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Pie day!!! Please come!!!

Sandy Creek
Nature Center 40th Anniversary Celebration

Sunday,
September 29, 2013; 3PM to 5PM

Trail walk with Dan Williams!

Sandy Creek
Nature Center

Tuesday,
October 1, 2013; 9:00AM

Photos of
today’s ramble are courtesy of Don Hunter (the complete set can be found here.)

Today’s
Ramble began with Catherine Chastain reading a selection from a wonderfully
illustrated book, Middlewood
Journal:  Drawing Inspiration from Nature
by Helen Scott Correll, p. 78:

I can tell summer
is losing its grip.  It’s interesting to
note that I understand more every year that the seasons, which I used to
consider fairly distinct, are really quite blurred.  Cat brier and Virginia creeper leaves begin
turning red as early as July: fuzzy spring-like oak leaves sprout until
frost.  During this morning’s ramble I
saw the first “fall” silvery aster bloom for the year, and the grass-leaved and
golden asters, which have been blooming for a couple weeks.  Thoroughworts (upland, round-leaved, and
hyssop-leaved) are in bloom, but fading. 
Tall goldenrods already brighten the woodland edges.  Joe Pye weed and pale indian plantain are in
full bloom down by Meetinghouse Creek.

While I drew, fall
field crickets trilled in the field behind me, and a white-breasted nuthatch’s
loud and nasal ank ank! ank ank! ank ank! gave away his position as he walked
head-first down the trunk of an oak looking for insects.  I remember the bird’s name and differentiate
him from the brown creeper, who also hops on tree trunks, by thinking what a
“nut” the nuthatch is to hop head-first straight down the tree.  The way a brown creeper does it, starting at
the bottom of the tree and spiraling up the trunk, seems so much easier.  The name nuthatch actually comes from the
bird’s habit of wedging nuts into cracks in a tree bark, then whacking at it
with his sharp bill to “hatch” the nut from its shell.

A pileated
woodpecker screamed several times close by. 
A breeze kicked up and stirred the leaves, eventually becoming a steadying
cooling wind that persuaded me to stay a while after journaling, just to enjoy
it. 

We then
walked through the shade garden to the road, down the road to the power line
and then to the river. Today’s theme was “vines,” but we saw many
other interesting things, both flora and fauna.

Continue reading →

Today it seemed appropriate to remember the Irish
poet Seamus Heaney who died a couple of weeks ago, so Dale Hoyt read one of his
poems. (Note: The flax-dam in the poem is a pond in which the stems of Flax stems are placed in the
water to rot, releasing the fibers that were used to make linen. Many Irish towns had such flax dams.)

Death of
a Naturalist

All year the
flax-dam festered in the heart

Of the townland;
green and heavy headed

Flax had rotted
there, weighted down by huge sods.

Daily it sweltered
in the punishing sun.

Bubbles gargled
delicately, bluebottles

Wove a strong gauze
of sound around the smell.

There were
dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,

But best of all was
the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that
grew like clotted water

In the shade of the
banks. Here, every spring

I would fill
jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks to range on
window-sills at home,

On shelves at
school, and wait and watch until

The fattening dots
burst into nimble-

Swimming tadpoles.
Miss Walls would tell us how

The daddy frog was
called a bullfrog

And how he croaked
and how the mammy frog

Laid hundreds of
little eggs and this was

Frogspawn. You
could tell the weather by frogs too

For they were
yellow in the sun and brown

In rain.

Then one hot day
when fields were rank

With cowdung in the
grass the angry frogs

Invaded the
flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

To a coarse
croaking that I had not heard

Before. The air was
thick with a bass chorus.

Right down the dam
gross-bellied frogs were cocked

On sods; their
loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

The slap and plop
were obscene threats. Some sat

Poised like mud
grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I sickened, turned,
and ran. The great slime kings

Were gathered there
for vengeance and I knew

That if I dipped my
hand the spawn would clutch it.

We planned to focus on butterflies again today,
but it was cool when we began, not a good sign for butterfly activity.
Butterflies prefer hot, sunny weather, so we left the parking lot with low
expectations. But with so many sharp-eyed participants it wasn’t long before we
found lots  of interesting creatures.

Continue reading →

We started with a reading from Janisse
Ray describing the Altamaha River as a library, which Hugh read. 

This
river (The Altamaha) is a library, full of biota.  In these stacks, everything is written in
different languages.  There is a dialect
for motions at the surface of water, ripples and waves and mini- volcanoes and
sometimes only a shimmering of wind. 
Each species has its own vernacular, rasps and howls and bellows and
flutelike songs.  Fish have a lingo of puff
and plop, and wild speech falls off the tongues of amphibians and
reptiles.  There is also a language
beyond sound.

In
this library, one shelf is for mussels and one is for bream that live in
submerged bank roots.  There is a cabinet
for the life of canopies and a dictionary of grass.  This library contains a reference for
butterflies, a catalogue of birds. It offers a concordance of arthropods, a
circulation of seeds.

The
river runs and runs.  It runs until it
makes a circle, half in the sky, and finds itself again.  It runs not simply to haul rainfall out of
Georgia.

Not
only to water the land.

Not
only to nourish these forests.

Not
only because it is a storehouse of life.        

The
river runs because it is the keeper of mystery. 
It is the bearer of what cannot be humanly borne.  It is the course of transformation.  It is a sacred urn that,  once opened, changes everything.

(From Janisse Ray, Drifting into Darien (Athens: UGA Press, 2011), pp x-xi.)

Bob Walker showed photos of the Gulf
Fritillary that emerged from the chrysalis that Dale brought last week and
which Bob took home to protect and see what emerged.

Our ramble today was through the
International Garden to the Purple Trail and then back by way of the Orange Trail.  Went around the Beaver Pond on the Orange
Trail and took it all the way to the Upper Parking lot.

Continue reading →

Dale brought a Gulf Fritillary butterfly chrysalis
to show; Martha and Bob agreed to take home and give it tender care. Martha will give us updates
on what emerges (butterfly or parasitic wasp).

Hugh read the story of Milton Hopkins and
an indigo snake. Milton graduated from UGA with an MA in zoology, and intended
to become a naturalist on the Barrier Islands, but ended up, in his own words, a
dirt farmer.  He was an incredible
birder, and known throughout the state. 

Although
it was winter, the snake had emerged from a gopher hole to sun.  Milton collected the snake, thinking to offer
it as a live specimen to a professor he knew at Mercer University, the head of
the biology department.  At home he made
a pine box and attached the lid with nails nailed only half-way down, thinking
he’d give the snake water the next morning.

“Lo
and behold,” his story goes, “the next morning I awoke to find an
empty snake box.  The huge reptile had
forced the pine planks clean off the box and escaped into our home.  Wife Mary had a few-months-old baby girl at
the time and wailed, ‘That huge snake will swallow my baby.’ I knew this was
impossible but couldn’t convince her.”

“‘We
all turned the home upside down for several days in search of the snake, without
success.  I was certain it had not
escaped the house.”

“One
morning early, while we were eating breakfast my peripheral vision caught a
swift darting motion from behind a large upright freezer.  Here was our snake.  She was coiled in and out of the heat-dispensing
coils on the back of the freezer, which backed up to a closed window.  The freezer had recently been loaded with
over six hundred pounds of beef we had just killed on the farm, and I hated to
think of unloading and reloading all that meat, so decided the best method of
recapture of the snake was to take out the window casing from the outside and
remove the lower window.  This took some
time and effort, and I had three pairs of eyes watching from inside the house
to be sure the snake didn’t move to another hiding place.”

“‘She
had herself wrapped around and in and out of the coils of the freezer, probably
seeking warmth, and it took some time to get her to turn loose and come
out.  This was accomplished, the snake
again put in her shipping box and this time the lid was securely nailed down.”

“‘After
affixing the address on the box I added ‘Live Snake’ in big letters.  Railway Express agencies prided themselves on
shipping anything, but I thought it prudent to leave the snake box in the
pickup, enter the freight agent’s office, and tell him what I wanted to
ship.   He says loudly, ‘a Live snake?'”

“Yes,
Sir,”

“The
agent said, ‘Boy, don’t bring that thing any closer in here.   Push my scales outside on the loading
platform, weigh the box, and I’ll give you a label to attach to it.'”

[From Milton Hopkins book, In One Place:  The Natural History of a Dirt Farmer, we
learn that the snake lived for many years at Mercer University.  The end came when it bit a student.]

Hugh’s reading is from Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
(Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1999),pp. 189-190.

We then proceeded down through the Dunson
Native Flora Garden to go out the White trail to the Blue Trail up the service
road and back on the Green Trail.

Continue reading →