Owl Alert!

The full moon shines in a cloudless sky. As I unload the car around 6:15 tonight, I hear a sound. Whoo, Whoo, Whoo, Whoo. Not sure of the source, I politely hoot back. Whoo Whoo Whoo Whooo? After a few minutes of conversation, the owl flew off to another spot in the subdivision. I am too excited for words! A real GHO in my yard, and I saw him fly off! (This picture, of course, was taken elsewhere, but it is a handsome bird.)

My yard has several vacated hawk nests, and abundant squirrel nests, which would make dandy homes for a pair of Great Horned Owls. I would be more thrilled about owlets than I was about the Cooper's Hawks, and that's saying something! Let's all keep our fingers crossed!

Creasey Mahan Projects

Creasey Mahan Nature Preserve is one of my favorite places to volunteer, or just to explore on my own. We wish that the couple who donated the land and created the preserve had kept the name on their gate post. "Hill-O-Content" is such a descriptive name! I can imagine the contentment they must have had driving down this lane every time they came home.

The Manor is really an old four-room two-story log cabin, built in the early 1800's, and later covered in clapboard, then aluminum siding. One of our volunteers spent many hours this summer caulking and repairing the 177 window panes on the home.

Natural springs burst out from the limestone in many places on the property. Most springs feed one of the small creeks. One of the early owners decided to build a spring house over a convenient spring just downhill from the house. Cool water still bubbles through the small building, ready to preserve milk, fruits and vegetables as it did almost 200 years ago. Last fall, a windstorm blew off its tin roof, and it sat there wounded, while we searched for money to make repairs. Actually, it will be a restoration, because a new cedar shingle roof is going on, much more authentic for a structure of this age.

The builders include the grounds manager, one of the members from the board of directors, and two other volunteers with terrific skills. As I watched them work, I felt the stream of time flowing through the building. When the first construction crew worked here, they had to quarry the stone, mix the mortar and place all the stones. Before putting on a roof, they had to cut the timber, make the nails, and cut the cedar to make the shakes or shingles to put on the roof. I mentioned this to our crew, and they expressed their appreciation for Home Depot which delivered all the material right to the site!

The Manor has four rooms in the original part, including this wonderful dining room. Each room has its own fireplace, since that was the only heat source in the 1800's. The hill above the spring house has been burned off and reseeded with Kentucky native plants, such as Little Bluestem grass. In the spring, the hill glows softly with wildflowers. In the fall, the Bluestem looks almost reddish, despite its name.

At the edge of the meadow, a Red Shouldered Hawk perches in a bare tree, searching for a tasty mouse for breakfast, while warming herself in the bright morning sun.

Since the first frost has not arrived yet, even though it is mid-November, a few brave flowers continue to bloom, including this Black-eyed Susan, some violets, and of course, the ever hardy dandelions.

Goldenrod seeds look like blossoms themselves, nodding in the breeze.

As you enter the main drive, stately maples line the lane. Well, they used to be stately. Now they are home to woodpeckers, insects and shelf fungus on the dead and dying branches. Maples don't give up easily though, and each tree has enough living branches to survive. Smaller trees grow between their elders, so they will be ready to take their place when the final windstorm blows down the larger trees.

When the preserve was established in 1975, there were few trees at all. Since the property was a working farm, mowed pasture for livestock was the common condition, but the donors wanted to create an arboretum, so the USDA was called in for advice. Their recommendation included planting hundreds of Autumn Olives, so that was done. Sigh... It seems that every story I hear about plants now regarded as undesirable includes the government recommendation that it be planted. Now the grounds manager is clearing the Autumn Olive out with a skip loader, simply ripping it up to clear the understory, and cutting large vines, both grape and poison ivy, which are strangling the trees. From the cutback done last year, native plants are making a good recovery already, so everyone is hopeful.

As a volunteer, I get to teach classes about fossils and birds, wander around taking lots of pictures, help plan events, and I redesigned their website. Offering is easy, but it's hard to get folks to let you work on their website, no matter how badly it needs it, so I really appreciate Tavia letting me do this. Also, Tavia Cathcart, the director, is a wonderful expert on plants and wildlife, so I have a built in resource for mystery flowers when I find them!

Falling Around

Although I haven't posted much to the blog lately, I have still been pretty busy. I realized this when I downloaded over 150 photos from my camera today, taken at four different locations and times! The fall has been beautiful this year! Yes, I say that every year, but it's always true! Now that November has arrived, most of the fall colors have dropped to the ground, but we can still enjoy them in photographs. David Sibley, of Sibley's Guide to Birds fame, was in town recently for a book signing. He's branching out and his latest endeavor is Sibley's Guide to Trees. The next day he came to Bernheim Forest for a tree walk. I have to admire anyone who spends so many years in one field, and has the courage to take on something entirely different, then go and talk to people about it in an unfamiliar area of the country. He discussed different things to watch for in the bark and buds of trees this time of year to help make an identification. Of course, when the Cooper's Hawks and Turkey Vultures flew over, it was natural to call our attention to the birds as well.

Cooper's Hawk at Bernheim Forest The winter birds are arriving. Cedar Waxwings are still around, and I've seen several Juncos in my backyard, and heard a White Throated Sparrow. At Putney Pond, a pair of Hooded Mergansers paddled around at sunset.

The remaining scarlet leaves are breathtaking, but I've been attracted to the various seed heads left on the grasses and plants now that the flowers are gone. They are so delicate looking! Much of my time has been spent working on computer projects for my volunteer organizations. They both decided to join Facebook, after seeing recommendations for non-profits to use that as a free marketing tool along with their regular websites. I've always resisted getting into Facebook, but had to start an account to create a page for the non-profit. I got the page created, but have become completely frustrated when trying to get a username assigned to the page. It attached itself to my profile, not the nature preserve! Then I found that you can't get rid of a personal username at all. I checked with someone else who does this sort of thing, and the pages we saw for my login don't look anything like the ones she sees as administrator for her organization. Grrr! Has anyone else had any luck with Facebook? I'm about to recommend that we just use mass emails and forget Facebook altogether.

Comic Sans Saves the Day

I'm not a big time Halloween person. I don't dress up, and I only get candy that I don't like. Otherwise I'd pig out on it before any little guys showed up. We did enlarge the front porch so Trick or Treaters no longer fall off it backwards into the bushes. However, in my spirit of Halloween, I hope you enjoy this non-caloric comic sans opera. (Remember, I spent 11 years in the IT business. Videos about fonts as people are funny to me!)

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Fungi are Fun, Guys!

Bread Dough Mushroom

It's been fairly cool and wet this summer and fall, perfect fungi weather. When we go for a hike, I may not find birds, but the fungi are flourishing fantastically! Now, here's the problem. I don't have a good fungi field guide, and when I try to look online, all I find are Latin names. I don't do Latin, thank you. So I have fun making up my own names if no one else in the group knows. I ordered what looks like a good book, and it won't be here for a while yet, so just enjoy my imagination on these. After all, mushrooms can be as pretty as flowers, can't they?

Chocolate Bread Dough

Yellow Frillies

Witch's Butter (someone else came up with this name) - a jelly fungi. Squeeze and it slimes all over your fingers.

Purple Umbrellas

Dead Man's Finger - That's it's real name, and apparently it's fairly rare since the naturalist was excited to find it. I would have called it Duck Head myself.

Frilly Pumpkin Turkey Tails

Birds Nest - this is the real name. If you brush against them the "eggs" burst and the spores are released to the air.

More jelly fungi

White Branch Straddler - it only grew on the bottom of this small branch.

Shelf fungi are fairly common, but this one was quite large. The naturalists pulled one from the tree trunk to show us its root, which was larger than his thumb, as you can see.

Little Orange Pearls

We found a tree at Bernheim that had 10 or 12 different kinds of fungi along its dead trunk. Between the hurricane in Sept 2008 and the Jan 2009 ice storm, Kentucky has an abundance of dead trees. A real fungi feast! We noticed that the fungi and lichens tended to start growing in the crevasses in the bark. You can see them lined up in rows - first a row of Turkey Tails, then a row of green moss and lichens.

Tortellini Mushroom

One of the nicest things about fungi is their willingness to pose as long as you need for the perfect photo. They don't blow in the wind, and they don't move around just as you take the shot. I appreciate that in nature!

Reelfoot Birds

We got to see some birds not normally found in the Louisville area. Well, someone said these were White Fronted Geese exploring the lake at Big Oak State Park in Missouri. Now that I'm home and checking the field guide, I don't know what they are. Any ideas out there?

The Reelfoot naturalist let us go into the large flight cage for his two Bald Eagles, who were pretty cool about having visitors. Plenty of wild Eagles flew over our parking lot, but they were too high for good pictures.

From our weekend stay, I'd have to say that Great Egrets were the most common bird we saw. They seem very territorial. Each morning we saw an Egret on the same branches around the lakeshore by our resort. If you walked too close though, they flew off, then returned in just a few minutes.

On our hike around the edge of the lake, we saw a handful of American Pelicans preening. It looks like they are standing on water, but there are lots of submerged branches to take advantage of. It only looks like a bird miracle.

The exciting part came when hundreds of Pelicans lifted on a thermal Sunday morning, wheeling and turning until they were high enough to start flying towards their destination farther south. From one angle, there were invisible, then they turned with a flash of white wings, and the next turn made them look black. It was simply fabulous!

A Bald Eagle called while we visited, and apparently I've turned off both the recording and sound making abilities of my camera, so there is no sound. I pieced together some individual shots to get the characteristic movements. Hmm, I'll have to get into the camera setup again so I get sound with my movies.

The Real Reelfoot Lake

Sunday was the best day of our KSNH weekend, because the sun finally came out. Since Reelfoot is on the Mississippi flyway, lots of migrating birds stop here. We visited a wetlands with duck blinds for handicapped hunters. Up to five people can use the drive-up blind, but one has to be in a wheelchair. They were in pretty bad shape after last winter's ice storm, and some hunter will have to clean them up before the season starts. Too bad we'll never see them as just duck watching blinds during the season.

Reelfoot Lake NWR is known for its lily ponds. They should be famous for duckweed as well, since it grows any place where fishermen don't take their boats on a regular basis, resembling a smooth grassy lawn under the trees.

Reelfoot Lake is surprisingly shallow. Many places are 5 feet deep, and the deepest pools are only about 18 feet deep. The wind can blow up good sized whitecaps in a storm though. Many of the cypress trees growing away from the shore are remnants of a cypress forest that grew here before the 1812 earthquake that flooded the area and created the lake. The naturalist said that stumps under the water are still in good condition, while those which are exposed sometimes have rotted. It's hard to determine the age of the oldest trees, since the heart wood rots out leaving a large hollow in the middle, while the rest of the tree lives for many more years.

Bald Cypress trees are deciduous conifers, losing their needles in the winter. "Knees" grow up as part of the root system, giving more stability to their foundation in the soft unstable bottom land. The knees also help oxygenate the trees when their roots are under water.

This looks like a group of knee monks heading for mass in the cathedral. Local people will cut the knees off and sell them at roadside stands. They advise you to boil the wood, then drill a hole up the middle to make a lamp. Sorry, not for me.

Whose Fault Is It?

We joined the Kentucky Society for Natural History on their fall conference at Reelfoot Lake this weekend. As we packed the car on Thursday morning, a quick glance at the weather map showed bright areas of green, yellow and red between Louisville and Colorado. It's going to be a rough weekend, we agreed. Indeed, as we explored the New Madrid fault region, we drove through miles and miles of rain. In addition to being wet, we spent the weekend without technology! Our T-Mobile phones had no signal at all, and the resort where we stayed, although very nice otherwise, had no Internet connections. This was truly a test of our dedication to nature studies! If you aren't familiar with history of the area, New Madrid, MO, was the epicenter of the worst earthquakes in the United States, in 1811 and 1812. The fault was created by a rift that failed about 500 million years ago, and the rift valley filled with sediment. The actual fault is about 25 miles underground, so you don't see evidence of faulting as you would in California, for instance.

Fortunately, the center of the country was relatively unpopulated at that time, when earthquakes exceeding 7 and 8 on the current Richter scale struck over a 3 month period. The fault crosses under the Mississippi River in several places, and uplifting caused the river itself to flow upstream for a while. Liquefied sand erupted in large geysers. The quakes were felt as far away as Canada. I-55 has a rest stop at the site of the epicenter, although they don't publicize it.

Will there be another quake here? Sure, but no one knows when. The damage will be catastrophic when it hits this time, given the size and nearness of cities like St. Louis, Memphis, Nashville and, yes, Louisville. A relatively small quake in April 2008 was centered in Illinois, felt in Louisville, and arose from the New Madrid fault system. Seismometers in the area show unfelt earthquakes occurring regularly. NOVA has a good online video about the New Madrid fault system.

The river itself is not exactly what I expected. The Army Corps of Engineers has turned the Ohio River into a series of lakes using dams and locks. Their goal is to maintain a navigation channel nine feet deep at all times. We call it the Ohio Lake here in Louisville.

The Mississippi River also has dams for navigation, but in between the dams the river twists and turns as it did in the days of Mark Twain. We watched a fully loaded coal barge turn almost sideways to make a turn around a large sand bar. A towboat pushing a full load of fifteen barges is like trying to steer three football fields, 365 days a year, in all kinds of weather. The map above shows some of the channels from the last 250 years. Oxbow lakes, such as Reelfoot, are left as the channel changes directions. The land is perfectly flat and fertile, so farmers plant great fields of corn, soybeans and cotton. Migrating Tree Swallows swoop after insects we can't even see, then perch on the power lines. I saw more Kestrels this weekend than ever before.

We drove downstream to the nearest bridge, then up the Missouri bootheel through the fault zone. Not wanting to drive that far again to get back to Reelfoot, we got to ride the Hickman Ferry across the river, back to the Kentucky side. The small boat you see on the side of this photo is on a hinge. When we pulled away from shore, this part swung out and around, so it could push across the river in a forward direction, just as it did on the way to pick us all up.

My next postings will all be about our weekend at Reelfoot, and the cypress swamps and wildlife we enjoyed.