Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in docviper's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, May 6th, 2012
7:57 pm	The Warblers are Here, the Warblers are Here It’s been another odd spring here in the mid-Atlantic. Day length and temperature crept up on everybody, so that the trees were pretty much fully leafed out a couple weeks ago. As I noted last week, the migrating birds weren’t here yet. Well, they’re here now. Cathy and I took the long way around the entire Patuxent Reserve, and along the way we got pretty much all the songbirds I can recognize by voice—yellow warblers, parula warblers, Cape May warblers, vireos (afraid I’m not certain what species), yellowthroats, indigo buntings, yellow rumps, wood thrushes, even a black-throated green warbler (I’m pretty sure). Although we didn’t actually see much of anything at all. Because the trees are all leafed out. So the leaves are bigger than the birds. Making visual identification difficult. Well, let me re-phrase that. Impossible. Anyway. I got a nice dark dragonfly. And a nice white dragonfly. And a butterfly. And an incipient grapevine. Along about the end of August, this baby’ll be drooped over with big bunches of fox grapes. And a nice example of last year’s southern toad cohort. On Saturday, I also managed to find my old friend the big-ass black racer in the wood pile, and a huge-ass garter snake, maybe the biggest one I’ve ever seen, in the brick pile next door. Neither one was hanging around for photography, though. Later in the summer I guess I’m gonna have to take a few hits for the team and catch ‘em so I do some portraiture. Oh. Remind me to tell you about the upcoming trip to the Philippines. Really. Right after the trip to Europe. I’m thinking the gods might finally be starting to get bored with kicking my ass and lightening things up a little bit in my life.  More later. Meantime, check out cancer blog at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com; professional sustainability blog at http://aehsfoundation.org/, and urban ecosystems book chapter at http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Thanks, everybody! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
9:58 pm	Spring the Color of Green It’s easy to photograph autumn. The colors are so distinct, it takes only a crude eye and a little bit of post-exposure manipulation to make stunning images.  Spring is different. The green colors vary across an enormous spectrum, but they change incrementally, the contrasts are low, the blending consistent. This week I had only a little time in the woods. Saturday was too cold and cloudy for any chance of pit vipers. Today was warm enough, but still moist and didn’t seem worth the drive all the way to the Catoctin Ridge. So I went across town to the Patuxent Preserve. A pleasant couple hours, if nothing spectactular. Got these greens of jack-in-the-pulpet leaves. And a greenier shot of the flower. This nicely colored butterfly. And a series of ferns. Christmas ferns—see the stocking-like shape of the leaflets? What I think might be a bracken fern. And a large, lighter green polypody. Maybe. I forget my ferns, it’s been a long time since I learned them. If there’s nothing else to say for global warming, I think the long, mild springs and long, mild autumns we’ve been having in the mid-Atlantic have been a real bonus. Take advantage, get the hell outside. And if you find pit vipers in the piedmont anywhere, let me know. I’m thinking they’re pretty much extinct at this point. But I’d love to be proven wrong. Check out the cancer update at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, urban ecosystems book chapter at http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com, and professional sustainability blog and twitter-choice web site fun at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/. Thanks for being here, everyone. Love to all! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012
9:24 pm	Asynchronous Spring in the Maryland Piedmont Friday (20 April), chimney swifts showed up in the sky over Columbia. They’re usually a week later, although the past couple of years it might’ve dropped from the 27th to the 23rd or 24th (the only detailed record is in my known-to-be-faulty brain). As in the past 3 years or so, the trees are well leafed out and the warblers aren’t even here yet in force. In fact, I’ve heard only a yellow warbler and maybe a blue-winged, both for only a few rounds of song. Time for the migrating birds to get with the global warming program! Yesterday was the first time this spring that the Patuxent Reserve didn’t yield any snakes—not even a garter or brown or ring-neck. And I gave it a hard hike, too. Trying to convince myself that copperheads really aren’t extinct here in the densely populated I95 corridor that cuts the eastern piedmont like a sword slash in Game of Thrones. So far, the evidence is against me. I did get a few interesting photos, though. This daisy in a treefall gap in the older-growth forest. This passalid beetle under some bark. You know both the adults and larvae are, like many rabbit species, obligate coprophages? They have to eat the feces of the adult that have not only been pre-digested by the microbial stew in the beetle’s guts, but subsequently further broken down by fungi and bacteria. Wood is not an easy meal! A non-red-backed morph of the red-backed salamander. A difficult-to-come-by (because short-lived and favored as food items by herbivores) may apple blossom in full bloom.  Altogether, a nice few hours in the woods. Edges growing too thick with roses and honeysuckles now that spring is so advanced. Next week, weather willing, I’m gonna have to hit the Catoctin Ridge. Hang in there, my friends. Check cancer update at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , urban ecosystems book chapter at http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ , and this week’s PeopleSystems over at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . Have a good week! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2012
10:35 pm	Misidentification Murder and Early Spring in the Piedmont Y’all have been letting me get away with misidentification murder on this blog. First, remember this young lady Molly and I found in south Florida? Well, in the original posting I identified it as a Uropygi, or vinegaroon. But it’s not. It’s an Amblypigi, a tailless whipscorpion. No tail, no spraying acetic acid at potential predators. Still, pretty nasty looking pedipalps with those big spikes, and she’ll grow from this centimeter-and-a-half or so to a palm sized adult. But she’ll still be an amplypigid, not a uropypigid.  Then there’s a shiny green beetle I gave you as a “soldier beetle”. Which it is not, of course. It’s a tiger beetle. They forage on forest paths and trails, flying ahead of people (and presumably deer, turkeys, bear, foxes, whatever), then dropping behind to grab any insects the clumsy vertebrates might have chased into the open. Nice way to earn a living. Possibly easier than that of soldier beetles, which are plant feeders and need to chew their way through quantities of protective and low-quality forage to survive. Today I got this garter snake, cooling herself off in a mudhole also populated (not coincidentally, I’m guessing) by a number of small frogs. While I sat and watched her, a turkey walked up behind me and when I turned to look at it, took off in that ungainly turkey way, wobbled downslope about 20 meters, and made a noisy crash landing before running off into the forest. Got this daisy. And these—maybe their elderberry flowers? Anyway, I had a nice walk. I’m getting healthier. It’s gonna be a good year for pit vipers. Worst case, we’ll get cottonmouths on the Outer Banks. Best case, we’ll have copperheads and rattlers from the mountains (or maybe even the piedmont) to go with ‘em. Be sure to check in at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/, and the weekly sustainability blog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/. Thanks! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
10:41 pm	Bustin’ Brush in the Patuxent Basin So it seemed a shade too cool to go all the way to the Catoctin Ridge for copperheads today, although it was pretty damned gorgeous. Instead, I took a long off-the-trail brush buster over at the Patuxent Reserve in Columbia.  Might’ve been a little too much exercise for my still-overly-fragile physiology. I hurt now. But it was worth it. See, I’ve been very suspicious, despite the insistence of the county authorities, that a population of copperheads could have survived in the Maryland piedmont on a parcel of land dead center in the Baltimore-Washington I95 corridor. But I got into some rocky, moisty habitat today, pretty far off the trail (although only a few hundred meters from a row of houses out on the roadway) that could well be copperheady. And got a few other things that make me think there’s a chance some might be holding on. Here’s what we got for today. Some kind of violet I don’t think we’ve had before. A little yellow forest floor flower. A little white forest floor flower. A fern crozier. Thought about bringing some home for dinner. Realized I can’t eat dinner. Gave it up. A jack-in-the-pulpit. A ringneck snake. With all the signs of being the northern (not southern) subspecies. A black rat snake about 3 meters up in a tree. I snapped lots of photos and managed to suppress my instinct to flop her out of the tree and into my hands. Since I was already covered in ringneck snake musk, I figured I didn’t really need another perfuming. It’s the ringneck and the rat snake that give me hope for the copperheads. The ringneck means the ground hasn’t been disturbed too much. Unlike the rest of Columbia, which has been dug up and turned over completely since the mid-60s. And the rat snake means the deer hunters haven’t blown always all the large, visible snakes in the parcel. And copperheads are a damn site less visible than a big black rat.  So there’s hope. I’ll keep at it, my friends. These snakes go some way for making up for the earth snake I missed a couple weeks ago in the same place, although they don’t make it up completely. More brush bustin’ to go! BTW, there’s new material up at other components of this weblog enterprise. Follow the chapter-by-chapter writing of a new book on urban ecosystems at http://www.sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/; weekly cancer blog at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ ; and my only professional weekly blog over at http://aehsfoundation.com/ . Thanks again for being here! (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 12th, 2012
7:18 pm	Pilgrim on the Path: Return to the Everglades. When we were younger (much younger) Bill and I used to go annually to Everglades National Park for a week of camping, birding, herping, and rum drinking. We would dragoon whoever else was around and wasn’t paying sufficient attention, jump in a car, drive like bats overnight (and a good chunk of the next day) and arrive in South Florida just in time to load up on lime juice and bottled water and head out to the Park.  Highlights? Oh, there’s the year I caught two enormous indigo snakes in the dry mangrove forest at the upper edge of the salt water. I gather they were mating before I rudely interrupted them. Both of them were longer than I am tall. Holding on to both of them while trying to get a photograph was hilarious.  Then there was the year Entomology Dave (now Viper Dave, remind him to show you his tattoo) took a bet, stripped naked at midnight, held a flashlight over his head, and raced into the wetland to see how far he could go before he was exsanguinated (good word, no?) by the mosquitoes. He made about 150 meters, if I remember. And there was the year we found the raccoon road-killed in the 5 mph camp roadway. And then found out why. Both our rum bottle and our enormous jar of peanut butter were off in the grass empty. That raccoon ate the peanut butter, drank the rum, and fell asleep in the road.  Molly and I didn’t have any particularly untoward adventures. We did have a great couple days in the ‘Glades. For the first time in my life I made it into Big Cypress National Preserve, where we saw manatees, green water snakes, and hiked off in the palmetto. Next day we went down the east side, out the main park road, and walked the trails. Photos follow. There’s an anhinga (one of very many). A black vulture lookin’ atcha. A little baby uropygid (or “vinegaroon”, so named because they spray acetic acid from a tube in their abdomen). This little girl is only ¾ of inch long. When she’s full grown she’ll be the size of the palm of your hand. Finding one of these has been near the top of my life list for a long time. There’s your sleeping alligator. Your wood stork.  Your heliconiid butterfly. A flock of busily foraging ibises. A heapin’ helpin’ of bear poo in the roadway. A great blue heron. And some fishhooks on the offshore angling vessel. Thanks for stopping by! Don’t forget to visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the latest cancer diary uptake. Until next week, my friends!!! (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 27th, 2011
10:43 pm	Thanksgiving 2011 Wow. Thanksgiving came together in fabulous fashion, with helping hands from all involved. I was too sick to do all the cooking and cutting, so everyone chipped in. Vegetables showed up all cut and ready to go, the turkey was delivered via mail order, Molly and Jesse picked up the beef.  I was completely exhausted by Friday, but had a wonderful time. We had a number of new people, including Beth and Maggie and Jonathan, plus a split of old-timers between the Wednesday Night Seafood Supper, the Thursday Regular T-Day, through Friday night movies and Saturday. Following are some photos for your delectation. Oh. Note there is a new posting over at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/. Thanks! (Comment on this)
Monday, September 19th, 2011
9:53 am	Technology Shmechnology A lot of art is high-tech these days. Jasper Johns, “30th most valuable artist” [1], famously works on an iPod. Note he also has 1700 proofs in the national gallery and his large canvases still sell for $10s of millions. Be that as it may, I’ve always wanted to be a printmaker. Somehow prints just seem to suit my completely self-taught, rather primitive and simplistic style. But the technology of printing is brutal. Chemicals, big chunks of stone or other materials, massive machinery to press and pull the print. You know, I am seriously technology limited. I’m afraid I’m stuck with good old fashioned pen and ink with occasional assist from some acrylics.  Here’s a sampling of what I have on hand. You can any or all of these for $125 bucks which includes shipping. They’re mostly about 23” by 31”, but the one with the big blue splash is larger. Also they ship unframed. Mostly because I can’t figure out how to ship something framed this size. But also because that would require me to charge real money. And since this is Bad Art By Dave, I’d feel guilty about that… .  Note there is new stuff up around the weblog horn. See http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for a whiny cancer diary, http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for a cool thought about the environmental effects of an ancient Greek engineering miracle, and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for a knock-down tap-out battle between Big Trouble in Little China and Machete. Thanks, my friend. My deep love and respect to each and every one of you reading this! Notes [1] according to a Wiki citation, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns    (Comment on this)
Monday, September 12th, 2011
9:27 pm	Early Autumn in the Eastern Mixed Hardwood Forest Of course, this year early autumn seems more like a particularly wet spring. Indeed, yesterday I managed to squeeze in a couple hours on the Catoctin Ridge between storms. And the forest floor was peopled with the accouterments of moist springtime. Nothing you would expect to see in our usual hot and dry September. Like mushrooms. Zillions of ‘em. All kinds. Like these orange beauties. I’m pretty sure these massive orange things—there was about a peck of them in this heap—are edible. But I’m not going there. Every year, at least a couple of Germans—who dote on wild mushrooms and consider themselves universally expert in their harvest—die of irreversible liver toxicity from mushrooms. That’s all the warning I need! Although I must admit when I’m in Germany during the mushroom season, I eat the wild mushroom soup at every opportunity… . Nearby were these tiny, delicate stemmed ‘shrooms. And on a fire trail, this big honkin’ one holding an entire watering hole in its cup. Here’s an instructive sequence. Here’s a red backed salamander. Here’s red backed salamander, but with only a sort of dull greenish back. Here’s a red backed salamander with no colored back at all. Salamanders seem to have enormous evolutionary plasticity. This multicolor complex just seems like its waiting for some selective pressure to throw the pattern into one pot or another. In the southern Appalachians, where the subwatersheds are separated by incredibly steep canyon walls, all the salamanders of each species look identical. Except when they run DNA analysis, they find every canyon has a clearly distinct genetic species. Makes no biological or ecological difference of course. But nobody asks ecologists to weigh in on these things, either. And a small orange salamander. An eft. Soon this guy will find a woodland pool and transform into a green and totally aquatic newt. Pretty cool life cycle, huh! Finally, a gorgeous katydid. Most of ‘em are chewed up and damaged by now. Not this gal. She’s a tough bird, and has fended off the birds so far! New material up around the horn. I’ve been sick, I apologize for being a day late with this stuff. Check http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the cancer diary, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com for the best in popular culture, http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for the best in sustainability and the environmental consequences of war. And thanks again for stoppin’ by—every time you guys read this stuff, I feel a little more life come back to my battered frame! (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 4th, 2011
11:11 pm	Late Summer in the Oak Hickory Forest This time of year, eastern forests get very quiet. Birds are done defending territories, not many are singing. Frogs and toads are few and far between, and only when it’s cool and moist. The insect chorus is there, cicadas in the daytime and crickets and katydids at night, but they’re getting worn down. Many have been eaten, others are beaten up. Everybody’s prepping for autumn. We do have the delightful comedy of the woodchucks. There is nothing, nothing, as happy looking as a woodchuck on a sunny bank in September. They are fat, rolly-polly, worried about nothing except packing in enough calories to get through the coming cold season. They soak up the sun and stuff themselves with grass. They’re hilarious. Eastern deciduous forests do not give up their secrets easily. It takes a lot of hard hiking and long, quiet hours to see even larger salamanders, snakes, and birds. Months to see mammals. And I am too frail at the moment to put in the hours needed to get the good stuff. A couple hours of slow walking is all I got in me at the moment. But it’s enough to find interesting things. Let’s see what we have in the woods on this long, late-summer weekend. Acorn. Mast, until the 1950s dominated by chestnuts, now filled in by oaks, is the key to a lot of the large-animal biomass in the eastern forest. Deer, pigs, turkeys, grouse, squirrels, many species are in. The ones that don’t get eaten either sprout into incipient oaks or recycle through the detritus. A mushroom, thoroughly eaten by a succession of invertebrates along with mice and maybe squirrels. Lots of carbon is cycled through fungi on the forest floor. Folks have been out tuning up their dogs for the upcoming hunting season, leaving poo on the fire trails. This batch of dung beetles and flies is frantically converting dog food via dog shit into next year’s generation of dung-collecting insects. This dung beetle is working particularly hard. He’s rolled this centimeters-in-diameter ball of poo a good 5 meters from its origin, and is working to bury it beside the trail. A mushroom, freshly sprouted from the soil, soon to be turned into animal biomass—probably tonight. A small snail, working to pack on the biomass in preparation for winter (and defecating while snoozing). A fritillary on a thistle. Tiger swallowtail missing part of its tail. Birds are packing on the poundage in preparation for winter! I’m not precisely certain what kind of swallowtail this is. But it is also missing part of its left hind wing. Possibly the same bird that grabbed the tiger. Finally, this bumblebee also packing on the weight, in this case most likely for its offspring to overwinter. New stuff up around the weblog horn this week. Be sure, if you have a few minutes, to visit http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for an essay on environmental consequences of armed conflict, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com for the best in modern culture, and http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the weekly cancer diary. Thanks for stopping by! (Comment on this)
Monday, August 15th, 2011
12:05 am	Wet in the Woods We celebrated Molly’s birthday this weekend. I reminded her that she’s named after the assassin in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. And had the thought that the side road of raising children hasn’t diverted me wholesale from the pleasures of prior life. I still like a day in the temperate eastern North America forest. With the excuse that I’m looking for pit vipers—copperheads and rattlesnakes—to photograph. Saturday I drove myself out to the Catoctin Ridge, hiked up a few hundred meters of road, then cut into the forest. Where it was quiet and humid. A shower caught me, and I parked my butt against a big hickory and fell sound asleep for 40 minutes until it passed. Then continued walking. Got totally lost. Somehow managed to gain several hundred meters of altitude and make a kilometer of linear distance away when I thought I was heading back to my car. Still, wet as it was, it was warm. I’m pretty weak and fragile, but I do not doubt I could survive a night lost in the woods in the present benign weather. Ended up I was a good kilometer from my car, but I would’ve heard the searchers. Here’s some photos from the day. And thanks for stopping by. There’s a new entry (no more coherent than this one) over at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ . The other sites http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ I’ll update during the week. Thanks for stopping by! (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 31st, 2011
11:57 pm	Don’t Pass Up a Good Striper Or, as they say here in the Chesapeake drainage, “rockfish”. Either way, it’s Morone saxatilis, North America’s seafood gift to the world. Nothing in any food snob ocean, from the Mediterranean (sea bass) to the north Atlantic (Dover sole) to the Caribbean (grouper) to the Pacific (mahi. Or snakehead. Or Humboldt Squid) tops it as a fine-flavored, beautifully textured, fish. Gorgeous wild caught striper ready to eat. And because it’s so delicious, it does best with the simplest approach. When Colin and I saw this bad boy on ice at the seafood shop in Wilde Lake, we looked at each other and said “grill”. Actually, Colin had to pay for it with his credit card. Left mine at home. We defined him not by snipping the fins at body level, but by dissecting out the abundant tiny bones at the base of the dorsals, anal, and pelvics (we left the pectorals to remove when carving). Sloshed him good olive oil inside and out, salted and peppered him heavily inside and out, and he was ready for the grill. Striper tail sticking out of grill cover. Before laying him on the grill, we roasted 5 ears of fresh corn in their husks. And put a bag of mixed potatoes (red skin, blue, and Yukon gold, I believe) wrapped in foil into the box with the charcoal. Fire roasted corn ready to be sliced into salad. We also slapped some nice boneless pork loin scallops on the grill for the non-seafood eaters in the crowd. Fire roasted pork ready to eat. The potatoes weren’t cooked through when the fish was done, so we dumped ‘em into the microwave for a few minutes. Yanked ‘em when tender, mashed them onto the corn kernels previously sliced from the cobs, and dressed the salad warm with a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette (made with commercial supermarket balsamico) and shredded fresh basil. Everything was delicious, as you can see from the hit the corn and potato salad took. I couldn’t eat more than a mouthful, of course. But that was probably a good thing. This was all that remained of that 3 pound fish after the first go-around! Fresh material up across the weblog empire. Please surf on over to http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for a cancer melodrama update, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some movie reviews, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for a new essay on Armed Conflict and the Environment. Most of all, remember I love you all, and I’m grateful that you’re taking the time to read this stuff. Thanks! (Comment on this)
Monday, July 25th, 2011
8:37 pm	Suburban Ecosystems Roasting It’s much, much too hot for me to haul my none-to-functional corpus out into the woods for an actual hike. Instead, I wandered around the yard for half an hour and observed the domesticated ecosystem. Here are some of my findings. Apologies for the small type face. The weblog service guys are still having server problems. Pretty pink flowers in the sunny spots. Cool blue and yellow flowers a little shadier. A backlit leaf. A nifty white flower. Some years ago, I planted a couple big roots of hops in the garden to the side of the front deck. Every spring, they sprouted and grew frantically into massive, long, tendriled vines. Very cool. Would’ve been even cooler if I could have figured out how to make a trellis tall enough to handle them. In any case, for the first few years, I used their flowers to make home brew. It was quite fun drying my own hops and using them to flavor beer. Hops emerging from the soil. In the interim, though, Cathy, had the yard redone. The hops are now buried under a meter and a half of backfill, where an elevated stone walled garden parcel replaced the old eroding hillside. A meter and a half of soil dumped on top of them? Doesn’t faze the hops one bit. Here’s a shot of the planter. The roots are about half a meter deeper than the bottom of that wall. And they’re still coming up and proliferating every summer. That’s persistence! I’ve got new material up around the horn. Please visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for a cancer diary update, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some movie recommendations, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for a new essay on the ecosystem at large. Thanks! (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 24th, 2011
10:26 pm	Suburban Ecosystems Roasting It’s much, much too hot for me to haul my none-to-functional corpus out into the woods for an actual hike. Instead, I wandered around the yard for half an hour and observed the domesticated ecosystem. Here are some of my findings. Pretty pink flowers in the sunny spots. Cool blue and yellow flowers a little shadier. [apologies for the partial entry. blogsite is having server troubles. I'll fix this entry as soon as they are back and functioning. Thanks for the patience!] A backlit leaf. A nifty white flower. Some years ago, I planted a couple big roots of hops in the garden to the side of the front deck. Every spring, they sprouted and grew frantically into massive, long, tendriled vines. Very cool. Would’ve been even cooler if I could have figured out how to make a trellis tall enough to handle them. In any case, for the first few years, I used their flowers to make home brew. It was quite fun drying my own hops and using them to flavor beer.  Hops emerging from the soil. In the interim, though, Cathy, had the yard redone. The hops are now buried under a meter and a half of backfill, where an elevated stone walled garden parcel replaced the old eroding hillside. A meter and a half of soil dumped on top of them? Doesn’t faze the hops one bit. Here’s a shot of the planter. The roots are about half a meter deeper than the bottom of that wall. And they’re still coming up and proliferating every summer. That’s persistence! I’ve got new material up around the horn. Please visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for a cancer diary update, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some movie recommendations, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for a new essay on the ecosystem at large. Thanks!   (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 17th, 2011
10:33 pm	Midsummer in the Oak-Hickory Forest With a side trip out of the piedmont to the Catoctin Ridge, odd geologic feature that is the furthest east outcrop of the Appalachian biome. And which would thus have been an oak-chestnut forest a century ago. Now it’s just got the still-rock-solid skeletons of fallen chestnuts, which don’t seem to rot under any circumstances. Note, if you will, the erstwhile devastating loss of keystone species—chestnut—to the fungal chestnut blight in the middle of the 20th century didn’t cause the forest ecosystem to miss a beat. The hickories took over, and provided as much mast for the deer and birds as ever. Keep that in mind next time someone is telling you the sky is gonna fall because tigers, or sharks, or snow leopards go extinct. The ecosystem doesn’t care what organisms are present. There will always be an ecosystem there, fulfilling ecosystem functions. It is entirely up to us—human beings—to decide how we want our habitat configured and why, and to make it so. There is no existentially “preferred” ecosystem state. It’s all in our heads. With that little lecture out of the way, let’s look at some of the life muddling its way through the scorching heat of another mid-Atlantic July. This Indian Pipe is a vascular plant which (mostly—check out the green tint on the stem) lacks chloryphyll. Check out this crane fly. See the little antenna-like stalks with terminal bulbs just below the wings? Those are called “halters”. They are remnants of the second pair of wings which flies (unlike most winged insects) lack. The halters act as counterweights to the wings when the animal flies. They move perfectly out of synch with the  wings, swinging down when the wings fly up and up when the wings move down. The little orb-weaving spider above is very abundant this time of year. The females like this one are maybe half an inch long. The nests can be enormous, spreading a couple meters at least between saplings. They are also invariably built at face height making hiking on little-used trails a spooky proposition. This butterfly is abundant around here this time of year.  I don’t know what this flower is, but it is interestingly structured and attracts boatloads of insects. This tall yellow flower didn’t have many insect visitors. A wintergreen berry on the forest floor. Makes a good hiking nibble. Finally, a couple of male goldfinches chowing down on seed packets. Thanks for stopping by! There is new material up around the horn, so if you have time, surf on over to http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ , and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Hopefully I’ll keep the momentum up to renew the whole batch every week for the foreseeable future. Thanks again!   (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 26th, 2011
9:02 pm	What a Difference a Week Makes Last week, the milkweed out at the Little Patuxent Reserve was peopled by longhorn beetles. This weekend, it’s got chrysomelids, bumblebees, and the first monarch of the year. There was also a bright yellow insect hovering over the flowers (I wasn’t able to get a viable photo). I’m pretty sure it was a fly, imitating the clear-winged moths that imitate bees. Making it, I think, a case of Mullerian (umlaut on the u, I don’t know how to do it), not Batesian, mimicry. Although I must admit that the last book on mimicry I read was in late high school. I gave up on the whole concept when I realized that the purported coral snake “mimicry complex” couldn’t possibly have anything to do with mimicry and likely simply reflects the default colors of little, fossorial, nocturnal snakes. Part of the mimicry problem lies in the “fossorial, nocturnal” habits that the coral snakes and their supposed mimics (several species of kingsnake, long-nosed snake, and others) share. Underground and at night, color just doesn’t seem like much of a parameter for adaptive evolution. The other strike is that the coral snakes are universally intensely venomous. So much so that whatever predators are supposed to learn that coral snakes are venomous (weasels? Hawks? Other king snakes?) would be dead from the bite, and so unable to pass on any genetic material having anything to do with coral snakes. I’m going with the default color concept.  Anyway, here’s some more biodiversity from the Patuxent Reserve here in the Maryland piedmont.  I’m pretty certain this pregnant garter snake is the same one I gave you just a segment of a few weeks ago. Here’s a bug on a milkweed. That first monarch of the year. A smaller butterfly deep in the weeds. Your standard cabbage white. Beavers girdled this tree in anticipation of coming back after it falls and using it as the foundation of a new landscape. It’s a good 2 feet in diameter. Possibly  these beavers have bitten off more than  they can chew? Then you got yer weird purple flower. And yer weird orange flower. Thanks for stopping by! New stuff up at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , nothing new at http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ or http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . I will make every effort to get new material up around the horn this week so you’ll have the full array for next weekend. Thanks again, all!   (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 19th, 2011
9:59 pm	Summer is Icumen In Llude sing cuckoo. I heard a cuckoo today out on the trail in the remarkable Middle Patuxent wild area. It was a black-billed. Much prettier voice than yellow-billeds.  Milkweed—at least 3 species, near as I can tell—was in flower, and covered with butterflies, moths, and other insects. It’s been cloudy, humid, and warm the past few days. I had the trails almost exclusively to myself this weekend, and got a few snaps of general biodiversity for you. Like this skipper butterfly, possibly in the genus Erynnis, cloudywings.  And these long-horned beetles out for  an afternoon of wining and dining. Which are red milkweed beetles, Tetraopes tetrophthalmus. I think this is a soldier beetle. This is a chrysomelid flower beetle. Another chrysomelid. An opilionid hunting mites on a leaf in the riparian forest. A pretty little grass flower. And a pretty yellow flower. Thanks for stoppin’ by. New material over at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/. The other two sites I’ll update later in the week.   (Comment on this)
Monday, June 13th, 2011
12:39 pm	Kick Save and a Beauty Columbia was carved out of sleepy suburban farmland in Howard County in a strategic coup by the Rouse Corporation in the late 1960s. Rouse was basically a mall-builder—Willowbrook in New Jersey is another of their early prizes. But Columbia was a whole step up in level of effort. Think about it. They wanted to build a mall in the D.C./Baltimore I95 corridor, but at the time the corridor was pretty empty. So what do you need if you’re gonna put in a mall? A market, of course. And what better way to generate a market than to build one in? Put in a mall and create a city around it, de novo, where the only place to shop IS the mall. Sheer genius! Inevitably since then, land prices skyrocketed and development in Howard County has been rampant. Remarkably, the one big outparcel whose owner refused to sell out to Rouse remained undeveloped until the original owner died a few years ago. I’m sure this big chunk of land is worth several fortunes as development fodder. Somehow, long-sighted ownership and quick action by the county and other funding sources obtained that land to keep it out of development. It’s now a huge natural area, with fabulous walking trails, dead center in the urban mayhem of the I95 corridor.  It’s been great for me to rebuild my strength via short walks with options for longer on good days. Following are some recent photos. I think this gorgeous damselfly is an Ebony Jewelwing, Calopteryx maculata. Here's the heavy belly of pregnant garter snake. Isn't she gorgeous? Here’s a Common Buckeye,  Junonia coenia. A Great Spangled Fritillary,  Speyeria cybele. And an ancient box turtle. I’m  sure she’s been in these woods since before Columbia was a gleam in the Rouse accountant’s eyes. One of  two I got on a recent humid afternoon. Thanks for stopping by. Newish material up around the horn, be sure to check http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ .   (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
9:08 pm	Spring Slips to Summer My Mom loved irises. There was some sort of garden in Montclair, New Jersey when I was a kid. One of Mom’s favorite outings was a picnic lunch and that iris garden. I’m afraid I mostly remember the lunches. Usually egg salad and tuna salad sandwiches on buttered white or rye, chips or pretzels, lemonade in a big “guj”, carrot and celery sticks, and a big bag of commercial cookies.  In the interim between my penultimate week of treatment and the last one (that’s the one that tried to kill me last weekend), Colin kindly accompanied me on a short hike on the Catoctin Ridge. We got these very pretty yellow irises in the stream bottom forest: And a fresh crop of large butterflies frantically slurping water and salt from the gravel roadbed: A hard-working dung beetle. Actually a REALLY hard-working dung beetle. This guy apparently couldn’t find any dung, so he’s rolling up a big ball of moss. Sort of the Teddy Roosevelt of dung beetles: “where we are with what we have”….. We got a honkin’ heap of little tiny spiders ready spread carnivore terror in the leaf letter for the next few months: A big, fist-sized southern toad: Far too big for this pretty little 2 year-old garter snake: This 2 year-old toad is more like it for the little lady snake: We got this slimy salamander under a rock. If the summer is as wet as spring was around here, this guy’ll be rockin’ until Autumn! These dragonflies were frantically trying to dry their new equipment, having emerged from their nymphal skins earlier in the morning: Finally, I don’t know exactly what this is. Best guess is some sort of pornographic pea flower. Nice, no? Anyway. Now that I’m out of the hospital without apparent permanent damage and without the death song that played in my head last weekend when I really DID want to die, I’m coming back to grips with the 4 interlocking weblogs. I’ll have new material up on all this week, so be sure to stop by and give a quick look to  http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ to get insights beyond those pumped out here at http://www.docviper.livejournal.com/ . Remember I love you all. Knowing you are out there in the world brings me phenomenal strength. Believe me, if I survive this thing, it will be the result of our collective will in the face of biological processes gone devastatingly awry. So, in addition to sending my love, I also send you my deepest thanks!!!   (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 15th, 2011
9:30 pm	Spring on a String We finally got a good strong clear front to come through the mid-Atlantic and clear out the succession of rainy days alternating with warm, sticky ones. The birds were beside themselves. As soon as this last clear weather moved in, the trees were filled with warblers. Got some good ones already—chestnut-sided, blue-winged, black-throated green, and a bunch more. And the spring flowers in the huge parcel of open land somehow, miraculously saved from development just on the other side of Columbia have been awesome. Here’re some spring hiking shots for your delectation.  Some cool purple violet-looking thing. A batch of incredibly fragrant yellow honeysuckle. What I assume are corresponding white honeysuckle. Spring beauty. A raspberry of some kind. A buttercup. I love that texture of the petals. And a tiny white flower. Might be chickweed. Finally, this quasi-abstract photoshopped From the sunset shadow on the carport. Thanks for stoppin’ by. New material up around the horn, so don’t miss http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ I’ll see you soon, with a little luck minus all tumors and just a few glands!   (Comment on this)