Woodcock Camouflage

I was startled by a woodcock a few days ago, when it flew up just a few feet away from me. It flew only twenty feet, though, before disappearing into the leafy background of the forest floor. I stopped what I was doing and stalked the bird, my point-and-shoot camera ready but hardly up to the task of capturing my prey.

The scarcity of birds on this website has a lot to do with their being equipped with wings and legs. The best that can be said about my aging Canon Powershot is that it represents nature as it's experienced in the field.

So it's time to test your visual acuity in a game of Find the Woodcock in the Leaves.

There was a nice piece on NPR three years ago about the woodcock's mating flight, which can be witnessed in fields around Princeton at dusk this time of year. The meadows at Tusculum, which adjoins Mountain Lakes, might be a good bet.

Mending Optimism, Mending Nature

It's a time of sleeping promise at Mountain Lakes Preserve. I'm not up on plant medicines, but if one's optimism is being beaten down by the world, flower buds on a spicebush can be a salve. Those buds tell of flowers to come, and also lipid-rich berries that will help birds get where they need to go this coming fall.

The abundance of buds on this stem owes to the direct sunlight this particular shrub gets during the summer, next to a sewer right of way that's kept clear of trees. The productivity of a nature preserve must be judged not only by its trees, but also by whether enough sunlight is getting through to sustain healthy shrub and herbaceous layers closer to the ground.

One participant in our nature walk last week pointed out that spicebush can be identified in winter by using a scratch and sniff test. Scratch the stem and smell the spicy aroma.

The many spicebushes in the preserve serve as historians, always ready to tell their story to anyone with the relevant reading skills. Each of the two shrubs in the photo have a single large stem surrounded by many smaller ones. The large stems predate the explosion in the deer population that peaked about ten years ago.

During those years when deer numbers were very high, the deer were so desperate for food that they would eat new spicebush sprouts to the ground each winter. Only the old stems, tall enough to be out of reach, allowed the spicebush to survive. Since the township began bringing deer numbers back into ecological balance, new sprouts have been able to grow to maturity, producing berries needed by wildlife.

Once new stems grow tall, a shrub will often allow its old stem to die, its function as a lifeline through hard times done. Counting the growth rings of one of the younger stems would likely reveal when browsing pressure began to drop.

During yesterday's walk, we stopped to help out one of the few native hazelnuts in the preserve. Andrew (left) is cutting exotic Photinia shrubs while Annarie and Clark cut Japanese honeysuckle and Asian bittersweet vines off the hazelnut. We left one vine growing--a native grape that bears large, delicious grapes in the fall.

Though some might be skeptical, it is enormously satisfying to do invasive plant control in the winter, while nature is asleep. We function in the woods much like dreams do in the sleeping mind, relieving stress so that when nature awakes in the spring it finds itself mended.

I used to follow the rule that one should bend down and cut stems of invasive shrubs to the ground, but as I get older, that rule becomes a very attractive one to break. The freshly cut stems are treated with a dab of glyphosate to prevent regrowth.

Foundation plantings in town may feature crocuses just starting to bloom, but out in low-lying woods, it's skunk cabbage that has sent up its hooded flower.

Variations on an Icicle, in 3 Parts

It's not every day that stalactites grow in a town park. If any toddlers toddled in to the deep snow in Potts Park recently, they might have taken a liking to these mass-produced icicles underneath a picnic table.

My summer fountain, which runs whenever there's a rain, turned into a frozen waterfall as snow slowly melted from the roof.

The third variation is the standard version of an icicle, whose reflection is visible on the window in the upper right corner of the photo.

Patterns In Carnegie Lake Ice

Walking over the Harrison Street bridge one day in late January, before the big snows, I happened to look down and noticed that Carnegie Lake had become one giant horizontal, black and white stained glass window.

I hadn't kept track of the weather, so can't begin to speculate on what forces might have formed such elaborate patterns.

This closeup gives the best comparison to stained glass patterns, including a shape that could be taken for a flower in the upper left.

White Pines Get a Natural Pruning

The weight of recent snows took a heavy toll on the branches of white pines, which could be seen scattered on the ground all over town. Though some pines that grow further south, such as loblolly and shortleaf pines, are self-pruning, white pines only get pruned by people or ice and snow.

The scars of ice and snowstorms present and past can be found by looking up the trunk.

Looks like some kids decided the fallen branches would make a neat little shelter at Quarry Park in the borough, though closer inspection suggests that not all the branches fell naturally. It's nice that some stubs were left--useful for (resiny) climbing.

White pines can be identified by their clusters of five needles (other common species have two or three per cluster), and also the way their branches come out in whorls along the trunk. One whorl is produced each year. Count the whorls and you have the age of the tree.

Mona Lisa and the Pixelation of Nature

Back in my twenties, when my argument with the world was about the very foundations of our culture, I often thought of nature as a work of art (the Mona Lisa always came to mind) that was being defaced by freeways and other human impositions on the landscape.

It was surprising to hear people speak of nature as chaotic. They saw plants springing up helter skelter in the woods, while I saw a sophisticated order, with each species adapted to a particular niche. Red maples, for instance, weren't just growing anywhere in the woods. They were typically in low wet areas, turning floodplains into a haze of red in the early spring, while sugar maples thrived on higher ground. Soil, sunlight, water, slope--all helped determine what would be found growing where. The order and synchrony were there to be found by anyone with the patience to learn and observe.

I recently found this sequence of photos in the hallway at the Princeton University's Friends Center. Listed in the credits are J. Alex Halderman and others at the Center for Information Technology Policy.

Though the purpose of the sequence is to show how computer data lingers for seconds or minutes after a computer is turned off--something called "memory remanence"--it accurately portrays the status of landscapes as their natural order and ecological balance is slowly undermined by development, invasive species introduction, heavy deer browsing pressure and any number of other impacts. Habitat restoration is in some ways like art restoration, removing the accumulated glaze of exotic species so that the hidden remnants of a pre-existing balance can rebound.

With time, some of the original colors will come back into view. At Mountain Lakes, this will be seen early this spring as spicebush gives a soft yellow hue to areas where it was formerly being eaten to the ground or shaded out by exotic shrubs.

There is, too, an analogy with digital photography. The sparse understory of most any woods appears pixelated these days to anyone with a memory of the rich, diverse array of wildflowers that once carpeted the ground. Though the woods still appears green, the patterns of a healthy order have sometimes faded beyond recognition.

Vines in Winter

Fortunately, Mountain Lakes Preserve has not been invaded by Bermese pythons (check out NOVA this coming Tuesday on PBS), despite the appearance of this poison ivy vine. It looks like it grew a winter coat, but poison ivy vines are always hairy, which rhymes with scary.

In this photo, the poison ivy is almost as big as the tree its climbing on. Looks like an angler stashed some fishing line inbetween the two.

Further up, it looks like the tree has lots of branches, but these are actually the vine's lateral shoots, which will bear flowers and berries later on. What we have here is essentially a poison ivy tree held upright with the help of a "donated" trunk.

The vine with the shaggy Irish setter-like bark is wild grape.

Native vines like poison ivy and wild grape tend not to grow in a way that would strangle the trees that support them.

Japanese honeysuckle, on the other hand, was spiraling up this shrub in a way that would eventually choke it. The trunk of the shrub was already getting distorted by the vine's tight grip. Note exotic honeysuckle vine's stringy bark, lighter in color than wild grape.

Turned out that the shrub was an exotic Asian photinia, so we cut both the shrub and the vine.

Asian bittersweet is very common at Mountain Lakes, identified in winter by its gray bark and large size. I had hoped to learn to distinguish it from native bittersweet before starting large scale removal, but it's likely that no native bittersweet remains in the park, or has lost any clear identity through hybridization with the exotic species.

Snow as a Visual Aid

It's usually very difficult to photograph a woods so that you can see individual plants clearly. The result tends to be a green blob, whether the woods is degraded or healthy. Snow can change all that. Look in the middle of this photo, and you can see how snow highlights and makes visible hundreds of invasive winged euonymus shrubs that have sprouted from seed on a slope between Mountain Lakes and Coventry Farm.

Meanwhile, the blackened snow lining city streets helps reveal what in other seasons is rarely noticed: all the soot and crud left behind by auto exhaust, oil drippings, and the gradual wearing down of tires and brake linings. All of this gets swept into the local creek, which in this photo is Harry's Brook, flowing under the road where it dips down in the distance.

Given enough time, the snow will turn completely black with soot. This crud is what we are feeding to all the aquatic life in the local streams.

Throwaway Culture Lingers On a Branch

One day a few weeks back I heard a great beating of wings in the backyard. Could it be the hawk I'd seen coming through now and then, which a birder friend told me might be an immature redtail looking for a nice feathery snack for lunch?

I turned towards the sound and saw ..... a plastic bag caught on a limb, flapping noisily in the wind. It fooled me several times more during the windy days that followed, and even when it wasn't playing with my expectations, it was stirring memories:

..... of documentaries at the recent Princeton Environmental Film Festival that told of vast gyres of plastic trash collecting far out in the ocean. The plastic absorbs pollution from the water, then gets inadvertently swallowed by fish or whales, whose stomachs slowly fill with toxic, indigestible plastic.

..... or the time a decade back when I visited the far south of Argentina's Patagonia. There, the summer wind blows so strong it can yank a plastic bag out of your hand and send it sailing down the street, to catch on distant fencelines or any plant brave enough to grow more than a few inches high. Some fields of desert scrub, downwind of town, fooled me, too, appearing at first glance to be in full bloom, decked out in the white of fugitive plastic.

From its perch high in a backyard tree, that's what a deceptive bag is saying to all who will listen: "Don't be fooled. Little things add up."

A Flurry of Activity at Mountain Lakes

Even before the snowstorms hit last week, this winter has been marked by a flurry of activity at Mountain Lakes, with a blizzard to follow, come summer.

Here, two FOPOS board members, Clark Lennon and Tim Patrick-Miller, are removing invasive shrubs from an area near the Mountain Lakes House, as part of a beautification of the grounds that's starting to gain some momentum.

A couple hundred yards southeast of the house, visitors to Mountain Lakes may have noticed some pink ribbons showing up in one area of the woods. The trees have been numbered, measured and mapped so that a location can be chosen for a clearing, to be used as a staging area for the dam restoration and lake dredging work scheduled to begin in July.

Much discussion has gone in to selecting an area that will disturb as few of the marked trees as possible. Township engineers have been working closely with FOPOS (Friends of Princeton Open Space), which holds the conservation easement on the property and has to approve various aspects of the proposed work.

For those interested, the township will present its plans for the dam restoration and dredging project, and accept public comment, on March 1st at 7pm in the Main Meeting Room of the Township Municipal Building.

Patterns in a Backyard Pond

A backyard minipond serves as a canvas for nature's artwork in the winter. Embedded in the beauty is many a physics lesson: the rock that melts the ice above, the leaf that melts the ice below, the bubbles trapped beneath and within, and the forces at work in forming all those loops and squiggles.

The impulses of kids to walk on ice or try to break it are safely explored on a shallow minipond like this.

We were surprised to discover that beneath the ice was not water but air. After the ice forms, the water beneath continues to be absorbed into the underlying soil, leaving a gap.

Seeing Promise in a Puddle

Some people might look at this December scene and see a drainage problem. I see a spot begging to become a wetland garden, so that some small portion of stately but static grounds can be devoted to habitat and color.

Wind at Work

Question: How could the wind fashion snow to look like a cross-hatching of shingles?

Answer: Until a better one comes along, Bob Dylan's answer will have to do.

Inadvertent Habitat

Until I started using firewood in December,

it hadn't occurred to me how perfect a woodpile is for storing acorns, sheltering a nest of mice,

or biding over the next generation of moths until spring.

The mice may well have provided food for the screech owls that nested in one of our trees last year.

In the future, I'm thinking of making enough woodpiles that some may stay through the winter, as compact habitat serving the varied needs of varied critters.

Stickseed Seeds Stick Around

This was one of my sharings at a December meeting of Procrastinators Anonymous--workpants so intimidatingly covered with stickseed burs that they remained in a heap in the basement for four months. My mind of big ideas resisted this nit pick picking project until winter slowed me down.

Stickseed (Hackelia virginiana) is deceptive in multiple ways. In the borage family, it starts out in the summer looking like a classy plant with ornamental possibilities. But its flowers turn out to be tiny, and instead of reaching some point of mature beauty, it fades into the background and sets a trap. The leaves dry up, leaving only a delicate frame that holds aloft hundreds of burrs through fall and winter. I've learned to keep an eye out for this plant, lest I become yet again an unwitting disseminator of its seeds.

Living Fossils in Princeton

Still Life of the Still Living:

Ginkgo biloba--leaf and twig with "short shoots".

A very informative article describes three tree species that are living fossils, a term used for species that are found both alive and in the fossil record, and have few living relatives.

Along with the ginkgo, the article mentions sweetgum and dawn redwood. All three can be found growing in Princeton. Sweetgum is native to North America, the others to Asia.

Deer Accident Data for Princeton

I just spoke to Princeton's animal control officer, who told me that Princeton township's deer control program has markedly reduced the number of auto accidents involving deer. When the program was started, around 2000, there were 346 accidents involving deer. The number of accidents has been dropping since then, and has leveled out over the past several years at 70 to 90 accidents per year.

What happens to deer that are killed by automobiles? There was a time when some of them were taken to Coventry Farm, where a lady used them to feed the vultures. She developed quite a following in the vulture community over time. These days, a contractor carts them away and turns them into fertilizer.

Reviews of Movies at the Library Environmental Film Festival

I've posted some reviews of upcoming movies at the Princeton Public Library's Environmental Film Festival at my PrincetonProject blog, which deals with issues of sustainability in Princeton.

Mountain Lakes in Winter

The recent cold spell made for lovely patterns of ice on the upper dam at Mountain Lakes Preserve. Warmed by the sun, these columns of ice were starting to break off of the face of the dam, as if from the face of a glacier, sending ripples of sound through the thin ice covering the lake.

Dirt! The Movie

Tomorrow, Jan. 7 at noon, there will be a showing of Dirt! The Movie at the Princeton Public Library. The movie documents how vital and multifaceted our connection with dirt is. Though often treated as something inert and expendable, dirt is portrayed in the movie as teaming with life, utilized not only for growing food but also for play, spirituality, water filtration, home construction, pottery, and even energy production. Interviews in India, Africa and the U.S. provide a broad portrait of how dirt is used and related to in different cultures.
I'll give a short presentation afterwards about local soils, including some surprises about how gardening values like fertility and earthworms don't necessarily translate well to lands dedicated to preserving biodiversity.

FILM: Dirt! The Movie

12:00 p.m.

Directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow

2009

Running time: 90 minutes

http://www.princeton.lib.nj.us/peff/schedule.htm

Free Sustainable Jazz Performance, Saturday, Jan. 2, 5:45

Come hear the Sustainable Jazz Ensemble perform this Saturday at the opening night party for the Princeton Public Library's annual Environmental Film Festival. We'll start soon after the discussion following the excellent bicycle movie "Veer". We'll be playing music I composed since moving to Princeton six years ago, with titles like The Case of the Kidnapped Kalypso, Fresh Paint (composed while breathing latex fumes in a freshly painted room), Lejos de Aqui (Far from Here), Lunar Eclipse (composed while forgetting to check out the lunar eclipse that was going on outside). Phil Orr's on piano, Jerry D'Anna's on bass, and I'll be playing saxophone.

There will be some light refreshments available later in our performance, but you're welcome to byof, since it's happening around dinnertime.

Info on all the extraordinary movies to be shown over the next two weeks can be found at http://www.princeton.lib.nj.us/peff/schedule.htm.

A Bluejay in a (not so) Bare Tree

My daughter gave me a tree drawing today, which fits in well with what I had started writing about an oak tree not far from our house:

Oaks are among the most giving of trees. They play host to more than 500 species of butterflies and moths--more than any other kind of tree hereabouts. When I lived in the Midwest, my backyard looked out upon two massive bur oaks that, as the squirrels traveled their long limbs, seemed like whole cities unto themselves.

You'd think, at this time of year, as trees stand stark against the wintry sky, that the oaks' giving would be done until spring. Most do appear lifeless and abandoned. So it was surprising to be walking in the neighborhood one recent sunny afternoon and look up to find an oak full of birds hard at work, harvesting a largely invisible crop. Four bluejays, three nuthatches, two mourning doves, and a flicker in a bare tree, or so a song might go. Most acrobatic were the bluejays, clinging upside down to wispy twigs to pluck the pin oak's small acorns, then bracing the morsels between their feet while they pecked them open.

On this day of giving, a time to celebrate trees, both giving and given.

Invasive Shrub Color

In fall, the local woods become a color-coded forest, making it easy to tell at a glance what species are growing where. Trying to take at least some advantage of this, I headed out in a car to survey where Asian photinia has invaded our nature preserves. The combination of its yellowish orange color and customary growth form aid in identification from the road.

Here's a new invasion getting going up on Mt. Lucas.

Once Photinia has lost its leaves, the honeysuckles are still green, revealing just how extensive is their invasion of the woods. That they hold their leaves long after native woody plants have dropped theirs suggests that the exotic honeysuckles evolved in a climate with a longer growing season.

Mountain Lakes Projects--Butternuts, Plant Rescue

Have a spicebush! As part of a planting project around Mountain Lakes House, Friends of Princeton Open Space board member Tim Patrick-Miller led a plant rescue on the old lower dam at Mountain Lakes. The dam will be enlarged this coming year, burying all existing vegetation. All told, we rescued five spicebush shrubs and four swamp rose.

In another project, initiated by Princeton resident Bill Sachs, we planted 20 butternut seeds outdoors, then covered them with metal screening to prevent pillaging by squirrels.

The butternut is a rare native tree threatened by an imported canker disease that is reducing their numbers even further. Bill, who edits the Nutshell, a newsletter for the Northern Nutgrowers Association, has been scouting out where these trees can still be found in Princeton. Until we get DNA analysis, we won't know whether the trees found are the native butternut, or a hybrid with an imported species.