Wildside

I spotted some "old friends" yesterday scurrying over the rock walls, on the sidewalks, and in the landscaping at the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati. If you're a herpetologist, you would call my "friends" European wall lizards. However, if you're a native Cincinnatian, you would likely identify these non-native lizards as "Lazarus lizards."

I'm not a "birder," but I like watching birds. These direct descendants of dinosaurs are fascinating creatures. They have raised my awareness on so many topics; who knew that the dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken?

  Well, on a recent odyssey to Pennsylvania, dodder was along a streamside bank, in small amounts amongst a lot of knot. Dodder as in Cuscata, a parasitic plant in the Convolvulaceae (morning glory family). Knot as in Japanese knotweed, or Fallopia japonica, touted as one of the most pervasive invasive weeds in the eastern United States.

 

...

Last weekend, at a lovely wedding weekend for my wife’s cousin’s daughter and beau in the Leelanau peninsula area of west-central Michigan, some of us took a pre-wedding walk to Pyramid Point near Lake Michigan. The views up the short trail to the summit were spectacular. Descending to the trailhead, off to the side of the trail in a meadow area was a – very cool herbaceous flower.

 

...

What a great response to our Name That Pine query posed last Friday. There were dozens of responses, some on Friday and Saturday, and then again a number today, Monday July 31. At first, this bimodal response rate puzzled me until I realized that some of you do not get bygl-alerts, our just-in-time alerts to your phone via e-mails, vs. the Monday summary of the previous weeks alerts. 

 

 How can you possibly not want to be alerted by phone the very moment that we ask for your pine ID skills and other matters!!! Well, it is imaginable, but if you do want to get those alerts...

I came across a large die-off of crayfish last week in Gilmore Ponds, a Butler County MetroPark in southwest Ohio. While investigating, I learned that the crayfish is the (Louisiana) Red Swamp Crayfish; a species that is non-native to Ohio. However, this crayfish is well known to anyone who has enjoyed crawfish etouffee.

Thanks to Tim Turner who is truly an alert BYGL Alert! reader, I can provide some new information on the “Calcium Hypothesis.” In my BYGL Alert! posted this morning, I cited a scientific paper published in 2016 that proposed squirrels are stripping bark to acquire calcium from the phloem tissue. The authors of the paper tagged this explanation for bark-stripping as the “Calcium Hypothesis.”

Over the weekend, I received an e-mail message from a landowner in southwest Ohio asking what could be stripping bark from the branches of a large thornless honeylocust on their property. Their pictures showed that long slivers of bark were being removed from branches that were clearly much too high to be within reach of other possible bark strippers such as deer.

One of the things I ask my Sustainable Landscape Maintenance students at the end of the semester is to expound upon 10 Things They Learned in class. Most of these are the core of the course: including plant selection and knowledge, plant pest, plant maintenance, invasive species examples. Pete Grantham of Akron though, added:

 

  I learn from you so much about living in the moment, talked to me about your hitchhiking [the old days] and how you think it’s fun to run out of gas. These moments that others would consider worrisome are...

This is a byglbook-alert, premature since I have only read the first chapter of the featured book, but I have started down its path of poesy and prose and hope you will too. The book is On Trails by Robert Moor (not “Moop”, for George Costanza fans).

 

  Robert Moor set out to hike the Appalachian Trail, Georgia to Maine, in 2009.  He speaks of this and then from there starts to muse deeply on the idea of trails, of paths, in his words “a meditation upon trails.”

 

...