The Urban Naturalist

Go ahead - Howl!

Photo by Susan Snyder

Get a load of that January full moon.  It lights the sky like a beacon. My little point-and-shoot camera didn't do it justice. With the clear sky, this moon provides enough light to see the outline of the mountains just below it -- silhouettes of black-on-black.

It's stunning.

Some Indigenous American tribes call the full moon of January "Wolf Moon." Maybe it's because the long, lonesome wail of a wolf on a cold, dark winter's night reminded them that winter was a time of hunger.  Other the tribes called it "Hunger Moon" or "Freezing Moon" or "Hard Moon."

Modern mainstream Western society still names a couple of the full moons: Harvest Moon in September and Blue Moon, which is any second full moon in a month's time. We'll have a Blue Moon this year in August, when full moons will light the sky on the 2nd and 31st. But it seems a shame that we are no longer tied closely enough to nature's lunar cycles that we name them.

As for the rest of the year's full moons, here is a rundown of some of the names various Indigenous American tribes have given them:

February -- Snow, Coyote or Black Bear moon

March -- Warming, Worm or Sap moon

April -- Grass, Worm or Melting moon

May -- Fish, Full Flower or Budding moon

June -- Hot, Flower or Summer Starting moon

July -- Strawberry, Hay or Salmon moon

August -- Thunder, Hot or Moon When the Chokecherries are Black moon

September -- Corn, Harvest or Big moon

October --Rutting, Autumn or Hunter's moon

November -- Beaver Moon, Moon of the Turkey or Moon of the Brown Leaves

December -- Long Night, Cold or Snow moon.

And then we're back to January again, the time of the Wolf Moon. Stepping out into the cold, clear night, I can stand in the front yard with my eyes fixed on that great ball of light and imagine I hear the wolves calling to each other on some distant mountain.

Holding on in hard times

  Photo by The Urban Naturalist

We hiked up a local canyon a few days ago to escape the summer heat and admire the waterfall at the top.  The rocky ascent gave shade, cool and respite as hoped.

Once at the top, I noticed sprays of the little yellow flowers pictured above jutting out from among the boulders.  If they had been birds, I might have some hope of knowing what they were.  But alas, this Urban Naturalist still calls plants by such names as, "those cute little purple ones," and "those little spiky yellow ones."

Still, I had to marvel at the tenacity of these little plants. They appeared so dainty and delicate until I realized the strength and stubbornness it must have taken to press up between those huge, unmoving rocks.

Over the past couple of years, many of my past business associates, friends and family members have struggled to weather the layoffs, housing crunch and general economic pitfalls that are challenging our country.  I have been planted in similar hard places.

Planted. It's an interesting word -- one that brings hope when I consider that little bunch of yellow flowers that bloomed in all their glory despite being wedged between the boulders.  Nature has so many wonderful and simple ways to show us how to endure the tough times.  We need only to take a hike or a walk around the neighborhood and pay attention.

  Photo by Doug Murray

If the photo of the mama grizzly and two cubs above seems unremarkable, well, it is.  We were several hundreds of yards from this marvelous wild animal, whom we managed to see numerous times over the weekend at Grand Teton National Park.  Keeping a safe distance is the way to make sure you live to tell the tale.

News of a 57-year-old Yellowstone National Park visitor getting mauled to death by a mama grizzly protecting her cubs during the same weekend we were bear-watching in the national park just south of Yellowstone is all over the Web, right now.  The California man was hiking along a backcountry meadow trail with his wife when they surprised the mama and cubs about 1.5 miles into their hike. The female bear attacked as they tried to leave.

National Park Service officials have, thankfully, decided not to kill the bear after determining that she was merely protecting her young, as all animals -- wild and domestic -- do.

It is a horrific tale and so sad for the couple who were trying to enjoy one of our country's jewels.  Reader commentary on news accounts of the attack has run the gamut, from people applauding the Park Service's decision to those who said they would hike with a gun so they could kill any animal that they felt threatened by, to those who say that a human's life is more valuable than that of a mother bear or her cubs.  Arrogance abounds in these situations.

The presence of bears - both black and grizzly -- and information that they can be aggressive when protecting young this time of year is posted prominently in both Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks right now.  You can't go anywhere -- not even the bathroom -- without seeing the warnings. All hiking trails are posted as well.

Cubs are born in the den around February, so mother bears have been nursing them in hibernation since that time. All of them emerge from the dens as hungry as ... well ... you know. Bears seeking to sate their appetites after a long winter will spend a lot of time in meadows looking for berries, small animals and grubs. It is best to stay out of the large open areas and those that are posted as having bear activity. Certainly, such attacks are rare, but that's not much consolation to the woman who is now a widow.

Our big western parks ain't Disney.  The animals are real, wild and apt to protect what's theirs. Rangers aren't being overly cautious when they say to be aware. Please get out and enjoy our national parks. Just  remember to pack some good binoculars and common sense.

Volunteer science

Photo by The Urban Naturalist

I am now a certified frog-watcher -- or rather, listener.  A couple of weeks ago, I joined about 20 other volunteers in training for FrogWatch USA, a program by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums that teaches people to identify frogs and toads by their calls and track the information as a way of keeping track of how populations of different species are faring across the country.

I won't go into the details of the program here (you can check out those at www.aza.org/frogwatch/).  Suffice to say that when the little amphibians begin calling to each other next spring, I will be listening alongside some pond with data sheet in hand.

I am a big fan of theso-called "citizen science" programs that engage regular people in keeping an eye out on the changes occurring in the natural world on which we all depend. 

The oldest such program is the annual Christmas Bird Count by the National Audubon Society. All across the United States during the month of December, groups of birders go out to count the species and numbers of birds in their are and report them to a national database.  The organization has been tracking migratory bird populations this way for more than 100 years, providing scientists with comprehensive data that they never could have gathered on their own.

Such data is important because birds and amphibians are often the harbingers of larger changes in our ecosystems. 

Amphibians -- critters likes frogs, toads, salamanders and  newts -- have highly absorbant skin that makes them highly susceptible to pollutants and disease.  When a wetland ecosystem is in trouble, the amphibans are among the first to let us know.  And humans need the water storage and cleaning abilities of healthy wetlands as much as they need oxygen.   In fact, algae, much of which grows in wetlands, provides most of the oxygen on the planet.

And the absence of baby birds in a nearby nature preserve that had been sprayed to erradicate mosquitoes was noted by Olga Owens Huckins in a 1958 letter to her friend Rachel Carson. Carson, a wetlands biologist, went on to write "Silent Spring," a book that resulted in the banning of DDT and creation of the Clean Water Act, among other laws.

Nerdy as it may sound to count birds or sit silently after dark listening to frogs, it is important scientific work -- work that the average person can do with a little training and some good old-fashioned care about the world that sustains them.

Log onto FrogWatch or contact your local Audubon Society to learn more. 

The power of a pea

Professor Pouncy Paws and I went into the backyard this morning to examine our gardening efforts. The sun was still thinking about peeking over the mountaintops, and an overnight rain storm did the watering for me.

As usual, The Professor examined only the catnip growing thick and tall in one of the pots, then rolled onto his back and morphed into a nip-induced goofball of fur.  I took a quick look at the cucumber plants and discovered that the beer traps seem to be attracting most of the slugs away from the new leaves.

But the most remarkable thing happening out there right now is the pea vines.  I planted heriloom peas back in April when the soil was still cool but not frozen. And despite the late snows and cold we had here in the northern Intermountain West, the little devils thrived.

I've never grown peas before and didn't know what to expect. Over the weekend, we noticed that little tendrils were shooting out from the ends of their stems and holding fast to whatever they could find -- mostly each other and the tops of the onions sprouting nearby. That wouldn't do, so I places some metal cages around them for climbing. 

My spouse and I marveled at the speed with which these tendrils caught hold of the cages and held on for dear life.  We are among those who -- despite witnessing the rapid, overnight growth of the butterfly bushes out the front and the pea vines out back -- consider plants to be a stationary, motionless sort of being.  We are not alone. Many of people walk past plants as though they are merely nature's furniture.

But the peas really laid that assumption to rest today. Just for grins, I picked up one of the trailing tendrils and held it against the cage. And to my awe, the tendril curled around the cage as if grabbing hold with a green threadlike hand.  This plant actually moved. I did it a couple more times just to make sure I wasn't crazy.

My friend the botanist is always talking of the marvels and wonders of plants. She often has assured me that plants do move at more than a glacial pace. And although I have never doubted her, I had not witnessed it myself until today.

My pea vines have little hands! It almost makes me sorry that I am going to eat their fruits. Maybe I should at least ask permission before I pick them.

Went to a garden party ...

  Photo by The Urban Naturalist

What kind of beer do slugs prefer at a garden party?

There was a time in my life when the answer to such a question would have been "Whatever I can get for $6 a 12-pack."  Of course, that was also a time when I would have been dating one of the slugs, and the "garden" would have been the overgrown, weedy yard of some house six of my friends were renting off-campus.

Fast forward (insert a number that will remain forever a secret here) years, and the slugs are little slimy critters consuming the cucumber starts I planted two weeks ago. I want to kill them in a way that does not involve using chemical pesticides that also kill the neighborhood's birds and cats.

The setting for my little party is two troughs made of PVC pipe that, when filled with beer, will attract the slugs. They will die in the beer, of course, but they won't care.

I covered the rough edges of the cut plastic pipe to help them avoid hurting their sticky little bellies as they crawled into my Evil Plan.

After getting the troughs seated in the soil, I peered into our basement fridge and wondered which variety of micro-brew would draw the little buggers. I settled on the Harvest Moon pumpkin ale. It wasn't because I thought slugs would prefer  "ripened pumpkin, cloves, allspice and nutmeg for a lightly spiced finish." It was because, as the name of the beer suggests, it had been in the refrigerator since last fall -- Halloween, if I remember correctly.

The Evil Plan most certainly would have worked better if an inch of rain hadn't fallen overnight. Still, I found four or five slugs floating in the beer bath this morning, leaving me only four to pick off my plants. 

And you know, I could swear that late last night I heard tiny voices singing, "Ohhhhh, I'm a lumberjack and I don't care ..."

The miraculous exoskeleton

News feeds buzzed earlier this week with reports about Austin Whitney, a young man who, despite being paralyzed from the waist down, took seven steps across the stage to receive his diploma at UC Berkeley.  Whitney made his historic walk with the help of a robotic exosksleton that was designed by researchers at the university. Whitney is the first human to have tested this one.

I found it somewhat interesting that many of the reporters writing the stories about Whitney wrote about the "exoskeleton," placing quotation marks around the term as if it were a foreign word or unknown jargon.

Really?  They assumed most people don't know what an exoskeleton is?  Odd. Most of the children I teach from second grade on forward know what one is. Even some of the first-graders have even heard the term by the end of the school year.

An exoskeleton is a skeleton that is outside the body (hence, "exo").  It is what insects and arachnids (spiders) have, and it was a miracle even before Whitney used a human-created one to walk. 

Most everyone knows that snakes shed their skins as they grow. But exoskeletons are discarded among insects and arachnids too.  For example, a dragonfly larva lives under water for about two years before emerging as the airborne form with which we are all familiar.  During its larval stage, the dragonfly will shed its exoskeleton more than a dozen times as it grows.  When it finally does emerge from the water, creeping up a cattail leaf or bulrush, the larva will shed the exoskeleton once more to reveal the winged dragonfly.

Cool, eh?  Another exoskeleton, with which urban naturalists may be more familiar, is that of the spider.  Remember the last spider you saw that was all curled up and dead?  Chances are, it wasn't a dead spider but was the exoskeleton of a live spider that is now ... bigger.

Sleep well.

The Learning Garden

Photo by The Urban Naturalist

The sun finally came out late yesterday afternoon, inspiring me to open all the doors and windows after dinner to enjoy the cool spring air and the lenghtening shadows of early evening.

The sun stays up a lot longer, now. So it was just before sunset when the three boys who stay with their father every-other week arrived at his home next door.  They are little boys. The oldest is 6, and the youngest pushing 2. 

Two weeks ago, the 6-year-old had come buzzing over to our house almost as soon as he arrived because our tulips had started blooming. He was so excited because he'd been learning about bees that week, and he wanted to see whether our flowers had adequate "nectar."

Yesterday was no different. Less than half an hour after their mother dropped them off, I heard the commotion of squeals and giggles out on the front walk. The tulips, now awash with color, had attracted all three boys and their father. The 2- and 3-year-olds trotted happily up and down the walk, while the oldest was intent on poking his fingers inside the bloom of a yellow tulip that was as tall as his youngest brother.

"Look!" he exclaimed, pointing to yellow streaks on the leg of his jeans. "I got the pollen out!"  I shared his excitement, then pointed to a group of white tulips tipped in  lavendar.

"You know, last spring, those tulips were totally white," I told him. "What do you suppose happened to them?"

"Oh! It must have been the bees! The bees!" the little boy said. "You should take a video of the bees!"

"But I never see them," I said.

"Then you should take a video of me being the bees!" he shouted happily and ran his fingers through the red, orange, yellow and purple flowers.

I trust we'll see the boys every day on this visit -- and perhaps the next. It all depends on how long the tulips last.

Who's in your urban ecosystem?

It's drizzly and cool in northern Utah this morning, but that didn't deter me from taking a walk around the neighborhood.

In fact, the rain inspired me to do it. Or maybe it's the spring. Not sure. For some reason, as I sat there with my second cup of coffee this morning, I got antsy to get out and see what was happening before heading off to work.

All the tulips are up, standing like colorful little soldiers along front walks and porches. I noted that this year, we have colors I never even knew we planted. Gotta love those bees.  As I walked through the streets of our modest neighborhood, I noticed that more than half a dozen houses are now up for sale, and renovation work on some that I have been watching the past year seems to have slowed or stopped. The wickedness of our failing economy seeps in everywhere.

I nodded to a jogger and watched as a mother dropped off her son at the elementary school. School didn't start for at least another half hour -- the guard was just setting up his crosswalk cones as I strolled by -- but this little boy was carrying a trumpet case with his backpack. Maybe he was arriving early in order to practice, like I did when I young.

Everywhere people were waking, leaving for work or school and going about their daily business. It reminded me of the collection of tiny organisms my students net from the ponds as we study pond ecology at the nature center.  We discuss what makes a pond ecosystem and try to find as many of the organisms in that list that we can.

Urban ecosystems are no different than the ones in ponds or fields or forests.  A healthy ecosystem recycles its waste, provides enough shelter and clean food and water for its dwellers, relies on symbiotic or cooperative relationships among those dwellers and needs everyone to do their jobs to make sure those systems stay intact and healthy.

I am going to try to do my ecosystem job better today. What about you?

 

Recycling wars

Lichen, one of nature's recyclers. The Urban Naturalist photo
 
A story in my local newspaper this morning described the conflict one of the area's smaller communities is having over recycling.

Amazing. In 2011, we still have whole communities that haven't yet decided whether recycling waste -- as nature always has done -- is "worth" it. The city is considering a voluntary recycling plan that would charge those who want to do it $2 to $3 more a month to cover the costs of the program. Those who don't want to recycle wouldn't have to pay the extra fee. As one recycle-supporting resident told city officials, recycling is a personal choice, and she didn't mind paying more.

How pitiful that this woman had to pander to the ignorance of a few in order to get her city to do the right thing -- and is having to pay more to do what's right in the process.  Cities have it all backwards. Recycling should be mandatory, and those who don't want to do it ought to be the ones paying more.  The true costs of our landfills encompasses more than trucks and people whose job it is to turn the stuff over.  Trashing our only planet will cost future generations much more than $3 a month.

One of the residents who is against having to recycle said his family "doesn't produce enough" to recycle. Really? Where does this guy buy stuff? I buy mostly fresh produce-type food, and one week's worth of packaging from the grocery store is enough to fill our indoor recycling bin twice.  Our recycling trash can goes to the curb twice as often as our garbage can.

When and how did we become so ecologically illiterate as a society? Step back and consider that nature has thousands of detrivores -- animals and other organisms whose job it is to eat dead and decaying stuff -- and it is plain to see that recycling waste back into the system is not simply a part of life. It is what allows us to make new life.

Recycling isn't a choice. It what nature intended. Those who don't do it, end up paying one way or another.