The Plainsboro Preserve is Anything But Plain

(This is an elaboration of a previous post.) A trip to the Audubon Society's Plainsboro Preserve this fall turned a number of notions on their heads. Plain became rich. Far became near. Small became large, and down became up. Reattach the "s" to "plain", and you get "plains", as in fruited plains, and a better sense of how Plainsboro got its name. For those of us who seldom venture beyond Princeton's bubble, it's a surprise to learn that New Jersey's inner coastal plain begins just across Route 1 from the hilly last hurrah of Princeton's piedmont. And with that geologic transition comes a floristic transition I had mistakenly thought would begin much farther south, not within the fifteen minutes it takes to pull into the Plainsboro Preserve's parking lot.

Witness fall colors like these, reflected in an improbably large lake, and any lingering notions of "plain" as in plainness quickly dissipate.

My intrepid guide for this journey of discovery was James Degnen, who has been visiting the preserve for years and has informally adopted a lesser known trail around the lake's eastern side. The trail fades at times, but it's impossible to get lost if one keeps the lake close on one's left.

The first surprise came with a glance down at the ground. Sand and gravel--strange to find so close to Princeton's clay.

He showed me a series of sandy beaches (a sandy beach in inland NJ?), which would be an inviting place to swim, if not

for the sheer dropoff just a few feet out. The quarry operation, now long gone, cut some 60 feet down into the sandy plains.

Though those little bluestem grasses in the photo can be found growing in Princeton,

this bushy bluestem cannot. Also known as Andropogon glomeratus, it's a resident of coastal plains and can be distinguished by its swollen plume on top.

Nor does Princeton host a field like this, radiant with blueberry bushes. Why haven't the trees shaded these blueberries out long ago?

Credit or blame goes to the beavers, whose habitat work is evident everywhere along the edges of the lake.

We may love sweetgum trees for their fall color,

but the beavers love them for their inner bark laden with sweet gum. Their preference is so strong, and the sweetgums so numerous, that we saw no other species of tree being touched by the beavers.

Some sweetgums they leave standing, to cling to life with only small strands of intact bark to maintain flow between root and canopy. One could say this is detrimental, but by sabotaging the normal progression to mature forest, the beavers are maintaining a younger landscape of shrubs and forbs that is every bit as important and beautiful a habitat.

At water's edge, the green of alder mixed with the yellow of summersweet (Clethra) and the sweetgum's bright red.

We found a few freshwater clams, or at least the remains, whose identity might be found in the master plan recently completed for the preserve.

In the gravel near the shore, the impressions left from fish nesting in the spring are still evident.

And what's this glistening white along the shore? Feathers, of geese, of which skilled bird counters counted 25,000 one evening a year or two ago. Through the winter, they use the lake as an overnight refuge after foraging all day in corporate landscapes that dot the NJ landscape.

Two winters ago, when an extended cold snap froze most open water to the north, 2000 snow geese took up brief residence on the lake, an awe inspiring sight, with their brilliant white against the dark background of winter woods.

On our visit, only four Canada geese gave the slightest hint of such abundance.

Plainsboro Preserve is a study in contrasts, between thick woods and open field, and most of all between areas that have been radically altered and those that have not. We walked through mounded landscapes, where dirt was piled up, back in quarry days. Some might point to the trees as evidence that the disturbed areas are now mended, but the area remains stripped of its plant diversity, with little more than Japanese stiltgrass to populate the ground.

In low ground, made passable by dry weather, tussock sedges build their pedestals,

remnant cables sprout and big steel boxes once used as anchors now anchor themselves as permanent mementos of a bygone era.

One anchor actually looks like an anchor, now being slowly grown over and around by a tree.

In contrast to the radically altered areas, a beautiful glade on the far side of the lake sprouted wildflowers rather than cables, and the same lichen that grows an hour south in the pine barrens.

Add to these the summersweet, blueberries, bushy bluestem, the sandy soil, and this field of switch grass, and you have a pine barren in miniature, albeit without the pines, just fifteen minutes from Princeton.

Further around the lake is the outlet, where pipes have been added over time to deal with the overflow from ever larger storms. It's interesting to check out google maps, and learn that the water that leaves this lake in Plainsboro Preserve travels westward, ultimately draining into Lake Carnegie. In this way, Plainsboro is connected hydrologically to Princeton, even though it's closer to the ocean and in a different geologic zone. The Princeton Environmental Resource Inventory , a book I helped to write, provides some useful related info on p. 17.

One sight that rankled a bit, after a glorious walk most of the way around the lake, was Chinese bushclover, which lines the trail on the west side of the lake. Its small seeds are said to be indigestible by wildlife, so the plant's aggressive displacement of native species creates a largely inedible landscape. A big, big problem in North Carolina, where it has escaped from erosion control plantings, it's becoming more numerous in NJ.

There was some evidence that land managers are taking a cue from the beavers and cutting down invasive shrubs like autumn olive.

This plant looked really familiar, seen decades ago in the northeast.

This is where most people walk--a wide path leading back to the visitors' center,

where a row of bee hives

begets rows of honey.

Always nice to have informative signage,

and a good harvest of color in the mind, to last us through winter.

Check out the programming, like monthly moonlit walks, on their website.

The Not So Scary Leaf Pile

For some reason, a pile of leaves can trigger fear in people. There are all sorts of scary rumors about what happens when you make a pile of leaves. Might the leaves attract rats, or catch fire from the heat of decomposition, or cut off oxygen and water to the ground underneath and thereby harm nearby trees? My experience provides these answers: no, no, and no. Then there are scary stories about what a leaf pile won't do. My radio alarm woke me up one weekend morning to a segment of You Bet Your Garden, the entertaining and informative gardening program out of Philadelphia. There was our normally spot-on Mike McGrath warning listeners that a pile of unshredded leaves will not decompose nor reduce in size. Come on, Mike. Just because shredded leaves are a handy item in the yard doesn't mean whole leaves are not.

Still, a scientific background will train your mind not to take any knowledge fully for granted, so I decided to put whole leaves to the test. This past spring, I "corralled" some wet, red oak leaves left over from winter in a circular corral made of green garden fencing. By early August, the pile was 2/3rds its original size.

By October, they had settled to a third the original bulk, and it was time to check inside the pile to see what sort of decomposition had taken place, and also to check what the soil and tree roots looked like underneath the pile.

On the outside, the leaves didn't appear to have decomposed, but that proved to be just a facade disguising the transformation the pile had undergone inside. Peeling away the outer layer of leaves revealed a core of rich, moist compost--enough to fill a large plant pot.

A three foot diameter leaf corral produced twenty pounds of compost, without any effort expended beyond tossing the original filling of the leaf corral this past spring. I may have tossed a shovel full of dirt on the leaves, to "seed" the pile with the micro flora and fauna that do the decomposing, but those would have migrated upward from underneath the pile anyway. There was no mixing of the leaves--the pile did all the transformative work on its own.

And did the pile of leaves, originally three feet high, cut off water and air to the soil underneath? The soil underneath the pile was moist and thick with tree roots. The leaf pile was not killing trees but instead feeding them. Just as the decompositional flora and fauna migrate upward into the pile from the soil underneath, groundwater will "wick" upwards in the soil to keep the underside of a leaf pile moist.

Red oak leaves are some of the more decay-resistant leaves homeowners encounter, and yet they broke down in an untended pile in less than a year. It may have helped that they were wet when they were made into a pile, so the next experiment may be to fill a leaf corral with dry leaves, and see what happens. Hypothesis: Rain, snow, and soil moisture will seep into the pile from above and below, and the pile will decompose in a way that is beneficial to all living things around it.

A leaf pile like this is about as sustainable as you can get. Instead of piling leaves in the street, where they must then be trucked to a composting site, ground, mixed in windrows, turned, screened, re-piled, then carted back into town, with fossil fuel burned for every step, make a pile in your own yard and let nature do all the work. And to model good behavior for your neighbors, integrate a leaf corral into your front yard landscaping rather than hide it in the back.

Make use of the resulting compost, or leave it all for the trees to feast on, so that the leaf corral becomes a bottomless channel for transitioning leaves back into soil. If enough people do this, government expense will go down, and the quality and permeability of urban soils will go up.

A Chicken's First Egg!

We've been without egg production in our backyard for awhile. Daisy the duck, who had laid one egg daily like clockwork for several years, suddenly stopped some months ago. And Buffy, the white Aracana on the left, also decided her egg laying days were done. The three new Aracanas, bought as chicks from Rosedale Mills in the spring, were keeping us in suspense as to whether they'd start laying before winter comes. For the first time in years, I found myself in the grocery store facing shelves stacked high with eggs, trying to make sense of all the cagefree, natural, hormone-free, organic, brown or white, plastic or paper possibilities.

But over the weekend I did a full cleaning and rearrangement of their coop, and changed up the yard a bit, installing my own design of a leaf-corral/food-scrap-composter in a few spots. (More on these nifty devices in a future post.)

Maybe one of the birds took the changes as a cue. Or maybe there's some magic in the date, 11/11--that being the number I see on digital clocks far more often than chance would suggest likely--because the first egg in months appeared in a back corner of the coop this morning.

Now the question is which chicken laid the egg, and will the other two follow suit, ushering in a new era of fresh eggs from the backyard.

Who Put the Honey in Honey Locust?

A quick tidbit here about the pods that fall from honey locust trees around town. There's a honey locust near the old gas station at the Princeton Shopping Center, and another at the entry to the Princeton Healthcare Center just up Harrison Street. Each produces lots of pods that fall and sit on the ground uneaten.

The tree's scientific name, Gleditsia triacanthos, has always jumped immediately to mind since field botany days. Maybe sweetness helps the memory, a sweetness that can be found in the inner lining of the pod. I finally tried it this fall, and found it tasted very strongly of something very familiar, but I couldn't say what. Some flavor of bubble gum? My younger daughter tried it and supplied the answer.

Dried mango.

Of course, do your research and make a positive identification before you try eating anything out there, and there's not a whole lot of it when you break open the pod, but it's fun to think there's a taste treat akin to dried mango going begging in well-traveled spots all over Princeton.

Update, Nov. 9: I forgot to answer the question posed in the title. The answer as to why something sweet is not being eaten, by wildlife or people, is the same as when I posted about the honey locust's seemingly useless thorns two years ago, and is most finely stated in this succinct article: The Trees That Miss the Mammoths. The article will be transformative for many, and comes with a warning:

Warning: Reading this article may cause a whiplash-inducing paradigm shift. You will no longer view wild areas the same way. Your concepts of “pristine wilderness” and “the balance of nature” will be forever compromised. You may even start to see ghosts.

The article bases its view in part on the research of Dan Janzen, whose course on ecology I took back in the '70s. Megafauna like mammoths, giant sloths and mastodons would have eaten massive amounts of vegetation, certainly creating much more open habitats than we have currently. Rereading the article, the thought occurs that the American Indians', who certainly helped bring about the extinction of America's megafauna, may have learned to do frequent burnings of the landscape in part to sustain the more open habitats that would otherwise have been lost after megafauna disappeared.

Thus, in a scattering of seed pods across a groomed piece of turf, can be seen the challenge of defining what is natural as the pieces of the earth's great ecological puzzle continue to be lost.

Naturalist As Actor--Onstage Performance Sunday, 3pm

We briefly shift focus here from outer nature to inner nature. A community documentary theater group I'm in, called Onstage, will perform "A First Time for Everything" this Sunday, November 8, in the Princeton Public Library community room at 3pm. We are based at McCarter Theater, under the direction of McCarter's brilliant assistant artistic director, Adam Immerwahr, and perform at many venues in the area. This is one of our few performances that we can invite the public to attend, so check it out.

More info about our mission and the stories we collect and tell, with a different theme each year, can be found at onstageseniors.org. That's John Abrams and Cecelia Hodges in the photo.

And that's me, at Passage Theatre, just as I first noticed the bald eagle swooping down from stage left in the middle of my monologue.

Close But No Persimmon

Each year, I play this game, and someday soon I'm going to win. In autumn, usually on my way to a university soccer game, I stop by the bridge over Washington Road to see if the persimmons on the trees rising around the bridge are within reach.

Planted as part of the landscaping, the persimmons have that Princetonian orange appeal. Unfortunately, the tight mesh of the fencing discourages any reaching through, even though the persimmons are just a couple feet away. Once they reach the fence, they surely won't taste as sweet as the grapes that Charlie Chaplin plucked from his window in Modern Times, but that seems beside the point.

The Princeton Tiger women's soccer team had a winning season, but for the Princeton Persimmons, it was another building year.

A Steamboat Called SPLASH--Riding the Real Deal on the Delaware River

There's a most improbable coming together of nature and culture, environment and history, on the shores of the Delaware River. Docked in Lambertville, NJ, a short drive from Princeton, it's a steamboat called SPLASH, one of the more serendipitous acronyms to ply the placid waters of a mighty river. SPLASH is short for Student Participation in Learning Aquatic Science and History, and the boat itself is a 40 foot version of steamboats that once stretched to 300 feet in their heyday in the 19th century.

All the splashing water is in the stern, where an authentic and fully functional paddlewheel propels the boat forward, but as a fully functional steamboat, the vessel and its mission make quite a splash on the Delaware River scene.

I can identify with this boat. It has midwestern roots, came of age in Ohio in the 1970s, went through a number of metamorphoses while casting about for a purpose in life, and finally found meaning doing environmental work in New Jersey.

Offering rides for school groups or private events, it was in full environmental mode when I took a ride at the invitation of Eric Clark. One of the "floating classrooms" is in the bow, where we scooped up some river water and tested its quality.

Pour some water in a test-tube, add a drop or two of diagnostic solution, and match the resulting color to colors on a chart. I forget the numbers we ascribed to the water that day, but the overall sentiment was "not bad".

Meanwhile, upstairs Kelsey McNeely was describing how she uses an Enviroscape to teach kids about how rivers receive pollution from streets and chemically treated lawns.

Squirt bottles of colored water represent the different sorts of nonpoint pollution that flow, silently and usually unnoticed, downhill into the Delaware. The rain we view as a cleansing of the cityscape is experienced by the fish and other aquatic life as a pulse of pollution. Hardly seems fair. Kelsey offered suggestions of how to reduce the pollution towns generate.

Since the steamboat is called "America's first great invention", it was appropriate to have educator and inventor Brian Patton displaying robots made by some of his students, with some of the parts constructed using 3-D printers.

The cleverness that goes into making these robots was also applied to Brian's Midget MG, a tiny sports car that he and his students converted to electric after a rod in the engine broke. Its bank of lead acid batteries has enough range to dependably get him around Lambertville.

Take some steps down to the third classroom to journey back a couple hundred years to the beginnings of the steamboat era. Food was provided, lest we run out of steam during our time travels. Engineer Pete Burns explained the workings of the steamboat while he tweaked the controls to keep the boat running smoothly.

Seems to me paddleboats marked a pivotal point in our relationship to nature. Prior to the steamboat's invention, the paddlewheel had harnessed water power to drive the machinery in watermills. In a steamboat, a machine drives the paddlewheel which in turn moves the water.

Along with the fragrance of well-oiled metal, there's a Rube Goldberg quality to the elaborate sequence of rods, joints and dials that make the steamboat work. Those cups of oil in the upper left marked a big step forward in steamboat technology. Invented by Elijah McCoy, son of fugitive slaves who had escaped to Canada before returning to the U.S., the cups automatically dripped oil onto moving parts, greatly reducing the maintenance required to keep steamboats running. McCoy was a prolific inventor who made his home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which by coincidence is where my older daughter was born.

Some internet searches later on revealed how deeply connected the invention of steamboats is to the Delaware River and the birth of our nation. The steamboat era is said to have begun in 1787 when the first successful trial took place in Philadelphia, viewed by members of the U.S. Constitutional Convention.

There is an incredible backstory to this boat now known as SPLASH. Once called the "Shawnee Princess", the boat was abandoned in the 1990s and became a home for critters in an Ohio park, when a Princeton University psychology professor named Bert Hoebel tracked her down. Overcoming what for less passionate people would have been insurmountable problems of transport, he was able to bring the deteriorated remains of the boat to New Jersey, where it underwent a total rehabilitation, funded in part by money raised by preserving his farm through the sale of development rights. Six years and nearly $200,000 later, Hoebel's dream was realized when SPLASH was launched in 2004. Though Hoebel died in 2011, his vision continues through the nonprofit Steamboat Floating Classroom.

Like all nonprofits, they need volunteers, donors and support. Though the boat goes into hibernation during the winter, their website offers lots of info, including a fuller telling of the boat's amazing history and rehab.

Beyond the admirable educational mission, there's an authenticity to the boat and to the setting that seeps in during the ride. I grew up on a lake where a vessel called The Lady of the Lake would make the rounds, carrying tourists. It looked like a steamboat, but there was no real steam, and the paddlewheel's rotation was for show, not propulsion. It's a double deception, because the expression, "the real McCoy", comes from the steamboat tradition.

With SPLASH, the authenticity begins with the massive ash tree that stands on the bluff overlooking the dock. The tree looks like it could have witnessed the first steamboats on the Delaware 200 years ago.

The steam rising from the stern is real.

The dials in the engine room all function.

We passed enduring icons like the Bucks County Playhouse, 

the bridge to New Hope, PA, 

took in some of the river scene, with rowers and dragon boaters honing their skills, and felt above all the influence of the water, which in its easy acquiescence to gravity demonstrates how to relax. My favorite spot on the boat is in the bow, which glides quietly forward just inches above the water, offering endlessly varied reflections and a view of the river bottom.

With some nature and culture, education in history and environment,

it's all sure to bring a smile.