Intimate Landscapes – October 2015

I enjoyed Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book (available online here) enough to think about my own photographs from a similar perspective and will start a monthly series this month with my ‘picks’ that fit the criteria: smaller scale but not macro, multiple species, and artsy.

I liked this first one because of the colors…and the tenacity of the plants growing on the rocks sticking out into the lake. The colors from the landscape are a blurry reflection in the water surrounding the plants.

The next one is close to a macro image. It is beech nut hulls and lichen in the mulch. Again the colors – golden brown and pale green – were what drew my attention.

The newly fallen leaf – surrounded by older leaves and pine needles (some of which were shed after the leaf fell since they over it) - appealed to me as did the hint of a red leaf peaking from under one of the brown leaves.

I was surprised to notice so many plants growing in this scene – moss, lichen, shelf fungus. That may be a rhododendron at the back. This intimate landscape is teaming with plant life!

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 24, 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.

Why being single is much more than handling just loneliness – Even though the number of singles has been increasing in many places (sometimes to over half the adult population), the market has filed to understand the commercial experience of singles by always skewing to the ideal life centered on couples and nuclear families.

The rapid and startling decline of world’s vast boreal forests – Boreal forests are Earth’s single largest biome…up to 30% of the globe’s forest cover. An indicator species of this biome are moose and their numbers in Minnesota have dropped so quickly that some groups want to list them as endangered in the Midwest. The Boreal forest may be shrinking…dying…changing. The boreal forests are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. There could be a near term tipping point. Many trees are dying already.

Sweden is on track to becoming the first cashless nation – I’ve noticed in recent years that I use a lot less cash…but not quite cashless. The US has a ways to go.

The Chemistry of Superglue – A little about the history of superglue…and how it works.

The end is in sight for reading glasses – I hope this works! The idea of replacing natural lenses with liquid crystals is also applicable to helping people that have cataracts.

Chaco Culture National Historic Park – Another Dark Sky Park. Now that I’ve been to one star party….I’m looking for other places in the US that have as good or better dark skies! I’ve been to Chaco once….during the day…and thought the isolation of the place made it easier to imagine the people that lived there long ago.

A nap to recap: how reward, daytime sleep boost learning – As I read about the study – I wondered what the results would be with a meditation break rather than a sleep break.

Winners of Nikon's 2015 Small World Contest Reveal the Microscopic Beauty of Our World – Images of things you can’t see so easily with just your eyes.

Orange lichens are potential source for anticancer drugs – Parietin in a pigment in orange lichens and rhubarb…that has the potential for treating leukemia without toxicity to human blood cells.

Study compares traditional, modern views of aging – There seems to be consensus that older people are more respected and perceived as wiser than younger people. However, traditional societies think older people have better memories and modern societies think older people have poor memories.

Cranberry Glades Botanical Area

Cranberry Glade Botanical Area was a stop on our way between Beartown State Park and Cass Scenic Railroad State Park in West Virginia. It is a boggy area with mountains around it. Many of the trees on the mountains had lots their leaves already…although there were some remnants of color left.

The cotton grass was waved in the breeze.

The boardwalk makes it easy to stay just above the bog yet see the dense grown on old logs.

The mosses growing directly in the bog are mostly green…but sometimes are vividly red.

Small plants are everywhere

But require bending down for a closer look.

There is a visitor center nearby that had an exhibit about invasive species (insects) that are causing problems in the area. They also had a laminated, folded quick reference about invasive plants that I bought – similar to ones I have about native birds and plants.

Beartown State Park

We visited Beartown State Park in West Virginia for the first time back in 2001. It is a small, but memorable park and well worth another visit. It consists primarily of a boardwalk around huge boulders covered with moss, ferns and lichens….

(and some very fast moving chipmunks)

With lots of trees that manage to grow up through the rocks.

The deep narrow crevasses are as similar to the slot canyons in the western US as we get on the East coast.

I took a picture of a staircase with my husband on it to provide some an element of scale.

The rock face had eroded pits. It is hard to fathom the amount of time it takes for weathering to form these pits; some of them are large enough to hold a person.

The leaf color was spectacular up close and

Looking up to the sky.

My special find of the walk was a pair of puff balls.

Growing In/On Rocks

I photographed a lot of organisms growing on the rocks when we made our tour of state parks in southern New York (Stony Brook, Robert H. Treman, Taughannock, and Letchworth). Most of the gorges are crumbling shale - small and large slabs. Since we are focused on waterfalls - some of the plants were cling to wet or damp rocks.

There were mosses and ferns that see to require very little soil

Others that grew in a bit more soil in the cracks…or lichen that grows on the surface of rock, breaking away small bits of the stone over long periods of time.

Any structure built of stones seemed to have colonized by something from algae to lichen to liverworts to mosses to ferns to higher plants. I enjoyed taking pictures of the small landscapes on the rock walls of the gorges and the walls/bridges that had been constructed for the trail. Enjoy my picks for the slideshow below!

Stony Brook State Park - August 2015

The first and last park we visited in our trek to state parks in New York back in August was Stony Brook State Park. The first time we were in the park was a hot Monday afternoon - and there were lots of people in the water. It was hard to get pristine pictures of anything. We returned during a damp and cool morning a few days later; the only other people in the park were park personnel!

There is a lot of moving water in the park: large falls and little trickles. The gray day made it easier to photograph.

My favorite of the images is a low falls - a little dark with the greens  and mists of late summer framing the water.

I liked the stone bridges

And wooden bridges.

Both had lichen and moss growing on their stone abutments.

There were some leaves that looked worn from summer…getting ready for fall.

There were berries ripening too.

There were a few cairns but not as many as we saw at Robert H. Treman State Park.

Last but not least - there was a spider waiting patiently in a web suspended from hemlock branches full of water droplets.

Zooming - August 2015

I did lots of hiking with campers in August…and managed some local photography jaunts (like the Butterfly exhibit at Brookside Gardens). As I was creating the collages for this month, I started experimenting with a better way to upload them…so click on any collage below to see a larger version of it! Some highlights of the zoomed images this month are:

• Feather in the grass
• Butterflies and moths
• A toad
• Milkweed pods infested with ?
• Crabapples on the ground before they could mature
• Water droplets on a leaf after a rain storm
• Lichen and moss
• Empty wasp nest
• Golden rod
• Water lily
• Magnolia seed pod

 Enjoy!

 

Mt. Pleasant Farm - August 2015 (part 1)

I was at the Howard County Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant Farm earlier this week to lead a nature photography activity for their campers (ages 5-12). By the end of the day I had over 1600 photos from the children that I needed to review during the evening and a few of my own. Now that I’ve had a chance to review my own - there are a few worth sharing via this blog….in the same order that I took them so they do reflect the hiking we did.

Just behind the nature center a large limb had been cut recently.

We went past the bee hives…down the hill…past the butterfly garden

And stopped to look at the mossy logs that have fallen over the stream.

Then we walked along the path toward Hodge Podge Lodge. The goldenrod was starting to bloom along the grassy path.

The shingles of Hodge Podge Lodge caught my attention….lichen, moss, and leaves.

The path to the side of the Lodge down to the stream looked wet from the rain the night before.

And we started to close the loop by walking toward the community garden. I didn’t notice the bugs on this plant until I was looking at the photos…and have not identified the plant or the bugs!

We started the hike for the second group on the path downhill from the back of the nature center. This red bud was early on the trail….with lots of seed pods.

The jewelweed was near the stream.

The mile a minute seems to be taking over this bird house.

Back up the hill and down the road toward the meadow - we stopped in the old orchard. The apples were beginning their turn to red.

There was lots of milkweed pods (still green) in the meadow….and some had beetles.

And every flower seemed to have an insect of some kind.

To be continued in Sunday’s blog post…

Jockey Ridge State Park

Jockey Ridge State Park was very close to our hotel in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. It’s a dune field on the sound side of the barrier island. They sponsor a school from hang gliding at the park which is just a little south of Kitty Hawk where the Wright Brothers took flight. We also stopped by the park before we headed inland to other wildlife refuges. All the pictures were from that morning in the park.

Walking to the end of the boardwalk from the visitor center that crosses over dunes stabilized with trees -

Some with curly lichen -

There is a wooden platform that looks out to a low place in the dunes where water had collected from the overnight rain.

I took the stairs down to the sand for a closer look at the ripples left in the sand

And a few bird tracks made since the rain had smoothed the sand.

My own footprints were the only human footprints.

I walked down to the edge of the water and heard plops in the water. I never managed to see the frogs but they were probably taking advantage of the water.

At the edge of the forest the shifting of the sand was obvious. Some trees were being buried

And some were clinging to the edge with their roots showing.

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! 

Grand Canyon National Park

I’ve been to Grand Canyon National Park three times:

• When I was in high school - in early spring 1971 when I walked a little ways down Bright Angel Trail then turned back when it started snowing.
• In May 1983 when my husband and I walked down the Bright Angel Trail to the plateau level. I remember blisters from the too-new hiking books and my legs feeling like jelly for most of the walk back up.
• In January 2015 when it was cold and breezy. We drove to the park through early morning light and saw a bald eagle landing in the top of a pine tree beside the highway. I wasn’t fast enough to get a picture but it started out the day right. The pictures below are from the visit a few weeks ago.

It is hard to fathom the sheer size of the place. The rim trail on the South Rim - accessible from many points - is an easy walk to try to get perspective. We were early enough that the haze had not burned off completely and sometimes the vegetation seemed to glow from light within.

There has been a lot of building in the main park facilities since 1983. I liked the way the paving incorporated different colors of concrete to make designs - spirals and gentle curves. But we didn’t stay in the developed area long. We decided on our plan for the day - settled on where we would eat lunch (Maswik Lodge Food Court) and began working our way toward Hermits Rest stopping at just about every overlook. After lunch we headed in the opposite direction (toward Desert View) where we would leave the park and head to our hotel about sunset. Along the way we saw rapids and twists of the river below, a mini-snowman, beefy crows, and the zigzag of a trail into the canyon. Sometimes I took pictures of lichen and small plants just to not be overwhelmed by the Grand Canyon vista!

I am already thinking about when I can go again!