Zentangle® - October 2016

At the end of each month, I scan all the Zentangle® tiles I created during the month and pick tiles for the monthly post – with a maximum set by the number of days in the month. October is a 31-day month so that’s how many tiles made it to the slide show below. I had 48 when I started and found it hard to pick 17 that would not make the cut.

I’m using the colored pens this month…and filling in solid areas. Some of the tiles are on paper that does not soak up the ink (leaving ink blots); it is lightweight packaging material that came with something we ordered…I should put the rest of the blank tiles I cut from it into the recycle.

I managed to create tiles even while we were camping last week!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Spider Webs in the Meadow

I’m using spider web photographs taken over the past month as my theme for this Halloween post. It seems like October 2016 was a good month for seeing photo-worthy webs…or maybe I was just out at the right time of day: morning before the dew had time to evaporate. The vegetation isn’t quite as dense this time of year either. Sometimes the web makes a complex pattern made visible by water droplets.

Sometimes the strands of silk are gentle arcs between pieces of vegetation. Are these strands the remains of an elaborate web torn by the wind?

Sometimes there is a web that is missing its middle. In all these cases – I might not have noticed the web with the dew on it.

But here are exceptions. I’m not sure how I spotted this one through the vegetation with water droplets. The light must have been just right.

And what about a very different web. This one was built over a hole in a tree….almost exactly at my eye level!

Packing for the Staunton River Star Party

Last week we drove down the Staunton River State Park in southern Virginia for the fall Star Party. We went last year but only stayed two days (blog post from last fall here). This time we made sure we remembered the tent! The picture I’m including with this post was while we were packing. By the time we were finished we had almost every nook and cranny in the back of the car packed with gear.

We were taking enough food so we would only ‘buy’ one meal per day at the 6-day event. My staples were salad stuff and mixed nuts; my husband had makings for sandwiches and cashews. I made zucchini bread to eat as part of our breakfast…and there were chips (a treat since a don’t normally buy them).

The telescope and associated equipment take up a fair amount of space as well. My husband ended up not taking the solar telescope to save some space for other necessities. Stay tune for more about our 2016 adventure at the Staunton River Star Party later this week.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 29, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

The world’s knowledge is being buried in a salt mine – The Memory of Mankind project is creating a modern version of Sumerian tablets discovered in the desert. The storage area is one of the oldest salt mines in the world – in the Austrian mountains.’ Ceramic microfilm’ Is being created to hold the information in a way that can withstand acid and alkali environments…and solar storm.

The Bug’s Camouflage is Very Impressive – A Lichen Katydid. In our area, the pray mantises are almost as good at blending into their environment!

Can wild seeds save us from food apocalypse? – A little history…a little status report…how and why seed banks are needed.

‘Shadow method’ reveals locomotion of secrets of water striders – We often point out water striders to our elementary school hiking groups. They are always intrigued by the insect that can ‘walk on water.’

In new ozone alert, a warning of harm to plants and to people – Snap beans, milkweed, coneflowers, and other plants turn brown and sickly when ozone occurs at ground level – becoming bio-indicators for this pollutant. While pollution controls have brought down the peak ozone levels, the background levels have been increasing.

Photo of the Week – October 14, 2016 – Fall photos from The Prairie Ecologist.

The amazing cloud cities we could build on Venus – With ‘going to Mars’ being so much in the news recently, it was interesting to read about why Venus might have some advantages over Mars for colonialization.

New satellite image database maps the dynamics of human presence on Earth – Data to support the first release of the ‘Atlas of the Human Planet’ – increasing our understanding of urban areas, population density, and the amount of vegetation in urban areas….and more.

Why do octopuses remind us so much of ourselves? – From National Geographic – so great pictures and article. An octopus has about as many neurons as a cat but two-thirds of them are in their arms!

Pediatricians update digital media recommendation for kids – Hopefully pediatricians bring up this topic with parents. The recommendations seem like common sense to me but maybe they are not intuitive to everyone.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – October 2016

More than half my ‘little celebrations’ this month were place/activity specify. There were 3 celebrations of familiar places/activities:

• I spent 4 mornings at Belmont for BioBlitz with fifth graders. The weather was near perfect – much better than the wet weather for the event last spring. Every day held a few surprises and I was pleased that my husband joined me this fall rather than my volunteering on my own.
• My walk around Brookside was a fall morning – a little cool – that was near perfect for walking around the garden loop. I’ll have to go back to see the mum exhibit in the conservatories.
• Mt. Pleasant Farm is probably one of my favorite places in the fall. What’s not to like about hiking with elementary school field trips! This fall the 1^st grades were the most frequent visitors. I got plenty of practice leading those hikes.

Another 3 of new places/activities:

• I’d never been to State College (Penn State) before. We picked a great weekend to go – colorful fall squash, gourds and leaves everywhere.
• Waggoner’s Gap was also new. The weather was not great for raptor spotting…so I celebrating finding the place….but want to go back again to actually spot some birds.
• Being with high schoolers assessing the Middle Patuxent River at Eden Brook was new too. The place was full of fall leaves and the river had plenty of scenic variety….and the perspective of high schoolers doing field work (sometimes with water flowing over the tops of their boots) added elements to the celebration that went beyond just going to the place on my own.

There were some serendipity sights that I celebrated via photography:

• Getting out to the meadow before the dew dried to photograph spider webs and
• Bright fungus growing on a tree where lightning had struck (and killed the tree).

And mixed in with those celebrations was one ‘lazy day’ that I celebrated because it was so different from the rest of the month!

3 Free eBooks – October 2016

There were some beautiful books I looked through online in October. Here are my picks for the top 3.

Brooke, E. Adveno. The Gardens of England. London: T. McLean. 1858. Available from the Internet Archive here. The illustrations are a step back into the mid-1800s both in terms of the grand gardens that surrounded large estates and how people interacted with them.

Harrap, Anne and Simon. Orchids of Britain and Ireland: A field and site guide. London: A&C Black. 2010. Available from the Internet Archive here. Skipped ahead by almost 150 years…and color photography! I am always partial the slipper orchids.

Duncan, James; Cuvier, Georges. The Natural History of British Butterflies. Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars. 1840. Available from HathiTrush here. As I looked through the images in this book, I wondered how many of these butterflies still exist. A lot has happened to the environment since 1840.

Enjoy!

The Middle Patuxent River at Eden Brook

Last week, I volunteered for a local high school’s assessment of river near their school – the Middle Patuxent River at the end of Eden Brook Drive. The high schools start early in our county so the volunteers were asked to be on location to set up by 7 AM (the students to arrive at 7:30). It was still pretty dark when I left my house. My role was part of the abiotic assessment – looking at the corridor of the river. The old bridge abutment was a good place to look up and down the river for the assessment. The bridge had washed away in some flood event (hurricane) years ago and not been rebuilt. I had a table for the materials the students would need.

There was fall color to each side and lots of leaves that had already fall.

I zoomed in on the crumbling abutment on the opposite side of the river.

Some of the concrete was providing nooks for leaves. The brush that might have done the same function had been lifted far above the current water level in the last flood.

To the right was a table set up to support a group of students looking for macroinvertebrates.

There was another table to the left. There would be 6 groups of students in all; three would do the macroinvertebrate search and three would do abiotic assessments. The students would rotate so that they all got an opportunity to do all the activities.

We unloaded boots for students that would working in the river....and we were ready for the students. There as a few minutes of calm.

And then the flurry of 60ish students arriving….half of them putting on boots and going to the river. Data sheets being filled out. It was 2 hours full of activity as all 6 groups fo students rotated through my activity.

The weather was near perfect…the students were exuberant…it was great day for a stream assessment. It's a suburban river - with a lot of problems associated with impervious surfaces and extra 'stuff' from lawns and roads and lots of people getting into the water....but the county had made the banks into an undeveloped park; the situation could improve for the river. I want to go back to hike in the area before all the leaves are completely off the trees – a fall foliage hike close to home.

Zooming – October 2016

I got a new camera this month and have been doing some experiments with the increase optical zoom (that also translates to increased digital zoom. I’m sharing some of my favorites in the Zooming post for this month. There were two pictures of milkweed bugs from early and late in the month. There are at least 4 instars of the insects in the ‘leaf’ picture and fewer in the second picture. Maybe it is getting late enough in the season that there are not new milkweed bugs hatching from eggs.

I like the zoom for photographing insects because I like not disturbing them. It’s even more important for insects that sting like the bee on the asters

Or the wasp that seems to be looking underneath the milkweed leaf.

Sometimes it just works better because the insect will fly away more quickly if I get too close – like this bumble bee.

Sometimes there are items that catch my eye because they seem to be spotlighted – like this fall leaf stuck in other vegetation that seems to glow in the morning sunlight.

One morning before I was scheduled to hike with first graders I heard a noise high in the tree above me and I finally spotted the noise maker – a squirrel gnawing on a black walnut; it takes a lot of work to get the nut inside.

I don’t photograph my cats very often. They don’t like cameras….but staying further away and using the zoom was effective – once.

Moving Day - Fall 1994

I found a set of pictures my daughter took the day we moved into our house in the fall of 1994 – and promptly scanned them. She was 5 years old and in kindergarten. She documented ordinary things – like the view of the partially unloaded moving van.

She also took pictures from the front porch of the house. The small tree with red leaves by the mailbox is an oak that is now almost too big for me to reach around (and it a major contributor to the leaves on our front lawn that I need to rake every fall).

Taking a slightly different view – the small tree near the front of the van was a maple that was never healthy. It eventually died and we replaced it with a red leafed plum. Across the street the ever greens are now very tall. Twenty-two years does make a difference in the tree size all through the neighborhood.

But my favorite picture is one that shows the perspective of a 5-year-old --- the washing machine coming into the house!

Waggoner’s Gap

On the way home from State College, we stopped at Waggoner’s Gap – a place known for being an excellent place to watch the fall hawk migration will thousands of birds migrating overhead between mid-August and December. We’d heard about it from some birding friends and decided to see what it was like even though the viewing was not optimal with low lying clouds overhead. We decided this would just be a reconnoiter type stop and we’d come back on a day when the weather was better. It was scenic drive through central Pennsylvania countryside west of Harrisburg to the small lot for the site.

There were clear maps of the trails up to the viewing area and ridge at the beginning of the trail and trail junctions.

The trail was over rocks and was marked by bird stencils. Do you see the orange stenciled bird in the  pictures? It did make it easier to pay attention to not tripping over rocks to have the markings at your feet rather than at eye level on trees.

At the top – there is a few of the colorful forest below and the valley beyond. Next time we’ll pick a day with fewer clouds, pack everything in a backpack rather than having anything in our hands (the hike is not hard but is over rocks, better to have both hands free) and plan to stay longer. I’d like to refine my skills at identifying raptors in flight!

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 22, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Invisible Details of Tiny Creatures Uncovered with Laser-Microscope Photos – Details of small creatures…how much of the world we miss entirely if we look only with our un-aided eyes.

What do Americans fear? – Evidently this is the third annual Survey of American Fears from Chapman University.

Obituary for the 25-million-year-old Great Barrier Reef – Another way to think about our impact on Earth.

Sweet Science of Honey – Did you know that honey is anti-microbial and it fights bacteria on multiple levels? So far, honey has not been shown to contribute to resistance either.

Hypothyroidism symptoms linger despite medication use, normal blood tests – A study that shows that not everyone gets symptom relief from the current standard treatment with levothyroxine…and that the medical community is finally beginning to notice.

10 Great Butternut Squash Recipes for Fall and Winter – I like butternut squash so I am always on the lookout for good recipes. Most of the time butternut squash, pumpkin and sweet potatoes can be substituted for each other in recipes too!

Cicada wings inspire antireflective surfaces – Another example of getting materials engineering ideas from nature.

Skip the Math: Researchers Paint Pictures of Health Benefits and Risks – It’s hard to understand the trade-offs involved in many tests and medicines. I was glad to see this attempt --- and hope that doctors become more savvy too.

Calcium supplements may damage the heart – There are growing concerns about potential harms of supplements…and this study about calcium is one example of studies behind that growing concern. The analysis of 10 years of medical tests on more than 2,700 people revealed that while a diet rich in calcium is protective…taking calcium supplements may increase the risk of plaque buildup in arteries and hear damage!

Why sentient tools will be catastrophic to the job market – Sentient tools (example: autonomous cars, warehouse workers, delivery people) are not as ‘sci-fi’ as they used to be. We see early examples of many of them. They will become increasingly able to outperform humans in a variety of jobs. Think of the ripple effect of autonomous cars – on insurance company revenues, on emergency services, on taxi drivers!

Pumpkins and Gourds

There as a display of carved pumpkins at the Botanical Garden at Penn State when we were there last weekend but I enjoyed the piles of whole pumpkins, squashes, and gourds more – so that is what I photographed. Some were stacked like cairns, others were arranged on shallow stairs, or drifted around pots of fall blooming plants. This is the kind of display I associate with fall as much as piles of raked leaves!

Sometimes their shape and texture makes them a stand out among all the rest.

My favorite display was in the children’s part of the Botanical Garden: a big bowl full of gourds and squashes. See the tubes mounted on the frame? Those are kaleidoscopes. There were steps so that even a small child could take a look!

Here’s the view through one of the kaleidoscopes when the bowl was still. I didn’t attempt a picture when the bowl was moving. What a great active sculpture for a Children’s Garden!

Fall Walk Around Penn State

What’s not to like about a sunny fall day with colorful leaves – maybe not in abundance but clearly visible. We started in Botanical Garden and then walked down through part of the Penn State campus –

Making the building where my daughter might do a post doc after she finishes up grad school as our on-campus destination.

It was a busy weekend with high school seniors and their parents visiting too.

The Botanical Garden included water features,

Colorful curves over a gate,

Sculptures of snakes on sunny rocks (in positions that real snakes might like),

And some larger sculptures that were holding pumpkins in keeping with the pumpkin carvings being displayed on many low walls (more on this in tomorrow’s post).

There were a few small butterflies in the pollinator’s garden too – I couldn’t resist testing the increased ‘zoom’ capability on my new camera!

Mid-October Road Trip

We made a fall foliage road trip last weekend from our home between Washington DC and Baltimore MD to State College Pennsylvania. We headed out on I 70 to western Maryland and then I99 to State College. Our first rest stop was in Maryland – the South Mountain Welcome Center with a rock façade (maybe from a local source?) and the morning sun showing off a little change in the leave color.

The next rest stop was the Pennsylvania Welcome Center (still on I70). That had big sunflowers in various stages of development. It was easy to see how the seeds look as they begin to mature.

Two of the flowers I photographed had bugs in them (I discovered when I looked at them on the big screen of my monitor. This one looks like and assassin bug

And then was is a milkweed bug.

Just after we left the welcome center – we started to see more color. It wasn’t the peak of fall foliage colors…but a beginning.

There was also fog hanging in the valleys…with a clear sky above.

The drive to State College was a good start to our fall road trip. I’ll post more about it tomorrow.

Raking Leaves – 1

I have a ‘little at a time’ strategy for leaf raking this year rather than waiting for the majority to fall before doing some marathon raking sessions. Almost none of the leaves have even turned on the maple….the few red one stand out against a green backdrop.

But the oak has dropped about half and the purple leafed plum is shedding too. I raked the areas with the most leaves before my husband mowed late last week – letting the lawn mower chop up and distribute the few leaves that remained.

I measure my raking progress by the number of trashcan loads I take back to the brush and leaf pile in the forest. I compress the leaves to reduce the number of treks from the front yard (where the oak tree is) to the back. So far, I’ve done 5. The leaves from the trees in the back yard I’ll rake directly into the forest – no trashcan involved!

Walking in Brookside Gardens

I’ve already posted about the serendipity and the catbird from my walk in Brookside Gardens last week. There were plenty of ‘normal’ scenes that I enjoyed too along with quite a few people walking the loop around the gardens. Here are some highlights:

The white wash is still on the conservatory. It’s there to help reduce the heat of summer inside but is washed off once it gets cool enough in the fall.

There are still flowers blooming.

And the seed pods of the magnolias have their bright red seeds (they always remind me of red M&Ms).

Some of the leaves are beginning to turn but most are still green.

I’ve been reading so much about the rusty patched bumble bees that I’ve started paying more attention to all bumble bees (this was is obviously not a rusty patched)!

Caster plants have maturing seeds. I always notice these at Brookside because one of my grandfathers always had a few plants in his garden.

The Tea House was empty as I walked by…the pond cloudy with sediment after recent rains.

Some of the ferns had spores on the underside of their fronds.

My last stop of the morning was in the conservatories. They were just setting up the mum displays --- and none were blooming enough to photograph – yet. I’ll go back in November. Along with a lot of gardeners working the garden, there were also people putting up lights already in preparation for the display beginning around Thanksgiving.

Catbird and Winterberries

Last week when I was walking around Brookside Gardens, I heard a noisy bird in the bushes beside the path. It did not take me long to spot it among the branches of a bush with nice red fruit…and take a picture. It was grayish bird with a black head and tail….and a rush colored rump. And it was gorging on the red fruit.

I managed to get a few pictures that helped me identify the bird when I got home – a Gray Catbird – and it the red berries look like winterberries which are one of the most popular bushes planted around Brookside Gardens. We like them for their color in the fall and winter….the catbirds are evidently very fond of the fruit!

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 15, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Pumpkin steel-cut oats – I am collecting pumpkin (and other winter squash) recipes. They are probably my favorite seasonal foods. I am going to use some leftover butternut squash (already cooked) for one of them today!

Salt’s Secret Success in Ancient Chaco Canyon – Evidently the salts in the soil around Chaco Canyon are not chlorides …but sulfate salts which are not toxic to maize. And the sulfate salts are useful for making pigments too which were used to color walls and pottery. The research contends that the water management systems in Chaco Canyon did not cause catastrophic salt pollution and abandonment of the area as had been previously conjectured.

A Win for the Whooping Crane’s Texas Home – I have been thinking about making a winter trip to the wildlife refuges along the Gulf Coast of Texas – seeing whooping cranes being high on the priorities for the trip – so I notice articles like this!

Thirty Years of Progress – My undergraduate degree in biology was about 35 years ago so this series of articles is a good update for me.

The London Landmark with 20,000 Skeletons in its Vault – The Museum of London – and a project to examine 1,500 skeletons from the collection and compare them with skeletons outside of London. It will be a slice through history using a lot of the same technologies used in modern medicine.

Hummingbird Whisperer Captures Close-Up Photos of Birds Visiting her Backyard – Hurray for backyard photographer Tracy Johnson – patience and persistence!

Culling of White-Tailed Deer Coming to National Parks in Western Maryland – We don’t have any natural predators for deer….so culling has become necessary. In our neighborhood, all certainly just won’t last through the spring and early summer because the deer eat them, low branches of trees are nibbled (or eaten) – even the evergreens which must be very tough eating. There are way too many deer and in a suburban area like ours culling is not an option.

Antarctic Invertebrates – Many times we only think of the larger, more visible plants and animals of an area….but biodiversity goes way beyond that view. This article makes the case about why we should care about invertebrates in the Antarctic…not just the penguins.

A Bird’s Eye View of Simmering Kilauea Volcano at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park – Last year at this time, we were planning a trip to Hawai’i in December and we enjoyed Volcanoes National Park when we went. Now I always take a look at any article about the place. This one includes a video of the Halemaʻumaʻu Crater now – even more active than when we were there.

A Sherlock-Worthy Look at an Ancient Horse Mummy – From the steppes of Mongolia and dating from the 6^th to 8^th century CE.

Brookside Serendipity

When I walk around Brookside Gardens – I savor the little serendipities of even a familiar place. This week I made an effort to photograph some of those surprises: a yellow petal that had landed on a very green leaf,

A turkey tail shelf function on an otherwise smooth stump,

Sunflowers in the children’s garden (I imagine this is a photo stop for many groups of children; I was too early for them although there was a mother reading a nature book to a young child at one of the tables in the children’s area),

A hat on a rock (there were a lot of volunteer sin the garden but nowhere near the hat),

A chipmunk that sat still long enough for a portrait,

A bald cypress knee in the plantings just outside the conservatory (the tree is on the other side of the sidewalk and there are no knees closer to the tree).

One of the reasons, I like natural areas – including gardens – is there is always something new….something not quite anticipated.

Blue Jays on the Move

Our neighborhood has a troupe of resident blue jays that make their rounds – most days – through our backyard for the bird bath and swooping off to the maple and then the taller tulip poplars at the edge of the forest. Sometimes they stop to look through our gutters for bugs in the leaf debris. The picture below is one on our deck railing after he got his drink of water. That is the small part of the route that they are easy to see; some of the time I miss seeing them completely but I always hear them.

This time of year the numbers of blue jays are much higher because so many of them are migrating through Maryland to go further south for the winter. I’ve often wondered whether the resident ones ‘talk’ to the transient birds because it seems like we have more blue jays around than we have during the rest of the year.

While I was raking leaves on Wednesday (the first round of the chore for this year!), a flock of blue jays chattered (or is it more like arguing) in the trees above.