Gleanings of the Week Ending June 27, 2015

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.

No Bake, No Stovetop Cookie Bites - I’ve always been intrigued about ‘no bake’ cookies. I like all the ingredients in these so maybe it’s a recipe to try.

Electric Motorcycles Used By Over 50 Police Departments - I like technology that is good for the environment and also is has a positive impact on the mission (they are quiet!).

Smart insulin patch could replace painful injections for diabetes - New technology hones delivery of insulin based on when the body needs it….much more like a correctly functioning pancreas.

Once and Future Nut: How Genetic Engineering May Bring Back Chestnuts - These trees once grew in Maryland. It would be great to have them part of scene again after 100 years.

Climate change threatens to undermine the last half century of health gains - Increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (heat waves, floods, droughts and storms) as well as indirect impacts from changes in infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement and conflict….it adds up.

The rise of Africa’s super vegetables - Indigenous foods…rather than imported…to feed the continent. And trying the preserved the variety available while studying only a few of the species.

Doctors often misdiagnose zinc deficiency, unaware of impact of excess zinc - Wow! I remember a few years ago when it was widely suggested that zinc helped recovery from colds….I wonder how many people developed zinc induced copper deficiency (anemia, low white cell count and/or neurological problems?

The Prairie Ecologist Goes to the Beach - Photos of the gulf coast beaches in Texas.

How the US, UK, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, & Italy Can Each Go 100% Renewable - The article and the comments - lots of potential ways to get it done.

The Best Weather Photos of the Year Will Blow You Away - I couldn’t resist. Good photographs. I was a little surprised that a rainbow picture was not in the group.

Nature and History Hiking

There are lots of ‘stories’ that we create for ourselves while hiking. Hiking is active and invites narrative. The theme can be about interaction with an animal or plants or a hiking partner. There could be an activity done with hiking that becomes part of the story: photography, bird watching, climbing, camping, etc. Recently - I’ve been creating stories using the history theme.

The longest timeframe history is in rocks - in layers. It is easy for this narrative to emerge when hiking the Grand Canyon…..the feeling of the vast amounts of time for water to wear away the rock is part of the place.

Sometimes rocks tell history with a shorter timeframe. For example, rocks along trails in areas that are near developments show up in buildings; the Master Naturalist hike along the Trolley Trail early this year was an example for me of rocks linking to history of the past few hundred years. A building not far from the trail was built of Ellicott City Granite with bits of amphibole for contrast.

Human impacts. Sometimes the changes caused by humans are evident along a hiking trail. Trash is always unwelcome and we may not hike that trail again - or help in a clean up project. It is a sad story. In fact - lots of the impacts are sad: eroded stream banks from changes in runoff patterns from housing developments and invasive plants. Many of the impacts happen quickly.

Other examples of human impacts take a longer period. The view of the forests on the east coast has changed dramatically now that the American Chestnuts are gone (almost all of them succumbed to the Chestnut Blight in the 1900s); they were the dominate (most numerous) tree in the forest. That history is harder to realize because it is about something missing. As I look into the forest behind my house - the most numerous trees are the tulip poplars. They are tall - but they don’t produce the large and reliable crop of nuts that the chestnuts did (for animals and people).

What about organisms that are not usually noticed? If you take a walk shortly after a rain - there might be earthworms on the forest path. Did you know that they are not ‘native’ to North America but brought in ballast from Europe during colonization? How did they change the forest? The leaf mulch was not cycled as quickly by the native organisms which means that the forest floor in precolonial times was cooler and wetter than it is now. How different did those forests look?

Master Naturalist Training - Week 4

Last Wednesday was the fourth of eight days of training to become a Master Naturalist in Maryland. Snow was not in the forecast….but there was still some on the ground. As I walked from the parking lot to the building, the fog was hanging in the low places and into the forest; daylight savings time made a difference in the lighting as well.

The two topics for the day were

• Microbes, Mosses and Mushrooms and
• Humans and the Landscape

I did the pre-reading for both modules and the factoid that popped out was that the cell walls of mushrooms are made of chitin (the same molecule that makes insects’ exoskeletons!). How had I missed learning that in the mycology class I took back in the 70s?

Another key learning from the beginning topic of the day was the logistics of the lecture. The instructor had her one year old son with her! I thought it was would be distracting (and eventually he was taken off to another room by a helper) but the lecture was interesting and he provided some of the lighter moments of the morning. It is not something that could be done for every class but I am thinking more often about ways we can blur the divide between work and the other things we do in our lives. The industrial age forced us to make work totally separate - but humans didn’t evolve in that kind of environment. Our interests were multi-faceted with only short bursts of total focus. Concentrating on one thing for a long period of time (the way many jobs are formulated) can be stressful simply because the human brain and body did not develop in that environment.

Later in the day we hiked into the woods and found lots of fungi. Slims and jellies

Shelf fungus

With pores (rather than gills) underneath

Lichen

In the afternoon we had two lectures. The first gave a history of the human development of the land along the Patapsco River (near our classroom). The story included John Smith (noticing red clay), a harbor just below the falls of the river was the second busiest harbor in Maryland after Annapolis until is silted up, the deforestation to feed the iron forges and heat houses, the mills (flour and textile), the floods, and trains - the first cars pulled by horses before steam engines were developed. Much of the around the river is deforested and is a heavily used state park. Floods are still a problem. The one caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972 took many years of recovery.

Switching gears - the next lecture was from a wildlife perspective. The impact of plants and animals brought to the New World was discussed. Some introductions were accidently but had a huge effect: earthworms changed the forest floor from deep mulch with lots of moisture to drier places….and changed the understory; chestnut blight took away the biggest tree in the forest. There is more forest in the area now than there was 100 years ago but the deer population is so large that plants in the understory are increasingly thorny invasive plants. We’ll have another lecture on invasive plants in week 6.

At the end of the day, I thought about my expectation that the lectures couldn’t all be as interesting as the first few - but the ones this week were still the same high quality in terms of material and presentation. And the weather is enabling more outside treks….makes it even better!