Gleanings of the Week Ending April 21, 2018

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.

Adventure Photographer Captures Majestic Scenes of the Natural World – Starting out this group of gleanings with some eye candy!

Arctic sea ice extent at 2018 winter maximum was second smallest on record | NOAA Climate.gov – It will be interesting to see what happens to the Arctic this summer since there was less ice this winter.

With a Green Makeover, Philadelphia Is Tackling Its Stormwater Problem - Yale E360 – This article discusses what Philadelphia is doing…also what Philadelphia has learned from other cities. Dealing with stormwater has become a challenge in many urban (or suburban) environments….and rain gardens, green roofs, wetlands, and other techniques are leading to more sustainable solutions.

More Reason to Leave the Car Behind When Visiting the Columbia River Gorge - News | Planetizen – Have to keep this in mind for a vacation to the Northwest.

A North American Climate Boundary Has Shifted 140 Miles East Due to Global Warming - Yale E360 – Quite a few of my family members live in the Dallas area…and they are now on the dry side of the boundary!

Basking sharks gather in large groups off northeast US coast: Group sightings are fairly rare -- ScienceDaily – Opportunist data gathering…maybe someday it will be clearer why they happen with the second largest fish in the world.

Google X Spinoff Dandelion Raises $4.5 Million To Explore Residential Geothermal – Residential Geothermal primed to become mainsteam?

Birding For People Who Do Not Like Lists – Cool Green Science – This is me…a birder that does not like lists. I’m just thrilled to watch them…trying to get good photographs of them.

More than 50 new Nasca Lines, found with the help of GlobalXplorer and citizen archaeologists | TED Blog – citizen scientists searching satellite images.

Top 25 Wild Bird Brood Parasites – National Geographic Blog – I never can resist the collections of bird photographs….even these that are brood parasites.

New Housing Development

I have lived in the same house for over 20 years and the area across the street from the neighborhood has always been a agricultural field.

There were some changes over the years: the field was planted with soybeans or corn or wheat – we always tried to observe the sprouts growing into seedlings as we went by to discover which it would be. The margins changed when herbicides came into popular use. Crop stubble was left, and tillage was reduced over the years – never leaving the soil bare for long or at all. And now – the process to develop the land into a residential neighborhood has started.

The development is in the initial phase with civil engineers doing studies and developing a sketch plan. Last week there was a ‘pre-submission community meeting’ (part of the county’s Development Review Process) that was crowded…people standing all around the edges of the room because the seats were full. It was my first experience at this kind of meeting and I was glad I got there early enough to get a seat. There was a lot of tension in the room with a lot of questions about the impact on already clogged roads and overcrowded schools. I am on the mailing list to get the responses to the issues raised within the next 30 days. I’m also sign up to the community Facebook page so that I can learn from others in the community that know more about how to maneuver within the process to protect the interest of the already existing neighborhoods…if this new development proceeds.

One of the new things I learned in the meeting was that the traffic issues on the roads now are largely due to a development that did not complete as planned and provide an entrance/exit to a major through street; instead the development only uses the narrow 2 lane roads in place prior to the development which were not designed for the volume of traffic they now carry. No wonder the people that have been following the issues for years are openly distrustful of the process and the developers rather than starting out in ‘trust but verify’ mode.

It’s positive that there are so many people engaged at this point…that the big issues have been surfaced. This is becoming my close-to-home HoLLIE-like project!

HoLLIE – Week 5

The Week 5 of HoLLIE (Howard County Legacy Leadership Institute for the Environment) class focused on farming in our area of Maryland, conversations that change hearts/minds/behavior, and protecting watersheds from storm water.

The day started out cool and damp…with lots of birds moving about and making noises. I took a short walk around Belmont, but the birds were not still enough for photography (and the light was not very good. I did get some silhouettes of pigeons in the sweet gum.

I had better luck with buds on trees

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seedpods from last summer,

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and the bark on the river birch.

Then it was back indoors for class.

The farms in our area are generally small and generally must specialize to be successful. The country is down to 3 dairy farmers and will probably lose one of them this year. We were encouraged to ‘buy local’ and I felt good that I already have signed up for the 2018 version of the Gorman Farm CSA (community supported agriculture).

By the end of the day – we were all hoping the rain would hold off for our field trip to see different ways Columbia, MD ‘slows the flow’ of storm water runoff. It remained cloudy...but no rain! We stopped at a bioretention area near Wilde Lake to handle the runoff from a large barn so that it does not dig a trench on it’s way to the lake (carrying the slope sediment with it). It was an attractive depression the grasses and other plants with interesting seed pods (this time of year).

The next stop was a stream restoration where a series of stepwise pools has been constructed that will slow water letting it soak in  with the series of pools or drop sediment before it moves on town to Lake Elkhorn. The project is completed except for plantings.

The last stop was an inline bioretention facility, Homespun pond, and a nearby residential rain garden. I listened but was busy photographing what turned out to be a male and female hooded merganser on the far side of the pond!

It was another good class day!

Previous HoLLIE posts: Week 1, Week 2, week 3, week 4