Nomads, days 25 and 26 (9/27/2023)

So, we made it to Flagstaff and camped at a KOA campsite again. Although we hate to admit it, they have become one of our favored establishments. They are predictable and have relatively roomy sites and usually very friendly. What did we do the next two days? I for one was very excited, knowing that I would really immerse myself in the ecosystem that I dearly love: the southern Colorado Plateau high altitude desert. We were going to meet up with friends for the next two days and visit places we used to live in. But first things first.

Day 25: Flagstaff (AZ) – Gallup (NM) – Albuquerque

Day 26: Albuquerque – Santa Fe – Tres Piedras – Alamosa (CO)

It was especially day 25 that was so familiar to me. We had lived in Gallup for three years in the early 1990s and this was the next homecoming for us. We were able to contact Gwen, one of our best friends when we lived there and were able to visit her for three hours before moving on to meet our next batch of friends. But first Gallup.

The drive to Gallup was amazing; it included I-40 at its worse, Navajo souvenir shops, the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Parks, and a lot of reminiscing (“been here, remember this or that”). The entrance into New Mexico was as dramatic as I remember. The landscape changed from flat, high-altitude desert to the red rocks and cliffs that Gallup is famous for. Gallup looked the same, except that I think they moved the Walmart (which was overrun every weekend by folks from the reservation who came down to shop). At least I think it was. They had built what looked like town houses along the interstate. Gwen told us later that it was low-income housing. And there was a dog park in Gallup. It was great catching up with an old friend talking about old friends that we were not able to catch up with.

A little about the desert. Short grass, fourwing saltbush, sagebrush, an occasional juniper and other assorted plants. Having lived in Gallup, the species (looking from the van) and the sparseness felt so familiar. These were all species I had done research on during my career out west or know from the bonsai folks I follow. We spent a lot of time with Gwen and her late husband Mark visiting spots in the desert, looking for petrified wood, hiking the woods and exploring the lave fields and lava tubed in the Mal Pais.

The road from Gallup to Albuquerque was similar, we drove through the lave fields near Grants ("remember camping on the ridge with our daughter in her play pen and us almost starting a forest fire or meeting those folks from Florida who decided to travel the U.S. after their home was destroyed by hurricane Andrew?") before descending into the Rio Grande are. Maybe with the exception of the Indian Casinos, it was also familiar. I remembered the day that I was varnishing the floor in our living room, and I ran out of varnish. I jumped in the car and drove to Lowes in Albuquerque for another can and drove back. This was a three-hour trip, and it was snowing all the way. I continued varnishing when I arrived home. The floor looked great afterwards. Ah, to be young again!

In Albuquerque we met our friends Jean and Steve who were moving to Arizona for a temporary job. This was a motel night for us; we ended up going to dinner together and afterwards we said our goodbyes. Time for us to sleep in because of a date we had in Santa Fe after 10:30, while they got up early so they could reach the Phoenix area by nightfall.

The next day we had a wonderful get together with Ruth and Terry in Santa Fe. Terry and I used to commute together to the coal mine we worked at, and they took care of our daughter when we needed it. We had a great time catching up and getting pointers for our trip further north and east. At their recommendation we followed the route to Tres Piedras and a stop-over at the home that Aldo Leopold built as the time of his marriage and acceptance as head forester of the Carson National Forest. I felt like stepping on hallowed ground. It felt very special!

We ended our trip in Alamosa at the KOA campground (did I mention our like of KOAs?). We had spent some time in Alamosa in the past to attend a wedding between good friends, which is the reason why we chose this for our trip home. Jean and Steve told us that I-40 sucked; moreover, we wanted to stay away from the large highways. Alamosa is at 7500 feet elevation and famous for the Sand Dunes National Parks. It was predicted to be 34 degrees that night. A microbrewery and dinner out later we settled into the van, small space-heater on and hoped for the best. Ah what a grant two days in familiar territory and with old friends.

A quick walk in Flagstaff in the Pondarosa pine forest near the KOA

The desert

On the road between Santa Fe and Tres Piedras (honey I am home)

Aldo Leopold's home

Not again ... Oh Las Vegas (10/2/2017)

Well, it happened again.  Another mass shooting.  What the fuck!
It is a horrible thing that happened, a thing that should never have happened.  I am absolutely devastated.

At least the gunman was not Muslim, nor some other minority; it seems to be a lone wolf.  Maybe an angry white guy (64 year old), who knows?  Not that this make it any better, nor that this is a thing to celebrate.  Actually, for me being a white guy of 64, it makes me feel horrible.  I know I am writing this way too early to come to real conclusions but I need to get this off my mind.

While I am glued to the TV trying to find out more about the crap that went on in Las Vegas, these two guys have not worry in the world.  They were fed and walked.  Daddy is home with a migraine and the news does not help.

It is amazing to watch TV and watch what went on and how everyone analyze it.  I just hear the automatic gun fire and wonder how people get these guns.  Honestly, you do not need them to hunt but you can use it to mow down people like I mow my lawn, but then he did it from a high-rise motel room.  

Readers of my blogs know that while I am not a hunter, I am pro hunting.  I am a naturalist/ecologist who believes like my hero Aldo Leopold that because of the extirpation of the natural predators we need to hunt deer, but we do not need automatic rifles to hunt for deer.  We use those to kill people as we saw last night!

A walk in the woods, the naturalists have it (Yorktown, 12/22/2016)

I have been reading a lot about nature.  In fact , as a biologist I consider myself a naturalist, or maybe an amateur naturalist.  I write a lot about nature in my blogs; it often revolves around the interaction between us humans and nature, or what I have started calling “nature deficit disorder.”  It is a term I stole as most of my readers are aware (there are now 30 posts on this blog where I talk about it).  

In the distant past I have wanted to become a naturalist writer.  But I am not sure if I have the quality to be one or to become one, so this blog will have to do, at least for now.  Among my favorite naturalist writers are John McPhee, Gretel Ehrlich, Sue Hubbell, and Edward Hoagland, among others.  Naturally, I devoured writings by Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. 

The last quick read I had was Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”  A friend of mine tried to convince me that it was Hemingway’s way of telling us that a man can be defeated but not be destroyed, or as he said, maybe that it is a metaphor for Apostle Paul’s writing when he describes that outwardly a man can waste away but inwardly he is being renewed.  Santiago was reborn as a legitimate fisherman; the book ends in him regaining respect from his colleagues and of course having respect in him self.  Hemingway himself claimed there was no symbolism in the story.  I mostly read the story because it is on a list of the top 100 books, as a lover of the water, a sailor, for entertainment, and as a naturalist (I used to fish when I was a teenager).

I have so many unfinished books.  That is not because I don’t like them, but it is partially because of my varied interest and because the only time that I can read is in the evening after work when I am tired.  I usually do not read novels, but read, you guessed it, naturalist and non-fiction books.  Right now I am trying to concentrate on a book on human psychology (Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman) hopefully it fits in with my study of humans and the idea of nature deficit disorder.

To me nature is very important for the human psyche; whether it is that freshly fallen sassafras leaf in the fall; the timing of the pine pollen in spring (mostly on my Instagram Pictures); my frequent walks along the New River Trail in far Western Virginia (7 entries); being out on the water in my kayak or my sailboat (too many to count); or examining a pine tree that apparently snapped in a recent storm (during my latest walk).  I like it all and I need it!  I like to take my time and enjoy taking it all in; the sights and sounds; the feeling of just being immersed in nature, being one with it.

Sunrise on the trail in the woods behind our home.

Take this past Sunday.  It promised to be one of those rare early winter days when the temperature was going to be above 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  We decided that there was no better way to get our spirituality that day then to get out in nature and we went for a two hour hike in the woods behind our house (no church for us).  We went off the beaten track on a trail that is not traveled on by many people.  

The trail leads from our home by some ephemeral ponds that so often write about.  This time of the year they are not as full other years.  They were fuller a month ago, and the water level has slowly been dropping.  These ponds are groundwater fed, meaning the water level in the ponds are as high as the groundwater and we've had a dry month and a half.  Groundwater levels usually rise in the winter and reach their highest level around the middle of February.  All trees are dormant at this time and throughout the winter.  There is little transpiration from plants and the evaporation is at its lowest as well.  By early April the groundwater levels and the levels in the ponds start dropping and the ponds dry up completely by mid to late June.  By that time the water level has dropped almost 6 feet.

Examining a pine tree that must have snapped during a recent storm this past Sunday.  This was on the trail.

The rest of the walk takes us by very young pine forests where the woods were cleared in 2003 after Hurricane Isabel devastated a certain area, through a shallow stream valley, back up to what is my favorite area: a wooded section with huge tulip popular trees.  I would estimate that these trees are close to 300 feet tall and probably more than 100 years old.  After that the trail descends into a mixed forested wetland that is often difficult to cross.  It is wide, dark and wet and often has shallow running water in it.  After passing through the wetland it becomes a fun trail and passes by a heron rookery that appears to have been abandoned in the past two years, and a large swamps where we love to watch redheaded woodpeckers and all kinds of ducks.  Eventually the trail end up in the Battlefield National Historic Park and from there the hiking and biking choices are limitless, but well defined.

A piece of broken off bark covered with lichen that I found lying on the forest floor.  I just loved the color contrast between the bright green and the leaves.  I want to bet it was knocked off by a woodpecker of some kind.

It was a great day for a hike!  Walking around you find all kinds of treasures, large and small, up high and down low.  Getting back from the hike I had my daily 10,000 steps, but the exercise was not the most important.  I felt mentally and spiritually recharged.   

Try it yourself, get out.  It is not scary out there; if you have not done it in a while, start in small doses or just go for a walk in your neighborhood and observe people's yards, the plants, trees and birds.  Take it all in.  Cure your Nature Deficit Disorder!

Just standing still and looking up in the woods is nice!

Travels, nature and breweries (4/9 through 4/16/2016)

My wife and I have been away on vacation for a week.  It was wonderful, away from work, away from the regular travel I do for work, just away from all the regular crap I do all the time.  We spent time in New England; we visited our daughter who goes to graduate school in Boston (Harvard) and (as we describe it to friends) we stole her car for a few days and drove to Maine.  This entry: however, is more about a few experiences I had and how they relate to some of the subjects that are a common thread in this blog.

As any good naturalist or any good Unitarian Universalist that visit New England should do (it helps I am both), I visited WaldenPond.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage site for many of us.  I often mention Aldo Leopold, who introduced the idea of environmental ethics, but in truth, it was Henry David Thoreau who was one of the first persons who introduced naturalism to the American public and the need to get away in nature.  He had a strong need to go back to the land, to get his sanity back, learn what life was all about and what it could teach him:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

The location of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond.

The plaque showing the location of the chimney of the cabin.

This is one of the most common used quote from Thoreau when it comes to Walden.  Walden was published in 1854 and was based on a more than 2 year stay in a cabin in the woods near Walden Pond.  It is just interesting to see how already in the mid-1800s there was an obvious need by some to get away from it all and go back to nature, to connect to nature, to experience nature and describe it.  Did Thoreau experience nature deficit disorder in 1850?  But it definitively shows the need to connect to nature.

Walden Pond

Thoreau was a fascinating character he did a lot more than just live for two years near a pond, he is worth a read and a study.  I have read a few books by him or books that tried to retrace his steps and it was impressive what he did.  But he was more that a naturalist he also was a philosopher, a humanist and humanitarian.  There is a whole society set up around this scholar and thinker.

While sitting in coffee shops, microbreweries and funky restaurants is wonderful, albeit maybe not so wonderful on the budget, they can only satisfy me so much.  It is really the nature that nurtures me and satisfies me in the long run.  Our most favorite times and memories of our trip to New England will definitively be our hikes around Walden Pond and on Mount Dessert Island (Acadia National Park); our trip to the top of Mount Battie to look over the Penobscot Bay; and our walks around all those wonderful lighthouses looking over the water (that’s nature too).  They will be staying with us much longer than that food we ate at that restaurant.

Visit to the Allagash Brewery (my favorite) in Portland Maine)

We encountered a beaver dam in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island (near Bar Harbor, Maine)

Looking down on Camden and the Penobscot Bay from Mount Battie

One of the many lighthouses we visited and had an opportunity to enjoy ocean views.  We saw a lot of common eiders swimming in the waters below these lighthouses. 

The need for nature really struck me during our walks through downtown Boston.  It is great to see how the famous "Big Dig" stuck a major highway under ground and turned the above ground part into a park.  Moreover, it was great to walk on the Boston Commons, in the Boston Gardens and even along the Charles River.  All little pieces of green, where people could enjoy a little nature.  One bizarre thing struck me and I had to take a photograph of it (below).  Not far from the Paul Revere house was a church that where the outbuildings were completely covered with a canvas depicting plants, branches and leaves.  It reminded me of Richard Louv's in his book "The Nature Principle" in which he describes that research has shown that even pictures of nature in buildings and offices help in reducing stress.  Personally, I know that being in nature is so important in bringing down my stress level and (I assume) bringing down my blood pressure.  Nature can be the woods (green) or the water (blue).  That's why I was so fascinated by what I saw on the church; hopefully it does the same in the area near the church.  I found it such an interesting idea of using a bare wall.  What a sight!

The canvas nature mural on a church in downtown Boston

Newport News Park (3/24/2015)

In his essays on conservation ethics Aldo Leopold wrote about how the removal of predators from the landscape was detrimental to nature.  The removal of the wolf in the western US by ranchers to protect their sheep eventually led to an explosion in the mule deer population and tremendous over grazing by the deer which resulted in a decreased food supply for the sheep and an eventual decline in income for the ranchers.  (Yes, I already wrote about this, but it is worth repeating.) It is amazing how interconnected our life is with the natural world.   It is even more amazing how humans now reached a stage where we can influence and alter the natural wold as opposed to the natural world impacting us.

I have seen this as well.  In the late 1990s, I conducted some research in Valley Forge National Park and noticed how small the deer were.  I am not sure if it was caused by malnutrition or whether evolution was at work here.  What I do know that the National Park is completely surrounded by residential areas, which have forced the deer into a smaller and smaller area to find their food.  Naturally,  they do browse in the neighborhoods, but it seems that they most likely consume native landscape plants while they leave a lot of the exotics alone.  With the lack of hunting and predators the deer population in the park must have exploded resulting in a lack of food.  Either the deer a scrawny because of that, but given enough time you can expect that there will be an evolutionary pressure for smaller deer that can survive and thrive on less food.  But mature deer in the park looked like they were miniaturized, or as I called them bonsai deer; mature deer stood two to three feet tall.

Zoom in on today's picture.  In my opinion we are creating a similar issue in Newport Nes Park as I encountered in Valley Forge.   We are allowing the deer population to increase without culling by predators or through hunting.  Deer have so overgrazed the park that most palatable plants have been pushed out.  In addition to the overgrazing the lack of forest management has resulted in a dense leaf bed through which very few plants can germinate.  As a result we have very little understory and the only plants that remain in the understory are unpalatable to the deer.  Deer are now invading our neighborhood.

That brings me to idyllic picture of a doe and her fawn.  It was around night fall and they were slowly migrating towards our yards for their evening meals.

Newport News Park (1/4/2015)

Wow, 2015.  Happy New Year to all my readers.

Today's blog is a multipurpose posting first of course it is a wish to all to make the best of it all and enjoy 2015.  I am sure that some readers may think something like: "this guy had 11 days vacation, and all the time to take the perfect picture, and now see what he shows as his first of 2015."  I'll explain this below.  Remember, one of my favorite sayings is: "It is what it is", and there is not much we can do about certain situations, but to enjoy it (or maybe grin and bare it?).

So why this picture.  It is about unintended consequences.  Lets start: I believe in the inherent goodness in all and everything, and that we as humans are capable in screwing it up (or sometimes misinterpreting it).  I am often reminded of Aldo Leopold who made a 180 degree turn after he shot a wolf (in the early 20th century) and later on came to the conclusion that exterminating wolves was not going to save the sheep ranchers, but that it was actually going to hurt them since the deer no longer had any predators.  The loss of predators resulted in the explosion of the deer populations and overgrazing by the deer, which in turn resulted in the loss of food for the sheep and actually crashing sheep populations.  In other words exterminating wolves actually hurt the sheep farmers.

A lot of human interference in nature has unforeseen consequences, but wolves are great examples.  After their reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park, the ecology of the riverbanks and wetlands improved.  When the wolves were exterminated from the parks, elk became bolder and started grazing in these areas and greatly impacting the vegetation.  The reintroduction of wolves really helped in the restoration of these areas.  This link provides some great information on that.

So why this picture?  During our walks out behind our home, a sight such as this is very common.  The bark is stripped from the small pine tree, and I can guarantee that the tree will most likely not survive.  This is not necessarily bad in this case, you can see in the background that the the tree density is very high and killing some trees would be very good.  But there is a deeper issue here.  What is this stripping of the bark all about?  Well, bucks (male deer) shed their horns in the late fall, and they start growing out around this time of year.  You can imagine that horns that try to poke out of your skin hurt or at least are a little itchy.  That is where these small trees come in.  A buck can not ask one of the girls in his harem to give him a scratch on the head, and so he has to do this himself.  In that process they scratch so hard that the bark comes off the tree.

But briefly coming back to those deer.  We have no (or very few) predators in the woods out back.  We have sighted a few coyotes, but that's it.  Moreover, no hunting is allowed in the park.  As a result the deer have proliferated. eating everything in sight.  The woods very impoverished; seedlings are eaten as soon as they germinate.  (It is actually so bad that the deer are running out of food, and they have invaded our neighborhood.  The other night we almost witnessed a crash between a deer and a car).  So now, the woods out back have very little understory and they are not very diverse.  The only plants that grow there are the ones deer do not eat.  Although I understand we cannot reintroduce the wolf in our back yard, or allow hunting, I wish we could somehow keep the deer population under control, thus keeping the biodiversity in the woods behind us (and allowing me to grow nice plants in my yard).  As you can see, our actions have all these unforeseen consequences in nature that may show up much later and sometimes too late for us to do something about.