Category Archives: Nature

From the Land of Not-Quite

Posted on May 29, 2011 | 4 Comments

I live not-quite in a not-quite city, and it seems to suit me. All my life I’ve been not-quite sure who or what I wanted to be, so I have not-quite “arrived.” I was not-quite part of any group in school, and not-quite a great student – not-quite a rebel and not-quite an angel. Sometimes I feel like I’m not-quite even here. It’s a little like being almost a ghost – I sometimes feel like I can observe while unobserved, like the proverbial fly on the wall. But not-quite.

With people from all sides encouraging us all to “follow your passion,” and “do what you love,” I have not-quite been there or done that. And my problem seems to be that I’m not-quite sure which passion to follow – science or art, writing or painting, growing roses or building web sites. Let’s not forget reading. If I could kick back with a good book all day and make a living at it… heaven.

This past weekend I met someone you might call a guru of authentic living. Patti Digh is a writer/blogger that my friend, Tresha, has been following on line for some time. Tresha sent Patti some of her artwork, and one piece was published in one of Patti’s books – Four Word Self Help. Tresha gave me a copy of the book. Sunday, Patti Digh was going to be at a bookstore in Houston to chat and autograph her books, so Tresha asked me if I wanted to go.

Now Houston is not-quite on my list of favorite places to drive in my car on a warm day. My car is apparently going through menopause, and is prone to hot flashes – especially after I’ve been driving a while. So Tresha and I had to find a place where we could meet where I could leave my car – well away from the torture chamber that is the Houston freeway system. Did I mention that the air conditioner in my car doesn’t work? Yeah, that, too.

Anyway it’s a lot more fun to drive/ride into Houston with someone else, so we met in beautiful downtown Brenham, about an hour from where I live and two from Tresha’s home. And they have a handy public parking lot smack in the middle of the historic district – we sometimes meet there on a Saturday to eat lunch at “Must Be Heaven” and visit the funky little downtown shops.

But back to Patti Digh and why she’s in a piece about the “Land of Not-Quite.” I get the feeling she used to live here, too. Her 37 Days blog explains what happened in her life to cause her to want to leave the land of not-quite behind. She has since published books of collections of some of her blog entries along with contributions from some of her readers (like Tresha’s artwork). Her trip to Houston was part of a book tour for her latest book, What I Wish for You: Simple Wisdom for a Happy Life.

She greets everyone like an old friend, and so obviously is enjoying her life now, it’s hard not to wish for exactly the same thing. Except that nobody’s life is exactly like anybody else’s. None of us have exactly the same dreams or the same experiences in life that may have led us to live apart from those dreams. Let me tell you, not-quite achieving a dream is a hell of a place to be. Suppressing dreams to the point of losing all track of them is like some kind of psychic amputation, complete with phantom limb pain.

I’m struggling to reclaim my dreams, beginning with sorting through the dim storage areas in my mind to find which ones were the most precious and can still make me happy, and how I can rebuild the support structures to hold them up while I learn just how much I’m still capable of doing. For instance, the dream I shoved farthest back in the attic is a horse. I never got over my teenage crush on horses. I discovered that I’m not a natural-born rider, but I never got to spend enough time on horse-back to get good at it. On the other hand, I did get pretty good at falling off. The current condition of my back and various joints makes horse-back riding look like a bad idea.

And I’ve fallen in love with mules. They appeal to the basenji-lover in me. Mules are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for (as are basenjis), disinclined to follow orders that don’t make sense to them (ditto for basenjis), disinclined to let every little thing send them into a panic (as some horses are prone to do), and every bit as attractive. I could devote a whole blog to photos of mules and stories about them – if only I could get to the mules. When I went to the Texas Shootout last May, I felt like I’d found a little corner of heaven, but this year the event has been canceled due to the bad economy and high gas prices. I was planning to spend more than just the final day at the event, force myself to talk to more people, and hopefully get invited to a nearby farm to visit and take more pictures. Not going to happen.

I can’t travel far, especially in the warmer months, because of my menopausal car. It’s not as major a hardship for me as it could be for some people, because I’m quite happy to stay home and keep the Puppy company… and read. If I could make a living reading, that would be another dream come true. It might not be possible to get wealthy from it, but I’m working on learning to write great book reviews so that at least I may be able to get all my books free (and pre-publication) at some future date. I’ve already had several published at Story Circle Book Reviews. I don’t get paid, but I’ve already gotten a couple of free books.

For my third dream (and if I was talking to a magic genie, this would be my third wish), I would love to have a great big rose garden in my back yard. I have ideal conditions – a bald prairie where the roses could all get tons of direct sunlight and great air circulation. I would only grow roses that had won awards for fragrance, like Fragrant Cloud, Double Delight, Mister Lincoln, and that I could get enough blooms from to take some to sell at the weekly farmers market in Bryan. I would make little cards to go with the bouquets with the name and history of the rose, because I think that’s the best way to enjoy roses – knowing their personal histories.

So there it is. My recipe for a happy life. It may yet come about. I feel I may be moving from not-quite to almost.

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Survivor: Central Texas

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 3 Comments
Spring's first rose

Some would call it a rose. I call it one tough hombre.

One of my Chrysler Imperial bushes put on it’s first bloom a few days ago, and I got a few pictures while it was at it’s peak. Some of the petal edges show a little burning — it was probably in the bud during our last cold snap and got a little frost bit. Still it has that gorgeous blue-red I’ve always seen on Chrysler Imperials, and it smells as good as it looks.

Both of my rose bushes made it through last year’s extreme drought conditions with very little help from me. At times they were completely leafless, but every time it rained a little, they would put out new growth. Then they endured the winter with no extra protection from the elements. A lot of people think that roses are too fussy to bother with. I used to think that, myself. That was before I learned that roses had names, like “Don Juan,” “Madame Plantier,” “Dublin Bay,” “Fragrant Cloud,” and, of course, “Chrysler Imperial.” For some reason, plants with names like that all of a sudden seemed worth whatever effort it would take to be able to have them co-habitate with me in my yard.

Madame Plantier and Don Juan were two of the first roses I fell in love with, through some gardening cards I subscribed to for several years in Kentucky. Finding those two roses in a local gardening center was a different matter, and eventually led me to on line searching, and the Antique Rose Emporium (ARE). Although I was still living in Kentucky at the time, I was able to order a Madame Plantier rose to plant in my front yard. In a few years  it grew into a big, spreading, wild-looking bush with attractive, small leaves, fewer than average thorns, and every spring would produce a huge crop of pinkish buds that opened into saucer-sized white flowers with a wonderful, old-fashioned fragrance. I miss her.

Since returning to central Texas, I’ve experimented with roses in containers. ARE has a list of some that are supposed to do well, but I suspect I didn’t have large enough containers, because after a couple of years they started dying. When I brought home the two Chrysler Imperials winter before last, I went out and got a couple of 32 gallon garbage cans, drilled a few holes in the bottoms, and planted them in those. Why don’t I just plant them in my yard, you ask? Because a few short inches below the surface it’s all concrete — heavy gray clay mixed with gravel of varying sizes. Hell to dig through, tends to repel water, which means the soil above it can stay soggy for weeks if we get a lot of rain. And one thing you learn about roses if you do any research at all is they need “well-drained” soil. They like a lot of water, but they hate wet feet.

The interesting thing about the roses ARE sells is that all their root stock were foundlings — cuttings gathered (or “rustled” — more on that later) from abandoned farmsteads and cemeteries, where they’d been thriving with no help from gardeners for years. And it seems that some time in the early eighties or thereabouts, some intrepid souls took to sneaking in to some of those places and snipping off bits of the plants, taking them home and growing them in their own gardens. The story of the Texas Rose Rustlers is colorful and entertaining, and unfortunately, they don’t tell it on their website any more. But their “Etiquette of the Rustle” page, and the “About” page at ARE contain some kernels of the story.

Now that it’s spring again, I’m thinking of expanding my garbage can garden, at least by one, so I can get another specimen of one of the first container roses I tried. She’s called Dame de Coeur, and is the most electric red and has the most knock-your-socks-off wonderful fragrance I’ve ever encountered. I love my Chrysler Imperials, and want another Mister Lincoln someday, too, but the “Queen of Hearts” is the next red on my list.

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Springbok

Posted on March 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Ok, so maybe I’m getting just a liiitle carried away with the “spring” thing. Bear with me, though, this one is not completely off the screen. It’s another zoo story, actually. (I guess I need to add a “zoo story” tag.) Yessir, back when I was a’workin’ at that there Foat Wuth ZOOO, my buddy Jeanne took care of the springbok herd. She had about a dozen females and their assorted offspring, and one herd male. As the official zoo “nursery” keeper, I sometimes got to help care for a rejected baby springbok for its first few days. But Jeanne always wanted to get the little buggers back into the herd as quickly as possible, so she’d take over the bottle feedings and keep the baby in the barn at the exhibit after that.

So, what does one call a baby springbok? (Warning! Possible science content ahead.) If you look at the Wikipedia page, you’ll see the male springbok referred to as a ram, the female a ewe, so it would follow that the young would be a lamb, or maybe a kid. But farther down that same page, the young are called fawns. So, which are they, sheep or deer?

Actually, neither. Since their “containing group,” Antilopinae, is in the Family Bovidae, they are a little more closely related to sheep and goats than to deer (Family Cervidae). And you can see the relationship if you consider that both male and female springbok have permanent horns, like cattle. Not branching antlers that fall off, like deer, or horns only on the males or radically different on the males, like a lot of sheep and goats. Which is probably why Jeanne always called the babies calves. I usually just called them “Shorty.”

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Spring Green

Posted on March 21, 2011 | Leave a comment
Tree branches dressed in new leaves

A green that shouts, "Wake up!"

There’s a color that shows up every spring — the first green the trees put on — that I just love. I glows. It lights up the countryside. Otherwise drab roadsides come alive and fairly shout with green. They almost don’t need sunlight to glow, but seem lit from within — these first leaves of spring. But on a bright day they can be almost blinding.

Later in the season as the sunlight gets stronger and hotter, leaves add thicker layers of waxy cuticle to hold in the moisture. The green turns darker and more business-like. The leaves get to work turning those light waves into plant food and oxygen, and put away the party colors until next year.

I often wonder if the paler, more tender spring leaves are better able to absorb the less intense early spring light. But not being a plant biologist, or intensely curious enough to try and find an answer, I content myself with thinking how lovely that an adaptation that helps the plant also delights the eye.

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Word Press Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

Posted on March 14, 2011 | 2 Comments
12 unit Purple Martin condo

Home on the prairie

Well, they didn’t specify whose home to take a picture of, so I chose one of my backyard Purple Martin condo. One of the not-so-many good things about living on a semi-bald prairie.

Last year, two martin pairs raised chicks in the house. I wrote a couple of posts last summer when they left. Or, rather, when they moved out of the house.

I have high hopes they’ll do the same this year. Early last week a couple of males, accompanied by one female, did a couple of fly-bys, and landed on the roof a couple of times. Now if I can just keep the starlings from chasing them off. It might be time to get a starling-eradication device.

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Written in Stone: the review

Posted on November 2, 2010 | 2 Comments

As I stated in my previous post, I recently had a chance to read a review copy of an upcoming science book. It is due for release this Friday, and you can order a copy now from several book sellers. I highly recommend getting a copy and reading it, if you have an interest in paleontology, evolution, or the history of science. Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature, by Brian Switek, has all those things and more.

The book begins with a recent news story – recent paleontology news, that is. A fossil was described that “could be” the elusive, and conclusive, missing link in the human family ancestral chain. In fact, the find, and the fossil, were rather shamelessly promoted, hyped, and hinted about, all the while being kept from the eyes of the scientific community – all but the team of scientists who had prepared and described the fossil, at any rate. “Ida,” as the fossil was informally named, was a beautifully preserved specimen of a small, female, primate some 47 million years old. As this story unfolds, it illustrates several themes that weave through the rest of the book. One is that scientists are all looking for answers to big questions. It’s why they are scientists. They are driven to search for the truth, even if and when it goes against their previous assumptions about how the world works. But scientists are also human. The tendency to interpret findings to fit those previous assumptions is sometimes too much of a temptation to overcome, whether they are conscious of doing it or not. And there have always been scientists who make no pretense about using the data to support any view of life other than one about which they have already made up their minds.

In the case of this book, the answers are truly some of the biggest in the natural sciences: Where did we come from? Who are our ancestors and what did they look like? What can fossils tell us about the ancestors of other creatures with whom we share the present-day earth? And the real nail-biter in my mind – are birds really dinosaurs? There is also the question of whether or not the progression of life-forms through the fossil record shows a progression in another sense, that of evolution from “lower” forms, like simple invertebrates, to “higher” forms, like us. And although evidence reveals that even “simple” invertebrates are quite highly evolved and adapted for their role in nature, there will always be those who want a way to justify placing the human race at the top of some pinnacle of evolutionary achievement.

Switek tells the human stories along with the scientific throughout the book. He digs into the history of the science and finds the personalities that go along with the names. Most students of evolutionary biology are familiar with Charles Darwin, and know something about his life. But Thomas Henry Huxley, Richard Owen, Othaniel C. Marsh, Georges Cuvier, and others are just names, or, at best, shadowy figures at the edge of the stage. Switek has given them substance. He details the conflicts some had with each other, as well as some of the outstanding collaborations.

Each chapter is a separate case study in the history of evolutionary paleontology, using the keystone examples that most of us are familiar with from some course or other in biology. The story of the Archaeopteryx fossils and the debates over the evolution of birds from dinosaurs and whether birds started to fly from the ground up or the trees down is a good example. The feathered fossils, one of which was on exhibit recently at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, are billed as “icons of evolution.” That presence of feathers has now been confirmed on a number of dinosaur fossils has added weight to the placement of birds in a much closer relationship to dinosaurs than would have been considered when the Archaeopteryx fossils were first discovered.

Another “icon of evolution” for many of us has always been the story of evolution of the horse, from the tiny Eohippus – or “Dawn Horse” (now classified under an older name – Hyracotherium), to our present-day horses, zebras, and their relatives. Presentation of the evolution of horses as a steady march from one form to another – from the small, many-toed forms, to the large, modern ones with their single toes – has consistently misrepresented the true story of the ancestry of modern horses. Some of the forms that are shown in a line leading from smaller to larger, actually co-existed at some point in the past and are not closely related. A more accurate portrait of the horse family is of a bush, with many of the branches containing the smaller forms dying out along the way.

Also included in the book is the chapter describing the search for the true evolutionary path of whales, which have been shown through recent molecular studies to be more closely related to hippos than to groups previously proposed as their ancestors. This points out another theme important to Switek, that the field of paleontology has something to contribute to other disciplines in evolutionary science, as well as being able to be enriched by knowledge from those other disciplines.

For anyone with a keen amateur interest in paleontology, this book has everything one could hope for in a single basic reference. There is history, drama, and all the major players – the fossils themselves – telling the stories that are much larger, and much more interesting, than merely a tale of “missing links.”

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…And I take that back

Posted on July 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

Turns out the martins haven’t actually left the area, they just moved out of the house. On reflection, it seemed like a bad time to migrate south — it’s still winter on the other side of the equator. Plainly, I don’t know as much about purple martin migratory habits as some people. I seem to remember my mom saying that they arrive in this area around Valentine’s Day, and leave again on June 15th. That’s pretty specific. But she must have meant that they leave the nest on June 15th. Or thereabouts. We didn’t get the house up until late February, and I didn’t see any martins around it until mid-March. Both families of martins were still using the nest a lot on June 15th. But now I see one group of four (mom, dad, two kids) fly over the house once in a while and never land on it. They hang out on the telephone wires out by the road. I’m sure there’s still plenty of good grasshopper hunting in the area. It just goes to show, you should never stop observing, and you’ll probably never be through learning.

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Like thieves in the night

Posted on June 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

The martins are gone. No goodbyes. No forwarding address. They just took wing and flew away. Their house looks a little forlorn, with just a random sparrow or two perched on the porch railings, where a few days ago the two pairs of adult martins and their well-grown offspring had all been jostling for the best perches on the roof. It made for a busy scene as one or another bird got edged off its spot and flew out and away and up and around and back, all the while chattering in their distinctive purple martin language. It had lifted my heart considerably to have them back after an absence of several years.

But let me back up a bit. For starters, my yard is ideal purple martin habitat — a flat, treeless plain. With plenty of weeds. Grasshoppers like weeds. Purple martins like grasshoppers. For breakfast, lunch and supper. When my parents moved onto this spot after several years in a fairly woodsy location at Hilltop Lakes (where they spent a lot of time watching deer and other wildlife visit their back yard) my mom decided they should have a martin house. A lot of people (like my mom) think martins eat mosquitoes, but they don’t. Other birds might, bats definitely do, but not martins. Still, having a little extra help with grasshopper control is good, too, whether you’re aware of it or not — which my folks weren’t, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, my dad being my dad, he built the house for the martins. He didn’t go half measures, either. The house had 24 apartments, and was attached to a post that could be lowered every winter and the house taken off, cleaned out, and put in storage until spring. This was all to keep the pesky sparrows and starlings from moving in and making the place their slum. After my mom died, in 1989, the martin house never came down again. And the sparrows and starlings started taking over.

When I moved back home in 2002, I saw no martins move in the following spring. There were no vacancies. The place had taken on the appearance of a shabby old tenament, with faded, peeling paint, and last season’s nesting material overflowing out the doors. Pitiful.

Oddly, even though the upright had taken on a bit of a warp, and as a consequence the house leaned a bit to the south, it withstood our brush with Hurricane Rita in 2005. It came down that winter, all on its own. The upright failed under the weight of all that accumulated sparrow and starling crap one stormy night. It made a sad sight lying broken in the middle of the yard. By then my dad was past knowing or caring about it, so my brother and I just quietly cleared away the debris and dug up the foundation of the post.

I looked at martin houses on the internet, and couldn’t afford any of them. I knew I’d never get my brother to build one, so I just kept shopping around whenever I thought about it. I didn’t want to give up, because purple martins in this part of the country don’t even look for natural nesting sites any more. So many generations have been raised in artificial nests that they have come to depend on us to provide them. Finally, last year, I found a house I could afford at the local Tractor Supply center. It’s made of the same kind of plastic that a lot of dog houses are being made of, so it’s lightweight. And it has swing out panels on both sides so it’s easy to clean out. We just happened to have an old T.V. antenna pole just the right height and diameter to attach it to and set it up in about the same location as the old one. Disappointingly, no martins moved in. I wondered if our timing was bad or if for some reason martins disapproved of the material the house was made of. Maybe it smelled funny. The sparrows and starlings didn’t seem to mind, and several of them moved into one or another of the 12 apartments. When cold weather came on, though, we took the house down and I cleaned out all the old nesting material.

Whether spending a year out in the elements made the house lose its plastic smell, or we had better timing in getting it up this year, I was delighted to see the first pair of martins that did a fly-by wheel around and fly in for a closer look. By mid-June, I was pretty sure there were two pairs raising babies in the house, and they didn’t seem to be bothered that they were sharing the building with some sparrow families (I never saw any starlings around).

Before long, the young were all out of the nests, and the whole gang of them would try to perch on the same corner of the roof during the heat of the day. It made for considerable shifting and jostling around, and there was usually a bird or two in the air trying to fly in and land on the favored spot. Hopeless. I was glad, however, when I remembered that they would be leaving soon to migrate back to their winter range — it had to be getting scorching hot sitting on top of that house out in the middle of the prairie in the full sun. If they are going someplace even hotter, I wish them well. But now the Mexican Free-tailed bats are here, and if I remember to go outside right at sunrise and sunset, I can watch them skipping through the air chasing things I can’t see — hopefully mosquitoes. Now if I can convince my brother to put up a bat roost…

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Celebrate, c'mon

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

It RAINED! Here. Yesterday. In my yard. On my crispy, crunchy grass. It rained hard, then tapered off, and was over after about twenty minutes. My roses loved it. They’ll be happy for days, maybe even put out some new blooms for me to smell. My brother may have to mow the lawn this weekend. Maybe he’ll remember how to start the mower. But I will be hauling the hose around tomorrow morning once again to soak my beloved crepe myrtle, and the two baby trees in my front yard. The grass can dry up and go to hell, for all I care, but I need those trees.

We all need trees. That’s why it always blows me away when we get into drought conditions, to see people wasting water trying to save their lawns, and ignoring their trees. Stupid. Most grasses are annual plants, if my memory serves, which means they grow fast — they can be easily replaced after they die off for whatever reason. On the other hand, how long does it take for a live oak tree to get big enough to provide enough shade for a house to lower the cost of keeping the air conditioner blasting all the time? And after it dies, how long to grow another?

I recently helped my brother put some blow-in insulation into the attic of a house in College Station where the owners were having a hard time keeping the house adequately cool in the recent/current heat wave. At one point as I was feeding the shredded phone books and what-have-you into the blower hopper, I noticed a rough looking place in the front lawn. A circular, disturbed bit of ground, just the right size to have been the base of a large, shady tree. A tree that would have blocked the entire front of the house from the brutal mid-morning sun (which was about to give me a heat stroke). No wonder they were “suddenly” needing additional insulation.

I am in no way implying that the home owners killed their tree through neglect or anything like that. Trees die, after all, and I don’t know how long those people had lived there. But while I was pondering the fate of that tree, the sprinkler heads popped up in the yard next door and started spraying water around the lawn, and into the street, and into the bright sunshine where it could evaporate before hitting the ground. And sprinklers are in no way adequate for watering trees unless they are set up to deliver the equivalent of an inch of rain per week. It’s better to just shut off the sprinklers and set a hose at the base of the tree with the water running at a gentle trickle for an hour or two. When watering bans go into effect, they generally don’t include woody plants like trees and shrubs. City officials and water treatment plant staff have information on what can be watered and when if restrictions  get serious.

We need to keep our trees alive. Screw the grass.

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The Importance of Popsicles

Posted on July 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

Computer use causes hot flashes. I’m sure a properly conducted scientific study would turn up a direct correlation between amount of time spent in front of a computer and number of hot flashes experienced in a given time frame by women of a certain age (of which I am one). So. I always have a paper plate handy — for fanning — and a stock of popsicles in the freezer for an instant cool-down.

This is has been particularly necessary this summer with the scorching heat we’ve been experiencing in this area. I have actually had to bring my heat-loving dogs inside for several air-conditioning breaks every day or I honestly think the Old Guy would melt. And he loves being outside more than food. So it’s saying a lot that he tries to force his way out the gate and runs for the door as soon as I get his leash attached.

What I’m saying is that I may post updates a little less frequently. And they’ll be short.

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