The Urban Naturalist

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?