Maggie's Farm

Some family and friends climbed Mt. Willey on Sunday. They popped a bottle of champagne on the foggy top. Here's one of their photos from a viewpoint, part way up:

I took this close-up of a clump of Indian Pipe (aka Corpse Plant) at the farm this weekend, in the Hemlock woods on the hillside. A fungus? Nope. It's a parasitic plant.

A reader sent in this photo of an Eastern American Toad (Bufo Americanus) in the garden this past weekend. Everybody enjoys stumbling upon these goofy critters, which tend to be active at night (when the sun will not dry them out) or during rain. If find it remarkable how often they can be found far from any pools or ponds in which to breed. They travel.

I remember rainy days in Cape Cod when the baby toads had completed their magical transformation from tadpole to tiny (1/2") toads in August in such numbers that you could hardly find a place to put your foot, like Red Efts on cloudy days in the Berkshires.

The only thing I know that likes to eat them is the Hognose Snake, and I've never seen one of them.

Scientificalistical experts have proven (the debate is over) that if you touch a toad, you will get warts, but if you are a girl, and kiss one, it will turn into a Handsome Prince (but you will get warts all over your face).

We have tons of Eastern Toads here. Like all critters, it cheers me to see them.

From Bowyer's Teddy Roosevelt vs. the Noisy Environmentalists at TCS, one quote:

TR and his Director of Forestry Services, Gifford Pinchot created a system of 'wildlife Reserves'. They argued that it would not be fair for one generation to do all the logging and all the digging and to leave nothing behind for future generations. They didn't think of these reserves as something pristine, which would be rendered somehow ceremonially unclean by the signs of human development. They just wanted to share natural resources and beauty with future generations, like ours. In fact the shift in language from 'resources' to 'the environment' signals the shift in world-view from conservation to preservation. A resource, by its very nature, is to be used, sparingly, perhaps, but nonetheless, used.

This is why the Roosevelt-Pinchot philosophy is known to historians as the 'wise-use' movement. It's why the administration's forestry handbook contained explicit instructions for how to extract lumber and minerals from the protected lands. That's why the memorial lauds 'development', which contemporary environmentalists forbid in places like ANWR.

The preservationists of the time, like Sierra Club founder, John Muir, fought against them. While Roosevelt/Pinchot sought to make nature useful to humanity, by opening it to efficient use, and protecting it from destruction, Muir claimed that nature was to be useful to nature itself, not to man. For Roosevelt earth is for us, for people. For Muir man and land were equals. It wasn't the conservationist Roosevelt who put ANWR's oil out of our reach, but the environmentalist Carter.

Shucks, that is cute as hell. Hunter though I may be, I would never shoot one of these splendid animals. Deer? No problema.

And I love Alison Krauss too. (h/t, Theo)

With all of our posts about our beloved Cape Cod recently, our readers deserve a decent map to see what we are talking about. You can see that Wellfleet has ocean, harbor, and bay beaches - and plenty of wonderful ponds too. All with entirely different characters. Pop quiz on the map later.

The green is JFK's Cape Cod National Seashore. Best thing (and one of the few things) he ever did. What would this Wellfleet road look like this if he hadn't protected it from development? It's not "barren" - it's lovely.

I have a watercolor of that island, now part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, over our dining room fireplace. A family of Great Horned Owls lives out there. I have seen them. Plenty of squirrels, bunny rabbits, and crows for them to eat (yes, owls like to pick off roosting crows at night - an easy meal if you don't mind eating crow).

A re-post:

Both the majestic American Elm and the Chestnut fell victim to blights imported from overseas. With their deaths, the New England landscape was altered, for the worse. No more village blacksmith "under the spreading chestnut tree," and no more village greens and churches graced by rows of giant vase-shaped Elms - the hallmark of old New England.

Yes, we still have some elms, but the young ones don't make it to adulthood, and any remaining trees are slowly dying off.

The good news is that there is a blight-resistant Elm available. You won't live long enough to see it in its glory, but planting some now in the right places will be a heck of a fine gift to the future.

You can find them at Miller Nurseries.

A quote from the piece in Smithsonian Magazine of the above title:

As a young man, Muir felt he was a student in what he called the ‘University of the Wilderness,'" Gisel said. "Yosemite was his graduate course. This is where he decided who he was, what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it."

When he first strode into Yosemite in the spring of 1868, Muir was a scruffy Midwestern vagabond wandering the wilderness fringes of post-bellum America, taking odd jobs where he could. In retrospect, visiting Yosemite might seem an inevitable stop on his life's journey. But his later recollections reveal a young man plagued with self-doubt and uncertainty, often lonely and confused about the future. "I was tormented with soul hunger," he wrote of his meandering youth. "I was on the world. But was I in it?"

A re-post from the archives:

It feels very bad to me to know that the fate of the Everglades is in the hands of the notoriously and historically disreputable Miami-Dade County Commissioners.  I'd like to hope that their bad days are past.

It's tough to be an ideological purist in real life. I've known Libertarians who went nuts when a neighbor put in a tennis court too close to his property line. And it is true that we all have a stake in the land. Developers, and the folks they sell to - homeowners and stores and businesses - will always want more if there is profit in it; conservationists will always want more of which to be good stewards; farmers - and I don't mean small family farms in Fla - will always want what they need. So it's always a battle for conservationists. (I don't mean environmentalists, whatever they are.)

My solution tends to be to urge groups to assemble themselves to buy up land, or to buy up the development rights to land, if they want to protect and preserve it for the future. States, land trusts, conservation groups, ad hoc groups with an interest in a specific piece of land. This can be done without a sacrifice of property rights.

BUT it is best done BEFORE there is economic pressure on the land. Unfortunately, people tend to be of the Big Yellow Taxi school: "You don't know what you got til it's gone. You take paradise, put up a parking lot."

I have no doubt that one of my literary heroes, Carl Hiassen, is on the story. I missed him on 60 Minutes last week, but was told that he is as funny in person as he is in print. If you haven't read him, especially his early handful of books, they are absurdist, black humor mysteries set in South Florida, with memorably strange characters, many of them deeply depraved, corrupt, and plain evil.

Carl cares about conservation and he loves Florida, and, bless his heart, he remains a reporter in Miami, so I will count on him to take care of this story, and this problem.

A fairly common Eastern woodland migrant and breeder, but often missed, despite the male's dramatic color, because they often forage up high in the oaks, way above eye-level. 

Read more about this handsome bird:  All About Birds

Photo courtesy of P. LaTourette.

Our post on how flies manage to land on ceilings a while ago was such a hit that it inspired me to do another fly post.

In the fall Cluster Flies head for houses to spend the winter in dormancy. When you turn on the heat, they wake up and clamber around disgustingly, often in clusters around windows.

When that happens to us, we get out ye olde vacuum cleaner.

You can read about their natural history here (they leave their winter shelter and lay their eggs on earthworm holes at this time of year. Their maggots live on earthworms).

I've never understood the passion for the boiled or steamed Blue Crab on the Atlantic coast. Too much work for too little reward - though they are by far the tastiest crab in the world, and a true Maryland Crab Cake is the best.  A lobster rewards effort better, but lobsters do not live in Maryland.

(Sauteed soft-shelled - moulting - Blue Crabs are another matter entirely. Great stuff.) Spelling note: "moult" or "molt" are both acceptable spellings, but apparently "molt" is more American.

Some Blue Crab links:

The Peoples' Lobster

A little natural history of the Blue Crab

How to correctly "pick" a crab

How Blue Crabs moult

This is Heade's Newbury Marshes (c. 1871) from the John Wilmerding Collection.  Newburyport, MA lies on the coast 40 miles north of Boston, at the mouth of the Merrimack River.

In those days, salt marshes were used for cattle grazing, and salt hay was harvested for winter fodder. Over the past 100 years, the once-vast Atlantic coast salt marshes have been devastated by fill, development, and by channelization in the early 1900s in an effort to reduce mosquitoes (Malaria was a big problem in New England at the turn of the century.) In one of the coastal New England towns I grew up in, the salt marsh acreage dropped from 1000 acres to 30 acres, mostly since 1940.

I think the subject of Salt Marshes will need to be a future post.

Goose chicks, early this morning (thanks, reader)

Our Spring Peepers have been out for a while, but now, on warm days (we haven't had many), the larger frogs come out to play.

I have eaten plenty of frog's legs in my time, mostly in the South, and they aren't bad sauteed with a little butter, wine and garlic... but so is anything.

However, I prefer that my Bullfrogs stay alive, croaking in the swamp. "Jug-a-rum."

These large (3-6") frogs are native to the Eastern US and Canada, and have become pestiferous when they have been transplanted (as in California and Europe). They will eat anything moving that they can fit into their Jaba The Hut-sized mouths, including small snakes and frogs.

I love swamps for their mysterious wildness and their abundance of life. Sippican isn't so sure that he does, but he is an effete, hyper-civilized egg-head sort, isn't he?

These handsome sparrows are uncommon in New England. However, I was pleased to see a flock of five or six this morning under the bird feeder. They are just passing through on their way to their Arctic and sub-Arctic breeding grounds.

Photo from this site. More about these sparrows at CLO.

Springtime, and amore is in the air. (h/t, Theo)