Maggie's Farm

The crisisification of everything from weather to fatness to flu season trivializes real crises.

Just One Minute mocked the NYT's crisisification of the Atlantic Menhaden population. Fair enough. It's not a crisis, but it is a serious concern to all those concerned with ocean wildlife - and one which could be easily solved by limiting the helo-guided factory-fish harvest of these bottom-of-the-food-chain schooling fish.

Even as recently as 6 years ago, when fishing on Long Island Sound, you could catch your bait for Bluefish or Bass by tossing a bare hook into a school of Menhaden, aka Bunker, and just dragging the hook through the thick schools. Since the factory ships appeared, those giant schools have been harvested like the herds of Bison and the sky-darkening flocks of Passenger Pigeons.

Here's The Most Important Fish in the Sea

Here's Meet menhaden - before this ecologically critical fish vanishes

Images via links above

We have posted in the past about one of my favorite birds, the Peregrine Falcon. They are "peregrine" because they breed in the north, summer in South America.

They are partial to cliffs and mountains, which is why they are comfortable living in cities with their abundant source of pigeons and sparrows, and nesting on tall buildings and urban bridges. 

The recovery of their populations east of the Mississippi is a wonder to conservationists and a tribute to what man can do to renew wildlife populations.

Photo is from an update on New York City's Peregrine Falcons at Smithsonian.

Walker Percy fans, of whom I am one, recall the protagonist in The Last Gentleman setting up his fancy telescope in Central Park to watch the falcons. (I am also a Dickens fan, a Wallace Stegner fan, a Mark Helprin fan... ok, I am not going to keep going down this track.)

I was sent this photo of American Black Ducks ("Blacks") by a reader in CT. Blacks are never abundant, but they are around. These northeastern dabblers, which are closely related to the Mallard, breed around both fresh (expecially beaver ponds) and salt water (mostly salt marshes). 

You can read about these fine ducks at CLO.

Caption and photo came in over the transom - might be photoshopped but we don't know -

By the length of his beard and the gray legs this bull moose must be over 10 years old. He appears to be over 8 feet at the shoulder hump … this fellow is ONE BIG BOY!  The picture was taken near Elliott Lake, Ontario, Canada on a dirt road, probably the width of 1.5 cars.

By 1940, essentially all American Chestnuts, a dominant climax tree (and a major mast-producing tree - once the major food of Turkey, Deer and lots of other critters) of American forests, were killed by the blight. Their wood has a remarkable durability and their somewhat rusty-colored carcasses can still be seen in our woodlands.

That is a bunch of Christmas Fern behind the fallen log.

Christmas Fern. From the leaf litter, you can see that these woods are mainly Oak, Beech, and some Maple.

Everybody knows about the Hubble, but the Spitzer is equally remarkable.

Photo of star formation clusters is from this Spitzer photo gallery.

It's fun to check in with HawkCount and to explore their site to see what people are seeing during our wonderful raptor migration season.

Image is one of my favorites: The rugged, late-migrating Rough-Legged Hawk.

The road out to our village in the Berkshires. It is indeed over the river and through the woods. Woods, fields, and swamps:

View from the upper barn. Trout stream down there in the valley. Those are our woods up on the hills too - insofar as anybody can "own" woods. The hawks, owls, deer and and bears own them, really. Well, God owns them, but I can harvest firewood there. You can see the White Pine infestation in the upper meadow. We have been at 'em, but it's a lot of work to cut them down. It's a shame that you cannot really burn White Pine in the fireplace. Too much resin, burns too hot.

To get a taste of central Ohio, we stayed at the very pleasant Honey Run Inn outside Millersburg in Holmes County, the heart of Ohio Amish country where every other name seems to be Yoder. Excellent dinner menu there, but pricey. 

If you don't get lost, it's only a 45-minute beautiful country drive down to Gambier in Knox Co. Gotta watch out for your turns, though, on those nice two-lane county roads or you can end up far from your destination with no gas station anywhere.

When I visit a new area, I like to get a close-up feel for the woodlands and their outdoors, so I took a couple of early morning hikes up there in Holmes Co. I'd say the bird life and the tree life are similar that of southern New England, and the woodlands are similar hardwood forest - except that the density of nut and mast trees is remarkable: Walnut, Beech, various oaks, Hickory, Shagbark Hickory, Butternut, Ash. When you walk through the woods in late Oct. as I did, you hear the startling thunk of walnuts falling constantly. Also different - I saw no pines and no birch. Plenty of majestic Tulip Trees as one sees in southern New England, and Maples all over.

You cannot have familiarity with a woodland without knowing each tree, and I try to do so. Was mann weiss, mann sieht.

4000 years ago much of Ohio was short-grass prairie and full of Bison. A cooler, wetter climate since then has made possible the hillside woodlands of today (everything flat seems to be farmed) - plus there are no more Indians to burn the prairies to suppress woodland growth.

From the size of the trees, this patch of hilly woodland below was pasture 40 or 50 years ago. Why I did not see or hear lots of Wild Turkeys I do not know, but these woods definitely hold plenty of deer.

 A few more snaps from my hikes in the morning drizzle below the fold -

As a nod to huntin' season, our current image on top is from Currier and Ives' American Field Sports series. I do not see Snipe too often anymore, but I do not know why. Last time I saw them in any numbers was in a Manitoba marsh.

We posted on the sad story of the Ash Tree diseases recently, but I didn't have a good photo of a White Ash, the fine northern hardwood and pleasant shade tree from which the Louisville Slugger happens to be made.

I took a photo of one - a young one - on the Kenyon campus in its orange and yellow autumn splendor.

Either the Emerald Ash Borer, or more likely Ash Yellows, killed a 100 year-old majestic White Ash which provided welcome shade to our place.

The wonderful Ash is under seige from diseases spreading across the country. It's a damn shame, because these shade trees were fairly good substitutes for the old Elms that succumbed to the Dutch Elm disease.

Photo is some sort of Ash, but I'm pretty sure it's not our Eastern White Ash from its shape.

For the past four days, we have been visited by the noisest Eastern Screech Owl I have ever heard. For an hour or three at dawn and dusk he doesn't shut up, and drives the pup nuts. Maybe it's the full moon that is doing it?

I have always been fond of these little owls, but they are rarely seen, just heard. I hope this guy sticks around.

Here's a sample of their calls, but their calls are more varied than that.

It's been interesting to me to see how many searches land on our post from last year: The mice, rats, voles, shrews and lemmings of New England.

It's gratifying to be useful to curious people.

Photo: The good old Meadow Mouse, properly named the Meadow Vole, common across the nothern part of North America, and good wholesome food for numerous predators. A lil' critter to be welcomed, because his presence means you have healthy lands.

h/t, Bits and Pieces:

The autumn hawk migration has begun around here. It's a wonderful phenomenon.

I had a Red-Shouldered (as in photo) high overhead this morning, but on the hills in September you can find "kettles" of Broad Wings - possibly our most commonly-seen fall migrant hawk on the Atlantic Flyway, circling as they ride the morning thermals up to catch a long free, coasting ride south until they reach the next thermal updraft.

The identification of raptors is difficult, and I have no skill at it but I have a couple of pals who are. Like so many things, you have to learn from an expert: a book is almost useless because hawks are almost always seen in flight and, during migration, usually at fairly high altitudes so you only have a profile and, perhaps, a flight style. Furthermore, many migrants are immature first-year birds without the mature plumage.

The species pass by in phases. In late October and November come the most interesting ones: rugged birds like eagles, Goshawks, and Rough Leggeds.

I easily identified my passing Red Shouldered because of the "windows" in his wings.

(Speaking of migration, I have seen almost no migrating Monarch butterflies this year. In fact, far fewer butterflies in the gardens all summer than usual. Missed them because, in my view, butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds are part of the vitality and fun of gardens.)

A re-post -

In a comment on our piece about clear-cutting, a reader let us know about this book: 1491: New Revelations about the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann.

Human fantasies about the Garden of Eden, like human utopian fantasies, just never give up. You might almost think we all wish we were back in the womb.

I ordered the book, but here's a quote from Charles Mann's 2002 essay in The Atlantic on the subject:

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

It's a fascinating subject to me. Here's the whole essay.

Image: An early version of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom

It's the time of year when Tree Swallows head for the coasts to assemble for their migrations. I have seen them flocking by the hundreds on Cape Cod in August (even saw an albino among them a couple of years ago), and by the thousands in places like Jamaica Bay NWP.

These fine birds bother me in the spring, when they successfully compete for the 25 Bluebird nest boxes I have gone to much trouble to clean etc.

Bugs and berries are their food, and they like to breed near water. More about them at the new, and less informative, CLO.

Photo is a male. The females are brown.

An experienced outdoorsman can identify most of the plants and trees in the areas with which he is familar - but not so much elsewhere. Like learning languages, though, he can learn a new area quickly because he has woods-sense based on the types of habitats he already knows.

An experienced outdoorsman can also predict what birds and critters are likely to be found in a given habitat. Woods-sense is one of the few talents I have. I like to attribute it to my Iroquois blood.

It used to be called Woodcraft, then Natural History, and now it's called Science: Barcoding plants by their DNA. It's sort-of cool, but it is soul-less and not woodcraft.

Photo: An Alder thicket - a common lowland and streamside habitat in the northern US. I have busted my way through more of these nearly-impenetrable things than I can count. The branches pull your hat off constantly, and sometimes you feel like you are in jail, with no exit. And if you try to raise your gun for a Grouse or Woodcock, there's always a branch to stop you. Good stuff.

Remember when Calvin insisted to his teacher that "Bats are birds"? (Correction - thanks, reader. I guess it was "Bats are bugs...". I was wrong again! That makes wrong twice in one week.)

New England is the home to around 7 species of bats, all nocturnal insectivores and most with some migratory habits.

Our most common bat is the Little Brown Bat (photo above) often found sleeping behind shutters or in crevices in sheds and attics during the summer and early fall. We had one who got into the house a few years ago. We managed to scoot him out a window. Wonderful - no, miraculous little critters, but worth keeping away from because they can carry rabies.

I noticed seeing very few bats around at twilight this year. I miss them dodging, diving, and ducking around in their bug-catching aerial antics. I checked it out. It turns out that there is a contagious bat disease in the Northeast. Whether this fungal infestation is the cause, or an effect of something else, is still not certain. It's a damn shame.

I hope their populations bounce back in my lifetime because these silent fluttering critters are one of the delights of the evening sky around here.

Marginal Revolution is a Puffin guy. 

More info about Puffins at All About Birds. Tyler Cowen linked to this Puffin video:

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One of Tigerhawk's young Bald Eagles at his place in the Adirondacks. Is he echoing the silhouette of the pump on purpose?

MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen's short essay is rightly making the rounds today. One quote:

...all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising (though inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community).

 Read the whole thing. Related, a wamist read Prof. Ian Plimer's book, and was converted.