Moving

I just changed my residence here in South Deerfield, moving to the house next door (literally). Unfortunately, it does not have wireless internet, so it may be awhile before I am able to blog again. I am writing this from a cafe' right now, just before closing. Stay tuned, though, more to come.

Holy Chiroptera, Batman!

I am quite certain that I like bats more than the average person. Still, there are some places I would rather not encounter them. Like inside my house. That is exactly where I found one flitting about in South Deerfield on Tuesday night, August fourth.

It was around eleven PM and I decided I would go out and see if I could find any insects around the lights in town. I opened the door to exit my room to be greeted by an airborne blur and the breeze and sound of wingbeats. I recognized the animal immediately, if only because the next door neighbor had a bat in her own home the week before and the situation was still fresh in my mind.

The bat was doing the flying equivalent of pacing up and down the dark hallway, looping through the kitchen at the other end, and coming back toward my room. Naturally, my first thought was to get my camera and see if I could take some pictures. I chose the kitchen as my vantage point, and got many, many fine shots of the empty room along with three appropriately ghostly images of the bat zipping by the fridge.

At times it seemed the bat had left the area entirely, but it turns out it was still making the rounds, just skimming two to three inches off the floor on occasion. I was incredibly impressed by the aerial skills of this little insectivore. Ok, it really wasn’t that little. Surprisingly large in fact, so I surmised it was probably a “big brown bat,” Eptesicus fuscus, perhaps the most common and widespread species in North America.

Once I had my fill of photography frustration, I simply opened the kitchen door and away it went, presumably to hunt moths and beetles, just like me. It turns out I did exactly the right thing when confronted with a bat in one’s residence. In the weekly e-mail newsletter from the Athol Bird and Nature Club came this tidbit from Mass Wildlife:

BATS IN THE BELFRY
“With summer's hot, humid weather finally here, some Bay State homeowners may discover bats residing in their homes! Attics are the most common portion of a house in which bats roost and raise their young. After a few hot summer days, an attic may become too warm for the bats, forcing them out and sometimes into people's living quarters as they search for cooler places to roost. What's a homeowner to do? Fortunately, a single bat flying in a room can usually be dealt with quite easily. Open an outside window or door in the room containing the bat and close off the rest of the room from the house. It's usually only a matter of a few minutes of circling before the bat locates the open window and leaves the house. Bats do not attack people or fly into people's hair.
If a bat has landed, it can be assisted out of a house in several ways. For a bat on a curtain, place a jar, coffee can or small box over the bat, carefully working the animal into the container, and cover it. A bat on the floor can be covered with a towel. Another method is to put on leather gloves and simply pick up the bat and release it outdoors --don't use cotton gloves or handle a bat with bare hands. Whatever method is used, don't worry when the bat squeaks loudly when handled. Take the bat outdoors and release it. If anyone has had direct contact with a bat or if a bat is found in a room with a sleeping person, the bat should be safely captured but not released. Contact local health officials for assistance in evaluating potential rabies risk and submitting the bat to the Department of Public Health for rabies testing.
Little Brown Bats and Big Brown Bats are the most likely species to be found in buildings. In some cases, with small numbers of bats, people don't mind their presence and concentrate on blocking holes and cracks leading into the human living quarters. Where there is a large colony in house walls, biologists recommend that homeowners wait to initiate eviction proceedings until the first week of August through November. Waiting to evict the colony allows time for young bats to mature and leave the house on their own.
Because Massachusetts and other northeastern states are experiencing a sudden and unexpected decline of bat populations due to a white powdery fungus on bat faces called White Nose Syndrome, the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) reminds all property owners with a summer colony of ten or more bats to report report the colony's location, type of structure where the bats reside, and how many bats are in the colony, by calling….”

This is good information. You can learn even more about bats, and what you can do to help foster a better understanding of these maligned creatures, at Bat Conservation International, the world’s leading organization devoted to bat welfare.

Cash for Clunkers

I try and avoid political hot potatoes on what should be strictly a nature blog, but this government program is aimed at mitigating extravagant fuel consumption, and it also points to a part of human nature that is a bit disturbing.

Even ardent supporters of President Obama’s policies and initiatives seem to be raising eyebrows at this popular program designed to replace “gas-guzzlers” with more fuel-efficient vehicles. One criticism is that the bar is set so low (one needs to only improve their miles per gallon by less than a factor of ten) it is really going to have a negligible effect. An improvement of fifteen or twenty miles per gallon in performance would seem to be a better threshold to qualify for federal funding help.

My criticism has much more to do with our American sense of entitlement to a personal vehicle. Why are my tax dollars being used to subsidize your car? I should at least be allowed to borrow it now and then if I have a financial stake in it. Never mind that I don’t drive (I can, I have a license, but I find it so nerve-wracking as not to want to bother), it is the principle of taking from the collective community to give to the individual that I find offensive.

President Obama would have been far wiser to use those funds to greatly expand public transit across the nation, including commuter rail lines. His reluctance to do so points out how pathologically isolated we have become. We can no longer tolerate “others” on the bus ride to the office, let alone any other destination. Even if we do climb aboard a coach, we plug our ears with MP3 players, bury our face in a book, or stare out the window. Whatever happened to striking up a conversation? Flirting? Sharing?

No, we would rather go into financial debt for our very own personal, mobile space than have to deal with “strangers” any more than we already do. I could go on about how some drivers need to be taken off the road no matter what kind of vehicle they are behind the wheel of, or how distracted, sleep-deprived, and angry the average operator of a car has become, but mostly I am simply saddened by our collective disdain for interacting with each other in public.

Tomorrow I take the bus, like every weekday morning, from South Deerfield to the UMass campus in Amherst. I will enjoy joking and conversing with the fine ladies and gentlemen that share that commute. I encourage you to explore your own transit options and make the most of them, both economically and socially.

Bullfrogs

I haven’t been to the Campus Pond at the University of Massachusetts in many weeks now, but back on June 8 I was treated to a large, very cooperative amphibian as a photo subject during my lunch hour. The bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana, is native here, but elsewhere in North America, where it has been introduced, it might better be called the “bully” frog.

The species is named for the early English naturalist Mark Catesby who explored the southeast United States in the early 1700s, documenting his findings in words and illustrations published as Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Just like its human namesake, the frog has had “legs” to parts of the world far removed from its native eastern U.S. haunts.

It has, in fact, been those meaty hind legs that have caused the dispersal of the bullfrog around the globe. Prized as a delicacy, frog legs are a staple appetizer on many a restaurant menu. It is far less expensive to harvest the amphibians locally than to import them, so consequently the bullfrog was introduced to various new territories including the western U.S. and British Columbia, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, South America, Europe, Asia, even Hawaii.

That humans prey on bullfrogs, along with herons, raccoons, snakes, and other animals, is not enough to mitigate the effects of what the bullfrogs themselves eat: which is nearly anything and everything. Where bullfrogs have been introduced, native wetland fauna can suffer dramatically.

Bullfrogs have been at the least implicated in the decline of the western pond turtle in the Pacific Northwest (they eat the hatchling turtles), the Mexican garter snake in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, and native frog populations in California.

Any animal smaller than the bullfrog is fair game, though, and even tarantulas are on the menu, along with various large insects, small rodents, and birds.

I have a hard time now hearing that deep bass call of “jug-o-rum” without cringing a bit. Every organism surely has its place, but when Homo sapiens extends the boundaries of place for an animal like the bullfrog, all hell can break loose in the aftermath.

High Ledges

Thanks to my friend Steve Gingold I have had the pleasure of visiting the High Ledges Wildlife Sanctuary on two occasions so far this year. The refuge is located just outside of Shelburne Falls in Franklin County, Massachusetts and operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society (“Mass Audubon” as they call it here). It is a property rich in both history and natural history.

Dr. Ellsworth “Dutch” Barnard grew up on the family farm established here in 1790. Portions of that property were included in the original 400 acres donated to Mass Audubon. Dutch taught English from 1930-1933 at what was then Massachusetts State College. He would return after decades of other professorial positions to teach at UMass from 1968-1973. He and his wife Mary spent the summers in a rustic cabin at the summit of the “Ledges” for more than fifty years. The cabin burned down a few years ago, but the chimney and a couple rock walls remain. Here is the view they enjoyed of the Deerfield River valley:

Dutch and Mary didn’t take it easy, either. They actively constructed the trails that are maintained to this day, and also identified the many plants and animals that call the sanctuary home. Twenty orchid species are known from the nearly 600 acres now encompassed by the boundaries of the reserve, and thirty species of ferns have been found there as well. I confess I didn’t even know there were that many kinds of ferns.

I saw my first pink lady’s slipper orchid there on our first trip, June 6, and this brilliant wood lily on July 11:

If you can’t visit the area yourself, and I highly recommend it, consider reading Ellsworth Barnard’s book In a Wild Place: A Natural History of High Ledges, illustrated by Charles H. Joslin, and published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1998. You can also see some of Steve’s magnificent nature images from High Ledges and elsewhere at his photography website here. Thank you, Steve, for the transportation and sharing your special places with me.

Peregrine Falcons

My friend Jeff Boettner tells the story of how he and his wife Cynthia were visiting Whitefish Point, Michigan during the hawk and owl migration when they met a woman coming back from the dunes. They asked the lady if she had seen anything exciting. She said that others claimed to have seen “a pair of green falcons," but all she saw was one bird.

I don’t have to go all the way to Michigan to see peregrine falcons. There is a resident pair right on the University of Massachusetts campus here in Amherst. They tend to hang out around the Campus Center, which has a high-rise hotel in the middle of it. One morning I spotted one of the birds perched on a light jutting out from the building. I ran back to my lab to get my camera, then spent the next half hour chasing the bird and its mate around the building. All I managed were a few shots from roughly 200 vertical feet away in bad light, including my specialty, “silhouette of bird leaving.”

Ok, I got a few shots and a backache.

As natural nesting sites have dwindled due to development and habitat fragmentation, it occurred to wildlife officials to try introducing falcons to the next best thing to a cliff: a skyscraper. “Hacking” is the term used to describe the process of releasing young falcons raised in captivity from a cage-like shelter placed atop a building. This has worked so well that falcons across the country are now returning on their own to nest in their birthplace cities, using buildings and bridges as sites for nesting.

The pair here on campus has chosen to nest atop the W.E.B. DuBois Library, a building that must be the tallest structure in the state west of Boston. You can’t see the top of it on a foggy morning. The Campus Pond below the library provides plenty of waterfowl for these “duck hawks” to feed on, though they are more apt to go after slightly smaller game like pigeons. There are remarkably few pigeons here, actually, and now I know why. I wonder if the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife would consider loaning some falcons to Tucson?

Should the falcons successfully launch their offspring (and I’m pretty sure I saw a fledgling this past Wednesday), it would mark the twentieth bird to have been reared here.

Meanwhile, on the evening of Tuesday, July 14, I saw the adult falcons over my neighborhood in South Deerfield. I even have a grainy image to prove it: Well, I thought it was the pair from the university. It turns out that there is another male and female nesting on Mount Sugarloaf just down the street. So, I can’t be sure just which birds I was looking at after all. Hey, after decades of declining raptor populations from the effects of DDT, it is a pleasant quandary to have two pairs of peregrines to tell apart.

For more about the UMass couple, see this online article. Watch this space for more falcon memories from yours truly.

Mow to Hell

Remember those foxes living behind my residence that I showed you about a month ago? Fat chance I’ll ever see them again. They are (were?) living at the edge of an enormous vacant area that is the former site of a pickle factory, long since torn down. The weeds, wildflowers, and sapling trees had grown up fairly tall, perhaps owing to the large amounts of rain we’ve been getting here in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Well, apparently we can’t have any of that. Tonight I discovered that somebody in a tractor (the tracks were evidence of that) mowed the entire area. That act has effectively ruined my after-work life of exploring in these days when the sun lingers until around 8:30 PM.

Citizens of the United States have become entirely too good at destroying urban, suburban (and increasingly, rural) wildlife habitat in the name of cosmetic appearance and liability issues. It is this latter notion that has really gone over the top. God forbid that a mosquito carrying West Nile virus, or a tick harboring Lyme disease should be lurking in the tall grass waiting for some poor soul to walk by. We certainly can’t afford to have a dead tree fall on a parked vehicle, or the roots of a living one buckle the sidewalk where a person could trip and fall. We collectively no longer tolerate risk of any kind from natural sources.

Meanwhile, our culture celebrates stupid risk, be it the stock market, legalized gambling, or extreme sports. Nature must be conquered in eco-challenge reality shows, but the natural world must not be allowed to fight back.

Neighborhood associations and government municipalities are also keen on instituting codes of uniformity for the appearance of yards, gardens, lawns, playground structures, and the exterior of homes and buildings. The result is a sterilization of nature, the introduction of hoards of exotic ornamental plants and their associated insect pests, and the release of who knows how many chemicals into the environment from the application of fertilizers and pesticides.

Weed ordinances provide for stiff penalties if your grass exceeds a certain height, or the clover, daisies, and Queen Anne’s lace compromise the integrity of your lawn. Well, I am here to tell you that one man’s weed is another man’s wildflower. The clover actually benefits your lawn, by the way, by fixing nitrogen and making it available to the grass. As far as I’m concerned, though, the “weeds” are those very lawns, a blight of turf in a land meant for meadows and and glades

I have an idea for a cartoon I want to draw and submit somewhere. It starts with a panel depicting a man sitting on his front porch watching a conflagration in his yard. The next panel shows his neighbor rushing to the fence and screaming “Your lawn is on fire!” In the final panel, the man casually replies “It’s a prairie.” That will be the day my friends.