Flash Friday ~ Reef

 

I float in the warm, salty water of the Caribbean Sea. Above me, clear air, blue sky. Beneath me, clear water that appears blue at a distance. The cove is shallow, the bottom pale sand, dark rock, and coral. I recognize brain coral from my field guide, greenish and furrowed in cranial folds and wrinkles, but much bigger than I imagined, each one bigger than a hassock. The fan corals actually fan, back-and-forth with the action of the waves, not stiff like a paper fan, but in a smooth, sinuous fashion like the tail of a fish. The other corals, the branching in filamented ones, move with the water, too, and all this movement surprises me. Though I'd known coral to be a living creature, I expected it to be stiff and brittle, the way it is in museum cases, failing to recognize those frozen-in-time specimens are mere dead husks. The long black spines of urchins bloom among the coral like bundles of slender chopsticks, and flower-like shapes form bouquets, only I don't know enough to say if they're coral polyps or sea anemones. 

I know so little about this undersea world that the fish that flash past in singles and pairs and threes and schools, strike me as mythological creatures brought to life. Of course I've seen tropical fish in nature programs and aquariums, but I don't think I truly believed in them until I plunged into the water and swam among them. It's not just their improbable colors in outrageous arrangements of stripes and spots that make them appear otherworldly; it's their nearness. I could, if I wanted, reach out and touch a passing fish. Even the more shy and wary ones hover a few yards away. No binoculars or zoom lenses needed.

Our guide, Juan, points to a crevice in the coral, and I see an electric blue fish sparkle with neon blue spots. Three fish shaped like an iron, white with wine-colored strips, fan past. Schools of pearly fish with blue and yellow markings congregate and disperse. Three enormous club-shaped fish with bulging eyes hover near the sandy bottom. A fish smaller than a grasshopper swims past. Small fish, big fish, fish in every imaginable, and unimaginable, color combination move about on their private, fishy business. I skull my hands, follow the contours of the reef--the swim fins are too bulky and cumbersome to bother with--and take it all in. The water is warm and buoyant; floating is effortless. I've never felt more at peace in my life.

I feel absolutely no fear, but I raise my head now and then to keep track of the location of the guide, our boat, and my companions and to clear water from my snorkel. One of these times I notice big black birds with long, knife-blade wings and long, scissored tails wheel in the sky. Magnificent frigatebirds, one of the birds I'd hoped to see when I came to the Caribbean. I float on my back and watch them until I remember I'm here to see the reef, and I roll back to the underwater world, overwhelmed with abundance. 

A ripple of energy runs through the schools of pearly fish with blue and yellow markings, and I realize Juan, hanging from the back of one of the boats anchored in the cove, is feeding them, bits of chum shaken from a net bag. The fish whirl around him, grabbing at bits of food that rain down. I notice pink feet paddling an arm's length away, and I see a brown pelican plunge its enormous mouth-bag into the water. I don't know if it's going for the whole, live fish or for the fish bits, and I'm not sure how I feel having such a large maw grabbing indiscriminately for food so nearby; I tuck my hands well out of the way.

Three sting rays, the largest the size of a card table, the smallest a notebook, join the scrum, flapping along the bottom like living magic carpets, hoovering up the fallen fish food, flipping and turning with amazing agility. When the food runs out, the scrum disperses, and I turn my head to come face-to-face with a sea turtle. It's a small one, maybe the size of two snapping turtles, and it hovers in the water vertically, it's head up, its back legs down. Its black, shoe-button eye looks into mine, and I think I'm going to have a moment of connection, but the turtle turns and paddles away on short, flippery feet as some guy in red trunks chases it with his underwater camera. 

Juan leads us back to the boat, gets out to warm up, and tells us we have a half hour to explore on our own. I paddle back toward the reef, noticing now that what look like rocks might once have been coral, and that where the coral does grow, chunks are broken off here and there, and that there's a greenish haze of algae over the whole thing. Maybe that's normal in a shallow reef. I don't know enough to know, but I do know it doesn't look as pristine as the reefs in nature programs. And though Juan told us to keep our feet up so we wouldn't hurt ourselves, he didn't mention not hurting the coral. The dude chasing the sea turtle was just one of dozens of obnoxious tourists who no doubt visit the reef every day. And some of the fish who were there only came because they were fed.

I skull along the edge of the reef, taking in the magical colors and shapes, the overwhelming feeling of peace, and wondering how I reconcile that one of the most peaceful, spectacular nature experiences of my life has also a somewhat contrived expedition to a diminished seascape.

Flash Friday ~ Extraordinary Days

 

I'd planned to go birdwatching my first morning in Mexico, but I didn't make it farther than the balcony of my hacienda, where a cacophony of new and unfamiliar birdsong filled the new and unfamiliar trees. I sat with my binoculars, my journal, my bird books, and a cup of tea and watched as great-tailed grackles, great kiskadees, Yucatan jays, a Yucatan vireo, an Altamira oriole, a golden-fronted woodpecker, and a plain chachalaca paraded through my temporary backyard. These are, no doubt, the crows, blue jays, and cardinals of the Yucatan Peninsula, but to me they were rare and wondrous sightings. On the ground below, a Mexican  agouti--a cat-sized rodent that looks like a guinea pig that swallowed a squash and is trying to walk on stilts--traipsed past the swimming pool. 

The trees, vines, and shrubs planted in the lush and meticulously maintained gardens and all things you might buy at the garden center to keep in a pot, only super-sized. Coconut palms grew right out of the sand on the beach, just like they do in cartoons. Beyond the walls of the resort, the jungle grew in a dense, impenetrable tangle. Over the next several days, I watched a troupe of howler monkeys parade across the tops of walls (tiny ones clinging to their mothers' bellies) and saw white-nosed agoutis nose among the tables of an outside dining area. I sat in the plaza one morning and watched two actual parrots steal a woodpecker's stash of seeds from the hole in a dead palm tree. I snorkeled in the warm, salty, and buoyant water of the Caribbean, watching schools of sequined fish flash among the coral, anemones, and urchins. I snorkeled in the cold, mineral water of a cenote, where sunlight filtered blue in the water, tiny fish nibbled at my skin, and scuba divers disappeared into a deep, scary cave. 

I purchased junk food in a Mexican grocery store, where real shoppers bought plastic bags of raw pork, packets of dried chiles, and heads of iceberg lettuce. I practiced my extremely rudimentary Spanish by asking every shop owner in the contrived local marketplace, "Tienes los sellos para postales? Donde esta los stampitos?" With no suerte (selling stamps, or sending postcards, it would appear, is not the done thing).

I rode a rusty bicycle among the Mayan ruins at Coba and followed its song to the most spectacular bird, the black-headed trogon (see above). With each "bop, bop" of its tune, it would splay its black-and-white striped tail feathers in a V, while staring at me with that intense blue-ringed eye. 

This is why we travel, is it not, to find the extraordinary in what, to the people who live there, are likely ordinary, everyday experiences? To shake up our notions of what's expected and see the world through new eyes?

Where the Buffalo Roam

 I made an unexpected trip to Colorado this month. My parents were in a car accident in late September, and while I wasn't able to go out in the immediate aftermath, I was able to squeeze a trip in between the end of one kid's cross-country running season and another kid's wisdom teeth removal (my first nibble on the Sandwich Generation). It turned out that delaying my trip allowed me to be more useful than I might otherwise have been, fretting outside a hospital room. Instead I was able to help around the house and take my mom to medical appointments and get out and about. Useful is what we most want to be when someone we love is hurting. Visiting after they were home also allowed me to spend two weeks with both my parents, whom I hadn't seen in three years.

I chose to drive there, due to the pandemic, the rental car shortage, and the illusion that I could control the situation by not being beholden to an airline's timeline. Curry and I made this trip many times before kids and a few times with them, and I did it once with just the kids, when Milo had his driver's permit and was keen to take on as much of the driving duties as he was allowed (his favorite, Wyoming--"Speed limit eighty!"). But I'd never done it alone, and oh, was it a long trip. I listened to many audiobooks. I saw many miles of corn. I developed a Pavlovian response to highway interchanges wherein my palms immediately began to sweat, even if there was little traffic and clear signage.

I also saw many strange things going down the highway: An entire molded fiberglass swimming pool. Several windmill blades, each far longer than its truck and trailer. Fedex trucks towing three trailers (the only sign of a trucker shortage; there was no sign of a supply chain shortage as I passed by millions of tractor-trailer trucks each day). A truck that appeared to be full, if the signage on the outside was to be believed, of ice-cream tubs filled with bacon grease.

I found that in the states where the billboards for Jesus were the largest, so too were the billboards for strip clubs and sex toy shops. In Iowa a farm had mounted satellite dishes on every fence post along miles of highway, each painted in a different brightly colored design, a drive-by art installation. In Kansas, I hit a tumbleweed almost as big as my car. It splintered into a million tiny shards like a dandelion clock blown in the wind.

And in Colorado, on my way out of town, I stopped and visited the bison. My first year out of college I spent as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Aurora, and for one of our projects we worked on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a chemical-weapons-facility-turned-nature-preserve in one of those particularly 20th-century ironies where the only undeveloped land is that which is too toxic for people. My team spent our days there digging up Russian thistle and planting American plum (oh, the Cold War symbolism). The place was pretty much a windswept plain of grass and weeds, with roaming mule deer, burrowing prairie dogs, and a few settling ponds that had been recently remediated for organochlorine pesticides, dioxin, PCBs, and other terrible things under Superfund. Sometime in the twenty-five years since I worked there, bison have been introduced, and I hadn't had a chance to see them yet.

So despite the lateness of the hour when I finally rousted myself from the embrace of family for the long trip home, I stopped by on my way out of town, and walked along a trail until I cam within sight of my quarry: the American bison, a herd of at least 60 or 70 animals, beyond a very tall fence. Most of them were lying in the grass, enjoying the view of some strange-looking clouds and the mountains beyond the brown haze of Denver. A few wandered from clump to clump of fellow bison, and the young ones pranced around, and every time one moved, a thin column of dust rose, and you could imagine the dust cloud a great herd might have generated when migrating across the plains. I stood for a long time, sketching and feeling a mixture of awe at this magnificent remnant of our continent's past and melancholy that this is it--this small herd, penned in by a very tall fence and developments encroaching from every direction (despite the Superfund site and the nearby dog-food factory and feed lots). Yet, despite their diminished prairie, despite their limited range, I'm glad they're there, and I'm glad I took the time to stop and say hello.

This post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child" and also be entered in a monthly drawing to win a print of one of the illustrations from Uphill Both Ways.

Wild Wednesday ~ Little Visitor

A few of weeks ago, as a nor'easter prepared to blow through, I dragged all our houseplants inside. We'd already had a couple of frosts, and, though the plants were mostly protected by the exhuberant growth of a kiwi vine that's taken over our deck in a Little Shop of Horrors-esque fashion, they were starting to glare at me in an accusatory fashion for neglecting them.

The next day, I heard a strange and surprising sound coming from the sunroom, where the plants live: Peep-peep-peep-peep.

I knew that spring peepers occassionally call during the waning days of fall, lamenting, I assume, the onset of winter. I did not know that they occassionally take up residence in houseplants and thereby move into the homes of unsuspecting humans.

I scurried to the sunroom, but the peeping had stopped by the time I got there, and with a couple dozen plants, all overgrown from a summer outdoors, there was no way I was going to find a frog the size of my thumbnail. And so it went over the next week: Peep-peep-peep-peep. Scurry. Silence. I tried playing a peeper chorus from my frog songs CD. I tried combing out dead leaves from the plants and pruning back excessive vegetation. I tried misting them with water to imitate a light rain. No luck.

Finally, after about a week, I made it to the sunroom in time to narrow the call down to the southeast corner. I took the plants from that corner and spread them out, and thus triangulated my way to the call the next time I heard it, finding the little scamp hiding under the succulent leaf of an aloe vera plant. At this point it was late in the day and getting a little chilly out, and I decided to wait until the warmest part of the following day to escort the stowaway outside. Unfortunately, when I went to release him, I found he had absconded to another plant and again I couldn't find him.

I was a little worried that the frog was getting dehydrated, so I lightly watered the plants and waited for the giveaway peep-peep. But it came less frequently and for shorter intervals than it had before. Had I squandered its last chance for survival? Finally, one day nearly a week after I first found the frog, I was able to narrow the call down to a small area of the room and found the peeper hiding between the inner and outer pot of another aloe vera plant.

It was a cold, damp day, but I wasn't taking any chances with the frog relocating itself again, so I took it outside, across the driveway, released it among the damp leaves that it's so well-camouflaged with, and wished it well in its upcoming hibernation and return next spring.

Wild Wednesday ~ Damsels and Dragons

Naturalists are, by definition, generalists, but many, if not most, have a particular area of interest about which they are most knowledgeable—birds or flowers or rocks or moss or trees. Et cetera.

Powdered dancer (Agria moesta) and Variable dancer (Agria fumipennis)

Me? I know a little about a lot of things, nothing about some things, and a lot about nothing. Birds, I'm decent at, wildflowers, trees. But I don't really have that one thing. That one area of expertise. That passion.

Pond damsel spp?

As a result, since becoming a Maine Master Naturalist, a requirement of which is to share naturalist knowledge with others, I've taught classes in nature writing and nature journaling, my area of "expertise" and a naturalist skill that can be applied to whatever interest a person has.

Ebony jewelwing (Calopteryx maculata)

That being said, one realm I've been dabbling in for many years, and which is the thing that will be my "thing" once I take the time to really get to know it, is the Odonata—dragonfly and damselfly family.

Dragonhunter (Hagenius brevistylus)

Because they're just so darn cool.

There are 158 species of odonates in Maine alone, and some can only be identified under the so it might take me a while, but half the fun is in the chase.

Wild Wednesday ~ Browntail Moth

This might be as close to a PSA as I come with this blog. First, the saga: Saturday evening, I took a walk to the end of our driveway and back, as I often do several times a day. I'd heard some peeping sounds in the birdhouse where swallows make their home, and I made a detour to check out the box, squeezing between a pin oak and an apple tree, both with lots of low leafy branches, on my way there. About halfway home, I felt a stinging sensation on my neck. Assuming the noseeums, which had been out in force earlier in the week, were back at it, I brushed and slapped at the stinging spot, which seemed to move around and grow worse. Back at the house, I started to rub an after-bite stick on the spots that stung, but rather than soothing, the minty ointment intensified the stinging sensation. Then I noticed a small, brown, fuzzy caterpillar on my shoulder. I ran outside, brushed it onto the ground, and smashed it with a rock (I said "I'm sorry" to it as I did so; it should be noted that the caterpillar did not apologize to me). Then I ran in, shouted to C to look up browntail moth, and jumped into the shower, where I attacked the area with soap and water. By the time I got out of the shower, swollen red welts covered my neck and shoulder from sternum to nape. Meanwhile, C found a picture of the browntail moth larva online, and it looked roughly like me attacker, but a quick scan through the literature didn't offer much in the way of treatment advice, so I took a massive dose of Benadryl and another antihistamine we had leftover from one of the kids' rash episodes, and went to bed.

The next day, I posted a picture of my leprous skin on Facebook with a warning that the caterpillars had moved inland. My field guide describes the moths' range as "presently dunes, coastal strand communities, and adjacent woodlands from Maine to Cape Cod." Last I'd heard about the moths, was when M was a baby, 15 years ago, and I was strongly advised against taking him into a state park near the coast. But as advice and consolation came in from friends, I realized that they had invaded much of Central Maine this summer. I also realized there's not much you can do about them. Again with the field guide: "Its short, deciduous setae (or spicules) [i.e., "hairs"], tightly packed into the rusty brown tufts over the dorsum, are highly irritating to most people and produce pronounced dermatological reactions if numbers of them get embedded in the skin." Yeah, no kidding. It's not only close and intimate contact with the caterpillar that's a problem, but the setae can become airborne and get you as you walk around (I believe this happens when they pupate and shed the old skin). They like all woody plants, but prefer apple and cherry trees as well as beech and oak—all of which abound on our property. The thing to do, apparently, is to look for the webs in the winter and early spring, snip them off, and drop them in soapy water. Too late for that this year.

This summer, I have had a neck covered in blackfly bites, an imbedded tick, clusters of bites from noseeums that somehow found their way inside my pajamas, as well as several dozen mosquito bites, and a small patch of poison ivy. Not one of these irritants, however, has deterred me from going outside. After the browntail moth incident, however, not only did I want to stay inside, I was ready to burn down our entire 15 acres. Every time I stepped out, I got goosebumps (which, of course made my rash hurt more, as each hair follicle stood on end, tugging at the stinging, embedded setae) and I cringed away from all vegetation. Over the course of days, however, I started going out, almost as usual (though not stepping off our driveway) and today, I did a visual survey of our pin oak, looking for evidence of brown tailmoth larvae. This is the only caterpillar I found, and I wasn't entirely sure it was the offending specimen (I could have brushed my skin against it as a test, but I'm not that dedicated to science) until I enlarged the photo and saw the two indicative orange dots at the back end (they really weren't that visible at normal size, and they're this caterpillar's most distinctive feature).



As a PSA, this is not very helpful, since I have no idea what to do about the caterpillars or about going outside without getting a "pronounced dermatological reaction."A Tyvek suit, perhaps? One information sheet recommend long sleeves, long pants, tight collar, hat, polyester fabric (apparently less prone to the setae attaching than cotton). But the whole point of summer is to be able to go outside not suited up for an Arctic expedition! As far as treating the rash, among the various remedies people suggested was scrubbing the affected area with a brush. After reading this, I jumped in the shower, and scoured my neck with an exfoliating face wash and repeated the procedure the next morning. This helped immensely, and when a few more spots sprang up on my wrist, I went at them with a nail brush with the result of almost immediate relief. C, who had a small patch on his lower arm, remarked how satisfying this remedy is, when it's what you most want to do to a rash anyway, but are usually not allowed to do.

Update: More information about the caterpillars' lifecycle and marginally useful treatment info here.

Wild Wednesday ~ The Great Unfurling

Doesn't it seem to you like you wait and wait and wait for spring and then suddenly it's here and somehow you missed it? This year—this morning, in fact, I think I caught the moment of spring, which is, appropriately enough, a verb as well as a noun. The trees are in the midst of opening up their buds and unpacking their flowers and leaves and shaking them out in the sun.

In other exciting nature news, several days of rain have added a bit of water to our gravel-pit pond, and at least three painted turtles have made themselves at home.

Wild Wednesday ~ Mid-May

I am a summer girl, for sure, but I'm loving watching spring unfold this year. I feel as if every year, the more I know, the more I notice--like the way new balsam fir needles spring forth like little pom-poms.

For years, each fall, I saw the bright red berries of red baneberry (Actaea rubra), but only noticed the flowers last spring.


The incredible sunny (very un-May-like) weather we've been having has brought out the painted turtles. There were at least thirteen on a log in our pond Saturday. I love watching the way one will jockey for a better position, knocking another off, who will then swim around and scrabble onto another part of the log. A pretty good life.


What's wild in your neck of the woods this week?

Wild Wednesday ~ Goldenrod

Goldenrods are members of the Asteraceae, or aster, family, meaning their "flowers" are really composed of many flowers working together to create a flower-like inflorescence that attracts pollinators.  Other flowers in this family include sunflowers, daisies, fleabanes, zinnias, dandelions, hawkweeds, chrysanthemums. If you have any of these flowers handy, you might take it apart and study it up close. Many, like the daisy or sunflower, have both ray and disk flowers. The rays are the "petals" and the disk flowers cluster to make the center circular shape. Others only have one or the other (e.g., dandelions have only ray flowers). Goldenrods have both, but each inflorescence, or capitula, is very small, so it's harder to see the "sunflower" shape with the naked eye. 

I only had time to i.d. two goldenrods this weekend (no, that's not true; I had plenty of time to pick and i.d. flowers on Saturday, but I spent the whole afternoon lying in the hammock, reading. Seventy-nine degrees, sunny, breezy, no bugs--we don't get many days like that in a year and it would be a shame to waste one being productive). This first one has been driving me crazy all summer:

Things to look for when identifying a goldenrod are the arrangement of the leaves (are they basally disposed--with rosettes of basal leaves--or all stem leaves? Do the leaves decrease dramatically in size moving up the stem or are they roughly the same size?) and the flowers (does the capitulescence--the cluster of capitula--nod? Do all of the capitula growing in a single plane--secund--or are the stems upright with the capitula arranged around the stem?).

This goldenrod has basally disposed leaves and upright, non-secung capitulescence, with slightly hairy leaves and stem. But the flower I kept identifying it as doesn't grow north of Connecticut.

And then I looked at it through the hand lens. The ray flowers, which I had been certain were pale yellow, were actually white! This made for an easy i.d. of white goldenrod (Solidago bicolor).

The second goldenrod I identified grows quite commonly along the edge of our driveway and in our fields. The flowers on many of the plants are already going by, but I found a few specimens still in their prime.

Other things to look for with goldenrod include whether or not it grows in a crowd (colonial), the texture of the stem and leaves (smooth or hairy?), the shape and edge of the leaf (toothed or entire?), and whether there is one prominent central vein or three.

This specimen was growing fairly alone, but looked like a much smaller version of the goldenrods growing in a nearby colony (but whose flowers had already gone brown). In other ways it was very similar--tiny capitula (as you can see in the next photo with my pen tip for scale), rough, toothed leaves arranged in kind of a spiral around the stem, hairy stem, secund capitulescence.

You can see the hairy stem of this specimen in the next photo.

And the stems of the larger specimens in the next.

These are the capitula of the larger plants. I'm going with rough goldenrod (Solidago rugosa) for both my specimen and its larger neighbors. Go Botany declares this species highly variable, and I think the differences between my smaller specimen and the larger plants in the colony fall within the range of natural variation, and may be due to my plant's size or relative age.

After investigating these two goldenrods, I cam across a flock of turkeys in the neighbor's field. Unfortunately I only had my phone with me (to take the close-ups with my macro rubber band), so it's not a great photo, but a wild one. I love the little turkeylets that can be seen waddling after their mothers this time of year.

And when I went back out a couple of days later to get whole-plant shots with the real camera (the phone really does a poor job on those), I had a little face-to-face with this guy in my pin oak. He clacked his teeth together to let me know he wasn't pleased to have his photo taken.

What's wild in your neck of the woods?

Revealed

On our property we have an old, small gravel pit, which I've written about here many times before. It usually has a good-sized, murky pond in the bottom, where I've seen two otters, a snapping turtle as big as a trash can lid, and fox tracks.

It's a good place to listen to frogs, watch painted turtles sun, and catch dragonflies.

A kingfisher nested in a sand bank last year.

I once watched a bobcat as big as a German shepherd walk down the road into it.

During the winter, the pond make a modest ice-skating rink. 

Last year, the pond served as my study site for the Master Naturals class; I came down here once a week or so to observe seasonal changes.

But this summer the biggest change of all has taken place--the pond has almost completely dried up.

It's been years since this has happened, and it's such a strange sight to see--grass growing where usually there is water.

The drop in water level has revealed the past use of this property by the farmers who once lived down the road.

A few frogs still make their home along the edges of the remaining water, and various mammal tracks crisscross the mud, but I wonder where all the turtles have gone.

We have had a very strange visitor for the last few weeks: a single pectoral sandpiper (can you see it in the left-hand side of the picture below?) has made its home in the wet mud along the edges of the dwindling water.

It's fascinating to see what is revealed beneath when familiar layers are stripped away.

Edited to add: It's been a dry summer, with many bodies of water well below their high water mark. Once the leaves fall from the trees, the pond will probably start filling up again, and by next spring it should be back to its usual self. But I'll keep you posted.