A Great Video about Pollinators on Mountain Mint

Some wildflowers are much better at attracting pollinators than others. The two champions in my book are clustered mountain mint and boneset. Back in 2008, I started documenting the many kinds of insects and other creatures drawn to the boneset growing in my backyard. Little did I know that an entomologist friend I hadn't seen since Ann Arbor college days, David Cappaert, had been inspired to do the same, 200 miles away, with the mountain mint growing in a Hartford, CT schoolyard. 

Dave had the advantage of 1) being an excellent photographer and 2) actually knowing the creatures' names. He created a remarkable video entitled "Mountain mint, one day in August," in which he documents 52 species he found on one stand of mountain mint. For its first 8 minutes, the video is a parade of colorful creatures with colorful names like bee wolf, wedge shaped beetle, stinkbug, ambush bug, jumping spider, freeloader fly, and orb weaver. 

Then, at 8:20 in the video, Dave begins describing the many interrelationships between the pollinators and their predators and parasites--a wonderfully complex food web, all "fueled by the nectar of the mountain mint." Check it out, and if you don't have any mountain mint growing in your yard, come to the Botanical Art Garden at Herrontown Woods, where in early July it's just starting to bloom. 

 

Note: We also have another kind of mountain mint growing in the Botanical Art Garden: what I've been calling narrow-leaved mountain mint (Pycnanthem tenuifolium), which is the more common species found growing naturally around Princeton, but clustered mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum) is the champ when it comes to pollinators. Being a mint, it also spreads quickly underground, so be careful where you plant it.

PrincetonNatureNotes on TV: An Interview on Storyline about Periodical Cicadas

I was delighted to be interviewed by Princeton TV for their weekly Storyline series. They call this segment about cicadas "The Great Awakening." Patricia Trenchak hosts the series, and George McCollough did the filming/editing.

In addition to the Storyline series, a scroll down the screen at PrincetonTV.org brings up Donna Liu's video called "Princeton's Water Story," which tells where Princeton's drinking water comes from; a League of Women Voters video of a primary candidates' forum--useful for prepping to vote this coming Tuesday--a Riverwatch series that gives an update on the decline in the population of red knots--an amazing bird that migrates from patagonian Argentina up to the arctic each year, with a very important stopoff for refueling in NJ--and other timely matters. 

Storyline The Great Awakening from Princeton TV on Vimeo.

Video Presentation on Invasive Species

On 11.11.2020 I presented a zoom talk on invasive species as part of a series of monthly talks sponsored by the Sierra Club of NJ--Central Group. The talk was entitled "Invasive Species and the Pandemic: Thinking of Nature as a Body." Thanks to Kip Cherry for inviting me to speak, to Chuck McEnroe for film editing, and to PrincetonTV for posting the talk online.

In the talk, really two talks in one, I tell how vanquishing aggressive invasive species has often been the first step towards creating special places for native diversity to flourish and people to gather. In the second part of the talk, I discuss how my experiences in climate change theater and land management led to the concept of nature as a body. 

Piano Talk -- Original Compositions and Thoughts About Self and World

Maybe not everyone reading this blog knows that, in addition to botanizing and nonprofit leading, I've been a professional jazz musician and composer since college days. Though my main instruments are saxophone and clarinet, I started studying piano in my 20s and got good enough at it to compose music, and even taught piano for awhile to beginners/intermediates in Ann Arbor and later in Durham, NC. 

I've composed hundreds of tunes--ranging from jazz to latin, classical, and blues--and some of the shorter piano pieces I've started recording along with some thoughts on how the tunes work and what they mean to me. With the music comes personal stories, like how I started playing jazz, and thoughts on how the music speaks to our time. The videos are recorded in the unglamorous milieu of my "mancave", where decade-old newspapers are still waiting to be read.

Four of them can be found on my youtube station. Their names are Palindrome, which is built on a musical palindrome, Why Am I So Happy?, which explores how music can simultaneously carry happiness and sadness, Con-tin-u-ing, which is a musical portrayal of long unsolved problems in our world, and The Daughter's Song, which sounded when I wrote it like the theme for a daughter in a play about climate change.