How Lazy Are We?

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to us, as a people, in this country. How lazy have we really become?

I've started volunteering on a gardening help line here in Wichita. Last Tuesday we got a call from a woman who wanted to know what to spray on her garden to kill the henbit that was growing among her iris plants. We informed her that

1) there wasn't a spray to kill the henbit that wouldn't also harm her iris plants, since both are broad-leaved plants;

2) the henbit is going to die and disappear soon, so it's really not necessary to do anything; and

3) if not doing anything wasn't an acceptable option for her, henbit is very easy to pull. So in the final analysis, we recommended that she simply weed it out.

She got rather huffy and said that she had way too much henbit to actually pull it out. Then she hung up, obviously unsatisfied with our answer.

Her attitude is far too common these days. Somehow, actually leaning over or kneeling down and (gasp!) pulling out weeds by hand seems to be seen as absolutely beneath any "normal" person's dignity. A triumph on the part of the chemical industry, I'm afraid.

It saddens me. First of all, this attitude leads to the use of ludicrous amounts of herbicide. I've consistently seen reports that say homeowners use many times more herbicide per acre than do farmers.

Secondly, reaching automatically for the spray bottle separates a homeowner from his or her yard. I find pulling weeds to be a relaxing and enjoyable part of yard maintenance...at least as long as I keep mulch on my beds to help control the weed population!

As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite gardening rituals is to grab a glass/bottle/can of my favorite beverage at the end of the day and stroll through the yard. As I stroll, I check on what's newly emerged, what's newly blooming, what's showing stress of any sort...and I keep my eyes peeled for weeds. If I get to them early on and pull them every day, as soon as I see them, the number of weeds never builds up too high and I avoid having them set seed. ("One year of seed leads to seven years of weed!") This walkabout doesn't have to take very long...but I often prolong it, just because it's so pleasurable.

My daily walkabout also keeps me aware of what's going on in the garden, usually before anything reaches crisis level. I notice pests and predators and their changing populations, visiting critters (or their tracks), plants that are doing too well or not well at all, and all sorts of other information. All of this keeps me much more in tune with my garden than I would be if I only acted when I noticed a problem from inside the house or from on the lawnmower once a week.

I can just hear the thought going through many readers' minds about now: "That's fine for you, but I'm much too busy to take time to walk through my garden daily."

Well, by the time you look over your crisis problem (which you could have averted with a quick intervention 2 weeks ago), figure out what you need to do, go to the store to buy the appropriate spray, come home and use it, then wait for whatever results you might get, I can almost guarantee that you've spent a great deal of time...and money. A great deal more time and money than you would have spent doing daily walkabouts with small interventions. Furthermore, you are not remotely relaxed about the situation. Your yard/garden has become a burden, rather than a stress relief, to you.

So now, before the season (and the weeds) gets too far advanced, give the daily walkabout a try. Grab a beer, a glass of wine, or a big iced tea and meander tonight. It gets addicting, in a wonderfully relaxing sort of way.

Snakes Alive

On one of my daily walkabouts, about a week ago (April 6), Becker started nosing around a clump of dead stalks down near the swampy area. He was pretty intense, but then jumped back suddenly.

My curiosity caught, I told him to "leave it" and hurried over to see what his excitement was all about. At first what I saw looked like a very long common garter snake, knotted up oddly. As I looked a little more carefully, I realized that it was a cluster of garter snakes, probably just emerging from their winter den.

They were relatively cold, so they stayed quite still as long as I stayed several feet away. Looking carefully, I counted at least 7 of them, of varying sizes, and all within about a square yard. In the photo to the left, there are actually 2 garter snakes. The one on the left is pretty obvious, but if you look closely, you can see the body of another one behind him. Follow that body to the right, and you can make out the second head, partially hidden behind an out-of-focus, dead plant stalk.

The photo to the right is yet a third garter snake from the cluster - nothing special, other than I thought the picture turned out reasonably well!

After taking all the various permutations of photos that I could think of without moving about too much (and spooking the snakes), I moved on to let them continue their lives without further upset. I haven't seen any of them since...but I still check that clump of dead stalks daily!

A Flaming Success!!!

The day following my last blog entries (in other words, Wednesday, April 2), we decided to try again to burn the back 5 acres. This time we had the expert help and guidance of Brad Guhr from Dyck Arboretum in Hesston...

and a little more wind...

and a lot less moisture in the air.

This trio of changed circumstances was evidently the key. In about the same amount of time that it took us to burn a tiny corner of the pasture on the prior Saturday, we were able to burn the entire 5 acres. And despite a few anxiety-inducing moments when I watched Prairiewolf, as keeper of the fire, get a little too cavalier about the location of the drip torch in relationship to his pant legs for my taste, the burn went off safely and with remarkably little adrenaline involved.

Since the wind was from almost exactly the same direction as on the prior weekend, we were able to start the backfire in the same location as before, building on what we'd already accomplished. It was almost immediately obvious that this fire was going to be quite different from our earlier attempt!

We took it slow and actually ended up burning much of the field as a backfire. Given the long, narrow shape of the plot, that seemed the safest alternative. The photo above is of the backfire as it engulfed, then passed, a red cedar.

Once we were absolutely sure that the flames weren't going to be able to jump our firebreak into the taller brome grass behind our neighbor's house, Prairiewolf started to set small headfires that travelled quickly to meet the slowly approaching line of backfire. Here in the headfire photo, note how the flames are stretching to meet the dry grass, while in the backfire photo above, they are being blown back over the already burned land through which they've just travelled.

The image of the back pasture as a smoking wasteland didn't last very long. Almost all of the smoldering ashes had already gone out by the time we posed the picture of the successful, but smoky, fire crew (Prairiewolf's father, Prairiewolf, and Brad).

Immediately after the burn, I wondered what would happen to the cedars, since cedar control was one of many reasons we chose to do a burn this year. The cedars generally hadn't flamed up during the fire, as I'd both expected and hoped they would, and many were still quite green. However, Brad assured us that most would, indeed, turn brown and die during the post-burn weeks, and I'm definitely beginning to see that happen now.

I've been walking through the burned area daily, as part of my normal "walkabout". In just 10 days the black has faded to mostly brown with stubs of grass shoots poking up all around. The weather has been cool and rainy, so not much has greened up yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that once the sun appears again, new shoots will spring up rapidly. Certainly the mowed paths and firebreaks are much greener now than they were 10 days ago.

In observing the burned area, it's hard to miss the rodent runs all over it. They look like miniature paths, and they definitely bring out the child in me. I have an almost irresistible urge to grab a few Hot Wheels, fall down on my hands and knees, and explore the newly exposed "road" system the rodents have been using. As shown in the photo, sometimes the rodent runs are even right next to the mowed path, yet the human walkers had no idea their route was being paralleled by a different species' busy transportation system until the fire revealed their secret.

Each day as I walk around, my eyes are always peeled for casualties of the burn. The later the burn, the more issue there can be with animals being up out of hibernation and caught by the flames. So far the tally hasn't been too bad: I've found the baked remains of 2 lined snakes (which really do bother me) and 1 mouse of some sort.

On the other side of life, there have been large flocks of cowbirds and other blackbirds, as well as smaller flocks of robins, and pairs of killdeer, eastern meadowlarks, and flickers combing through the ashes looking for tidbits to consume. Since all of this birdlife has been coming back daily ever since the burn, I have to assume they are being successful in their searching.

It's going to be fascinating to watch how the burned area recovers. I'm hoping that there will be less weedy annual grass material and many more prairie grasses and forbs, but of course that all depends on how thoroughly overgrazed the land has been. In any event, it's now up to "Mother Nature" to work her magic, but I'm going to do my best to watch and record as she does.

Let the Photos (Re)Begin

Well, I finally took the time to figure out what I was doing, more or less, with the photos from my new camera, so I've started to post a few.

Obviously the last post about the attempted burn contained a couple, but I've also gone back and added photos to 2 prior posts:

1) the post about the goatweed leafwing sheltering deep in the grass (http://gaiagarden.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-do-butterflies-do-when.html)

and
2) the post about the wheel bug egg masses (http://gaiagarden.blogspot.com/2008/03/egg-mass-day.html).

As I find time, I'll try to add more photos that might clarify some of my posts from the last 8 months or so. I guess it will make it easier to figure out which I've illustrated if I list them at the time I make the change, so I'll try to remember to add brief posts to that effect.

Let me know what you think.

Well, We Tried....

Not unexpectedly, given how overgrazed it was when we moved in, the back 5 acre pasture needs to be burned. Burning will, at least theoretically, decrease the seed load of undesireable annuals and change them into a nice little burst of fertilizer for the plants that are left.

With pastures on 3 sides of our little plot, first Prairiewolf mowed a 20' wide firebreak on all 4 sides to give us a safety margin. (This photo shows him beginning to mow the firebreak as the smoke from another fire fills the air to the west.) We got a fire permit from our local fire station, then we started religiously watching the upcoming weather forecasts. The wind has to be between 5 and 15 mph, and we'd prefer to have it out of the east, since that would push the fire towards the wheat field on the west, with much less chance that it would accidentally get out of control. Last but certainly not least, without slave labor (i.e. children) at home to help, we have to round up bodies ahead of time to help us keep the fire under control.

All systems looked like they'd be "go" last Saturday morning. We cajoled Prairiewolf's father, cousin, and brother into getting up early to help us, and we set out the water buckets and rounded up the rakes and shovels the night before.

On Saturday, everyone miraculously showed up on time. The winds were behaving just as forecast. We had coffee and muffins to fuel us, then tramped out back to see what we could do.

It wasn't raining, but it was cloudy and there was a mist in the air. Since it hadn't rained for 2 weeks, we thought we'd be okay despite the mist. After all, it wasn't actually raining. We started the backfire and tried to spread it along the edge of the firebreak. It would burn a few feet, then flicker out, despite piles of dead grass raked over from the firebreak mowing. For over an hour we nursed the backfire along, managing to get black earth almost 30' deep at one point, but nothing really carried. (Here is the remnant of our backfire...after the fire had totally gone out.)

So, having little success working against the wind, we decided to switch gears and set the headfire. Surely with the wind, which now seemed to be about 8-10 mph, the flames would become strong enough in the dead grass to move across the pasture reasonably well. By this time, we were pretty sure that too strong a fire wasn't going to be our problem!

However, even moving with the wind, the flames were no match (no pun intended) for the mist, which had moistened the grass just enough to make it resist the fire. Our grand "headfire" sputtered out within 10 feet.

My final photo here is of the valient burn crew, after we'd finally decided that the weather had outsmarted all of our grand plans for the day, posed in front of the blackened remnants of our "grand headfire".

We'll try again as soon as the weather, personal schedules, and extra personpower becomes available. Hopefully, we'll have better luck next time.

Walkabout Woodpecker Music

Lately I've been going on "walkabouts" with Becker, our German shepherd, each morning. I take my binoculars to watch for migrating birds; he utilizes his built-in odor detection system to hunt for cotton rats and other fascinating fauna.

As I walked by the draw two mornings ago, I heard a woodpecker drumming, but couldn't localize it at first. The drumming made me think it was a big one, though. It was very loud and resonant.

Walking to the other side of the draw, I found my musician - a female downy woodpecker, the smallest of the local woodpecker species! For an all-too-brief time she performed for me. The first time I heard her, the drumming had been particularly low and resonant. As I watched further, I noticed that she was drumming on the very tips of the stubs of dead branches in a large, old cottonwood skeleton. She'd drum on the tip of one stub, producing one tone, then fly to another stub and try it out, producing a different resonance and tone.

As the season goes on, will she pick one favorite, or continue to create an arrangement of tones?

At one point she attracted a flicker, who flew in to see what this interloper was doing. Obviously the downy decided that it was the flicker, at least twice her size, who was the interloper, because it wasn't the downy that got chased away!

Each day I notice something just a little bit different as I walk. Rarely are the changes significant: a new bird showing up here, or a few new leaves unfurling there. An insect egg mass under a branch here, an overwintering grasshopper moving stiffly through the grass there. But as I watch, I'm getting to know our little piece of the Earth a little better each day...and I love what I'm learning.

Black Clouds Descend

The spring influx of blackbirds has occurred at my feeders. This is the time of year when I always get discouraged about bird feeding, watching hordes of dark bodies descending on my yard and pushing the other birds out. The mixed flocks of red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, and common grackles seem to increase in number daily now. Yesterday I counted over 100 grackles at one time, and about 25 red-winged blackbirds. I've counted 22 cowbirds at once, too, although it's entirely probable there have been more. (I only count those on the ground or in the nearby bushes, not the flocks waiting in the treetops to join the feeding frenzy.)

It's the cowbirds that I particularly resent supporting. I know they were a normal part of the Plains' avifauna historically, but I also know how disruptive their populations have become to warblers and many other songbirds as human-wrought habitat changes have increased both their range and their sheer numbers. Of course, those human-wrought habitat changes have unfortunately also simultaneously decreased habitat for many of the other bird species that the cowbirds parasitize, compounding the population pressure the cowbirds exert.

As I watch the swirls of dark birds move in and out of my yard, I'm also uncomfortably aware of their metaphorical use in literature as harbingers of unpleasantness or even evil. I find that very ironic, given that it's human changes to the environment that are behind their unbalanced increase in numbers these days. Have fiction authors tapped into an unexplainable truth of nature: that large, unbalanced increases in the number of crows, jays and blackbirds signal coming distress for humans themselves?

Philosophical musings like this double my discomfort at hosting the black hordes, while my more rational self laughs and reminds me that these birds are migratory in spring and, with the exception of the cowbirds, territorial during nesting. Therefore this "problem" should be self-limiting.

But will my rational self or my emotional self win out in the when-to-quit-bird-feeding-for-the-season debate? Only time will tell....

"For Cynthia" is Beginning to Brighten the Landscape

Each day brings some new indication of spring. Today's change: the tightly furled yellow buds of the forsythia have begun to open. It's always a lift to see the bright sunshine of the forsythia blossoms against the cool clear blue sky of spring. (The photo here was actually taken last year. So far the only forsythia blooms open on our bushes are onesies and twosies about 2' off the ground.)

Just last year I learned that this spring reliable can also serve as a reminder/trigger: it's time to apply corn gluten to the lawn for summer weed control.

I like the idea of using natural signals to time particular garden tasks. It makes biological sense to me.... Truthfully, it also seems a little poetic. And when we're applying a substance that's a fertilizer to already established plants, rather than a poison to almost everything it touches (like so many petrochemical substances that get used by many gardeners), it seems truly life enhancing.

So, folks, let's get out there and get those spreaders spurting. Here's to the golden sunshine of spring!

A Beautiful Start to the Day

It's not even 8:15 yet this morning, and already I want to share a few gifts that I've received today....

Prairiewolf woke me up early to see the moon - full and shining silvery on the undersides of a geometric progression of linear clouds that alternated with the black of the open sky, growing larger and brighter and fluffier as they got closer towards the center of the sky.

It was still fairly dark when I stepped outside to get the paper. A robin was loudly and melodically greeting the coming day. On the way back towards the house, I stopped at the car to get birdseed out of the trunk so that I could load the feeders for the early morning crew. As I hoisted the second set of bags, I looked up at some movement and saw a medium sized canine trotting swiftly along the cedar hedge, about 75' away from me, going from west to east. My first thought was to stop Becker, so I called out his name, then realized immediately that he was standing right beside me. At that moment I realized that the trotting canine was a coyote, totally intent on reaching its destination. By the time I'd made the connection, it was gone, but it left behind a little frisson of wild in the air.

Then, as I filled the birdfeeders, I noticed the moon again, setting in the west. The silvery color was gone; now it glowed bright, fresh orange against the deep lavender of the clouds.

And as I took our dear, old, blind Shiner out front for her morning potty break, the sun was finally coming up. First the sky glowed bright peachy pink, silhouetting a big old cottonwood behind our neighbor's home. While I stood watching, the disk of the sun itself came up above the horizon, burning flaming orange against the peach and lavender sky, as if the moon from the western sky had transitted around behind the earth so fast that it caught fire as it came above the horizon again.

The simple pleasures of life in the country....

Goatweed Leafwing

Okay, so here's the scoop on that butterfly I saw hiding from the wind in the dead grass....

It was a male goatweed leafwing (Anaea andria), fall form. The male and female of this species look a little different - the male's wings tend to be "plainer", i.e. with fewer spots, bars, etc., but brighter than the female's wings. Both are basically a shade of brownish-orange, with the fall form of the male being a particularly rich, velvety looking rusty orange with brownish edging.

The underside of the wings of both sexes looks remarkably like a tannish, dry leaf. The butterfly generally rests with its wings folded, so it can be hard to see the brightly colored upper wing surfaces.

The eggs are laid singly on the underside of the leaves of Croton species. Here in Kansas, it would appear that there are 3 larval plants: Woolly croton or hogwort (Croton capitatus), Texas croton (Croton texensis), and Prairie tea (Croton monanthogynus). When the caterpillar is little, it rests on the midrib of the leaf it is eating for camoflage. As the caterpillar gets larger, it first folds, then wraps a leaf around itself to remain hidden.

The adults feed on rotting fruit, sap, bird droppings, and dung.

This species overwinters in its adult form. They have from 2-4 generations/year, depending on how far north they are. (Goatweed leafwings are found as far north as South Dakota and southern Michigan, and as far south as central Florida, southern Texas, and northern Mexico.)

A last interesting note: One site mentions that the adults play dead when handled. Another site talks about how the young caterpillars attach fecal pellets to their backs and the midrib of the leaf they are eating, probably to keep ants and other predators at bay. These behaviors, along with their camoflage coloration and behavior as larvae and adults, makes this butterfly species a good example of several types of predator evasion.

What Do Butterflies Do When...?

I was out working in the front yard this afternoon when I noticed a bright orange butterfly flittering low above the tallgrass. As I watched, he landed in the grass, so I grabbed my binoculars and went to chase him down.

According to Weather Underground, the wind was blowing about 14 mph with gusts up to 32 mph, so I wasn't surprised that the butterfly was choosing to ground itself for a while. I just wanted to see what species was flying so early in the spring, because I didn't recognize it from a distance.

It took me a while to find the butterfly with my binoculars, as it is a species whose underwings are patterned a beautiful tan/brown that closely mimics dead leaves. Patience paid off, though, and I was able to see the upper wing surface pattern - a male goatweed leafwing, Anaea andria.

As I sat and watched it for a bit, it briefly flew again, then landed and started walking deeper into the detritus of the dead grasses and leaves. I wasn't sure what it was doing at first, but as I watched for a while longer, it became obvious that it was finding a sheltered spot to wedge itself where it would remain out of the wind and safe (hopefully) from predators. Even knowing it was there, it was hard to see it if I took my eyes away for even a moment. If you look at the center of the photo here, you can make out the butterfly. Only the tan undersides of the wings are showing.

I went back to the house and got my camera, capturing a couple pictures, but it's so well camoflaged and at such an odd angle from the camera (due to the wedged position that it had assumed), that it's hard to see. However, here is a closeup from the picture above to help pinpoint the butterfly exactly.

It was the first time I've ever actually watched as a butterfly took shelter from the wind. Somehow I'm surprised that he chose a spot right on the ground. I wonder where he sheltered to ride out the winter? Was it someplace similar?

Their Voices Gave Them Away

Just a brief post to say that, after listening to the recordings on the Kansas Anuran Monitoring Program (http://www.naherpetology.org/kamp/default.asp?page=taxa), I am quite sure that we have boreal chorus frogs (Pseudacris maculata) singing in the draw. They were particularly vocal last night - a bright moon, warm air...ah, they were in the mood for love!

I have also heard the simpler call of the spotted chorus frog (Pseudacris clarkii) during the afternoon earlier this week when the temperatures were a little cooler. They could well be singing along with the boreals in the evening, and my ear would probably not be trained enough to separate the two songs. (Thank goodness I'm usually able to learn visually - I'd be a basket case if I had to rely on my auditory learning skills!)

"Magic!": Four New Big Ones

I am really excited. A couple weeks ago, Prairiewolf and I went to the nearby Brady Nursery, known for their locally grown trees, and we splurged, picking out 4 big, balled & burlapped trees to purchase for our yard. They came yesterday!!!

The guys who brought them out and planted them were very efficient and professional, yet took the time and effort to check with me as they put each tree in its hole to make sure that it was oriented the way I wanted it to be. I am tickled pink with how each one looks.

By the front door we now have a 3 trunked eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) to make our entryway a little less mundane. It will also serve to soften the front of the house and give us a little privacy at the front door from the house across the road.

Speaking of which, there is now a Shumard oak (Quercus shumardii) in the middle of the yard, perfectly placed to add yet another layer of privacy between us and the across-the-road neighbor when the leaves are out.

In the back yard, there is a multi-trunked Oklahoma redbud (Cercis canadensis ssp. texensis 'Oklahoma') in the northwest corner of the courtyard, which the birds took to almost immediately. Suddenly the courtyard is beginning to have a little interest in it besides the bird feeders. It makes me get antsy to start putting in the flowerbeds that I'm planning for back there.

Lastly, there is a tall, slim bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) to the north side of the parking area in front of the back garage, which will hopefully shade that utility area and give it a little grace and grandeur.

I can't believe how much these 4 fairly young trees add to the excitement of the yard, as far as I'm concerned. Not only are they 4 new, but native, species/varieties, two of them are also multi-trunked specimens, which I think adds an important change of pace to the "single-trunk-green-meatball-single-trunk-green-meatball" theme we sort of had going here.

Now, hopefully, all of them will settle in readily and add their distinctive personalities to the yard for years to come.

Missing

Our ancient companion has gone missing.

Yesterday morning when I got up and went out to get the paper, I noticed that our old English setter, Lefty, wasn't in his dog house. For some reason this made me nervous, although he usually goes on patrol around the house and yard at this time of day.



I walked around the yard and couldn't find him. So I went inside, rousted Prairiewolf out of bed, and we both started looking for him in earnest.



Lefty turns 16 next month. (This photo is from 4 years ago.) He's blind with cataracts, totally deaf, can hardly walk and he's been acting as if he's in heart failure. But on his good days, he still gambols like a puppy and it's a rare day that he doesn't want all the petting he can finagle.



Given his physical condition, our first thought was that he'd gone off somewhere to die. However, since he can't walk or see well, we figured that we'd be able to find him nearby. We walked all over our property, checked the neighbors', drove the roads slowly with binoculars, but we couldn't find him.



We walked our property again, drove the roads again, then printed up a few flyers and left them on the doors of the neighbors who weren't home.



By mid-afternoon, I'd had a terrible thought: what if he'd been taken as bait for dog fights? Prairiewolf scoffed at the idea, but once it crossed my mind, I couldn't get rid of it. It made a sad situation even worse.



This morning arrived, and still no Lefty. Prairiewolf, however, discovered obvious signs that we'd been visited by other canines during the night - fresh "markings" around Strider's kennel. Now the most logical theory - and one that makes me feel infinitely better, for some reason - is that Lefty followed some roving dogs, possibly including a female in heat. Now, due to his failing senses and physical incapacities, he's lost.



We expanded the number of flyers we put out this morning, and continued to drive around looking for him.



When we got home, we'd gotten a call from a neighbor up the road that seems to verify the "lost" theory. The neighbor said he saw a muddy white dog hobbling around yesterday, ironically only about 1/4 mile away from our house. Knowing this gives us both hope and frustration: he was obviously still alive and nearby yesterday but how frustrating to have him so close, yet be unable to find him.

Prairiewolf is out walking the creek and pasture again. I'll be joining him shortly. Hopefully, one way or another, we can bring our old boy home again. The yard feels empty without him.

Egg Mass Day

Funny how sometimes serendipity places the same thing in my way over and over again, in close succession. Today it was that way with egg masses.

First, as I was pruning out some eye-pokers on the new trail that Prairiewolf mowed for us in the draw, I found an egg mass glued on the underside of a branch. The entire mass was about 1/2" in diameter and consisted of about 100 small eggs, each almost 1/4" tall, arranged in a honeycomb pattern. The eggs were columnar in shape, black bodied, with a cream colored, round top.

As I was finishing today's pruning, this time working on the honeylocusts along the driveway, I came across 2 more of the same sort of egg mass. You can see one of those egg masses in the center of the photo to the left. A closeup of the egg mass is below.

Finding this many egg masses of the same kind made me suspicious, so I decided to do a google search when I got a chance. THAT many eggs makes me nervous about a pest species. Tent caterpillars sprang to mind.

Before I had a chance to check out the internet, however, I was moving a pile of small cedars that I had cut out of the back pasture earlier today. I noticed that 2 of them had preying mantis egg cases glued to the underside of a branch. Needless to say, I put those 2 cedars aside so that I can salvage the egg cases before we burn the remains of the cedars.

Finally this evening I had time to search for the identity of my mystery eggs. Tent caterpillar egg masses didn't match at all. The only other insect I could remember seeing on the honeylocusts were wheel bugs, so I looked up their eggs. Eureka!!! That is indeed what they are.

Which is wonderful! Here is a photo of a pair of wheel bugs that I saw last September, patrolling a honeylocust while getting ready to lay one of those egg masses. They are about an inch long each. The male is on top, the female (with the swollen abdomen) below.

Wheel bugs are voracious predatory insects, about 1 1/4" long, with appetites resembling preying mantises. They get their name from the wheel-spoke-like half moon structure armoring their thorax. Once you see one, you won't forget it! Don't pick them up, however, as they can administer a painful bite with their sturdy sucking mouthparts (called a beak).

I had to remove the honeylocust branch with the 2 wheel bug egg masses, so now I have to find an appropriate site to stash it where the young wheel bugs will have a good chance for survival when they hatch out this spring. It's so much fun to make discoveries like this in the yard!

Technophobia

Sometimes I really irritate myself.

Actually, I really irritate myself lots of times, but that's beside the point.

This morning's irritation is one of long standing...my technophobia.

For those of you who have read my blog for a while, you will have noticed that I haven't posted photos in several months. As counterintuitive as this is, that's because Prairiewolf got me a wonderful new camera last summer which takes really awesome photos. I've now got wonderful closeup photos of insects and flowers, as well as landscapes, family shots, and the normal mix of subject matter that we all take.

But in my normal (read techonologically nonfunctional) way of approaching things, I took a ton of photos immediately, including a bunch that I really didn't want to lose, then got nervous about experimenting with manipulations that I'm unfamiliar with. Now I literally have hundreds of photos with file sizes too big to use on blogger that I need to sort back through (on the camera) so that I can change the file size to one appropriate for web posting. Which means that I get into being both technophobic AND lazy about approaching the task.

I know: Cry me a few crocodile tears too. Maybe if I post this, I'll get the kick in the pants that I need to actually move forward with this task. If you see photos on my blog again, you'll know I took at least a baby step forward!

The Chorus is Back!

Prairiewolf and I have been commenting for several days that it seemed strange we hadn't heard any frogs singing yet...and, lo and behold, yesterday they started to sing!

In the past, I've rather generically thought that frogs singing in early spring were probably spring peepers, but this year I decided to try and learn a little more. For starters, if these were spring peepers, I really had expected them to start singing a little earlier than they did.

So I searched out a CD of night noises that I purchased last fall, looked in the only amphibian reference that I currently have at home (The Amphibians and Reptiles of Missouri) for likely suspects, then listened to the two species on the CD that seemed possible based on the descriptions in the Missouri book.

My possibilities seemed to be either spring peepers or several species of chorus frogs. Listening to the CD, it was obvious that what we were hearing were chorus frogs.

Then it got a little complicated. I went to the web and searched for chorus frogs in Kansas, coming up with definitive looking sources (Great Plains Nature Center in Wichita, Kansas Herpetological Society, and the Kansas Anuran Monitoring Program) that said we only had 3 species: Spotted - Pseudacris clarkii, Boreal - P. maculata, and Strecker's - P. streckeri. IUCN (International Union of Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) range maps, though, show that the Western Chorus Frog, Pseudacris triseriata, occurs throughout most of Kansas too.

After more research, I think I've resolved the discrepancy, at least in part. Some sources talk about the boreal chorus frog and the western chorus frog as two subspecies of an overarching species. The classification seems to be in some flux currently.

The upshot is that I'm not sure exactly which species we're hearing, but I am sure that it's a chorus frog.

A little biology:

Adults of these species range in size from 3/4" to 1 1/2" in length. Breeding sites are generally temporary bodies of water; after breeding is finished they are often found under rocks or logs, in grass, or even in loose soil or animal burrows. Western chorus frogs, at least, can generally survive in urban areas, unlike many other species of amphibians.

These chorus frogs overwinter underground, but they don't burrow deeply and they can tolerate freezing temperatures due to increased levels glucose in their blood.

Generally, chorus frogs eat a variety of (small) insects and spiders.

Now my task is to try to listen carefully to the calls and narrow down the species that we're hearing. Auditory learning is NOT my strong point, but it will be interesting to see what I figure out.

First Blooms of Spring

I looked out the kitchen window yesterday and staring me brightly in the face were several beautiful big clumps of yellow crocus blooms. I hadn't even noticed that the buds were up! (So much for my great powers of observation.)

When I looked back at last year's blogs, it appears that the crocus blooms are about a week behind where they were then. I'm actually quite thankful for that. Hopefully we will have a slower but steadier spring, without the trauma of a late frost cutting back weeks of tender spring growth.

Spring fever, however, is definitely beginning to rumble in my psyche.

Jackrabbit Redux

As is my habit when I encounter something new, I did a little research after seeing the jackrabbit a few days ago. What I found out is, as usual, interesting (at least to me!).

First of all, finding one in an overgrazed pasture is not unusual at all. They like shorter grasses that they can see over, since they are preyed upon by a wide variety of raptors and by a few mammals. What I haven't been able to find out is how common they currently are in Sedgwick County. Prairiewolf says he used to see them when he was quite young, but that by the time he was in high school, they seemed to have disappeared from the area. This was the first one he had seen in Sedgwick County since his childhood.

The species we saw was the black-tailed jackrabbit, Lepus californicus melanotis. It's actually a hare, and its young are precocial, meaning they are born fully furred, with their eyes open and ready to leave the nest shortly after birth.

Jackrabbits became a major agricultural pest during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930's. At a time when there was little vegetation at all because of drought, their numbers actually peaked, probably because of warm winter weather and subsequent low mortality. The attitude of "kill any predator you see on sight," prevalent at the time, certainly wouldn't have helped much either. The jackrabbits literally started competing with cattle and other livestock for what little grass was available. (One site, the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management, states that hares can eat 1/2 - 1 pound of green vegetation every day, so you can see that large numbers of jackrabbits would definitely have an effect on vegetation.) Jackrabbit roundups were held to try to decrease their population, but these were of limited success. Their numbers seemed to decline naturally over the years, with a particularly sharp decline occurring in the late 50's/early 60's.

While I was unable to find definitive statistics about their current abundance in Sedgwick County, the concensus seems to be that recent changes in farming practices have decreased their numbers overall, especially in eastern Kansas. There seems to be little concern about jackrabbits reaching agricultural pest status again any time soon.

So I think I can enjoy my jackrabbit sighting with little or no concern...knock on wood!

Clash of the Titans: Winter vs. Spring

The last few weeks have included wild swings between signs of impending spring and strong reminders that winter isn't willing to loosen its grip yet.

Two weeks ago tomorrow, I heard the first meadowlarks setting up territories in our back five. We have a pair of easterns that seem to be staking out our land in particular, at least 2 other pairs of easterns within hearing distance...and I actually heard one lone western singing away in a field just a little south of us.

One morning last week, I noticed that the cardinals had joined the springtime territorial chorus, then just a few days later I heard red-winged blackbirds vocalizing their raucous, "Ogalee!!!" These bird calls just make my heart sing along when I hear them.

The crocuses are poking up through the mulch, too. Just an inch or so is showing, but the fresh, bright green is wonderfully promising.

So much for spring.

The strongest, yet oddest, winter phenomenon we've had recently was waking up on the night before last to thundersleet. This is the fourth winter thunderstorm we've had in two months, and I find that very odd. Having just one was strange; I really don't know how to react to four of them. I briefly researched this type of storm on the web, and all of the sites I looked at noted that winter thunderstorms were quite "unusual." What's doubly unusual to me is that the temperatures have usually been quite cold when the storms roll in (Wednesday night's storm occurred while it was 19 degrees Fahrenheit), and at least 2 of the storms have occurred in the wee hours of the night when the atmospheric energy should, theoretically, be less than it is during the day.

There's a little part of me wondering what the spring storms will be like if the winter storms are already bringing us such unusual weather.

Overall, I have to admit that I'm glad we haven't had any prolonged warm spells. As enjoyable as those are, I hate having the plants leaf out early, only to be set way back by a late freeze. Surprisingly, I'm not suffering badly from spring fever yet. Too much to do inside the house, still, I guess.

The Wichita Lawn and Garden Show is in 2 weeks; that's probably when spring fever will descend on me with a vengeance. I wonder what strange and wonderful things I'll find there this year!

A Back Five Surprise!

Prairiewolf and I took the two young, energetic canine idiots on a walk this evening through our back five acres, enjoying the last of the warm air before the cold front comes through tonight. About 10 days ago, during the last warm spell, I heard a meadowlark pair beginning their territorial songs out there. They were there again tonight. I've seen a cotton rat, too, as well as occasional coyote scat, and I'm sure there are voles and other small rodents by the score there.

But tonight I saw something that truly astonished me - a jackrabbit. We flushed him as we walked by, and I immediately knew this wasn't any cottontail. He was big, with black on his tail and black tips on his ears. Not surprisingly, the only view we got was of his hind end as he skedaddled out of there. For as long as we could see him, he was still running.

I'm hoping he's scoping out the area as a permanent residence. That would be an astonishing success, in my eyes, for the habitat in that back five acres was horribly degraded by years of overgrazing and, despite our allowing it to lie fallow this year, it is still covered mainly with weedy, low food- and cover-value species such as prairie three-awn grass. Watching the changes that occur is already proving to be fascinating.

The View To and From 1868

A good friend recently sent me a wonderful present, the 1868 Report from the Department of Agriculture. This is no piece of fluff, but a hardbound book, 671 pages in length.

I've been having a delightful time vicariously exploring our country and its agriculture 140 years ago.

For a little background and local scene-setting....

In 1868, the Chisholm Trail was 3 years old. Cattle drives from north Texas to the new railhead at Abilene, Kansas, had started the previous year. (These drives would only continue for another 5-6 years before fences across the trail curtailed its use.)

Bison were still commonly seen in this area.

Wichita did not yet exist. In 1865 William Greiffenstein, "Dutch Bill", had established a trading post on Cowskin Creek near the present site of Wichita. The entire area had been surveyed in 1867 and, by 1868, it was beginning to open to settlement. 1868 was the year, in fact, that Wichita became the actual gleam in its forefathers' eyes. A small group of men started the Wichita Land and Town Company that year to promote the establishment of a new city. The only buildings that existed there, though, seemed to have been built that year. They were a house constructed of cottonwood logs by D. S. Munger and a hotel known as the Buckhorn, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Vigus. The first church was not built until the following year and the first jail wasn't built until 1871.

Back to the 1868 Agricultural Report....

Lots of land was still available for homesteading and settlement. In Kansas specifically, only 20% of the land had so far been purchased or "entered under homestead laws"; approximately 80% was still available. In the country as a whole, 18 times the combined areas of Great Brtain and Ireland remained to be sold or homesteaded. To homestead, you were supposed to be a U.S. citizen or have "declared [your] intentions to become such." And, of course, you had to be male, over the age of 21 or "the head of a family", and planning to use the land for actual settlement and cultivation yourself.

Kansas was glowingly described. The Neosho River Valley was "considered the garden spot of Kansas." The climate of the southern portion of the state is described as "temperate and healthful, and especially favorable to stock-raising." Also, "[t]he climate is peculiarly adapted to the cultivation of the grape. Excellent wine from the Kansas grape has been manufactured."

With typical "grass is greener" greed, this notation was made, "In the year 1867 nearly 2,900,000 acres were surveyed in the Cherokee neutral and Osage reservations, situated near the southern boundary of Kansas. As Indian reserves, these lands had been kept out of the market, and are reported as among the most desirable in the State. They are now open for homestead entry."

Not surprisingly, agricultural commodity reports were given. Indian corn was the primary crop produced in Kansas in 1868, selling for $.99/bushel. Wheat was second, selling for $1.35/bushel. That year, averaged across the country, corn yielded 25.9 bushels/acre and wheat yielded 12.1 bushels/acre. Specific yields for Kansas aren't given.

However, on average in Kansas that year, corn produced $17.82/acre, wheat produced $21.06/acre, and rye $21.42/acre. The most lucrative crop per acre was tobacco at $143/acre, followed by potatoes at $79.90/acre.

A big problem across the country, as noted in this report, were losses and depredations by dogs. In Atchison County, Kansas, one correspondent noted that some farmers had disposed of their sheep because of "the destruction of dogs and prairie wolves. Dogs are quite numerous and the greatest nuisance, and I think our legislature should tax them heavily." In Ohio alone, it was reported that over the prior decade an average of 35,715 sheep had been killed and 23,374 injured by dogs each year.

Grape culture and wine production were reported on quite extensively in this volume. Only 1 county in Kansas, Leavenworth, actually reported any such activity, though. An average of 450 gallons of wine per year had been produced there over the preceeding 5 years.

Not surprisingly for a country being newly settled, hedge building was an important topic. The cost of putting in a hedge was compared to the comparable cost of building wooden fences, with hedges reported to be significantly cheaper. The total cost of hedging a quarter-section farm for 20 years, including maintenance, was placed at $1596, while board fencing during the same period of time was estimated at $4000. (Remember that at this time, through the Homestead Act, that same quarter-section farm would only have cost $200 plus $18 in commissions and fees.)

While the honeylocust (the species, Gleditschia [sic] triacanthos, complete with thorns) was mentioned as a desireable hedge tree, and it was mentioned that buckthorn (Rhamnus catharticus), Cherokee rose (Rosa laevigata) and other species had been tried, the osage orange (Maclura pomifera, then identified as Maclura aurantiaca) was the tree being touted as most ideal for use throughout much of the country. This could be obtained either through the purchase of seeds or through the purchase of "quicks", which we would undoubtedly call whips or seedlings today. Quicks were the recommended method of establishing a good hedge.

It was recommended to trim the newly planted hedge trees each year for several years to thicken the growth. "Pleaching" the hedges when they reached 2" in diameter at 3' above the ground was also highly recommended. (As far as I can determine, pleaching a hedge means to braid or interlace the shoots.) If a double row hedge was pleached by crossing the saplings alternately, a herring-bone hedge was produced, apparently a particularly strong type of hedge.

I must admit that I rarely see double hedges of osage orange, let alone hedges that appear to have been pleached at any time during their life, so I doubt that these recommendations were widely followed, at least around here.

County roads were a big concern. Throughout the country, it was common to require all able-bodied men between certain ages (for example, between 16 and 60) to provide several days free labor each year to build and maintain these roads. The number of days' labor that were required varied from one to fifteen days, depending on the state. A man reporting from Massachusetts highlighted one of the common, major flaws of this system, however, "The system is good where the people are all interestd in good roads, but there are many who are never ready to work or pay; and, if they pretend to work, it is more of a holiday affair than a matter of public benefit." A new system was proposed in this report that consisted of levying a tax in money, rather than in labor, for the purpose of constructing and repairing all roads in a county under the management of a permanently employed, "competent county road engineer".

Human nature doesn't change, does it? There are always those who want others to carry their load for them while they goof off or otherwise refuse to participate in projects for the good of the community overall.

Of course, 1868 was well before the days of chemical agriculture. I noticed several reports that showed how farmers, then, dealt with soil fertility and pest problems. Not all of their methods were benign.

One report noted how much better wheat did if it was planted after red clover, better even than after the application of manure or other forms of fertilizer. Clover grown for seed, rather than cut for hay or grazed by sheep, produced the absolute best crops of wheat the following year.

It was recommended that potato bugs be managed by first planting varieties that they particularly liked, attracting all newly emerging potato bugs in the spring and keeping them occupied, then later planting other, less tasty (to the bugs) varieties which can develop "unmolested".

Another farmer noted his experience with potato bugs too. He reported that the bugs appeared in patches in his field. He handpicked the bugs, larvae, and eggs for several weeks until a friend recommended a mixture of "Paris green" and dry ashes for potato bug control. When he tried it, he said this worked extremely well. [Note: looking up "Paris green" on the web, it appears to be a TOXIC double salt of copper arsenate and copper acetate. This WOULD NOT be a recommended organic pest control method!] Ultimately this farmer recommended specific methods of planting to increase the ease of finding (and thus picking off and destroying) the potato bugs; he felt that this way one could "sav[e] the cost of the pigment". He also recommended not planting on ground where potatoes grew the year before, where the potato bug population would already be well established.

Side notes....

In New Jersey, land was renting at $100/acre for market gardening, which seems fairly expensive to me.

"Camus", also identified as the bulb of Scilla Fraseri [sic], eastern quamash, or wild hyacinth, was noted to be an important food item for the Native Americans. It was reported to have a sweet, gummy taste and to be very nutritious, and therefore it was being recommended as a potential "new" culinary vegetable for cultivation. (Note: I have no knowledge as to the actual edibility of this plant. PLEASE don't try it! For all I know it's very poisonous.)

There were many variegated varieties of trees being recommended for planting, including a variegated osage orange, a variegated sycamore, and a variegated red maple. There was even a variegated ginkgo noted!

Many trees were discussed as suitable for street trees. I was rather pleasantly surprised at how many were somewhat unusual natives, like yellow wood (Cladrastis kentukea, known then as Cladrastis tinctoria), wild cherry (Prunus serotina), osage orange!, and even the Kentucky coffee tree (Gymnocladus canadensis, now known as G. dioicus). Of course boxelder (Acer negundo), known then as ash-leaved maple (Negundo aceroides) and silver maple (Acer saccharinum, known then as Acer dasycarpum) were also recommended street trees! The boxelder was actually described as "one of the finest formed ornamental trees where it has space to develop its natural outline."

Last, but not least, it was interesting to note the climatological data recorded. In Kansas, the recorded lows for 1868 occurred on December 11, measuring from -6 in Baxter Springs to -20 in "Olatha". The recorded highs for the year occurred between July 20-22, with Holton reaching 111, Leavenworth 108, and Atchison 107. (Remember, fully 80% of the state hadn't yet been settled by Europeans during 1868; presumably the Native Americans would not have been measuring and/or recording temperature readings using European measurements at this time.)

So what impressions am I left with overall?

* The weather was quite variable in Kansas that year. Comparatively, we generally don't have anything much to complain about, especially considering that we have heating and air conditioning in our homes!

* Kansas was truly a baby 140 years ago. So maybe when the policies of its people and politicians don't seem very wise to me, there's a reason - even now, as far as states and countries go, Kansas is still barely adolescent in its development!

* Going back to "the good old days" isn't all it's cracked up to be. Can you imagine the uproar if all able-bodied people were actually required to pitch in days of free labor to help our country run, instead of just allowing themselves to be taxed? The jury system is one of the only vestiges of the old system of running things left, and I know how most people go out of their way to avoid serving their time in that venue.

* Crop rotation and hand-picking insect pests have been important agricultural techniques for a long time.

* Wine was basically just another agricultural product. And the farmers and settlers in Kansas were being encouraged to experiment with growing the grapes and producing this popular product.

* Marketing is nothing new. From "finest formed ornamental trees" to "mild", "temperate" and "healthful" Kansas weather, promoters push the limits of credibility. Then, as now, the buyer had better beware.

Comparing aspects of life-then with life-now can certainly be fascinating. Overall, I guess, the truism that comes to mind is, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Ordinary Serendipity

It's funny how, every once in a while, life throws something at you several times in a row, as if to say, "Hey, idiot! Pay attention to THIS!"

I've been getting that sort of notice over the last several days, but not about anything in particular. No, in fact I feel like I'm being reminded to pay attention to the wonderfulness of ordinary life.

There was the message in Thomas Moore's book, Dark Nights of the Soul:

One of the greatest things a human being can do is raise a child to be happy and wise. One of the most altruistic things you can do is be a good neighbor and an involved citizen. The soul is fulfilled by the ordinary....

...the deep soul longs for ordinary connection and engagement. It wants friendship and family and community. It longs for the simple pleasures...

Then in today's Wichita Eagle, Suzanne Perez Tobias's column, entitled, " 'Dalai Mama': Or how to stop and smell the Glade," dealt with the related theme of taking time to notice the wonderful in the ordinary - her example being the excitement felt by a young child smelling the air fresheners in the grocery store, totally missed by the child's mother who was busily chosing the perfect bathroom cleaner to rout out soap scum.

When I visited in Mobile last month, I remember, too, a snippet of conversation about how much we all deeply enjoy our ordinary routines, especially as we've gotten a little older.

Suddenly all of these reminders coalesced into the deep pleasure of luxuriating in my ordinary morning. The sky is gray, a little snow is spitting, the temperatures are nippy and the wind is blowing, but I'm warm inside, lazily lounging in my robe, sipping a cup of coffee and watching the birds filter into the feeders and then lift out again in sudden waves of caution. I've read the paper, had a bowl of cereal, fed the cat and dogs, and now I'm doing my daily computer check-in, complete with a purring cat snuggling into my arms and a content dog lying at my feet.

I don't think life can get much richer than this.

Interesting Winter Birds

This is one of those times when I'm both thrilled and sad at the same time. It's been an "irruption year," which means a year when large numbers of northern bird species are seen further south than normal.

Of course, as a birder, seeing birds at my feeders that aren't there during most winters is a lot of fun. That's the thrill.

On the other hand, the reason these birds have to forage so far south is generally assumed to be because their food supplies up north are so poor this year. This means that their habitat is compromised this year, which almost certainly means that their mortality will be higher than normal. That's the sadness.

First I saw red-breasted nuthatches early in the fall. Shortly thereafter I saw a couple purple finches, then pine siskins. Pine siskins aren't too unusual here during the winter, but the red-breasted nuthatches and purple finches are much less common. The nuthatches and pine siskins have been coming daily. I've seen the purple finches just a few times.

Then today I saw the most unusual irruption species I've seen so far: a red crossbill. That may be the first one I've personally seen in Kansas.

At first I noticed a very orangy-red bird that I thought might be an unusally colored purple finch, based on the amount of color. Then I noticed that it wasn't very streaky, and that the wings were almost a solid tannish brown, with a strong brown eye streak on its face. At this point I grabbed the binoculars for a closer look...and, low and behold, I noticed the longer-than-normal bill with the oddly offset tips. I checked against the guide book - sure enough, a red crossbill.

I wish it well. Hopefully it will fatten up on all the sunflower seeds I'm providing and be able to head back north, healthy and ready to breed this summer. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying all of my unusual visitors.

Officially Weird, at least in my book....

Okay, I know we now live on the prairie, which has strange weather almost by definition, but it's getting even stranger these days.

We had thundersnow a few days before Christmas.

About a week ago we had a big thunderstorm, complete with severe weather warnings, blow through at night with temperatures around 34 degrees F.

And at 3 a.m. last night we had another big thunderstorm with an absolutely impressive display of lightning and thunder. The temperature was 21 degrees F. and the storm was accompanied by freezing rain and ice pellets/hail that coated the ground.

If we're having this many thunderstorms in the middle of winter, what is this spring going to be like?

Favorite Books of 2007

The folks at Watermark Books published lists of their favorite books in 2007, which made me think that perhaps I ought to do the same. Since January 2008 is almost over, I guess I ought to do it now before it becomes too obsolete to be of interest.

I started keeping lists of the books I was reading about 4 or 5 years ago (in 2003). In 2007, I finished reading 47 books during the course of the year. Almost 1 per week, but far from the one-a-day that I think Prairiewolf suspects me of reading!

As I scan the list, I don't see very many books that I've read before. Only 4, and just 2 of those were mindless "comfort" books. Not bad, for a year's worth of reading.

Other categories, not including my rereads:

8 light, current fiction - mass market type
2 gardening books (cover to cover), about prairie gardening
3 other "reacquaint myself with Kansas" books
17 current fiction
4 memoir types, not including gardening/ranching/wildlife watching memoirs
4 memoir types with a gardening/ranching/wildlife watching focus
1 home remodeling book
1 book on world religions
1 book on ecology
2 self help/self education type books.

Here is a list of some of my favorites, in the order that I read them:

Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich: The idea that certain special objects somehow absorb vibrations from human spirit (esp. in a positive way), and that those objects can then influence other humans around them, intrigues me. And that's one of several interesting themes in this novel.
The World's Religions by Huston Smith: With clashes between various religious groups influencing global politics and even local mindsets, I found it educational to read this informative and positive guide to the various major world religions.
Prairie Erth by William Least Heat-Moon: One of the books I read to reacquaint myself with Kansas, this fascinating, in-depth examination of Chase County, Kansas, helps peel back the layers of culture, history, geology, biology, and so forth that have interacted to influence modern life in a central county of Kansas.
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen: Although the premise of the book (a young man joins the circus as a veterinarian during the Depression) didn't initially excite me, this tale was just plain engrossing. A good read.
Marley & Me by John Grogan: If you have a soft spot for dogs, especially if you've ever owned a less-than-perfect one that you loved dearly despite yourself, this is a "laugh out loud, shed a few tears" stunner of a good dog tale.
That Distant Land by Wendell Berry: A quiet look at connections between the people who populated a Kentucky community over the centuries, this series of stories manages to capture the sense of community that seems to be missing from so much of our modern life.
Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O'Brien: Another book that combines the culture, history, geology and biology of a land, but in this case personalizing it through the telling of the author's struggles to live on his ranch in South Dakota.
Bringing Nature Home by Douglas W. Tallamy: A spot-on rationale for why it's important to use native plants in our landscapes, followed by an exceptionally interesting exploration of many of the different insects that can be found around our homes and yards.

Of course, I also have to admit to the guilty pleasure of loving to read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series and J.D. Robb's .... in Death series, much as those are somewhat in the "junkfood for the mind" genre.

Last but not least, there were only 3 that I felt were a complete waste of my time. And I don't think that's too shabby for a year's worth of reading.

Wait a Minute and It'll Change

Yep, I'm referring to Kansas weather. I got back from a week's trip to Mobile, Alabama, last Wednesday evening. The next morning the temperature was 8 degrees (F) on our breezeway. Yesterday it got up to 65. This morning it is 23, with an hour's worth of snow and winds up to 30 mph (gusts to 35).

Weather like this, with big swings in temperature and unrelenting wind, is one of the factors that makes living on the prairie so challenging for plants, animals and people alike. I'm sure thankful for a warm, modern house. Huddling around a fireplace with freezing cold air leaking in every crack, as the pioneers would have been doing, just doesn't sound appealing to me.

As I look out over the landscape this morning, it's a study in tan and gray brown and white and dusty olive drab. I think that's what struck me most about being back in Mobile - everything was so incredibly green. And the folks down there were lamenting about the hard freeze they'd had the prior week. Apparently if I'd gone a week earlier, there would still have been salvia and many other flowers in bloom. Oh, well, even the deep rich green of the live oaks, azaleas, yaupon and camellias was refreshing to my more northern eyes.

Oh, one last observation.... On Sunday, when the temperatures got into the low 60's, I saw both a wood roach and a honey bee out and about. Living, active insects. Somehow that seems amazing for January 27th.

Mid-Winter Mulching

Who says gardening has to stop during the winter? Prairiewolf and I took advantage of a relatively warm weekend (highs in the upper 50's to low 60's) to push away the winter blues by working outside.

First we took our Christmas tree in to the recycling point yesterday and picked up some of the free mulch available there. What an excellent program that is! They evidently take a portable chipper around to each of the drop-off points and chip the discarded trees into mulch right in place. The trees don't have to be transported anywhere, saving time and money, and the mulch is perfect to put in shrub beds or under trees. My only problem is a desire to be piggy and take several truckloads of mulch home. Heaven only knows we could sure use it around here!

Today we finally got back to shredding the leaves we picked up earlier this fall. Our month's worth of snow and ice put us way behind the power curve on that project, but today we got another 10 bags or so shredded, and we moved the rest of the bags to the compost area so that they're not "decorating" the front of the garage anymore. In doing this, we discovered another challenge that the last month's weather has created: some of the bags have collected moisture inside them, and the leaves in those bags are almost impossible to shred using our current chipper/shredder. It clogs up. I'm not sure what our solution to this dilemma is going to be yet.

The last part of today's outside work was spreading out some of the (unshredded) leaves whose bags had disintegrated. When I tried to use leaves as mulch last winter, they quickly blew away in the wind, so this time I covered them with a light layer of shredded cedar to try to anchor them in place. Hopefully my little experiment will be successful, because this will make using all our "shredded brown gold" much easier.

I feel good about the weekend's accomplishments: the forsythia by the garage are tucked in with a thick blanket of fresh green mulch, the area nearby smells marvelously of recycled Christmas trees, the front of the garage is once more free of big black plastic bags, our pile of shredded leaves has almost doubled in size, and one big area of bare ground is resting under a trial layer of leaves and cedar mulch.

I think it's time to settle in with a seed catalog or two or three....

Black-Footed Ferrets in Kansas Again

Back in September, I ranted with frustration over attempts to control prairie dog populations in Logan County, Kansas, through a county-government-initiated chemical poisoning campaign (http://gaiagarden.blogspot.com/2007/09/did-i-miss-timewarp-to-1904.html).

On Christmas Eve, I read a follow-up to that story which made me feel much better. The landowners involved, who were already working with the federal government on a plan to re-introduce endangered black-footed ferrets to their land, were able to get a restraining order to stop the county government from doing any further poisoning.

Then on December 18th, 24 black-footed ferrets were actually released on the property involved. Hopefully it will be the start of a healthy rebalancing of the prairie ecosystem in that area, since black-footed ferrets are a primary predator of prairie dogs.

There are still lots of hurdles to get over. For example, they picked mid-December for the release date to allow the black-footed ferrets a chance to establish breeding territories before the spring mating season occurs. However, the winter months on the prairie are a strenuous time of year for any animal, and mortality may be quite high. (In fact, our last big snowstorm came roaring through just 4 days after the ferrets were released.)

Even if most of the released ferrets survive, it will be years before their numbers build up to the point where they truly keep the prairie dog populations in balance. On the other hand, there are other predators like coyotes and rattlesnakes who will be happy to help the ferrets control the prairie dogs, so all the work of rebalancing the prairie won't be left entirely to them.

I'm choosing to be optimistic about the success of the ferrets' reintroduction, because I have to believe that we can learn to work more effectively with natural processes, rather than always working against them. This is an exciting step in that direction.

Now it's up to the ferrets themselves. I must admit I'm feeling some anxious anticipation, wondering how they're doing. Unfortunately, this is one of those times when all the watchful worry in the world won't affect the outcome, whether for good or for bad. It's too bad my worrying can't help, though, because it's something I'm really good at doing!

'Though the Weather Outside Was Frightful,...

Wow. What a way to wrap up 2007.

Since my last post, life has been a whirlwind of activity, both wonderful and strange.

My mother treated me to a true English tea at Aunt Hattie's Tea Room on W. Douglas during the week before Christmas. Relaxing, delicious - a real treat! Strawberry soup, fresh cherry almond scones with lemon curd and Devonshire cream, cucumber sandwiches, a pot of hot tea for each...and that's just the beginning of the list of delectable goodies they put before us. I have to admit that we basically licked our plates clean.

The next day my kitchen was unexpectedly taken over by our good friends Flip and Shelley from Chicago. It was great fun to relax and watch somebody else work there. As usual, they coaxed fantastic food from my mundane equipment as we laughed, talked and drank our way through the day. I rather think my kitchen celebrates being used as it should be used each time they come to visit!

The object of their culinary take-over was the production of several decadent desserts to contribute to the annual Christmas extravaganza held by another of their long-time Wichita friends. We were graciously invited to the party as well, and that night Prairiewolf and I enjoyed a rich feast of food, beautiful holiday decorations, stimulating fellow guests, and the crowning enjoyment of excellent young Irish dancers accompanied by a live Celtic ensemble as they put on a poolside performance that won't be soon forgotten. It was truly a memorable evening.

With a snowstorm predicted for the next day, our son Qkslvrwlf decided to travel home a few hours early, and came in from St. Louis later that same night. As always, it was wonderful to have him with us again, although I wish he could have joined us for the Celtic music and dancing earlier. I know he would have enjoyed it tremendously.

Boy, the next morning we were so glad that Qkslvrwlf had traveled early when the sky opened up and the snow came in blinding, wind-driven veils of white. I think that storm was the closest I've ever seen to the white-out prairie blizzards that I've read so much about. You know, the storms where the settlers had to rig a line from the house to the barn, or they'd get lost as they tried to do their chores and end up wandering about until they froze to death.

Accompanying the heavy snow was thunder and lightning - thunder snow. Truly awesome.

Flip and Shelley joined us again that afternoon, despite the snowstorm (I believe Flip's words were, "I HATE Kansas weather!" as he walked in), and we continued our previous day's agenda of laughing, talking, drinking and eating, now further enlivened by the presence of Prairiewolf and Qkslvrwolf and by the addition of a few games to the mix. The only thing marring our afternoon - and it was a biggie - was concern about our daughter, Genie02, who was travelling up from San Antonio that day. She began hitting the snow around Oklahoma City, but luckily she's a good driver and the worst of the storm had blown itself out by the time she got near. So she got here safely and was able to join us about 7 o'clock, in time for a superb dinner of champagne chicken, smashed potatoes, Thai green beans, and chocolate chip cookies, cooked up by Chefs Flip, Shelley and Qkslvrwlf.

Flip and Shelley had to leave early the next morning to head back to Chicago for Christmas with their family, so Prairiewolf helped push them out of the driveway through the snow and got them safely on their way. Then the 4 of us, Prairiewolf, Genie02, Qkslvrwlf, and myself, settled in to enjoy the rest of one of the best Christmas times that I can remember. We put the tree up, finished buying and wrapping presents, had both sets of grandparents over to help us celebrate, enjoyed a Christmas Day meal that featured a wild turkey which Prairiewolf had shot last spring, experienced more unique weather in the form of snow mist, brewed some beer, and just generally enjoyed being together as a family for those few brief days.

My family and friends truly enfolded me and made this Christmas especially warm and full of love.

Both kids have had to leave by now. It was hard to see them go, but they are safely home and once more immersed in their own lives. I treasure the times we get together all the more for their brevity. Their love and support warms me even from far away.

Looking back on it, Christmas this year was memorable for family and friends, thunder snow and snow mist, Celtic music and dancing, delicious food, and much laughter and happiness. It's the gift of a feeling of celebration and love and joy that I wish I could somehow share with all the people on Earth. We could all use more of it in our lives.

Native Plants Do It Better

It's rare that a new (to me) ecological concept related to gardening and wildlife hits me upside the head, but I treasure it when it does. Reading Douglas W. Tallamy's new book, Bringing Nature Home, brought me just such a moment.

For years I have believed that gardening with natives was important, but I have allowed myself to become less single-minded about that belief, especially in recent years. I couldn't answer people's questions about why, for example, a native berry-producing shrub was better than an exotic berry-producing shrub if the birds liked to eat both types of berries equally. Instinctively I felt the native was better, but I couldn't produce the underlying logic to share with others.

Tallamy nails my missing logic in this book.

Every time a plant is described as "pest free", the nurseryman is saying that leaf-eating insects (and often other herbivores) won't eat it, usually because they truly can't eat it due to its chemical makeup. This means that the particular plant in question - almost always an exotic introduced from another country or from a different area of this country - is taking space, using nutrients from the soil, capturing sunlight...and adding little or nothing to the local food chains. In essence, it is a sterile placeholder, taking the place of other, native plants that can and do support diverse, healthy populations of native animals. Because the exotic plant is not getting eaten or controlled in any way, it can easily outcompete the locally palatable native vegetation, so when the exotic escapes into the wild, there is nothing holding back its takeover of local habitats and sterilizing them.

So right now I can practically hear the question going through your head, "Why would I possibly WANT insects to eat my plants? Won't that kill them?"

The simple answer is, "No, it won't kill them. Native plants evolved along with native herbivores so that both balance each other. Then, too, having native predators feeding on the native herbivores further keeps that balance in place."

Insects are one of the primary ways that the energy captured by plants gets moved up the food chain. They are the primary herbivores of many, probably most, plants; then they become the food for primary predators, from other insects to amphibians to birds.

If you love to attract birds to your yard, it's important to know that the energy and nutrients for bird reproduction are almost entirely based upon insect food. Berries in the fall won't do birds any good if there haven't been any birds produced earlier in the year because there were no insects available to provide the food and energy for eggs and young.

I can hear another question, "Japanese beetles are eating my roses to stubs. How can you say that insects won't kill my plants?"

Japanese beetles aren't native insects, and they are not acting "naturally" for our native ecosystems. Many major pest outbreaks are actually caused by alien insects or diseases introduced accidentally into our country. Like the alien plants they often come in on, these alien pests have no natural enemies and ravage unchecked throughout the countryside. Chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease and now sudden oak wilt are all examples of alien disease organisms; (Asian) azalea lace bug, soybean aphid and Japanese beetles are examples of devastating alien insects.

I've just hit the highlights of Tallamy's book here. He describes the concepts in much greater depth than I have here, plus he provides lots of interesting examples. He has also included a wonderful section about the different types of insects, including some fascinating and fun insect life histories. If you love to garden, especially if you love to attract wildlife to your yard, I highly recommend that you read this book.

Luck Comes in All Forms

We - all of us in the Wichita area - got really lucky over the last few days, especially yesterday. According to my rain gauge, we received over 5" of rain. We started yesterday with about 1/4-1/2" of ice on the trees and wires, but at our house the temperature hung at 32.1 to 32.9 degrees Fahrenheit all day. It wasn't warm, but it was just enough to keep all that rain from freezing as it hit. It was even warm enough to slowly melt much of the ice left from overnight.

Folks to the north of us and the south of us weren't that lucky. Oklahoma got hammered a couple days ago; north-central Kansas got it yesterday. I talked with a friend who lives in Holton, north of Topeka, and the entire town was coated in over an inch of ice, leading to massive power outages and major tree damage and loss. The face of the town will be changed for years.

Ice is such a good example of something incredibly beautiful that is also incredibly destructive. Wichita's turn came 3 years ago...and it will come again. Meanwhile I'm thankful for the luck that came our way, and mourning for the losses of those who were less lucky this time than we were.

Subtle Editing on Global Warming

We've lived in places - Topeka and Mobile - with strongly right-wing newspapers (supposed "left wing liberal bias in the media" not withstanding). The Wichita Eagle seems generally more balanced to me, but I notice that they do have a way of subtly influencing the news that I don't agree with.

Today's paper is a case in point. On the front page we have 4 local stories and 1 state story. Except for the story on the ice storm (which deserves front page coverage), all of the other stories are about on-going issues, any of which would have been sufficiently covered on page 4 or 5, and all of which will be forgotten in a year or two or three.

Buried on page 6A is a story about an issue that is probably signalling a major change in our world, about a warning bell of global significance. "Scientists Shocked by Arctic Ice Melt" is about the newly released report on the massive melting of the Arctic ice mass seen this summer. This melting is occurring much faster than even the most pessimistic computer model climate prediction. At the current rate, the Arctic may be ice-free at the end of summer by 2012. That's less than 5 years away.

This is a massive change.

Another fact from this article that startled me was that, according to NASA satellite data, the volume of Arctic sea ice at the end of this last summer was just half of what it was 4 years ago. Fifty percent (50%) of the Arctic ice volume gone in just 4 years.

So why doesn't this news deserve front page coverage? These are huge changes that signal a need to act decisively and rapidly before the process of global warming becomes irreversible. I think I found a piece of the answer in a couple articles I read recently. These articles talked about how the Coast Guard was going to start patrolling the Arctic as it was opened up for new shipping channels. The new shipping channels would shorten transport distances between certain cities - the Northwest Passage coming true at last.

Why worry about global warming if it's offering a profit opportunity?

"The love of money is the root of all evil." It's long past time for all the world's citizens, and for the American electorate in particular, to look at the proponents of each side in the global warming "debate" and determine who has the most personal profit to make from their stance. I can pretty well guarantee it isn't the scientific community.

Then it's time for those same citizens to take action to change our current course. The people making obscene profits from the status quo CANNOT be trusted to see the changes that need to be made and lead the rest of us to make them. Only the average informed citizen can remove these profit-mongers from leadership and chose leaders more qualified to lead us intelligently and carefully into the future. Let's do it.

My Favorite Part of the Season

My favorite part of the Christmas season began today - I dug out the Christmas cards and started working on them. Serendipitously, I received our first Christmas card for the year too.

I know that a lot of people dislike the time, effort and cost of writing Christmas cards, but for someone like me, who has moved around a lot throughout my life, it's a wonderful way to keep connected with friends from long ago. Our lives may have separated us years before, but I still love to hear what they and their families are doing.

It's wonderful how some people remain close friends, no matter how long it's been since you saw them last. When you are lucky enough to meet with them again, you often feel like you were never apart.

For the longest time I tried to write personal letters to everybody, but I finally gave up a few years ago. I'd get a few letters written, then get overwhelmed by other holiday activities and end up inadvertently pruning my Christmas card list. Prairiewolf now helps me. He writes a great Christmas letter, which I then print off. I try to add brief personal notes, then I address and mail them. Our success rate at getting out all of our intended cards has increased significantly since making this initially unwelcome compromise.

But even joint cooperation doesn't help when a major move coincides with the Christmas season.
With our move occurring at the end of December last year, I don't remember being organized enough to send out any cards...and I'm afraid that if I don't touch bases with a few of my usual card-buddies this year, they too may move and we'll lose touch completely.

What a loss that would be. There's my best friend from junior high in Panama. We've been in touch for almost 40 years now. (Yikes! Has it actually been that long?!) Then there's my college roommate (in touch over 30 years now). There are friends from our early married years, and from many of the places that we've lived. Now I'll be adding many friends from Mobile.

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Buffalo for the Broken Heart

I recently finished reading a fascinating book, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, by Dan O'Brien.

It was a random pick-up at the local bookstore. Something in the title caught my eye, then the jacket blurb made me look more closely. By the time I'd skimmed several pages, it went into my (admittedly oversized) "to buy" pile and made it safely home. Something about its promise made me pick it up soon thereafter; once I picked it up, I was hooked.

Buffalo is a quiet book. It's part personal memoir, part natural history, part cultural history, all interwoven into a well paced story that captured my heart and imagination. It's the tale of a relationship between a man and his South Dakota ranch, the Broken Heart. There's love and heartbreak, comraderie and loneliness in this book, along with beauty and unimaginably necessary daily gambles.

Having moved back to the prairie after several years in the longleaf pine forests of the deep south, I'm finding myself fascinated by the differences between the 2 places. I expected and was moderately prepared for the difference in vegetation and climate, but the differences in mindsets and cultural assumptions is surprising me. I find myself appreciating how the local history of a place infuses its people with a sense of identity that I'd never really noticed before, even people who move into an area rather than having been raised in it.

In Mobile, the people seemed to have a baseline identify still founded upon the old Deep South cultural identity of plantations, cotton growing, and the almost aristocratic society that it created. Entertaining was an everyday, gracious artform there, and the homes tended to be classic and richly decorated.

Here, the people seem to have a baseline identify still founded upon the "wild west", with its necessary independence of spirit and underlying rebellion. There's a mistrust of anything too "fancy", and a sense that cattle and farming are both intrinsically good and tragically fated to break people's spirit.

In Buffalo for the Broken Heart, O'Brien recounts how he (and countless other Great Plains ranchers) try to wrest a living from the prairie by raising cattle. As he describes it, it's basically a no-win situation, based on a disconnect between cattle and the prairie environment compounded by a disconnect between natural forces and the market economy. After almost losing his ranch (saving it only by taking a job elsewhere and sending money back, while a neighbor looked after it), O'Brien hesitantly decides to try running bison instead of cattle. It's an incredible gamble and an almost unbelievable amount of hard work, but he makes the commitment and describes both the joys and the fears of the process.

Our little 10 acres will never support a bison, but bison lived here 150 years ago and helped shape this land. There's even a depression behind the draw that I suspect may be the remnants of an old buffalo wallow. The descriptions of O'Brien's prairie lands, of how the cattle fought them and how the bison reveled in them, were evocative and haunting. I can picture bison on our land now in a way that I wasn't able to before reading this book.

I know where the past of this land has been. I wonder where its future lies.