Lonely John's Nature
Report
2013-4-21 The vernal
pond near my house is now covered with thick green algae. Looks like
you could walk on it. That same pond was being skated on just a few
months ago. I heard first bullfrog of the year. Soon the pond will
dry to mud and grow over with weed.
I noticed, for the first
time this year, some shade under a tree. Today my first day wearing
short pants. I found the first tick insect of the year attached to
my skin. First housefly, dogs madly leaping and snapping at it. 80
degrees outside. My tap water temperature is now up to 57 degrees
from a low of 37 in winter. Almost time to turn off the water heater
for the summer.
Carolina silverbell trees
shed their brief and extraordinary bounty of white flowers like a
late season snow storm. Red maple “helicopter” seeds on the
ground everywhere. The tiny peaches on Tom's peach tree are already
starting to swell at an alarming rate. Flowering dogwood, the
fragrant lavender blooms of lilac and Japanese wisteria. The
distinctive fragrance of the invasive Russian olive by the sides of
the highways. Tremendous genetic diversity in the areas near the
cities due to the many plants and insects imported since the time of
Olmstead.
Tree caterpillar poop is
on car hoods. I noticed one tree with all the caterpillars inside
shelters they constructed of leaves, leaf edges folded and bound
together with silk.
Many rabbits, small ones.
Always a lot of them in spring and early summer, relatively tame and
eagerly consuming the tender new shoots.
I saw a great woodchuck
lumping across my dead end street.
The neighbor kid now rides
his motorcycle around his tiny yard everyday after school..
Friend Tom reports newly
migrated bears may be in the area, may maraud his bee hives at Fay
field in Sudbury.
The cardinal bird of a
month ago seemed to be the only bird singing in the bare limbs of the
trees at that time. Now that the limbs have leaves, he seems to
have stopped. Now there is a bird that I have often heard in spring
time who sings with a will. It repeats one phrase a couple times
and then switches to a very different phrase and repeats that a few
times. It has an un ending variety of melody, rhythm and never seems
to repeat any of the phrases. I was thrilled when I was able to
spot one and was surprised to learn that it was not a mocking bird
but a common catbird. I had known their typical feline call from
other times of year, but it seems that this time of year they become
more inspired.
I visited a friend Chris
at his house. We heard a couple owls calling to each other, marking
the radius of their territory by the distance the call carries. The
call seemed to echo among the many tree trunks in the deep and open
forest. It seems unlikely that a forest would return an echo, but I
have perceived such a forest echo from other sounds like the barking
of my dogs. It seems that owl calls are relatively consistent for a
given species and readily described by words and so easy to look up
on a computer. Cornell has a great ornithology website. These owls
were barred owls. (I thought it was spelled 'bard'. Oh, well, it
was a nice thought that there would be a poetic owl.)
Friend Chris is a sound
engineer. He told me about the effect
different weather has on the way sound carries. Contrary to what I had thought, the humidity of the atmosphere does not
have much to do with how far sound carries. Wind does carry the sound farther. And air
temperature changes sound dispersal. When the air is warmer at
higher elevations in the atmosphere than down by the ground, sound
carries more because the sound waves travel faster in the thin air
and so the sound that was radiating upward from a source on the ground tends to curve in an arc back down to
earth again at some distance away. He said the effect is most pronounced a mile away from
source. And when the air is warmer at ground level than higher up, sounds about a
mile away are less noticeable. He said that on a clear, sunny
morning, the ground air starts to warm up more than air up higher,
starting at around 9 am. And this effect lasts until about 6 pm when the heat of the warm soil starts to rapidly radiate away from the earth, warming the air
above. Then we hear the distant noises well and this effect then
lasts until 9 am the following morning.
I recently read that there
is a kind of cicada insect called the “Magicada” that only
emerges from dormancy once every 17 years. It makes a nearly
unbearable racket for 2 weeks and then goes back into the soil to
benignly live off the sap of tree roots for another 17 years. The
big news is that a large cohort of this 17 year cicada is scheduled to emerge this springtime. I was
disappointed that they will be present and singing in Connecticut but
not Massachusetts.
There are also 13 year
cicadas. Notice anything? Both prime numbers. An adaptive
mechanism. If there is a predator of the cicada whose population
levels fluctuate on a consistent multi-year periodic cycle, then the
years when predator population is at peak levels will coincide with
the years that cicadas emerge much less frequently, as the product of
the prime number times the number of years of the periodic cycle of
the predator. For example, if there is a predatory wasp that has
peaks in its population levels every 4 years, and if the magicada were to have a periodic cycle length of 16 years, then the wasp population would
eventually synchronize its cycle with the magicada's and every time
the magicada emerged the wasps would be at peak levels, which would
not be good if you were a magicada. But if the magicada's period
length is 17 years, their cycles only coincide every 54 years. (4X17
= 54). And it works for every single other predator of the
magicada that has consistent multi year peak population level cycles
because 17 is a prime number and is not divisible by any number
except itself and 1. It almost seems that the cicada has some kind
of collective unconscious. I can see why some people might be
tempted by the idea of intelligent design.
Today I was climbing in
the very top one of my trees and noticed the spruce next to me had
small new seed cones. The juvenile cones of the spruce are the most
indescribably divine hues of deep and brilliant red I have ever seen.
Very few of cones this year, last year there were many. This is
thought to be an adaptive mechanism. Those squirrels that eat them
will famish on a year when the cones are scarce. Then the next year
when the tree has saved energy, there will be many cones and few
squirrels to eat them.
I recently found an
extraordinarily large European beech tree. I searched the internet
for a list of giant trees in the area and was surprised to find no
lists. I telephoned the location of the beech to state forest
health director Ken. One of the rituals Ken dutifully conducts is
the measuring of the girth, height and spread of ancient trees.
Wonderful government supported poetry. The measurements are
recorded on a list which is not publicized in order to protect the
trees from evildoers. There are many of these so called “champion”
trees among us, often in suburban areas where farming and logging has
long departed. I went to sleep that night dreaming of mystic and
enchanted places, not to be found on any map, nearby and overlooked.
My
goodness, it has happened again! It's almost midnight.....jp