Maggie's Farm

A coronal mass ejection should hit us tonight - a little gift from Mr. Sun. Could be a nice aurora, in Yankeeland. 

He calls himself a "heretic." One quote:

He also cautioned that people may be kidding themselves if they imagine it is possible to stabilize the Earth’s climate.

“The biosphere was constantly changing in the past and it will be constantly changing in the future,” Dyson said. “The idea that we can put a stop to change is a dangerous illusion.”

Also:

“All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in 50 years,” Dyson said.

More from his speech at Synthstuff. We are in very good company if we see it as he does. Wish he would speak out more.

No fresh postings today, because your Editor Dog in Chief, along with most of the Maggie's Farm crew, are working on an annual fund-raising event for our Ducks Unlimited Sponsor's Dinner tonight, and setting-up takes all day.

By 6 pm, we will be ready to receive an onslaught of 180 well-dressed guys with an open bar, and a fine steak dinner later, with about 70 cool raffle items, 30 Live Auction items including stuff like a 10-day African Hunting Safari for four, and 9 days in Morocco for two with a full-time guide, and dove shooting in Argentina for three days. Even a wild boar hunt in Texas, and a traditional layout duck hunt on Long Island, and other equally cool stuff like his-and-her Rolexes, and lots of guns, too.

The place will be decorated for Christmas. Like modern-day Christmas, our event is a jolly, earthly, material festivity with a spiritual purpose.

For many people on the left and right coasts, DU is not as familiar as it is in the heartland of the US and Canada, but with over 11 million acres of wildlife habitat under protection, and over 800,000 members, it is a big organization, and does nothing but good works, with minimal lobbying, and no political action.

Contrary to the impression of some, DU isn't all about ducks - it's all about protection of fragile and threatened habitats which support all sorts of critters and birds. While probably most members of DU rarely hunt, DU does have a bit of a hunting flavor to it.

Why? Good hunters know the land, and have a feel for it, like the Indians did. The wise ones know the plants and trees and birds and the geography and the habitats. Hunters are the most serious conservationists, because they really get out there, off the beaten path and into the wild world. Your average "greeny" rarely loses their boot in a bog, or surprises a moose in a meadow, gets near-frostbite in a duckboat at 4 AM in a January snow, awaiting sunrise, or watches a red fox trotting home in the early morning from their tree stand, or even sees a Woodcock twitter through the birches. It isn't an abstraction when a subdivision destroys your favorite grouse cover, or fills in your favorite duck swamp "for the tax revenue".

All of us Maggie's Farmers consider DU worthy of our effort and our giving. We consider it part of good stewardship - good citizenship, and it's good fun too.

You can read all about DU here.

Most popular in the US is the Black Angus. This Scottish breed was brought to the US after the Civil War, and soon replaced the Shorthorns and Longhorns.

The white-faced Hereford, from Herfordshire, England, is the dominant beef breed in the western US. Herefords were not imported to the US in large numbers until after 1890. The hornless variety are Polled Herefords.

 The Charolais is often used to hybridize with Angus and Herefords:

One of the few large Ice Age Pleistocene mammmals surviving in North America, and still in some parts of northern Europe, is the Musk Ox. I am always surprised to remember that there are Musk Oxen in Canada - they are rarely a subject of cocktail party conversation - unless you have the bad luck to be chatting with the dull and pedantic Bird Dog.

They are the Bison of the Tundra - but they are not bovines, despite their appearance and name. They are closer to goats.

Remarkably, there is a group in Alaska which is breeding them for domestication, which does seem 6000 years too late. A bit about these remarkable critters here.

Can they be hunted? Once you get up there, it's too much like shooting a cow in a pasture. The Eskimos kill them, though, but they kill anything, including seagulls.

From Sailing Anarchy:

"We recently sailed in a race from St Simon Island GA to Ameilia Island FL with my 70 year old father, brother in law and brother last weekend. We won the race.

In the middle of a 60 feet deep channel between two islands separated by about two miles was a six point buck swimming at about three knots."10/27/06

Any breed of cattle can be - and is - made into hamburger meat, including old Daisy herself, when her milk production slows down. But today we'll just look at two of the historically popular American beef cattle.

The Shorthorn is a relatively minor breed now, but when it was brought from England in the late 1700s it became popular. It had its origins in Roman times. This is a bull:

The Longhorn was brought to the New World by the Spanish, and was the main Western breed until replaced via hybridization, and by other breeds like the Angus and the Hereford, by 1900. Now it only exists on refuges and there are few breeders, but its gene pool might have something to offer today's breeders.

No, I am not referring to Washington, DC. I am referring to one of the smallest North American birds, the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet.

Yesterday was classic New England weather - 50 degrees and clear in the morning, 70 degrees, drizzling and calm at noon, then branch-breaking wind gusts with a 25 degree temperature drop at 4 pm. By night-time, it felt like fall had truly arrived, and today it was clear and crisp, and the maples showed some red.

All day long, small flocks of Kinglets were fluttering around the shrubs, and poking into the sedum, outside my window. Close enough that you could occasionally get a slight glimpse of the red crown, if they tilted their heads in the right way. But, basically, you cannot count on that as an identifying feature.

These drab, tiny warbler-like guys - but smaller than warblers - weigh about a quarter of an ounce, lay clutches of 12 eggs (a clutch can easily weigh more than the mother), and winter wherever the temperatures stay above 25 degrees. The flocks outside my window are working their way south, but I hope they will hang around for a while.

They must have had a good breeding year up in the coniferous forests, because I have never seen so many.

Image borrowed from the excellent CLO site.

Mooooo. Are you tired of our cattle interest over the past couple of months?

Well, just a couple more cattle posts to go, then the final exam.

Today, wild cattle. There are 12 species of wild bovines left. We already learned that the mighty Auroch, the prized game animal of Polish kings and the ancestor of the domestic cow, has been extinct, alas, since the 1600s. We all know the American Bison and the Cape Buffalo - a member of the Big Five great game animals of Africa (image above), but you cannot name all twelve, and neither can I. Here they are.

Note that the Musk Ox is not among them. It's not a bovine, and it is more closely related to goats.

Image of a friendly Cape Buffalo from the very fine wild cattle site.

We had another wave of the little guys last night,
because they were much in evidence this morning. Another flock of Robins and another flock of Blue Jays. And a bunch of warblers - some singing, for no good reason, and if you don't know their calls, you cannot identify fall warblers unless you are an expert. In their non-breeding plumage, they all look alike.

Among other birds, had a migrating Phoebe this morning, snagging bugs on the driveway. One of my favorite birds. This common flycatcher likes to nest on or near houses, bridges, etc., has a sweet song, and is readily identified without binocs by his tail-wagging. Some of the other flycatchers are far more challenging.

Birders often claim that waves of migrants tend to precede cold fronts. That could be true. On the other hand, there are always cold fronts coming during migration season. Anyway, many species do pass through in waves.

The Eastern Phoebe image borrowed from CLO. More about the likeable Phoebe here.

This species of the Southern longleaf pine forests (which have been harvested almost to extinction and re-planted with faster-growing commercial pines) has been in the news recently (see Monday links below). It has been endangered since the 1970s because of habitat loss. I have never seen one, but haven't spent any time trying to.

They are one of a very few bird species which are found only in the US. As with other woodpecks like Downies and Hairies, the red cockade is usually not visible.

These birds have unusual breeding habits: they are "cooperative" breeders, and the males incubate the eggs. Read about them here at CLO, from which we borrowed the photo.

What can be learned from the news story? I think the message is that the Feds cannot expect American citizens to roll over every time a Federal bureaucracy decides they know what is best. However, it is one of the jobs of the Feds, for better or worse, to try to protect endangered species. These are Federal laws and, in this case, their enforcement  threatens individual property rights, which Americans feel as strongly about - or more so - than they do about the Second Amendment.

So if the Feds want to do their job effectively, they need to approach such issues in a humble, friendly, cooperative, compromising manner. In DC, far from the piney woods of North Carolina, it is all too easy to feel the power, and to forget who pays their salaries and for whom they work.

We did a post on Goldfinches in the past. We have discovered, this year, that the Goldfinches like echinacea seeds as much as they like thistles. Sitting on them every morning. There is nothing like birds and butterflies to add color and vitality to a garden. They provide the movement, like dancers on a stage set.

A sterile garden, with no animal life, is dull. Need the birds and bees to make it complete.

Echinacea, aka Purple Coneflower, aka Snakeroot, is a Great Plains plant or herb. The usual forms are tall, for the back of the border, (and tend to tip over about now) but there is a shorter version now.

We all need someone we can feed on
And if you want it, you can feed on me
Take my arm, take my leg
Oh, baby, don't you take my head

Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed 

I see Praying Mantises all the time, motionlessly stalking bees and bugs in my rose bushes and raspberries. Huge bugs, but very well-camouflaged. Lady Praying Mantises are known to take the concept of giving head a bit too forcefully. They begin with the guy's head, then, once well-fertilized, end up consuming the rest of him. Maybe they get too excited.  Or perhaps it's a feminist thing, and it makes the charming Lorraine Bobbit (Hey, lonely guys! She is still looking for a date!) seem tame by comparison. NYT Science News

Sissy might know more about this type of sunflower, which is in bloom right now at Maggie's. I don't know whether they are a wildflower, or escapes.

One of our old hayfields has been over-run with Goldenrod. It makes for a pretty sight in August, but there is no hay there anymore, and the upper part is all Milkweed, to the delight of the Monarch butterflies.

Rather than trying to rehabilitate it as a hayfield by deep-plowing, re-seeding for a couple of years with red clover, and plowing again and re-seeding with good hayseed, the current low-cost plan is just to mow it every two years, and to let the animals and birds enjoy it - which they do. Don't need more hay. Sparrows, snakes, and Wild turkey like it as is. And deer, of course, by the bushel. And I have noticed that the beaver come out of the marsh to eat stuff in the meadow at night.

I have planted junipers next to the rocks, because with high growth you cannot see the rocks when you mow. Also, putting Bluebird houses on each rock, which the Tree Swallows seem to take over. Last summer I stupidly drove a tractor right up on one rock, about a 3' item I forgot about, and not only did it scare the bejesus out of me, but it also took another tractor to pull it off. Picture the front wheels of a Farmall four feet in the air, and a boulder jammed under the crankcase. Three Stooges.

Mark the rocks before you mow. A good adage in rocky Yankeeland, where glacial boulders are one of our main crops. Like measure twice, cut once.

You can see how the dang White Pines had been invading that field about 15 years ago. That process has been halted by aggressive border patrol, but it's a big job to roll it back. Cannot get a logging truck over the bridge, so it's sweat and chain saw. One step at a time. It's an excellent work out.

The wild Autumn Clematis is in full bloom all around Maggie's Farm. The highly aggressive and fast-growing wild version lacks the fragrance of the cultivated variety, often called Sweet Autumn Clematis. This one, covering a fence, has a wild morning glory growing amongst it.

A favorite of the Maggie's Farm hummingbirds, Jewelweed likes it damp and sunny. Its delicate orange flowers are in bloom right now.

August is a prime time for New England wildflowers. This little island in the stream has Joe Pye Weed, Goldenrod, Purple Loosestrife, and a white aster that I cannot identify. Plus some good-looking grasses.

We may be the only blog in the world who finds slime molds (good photos there of different varieties, including photo below) interesting. The first time you see one on the forest floor, the garden, or the edge of the lawn, you tend to think somebody spilled some poisonous orange glop from a bucket.

They are difficult to categorize: not exactly fungi, and not exactly protista, but probably more like protista - eg animals. Their colony creeps around slowly, munching on bacteria, and when they run out of food, they creep into the sun and form spores, and wait.

There is new science on how this thing adjusts to changing conditions.

From a piece by Roy Spencer in TCS, A Little Eco-Nomics Never Hurt:

The dangerous illusion underpinning many environmental efforts is that it is both possible and preferable to keep pushing toward a 100 percent clean and safe existence. Those of us who try to point out that there are practical limits to cleanliness and safety are immediately branded as shills for big business. Meanwhile, environmentalists and politicians get to hold the high ground of altruism and concern for the public's interest.

P.J. O'Rourke once said, "Some people will do anything to save the Earth...except take a science course." To that I would add, "...or a basic economics course". If for a reasonable cost we can remove 98 percent of the contaminants in our drinking water and make it quite safe, is it then a good idea to spend ten times as much to push that purity from 98 percent to 99 percent?

In the real world, there are only limited resources to accomplish everything we want to do, and resources diverted to wasteful ends are no longer available to tackle more pressing problems. Only in the imaginary world of the environmental lobbyist, pandering politician, or concerned journalist is it a public service to keep pushing toward 100 percent purity.

One of our favorite movies of all
time has given its name to a
Hosta.

As amateur hosta collectors, we gotta get this one. How cool is that? Almost looks like rhubarb.

Wayside has it. Red October.

Maggie's Farm readers know how fond we are of Box Turtles and Wood Turtles - two woodland species which can be found in New England, and both under extreme population pressure in these parts - essentially endangered.

When we see them, we tend to see the Box in the shady woods, and the Wood Turtle in the streams, but our pup finds the Wood Turtle in the wet pasture too.

We train our dogs to bark at them, but to never pick them up. The first time they find one, we give them heck with the shock collar and they learn that these turtles are radioactive.

My introduction to the charming Box Turtle was at the Massachusetts Audubon Society sanctuary in Wellfleet as a kid. Cape Cod was full of Box Turtles then. Many fewer now, due to cars and dogs and coyotes - and the northward march of raccoons.

Why does the subject come up? Tuesday night, with lightning flashing all around and rumbling thunder in the distance, I took an evening stroll with the flashlight, and stumbled on a Box Turtle digging a hole for her eggs in a sandy patch surrounded by oaks, not far from the marsh. Slow and steady. I have never seen this before.

My first thought was "Wish I had my camera," but my second thought was "Why photograph everything?" It makes it no more real, and this is a special sight, a real gift from nature. So I turned my light away, and left her alone to her arduous task.

Image of a box turtle digging a nest hole, in daylight, from Univ of Ga.