."

As an editorial aside, I find that I've been saving up my local natural history blogging for these bi-weekly columns.  I am also writing more outside the blog, both newspaper and magazine articles and my slow but steady efforts at an historical novel based on a counterfactual premise that Washington was captured at Trenton.  There are chapters in every life, and so, too, with this blog, which has evolved considerably from its humble origins back in the fall of 2005.  I no longer feel compelled to compose a daily post, though I have not lost interest in Walking the Berkshires or this medium.  Thanks for sticking with me as we see what evolves.

Night Stalker: The Latest Lakeville Journal Article

My latest article in the Lakeville Journal, readable here with free subscription, is about Great horned owls.  Fair use extract:

"The dead of winter is the season of love, if you happen to be a great horned owl.  In late January, when it would seem to our weary eyes that there could be neither sign nor expectation of spring, solitary owls are seeking each other. In the hours after dark and again before dawn, their deep-throated hoots echo far and wide, for their territories are large and they hunt alone. Great horned owls reunite only to breed, and their dark music and preening display have a terrible beauty. These birds are the dragons of their kind."

Today's Lakeville Journal Article

I managed to wander quite far afield in this week's Nature Notes article in The Lakeville Journal,  which is readable on-line with free subscription.  Only the bookends of the piece are rooted in the local enviroment, since I found it difficult in the dead of winter to find something new and fresh to say about life outdoors.  As for the rest, I went back to my days in Africa and what I learned about tracking from a sleeping elephant.

Here are the bookends: 

"‘I track humans,” said the stranger sitting next to me, by way of introduction. As a conversation starter it made quite an impression. He was the sort of character who could fairly be described as crusty, and I suspected I might end up as captive audience to his Ancient Mariner. He went on to volunteer that he was an expert tracker whose services had been of particular value to law enforcement, and who now was responsible for preventing poaching on a large piece of private land in the Berkshires.

“You know how I catch ’em?” he asked, raising a craggy eyebrow with the confidence of one in possession of secret knowledge. “I find their tracks in deer season and then I go to the nearest bar.  Anyone sitting on a stool is showing me his boots. I just compare what I see to what I saw...”

"...The last elephants to roam the valleys of the Litchfield Hills passed away at the end of the Pleistocene age.  But one of the old family names of our region, the Spurrs, comes from the Dutch 'spoor', meaning the trail left by a person or animal. As a follower of spoor, I limit myself to following the tracks of small animals in the snow, the one time when our poor blinkered senses discern what other creatures know in every season."

For the part in the middle, go here.