13may~ Laughing Gulls Jamboree

Last week I said I’d try to explain the enormity of the event.  That’s going to take longer than I supposed, and will require more percolation, so I’ll keep working at it and say something—whatever I’ve got–when I’m ready to move on from Reed’s Beach.  

Also, I shouldn’t have used the term copulate.  I said they were “moving slowly, copulating” but they’re not.  Their fertilization is external and done at the time the eggs are deposited in the small burrow the female will excavate.  They are linked together, in the way male frogs cling to (amplex with) females as they lay their eggs.  Male “crabs” grip the female with their first pair of walking legs—which I suppose is true of frogs and toads as well.  Sometimes additional males (satellite males) join the line of line, forming a truly homely bridal train.  The point being, I suppose, that the satellite males have a chance of being at the party when it comes time to fertilize the eggs at the bottom of the excavation.

Meanwhile lots going on,  The Laughing Gulls are really noisy, dressed in classic style and so sleek!…Cary Grant comes to mind.   Almost every body is oriented to the action…some folks are contrarians, almost as if making a statement.

Take note of the guy in the upper right.  He has a very thin and shiny, mucous-y strand that reaches up over this crown.  If it was a dog I’d say it was a slobber, but I don’t think gulls slobber.  It doesn’t say anything about him, but it does mark him.

And here he is again, eating a small item from the beach.  I’ve always been fascinated watching sandpipers work the beach and find something edible every few seconds.  Fascinating because I can’t find anything there.  I’ve looked and almost never find anything that edible (for a sandpiper) and of coursed I never know what has already disappeared down their gullets.

But on occasion , and by chance, you catch an instant like this.  To be sure I still don’t know what is going eaten.  But we’re standing on a beach with thousands of female Horseshoe Crabs, who are there specifically to lay thousands of eggs.  There are thousands of gulls gathered specifically to eat those eggs, and they are busy eating something.  Horseshoe Crab eggs are about 2mm, and generally greenish/yellowish.  I’m going to go out on a limb and suppose that he is about to swallow a Horseshoe Crab egg.

And I wonder if he were to shake his head if he might sling another mucous-y thing on top of the first.

06may ~ Horseshoe Crabs’ Jamboree

This is our most recent experience of awe.  It’s a bit of a fuzzy word, but I recently saw it defined  (Dacher Keltner, 2023).  He says it is, “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast, that transcends your current understanding of the world.”   I’m OK with that.  It’s in keeping with my experience.  Like this one.  Seeing an amazing event, and realizing that it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Being witness to a massive event is astounding.  The impact can vary, but first you have to understand that it is massive—not just, “Whoa, lots of crabs on the beach today!”   The event is the egg-laying of Horseshoe Crabs in the beaches of the Delaware Bay.  These photos are taken on the New Jersey side near Cape May.  The Jersey side has about 15 miles of “Prime beaches”, the Delaware side nearly 45 miles.  This is Reed Beach, a location provided to us by Ken and Sharon, the long time owners of The Bird House of Cape May  https://birdhouseofcapemay.com/).  Unfortunately their web site is being remodeled but you might just file the URL away and check back and see what they have to offer.

First the event, and then why it is so powerful. 

The first photo was taken by Gina.  She is better at taking in the scope of things than I am so I’ve used one of her images to set the stage.  It’s just after high tide, and the Horseshoe crabs, are in long rows at the water’s edge, most of them moving slowly, copulating, trying to right themselves as the waves push against then.

Each spring millions of Horseshoe Crabs haul themselves out on the beaches along the Delaware Bay, at high tides, to mate and lay their eggs in the sand.  That in itself is a monstrous oversimplification.  Good sand is porous and sloping so that it drains well, and has a proper texture that allows excavation by the crab, and more.  High tides around early May, are events that don’t escape the attention of the Laughing Gulls, or of the Red Knots, that will arrive in a few weeks when the egg laying reaches its peak.  These photos show a lot of crabs, but this still is not the peak.

So the Laughing Gulls are having a banner day, supervised by a Herring Gull, who seemed to do a lot of watching but not much eating—not into Horseshoe Crab eggs?  Or already sated?

And the last picture this week has an apocalyptic feel to it, with the oval eye made severe by a protective ridge.  Next week I’ll try to explain the enormity of the event.  To be sure, there are a lot of crabs on the beach.  But it is the part you can’t see, that beggars the imagination.  This may not rise to the level of awe for some folks, but the larger event, for which these Horseshoe Crabs are key part, surely must.

* * *

April 5, 2024 ~ An Eclipse quandry

The eclipse was “up there”, but unless you are in the path of totality, “down there” is more interesting, and the visible event itself is underwhelming.  Sacrilege, I know.  The direct visible evidence of the slowly turning gears of the universe is awesome, but I can’t really see that up there.

The photograph is from the previous solar eclipse in August 2017.  There were lots of leaves on the trees, and we were struck by the shadows on the ground.  The tiny gaps between leaves formed pin-holes that projected as many of images of the eclipse onto the ground.  For some reason I never posted this one.  It makes me miss Charleigh, who was an incredible companion for us.

This time the shadows are different—no leaves for one thing.  The following image pair records before and after pictures.  The shadows are of Redbud branches and twigs.  The top image during was taken during maximal occlusion, the lower one 24 hours later.  

I account for the difference because with only 8% of the sun’s disk visible, it amounts to a point light source.  Point light sources produce sharper shadows and reveal detail otherwise lost in a wider light source.  

Usually the full solar disk is about as close to a point source as you can get.  So I think I understand the difference here,.

The explanation for this last picture (below) is up for grabs.  It records the shadow of another branch on the deck.  I don’t understand why it looks the way it does.  How can it be brighter on the east side, while retaining a darker umbra, with a sharp edge, on the west side.  Here’s the best I’ve got, but it doesn’t even convince me.  Maybe the “west” side of the solar disk, the brightest part during maximal occlusion, was the main light.  And the shadows were filled by the brilliant, if tiny, arc that extended around the ring.  On the other hand pinhole images are reversed….Any photographer/physicist should feel free to help me out here.

01apr ~ “…in my Easter Bonnet, …”

Another serendipitous image.  Yesterday (Easter) Gina was headed off to town and when she got to the mailbox, she saw this apparition.  Clustered, they created a very large mass that silently floated over the ground like a hovercraft.  Of course, other than aliens, there aren’t many options so she called me, thinking I might want some turkey pix.  I did.

I walked down to the mailbox with my longest lens (600mm) and found them over 300 feet from the road.  I could barely make them out at that distance, but the following photos, “optimized” are what came of the adventure.  

Turkeys are famously vigilant and the hens were giving me the stink-eye even though I was mostly hidden by the roadbed.  The gobbler didn’t want to be disturbed, he was doing his thing, and I have got admit his performance was eye-catching, even if his makeup lacks subtlety  But when I slowly began to move sideways to get clear of the brush, the hens began to drift into the woods.

Now about the gobbler, who has more extensions extended farther than I’d ever seen before.  Our travel trailer has a slide—an extension—that we can open to get more room.  More room inside, bigger outside.  One might say puffed up.  Big RVs may have a good half dozen slides so that when they puff up, they look like a bureau with all the drawers open.  

This gobbler expands in all directions.  All of them!, by raising the plumage in his feather tracts (now individually defined) and dragging his knuckles…er…wing tips.  And it looks as though the air bags have deployed to create ginormous bosoms that lead the parade.  

Turkeys are famously vigilant and the hens were giving me the stink-eye even though I was mostly hidden by the roadbed.  The gobbler didn’t want to be disturbed, he was doing his thing, and I have got admit his performance was eye-catching, even if his makeup lacks subtlety  But when I slowly began to move sideways to get clear of the brush, the hens began to drift into the woods.

Now about the gobbler, who has more extensions extended farther than I’d ever seen before.  Our travel trailer has a slide—an extension—that we can open to get more room.  More room inside, bigger outside.  One might say puffed up.  Big RVs may have a good half dozen slides so that when they puff up, they look like a bureau with all the drawers open.  

This gobbler expands in all directions.  All of them!, by raising the plumage in his feather tracts (now individually defined) and dragging his knuckles…er…wing tips.  And it looks as though the air bags have deployed to create ginormous bosoms that lead the parade. 

And such unseemly colors.  

And his beard is squeezed in his cleavage.  Do you suppose it functions as a depth gauge?  Amazing! 

But the ladies have been distracted by me (it’s a curse)….distracted/frightened/suspicious, … whatever.  

It’s hard to tell just where in that mass, there is actual flesh and blood.  That’s why I’ve included the last picture.  The ladies are all gone, so he might as well collapse his tent and fade into the brush.  And he does.

The End.

25mar ~ My error … & vultures

Not my first error…  THIS is the flowering cluster of Spicebush.  Last week I was pleased to announce the discovery of Spicebush at Brawley Creek.  Actually both were photos of Aromatic Sumac (male and female flowers).  I made some incorrect assumptions, so no Spicebush discovery for Brawley Creek.

For a naturalist the field of interest is very broad and so I gleefully wander into areas beyond my professional competence.  But his blog is read by a broad range of generous experts who advise me when I make mistakes.  Gary Emberger, an authority on mushrooms, who is knowledgeable well beyond his specialization.  He set me straight and provided this really remarkable photo of the real thing.  Thanks, Gary.

Redirecting…….

This is a Turkey Vulture.  I’m entirely sure of that! 

Several of them took positions in the branches over Brawley Creek, about 2weeks ago.  The wea a dead Raccoon in the creek bed, but they left it alone, so I don’t have any idea why they are there.  Maybe they were after my dead Spicebush?  Gina called them to my attention, and I shot the images through two layers of plate glass.  That accounts for the unusually textured background.  They have great eyesight of course, and even moving slowly inside the house I was making them uneasy, so I couldn’t open the door for a better image.  This is what I got.  If you wanted to photograph “suspicious”, this is a reasonable start.

The bird on the other side of the 90° bend in the Walnut branch decided to leave and as luck would have it, I caught his departure on “film.”  Turkey Vultures taking flight in confined spaces are ungainly.  Their wings are not made for that and watching, this is like watching a child on his first solo bicycle attempt—lots of anxiety.  But he did make it out of the thicket of twigs and branches.  I mention my anxiety becasue this frame renders him graceful.  Even the excrement is beautiful.  Talk about lemon-aide from lemons.

18mar ~ Doppelgänger’s

Both photographs were taken on March 14th at the beginning of their period of flowering, and both flowers are on native shrubs.  They are both roughly to scale.  One of them is in the Cashew Family, the other is in the Laurel family.  Both are fertilized by bees, both are dioecious (male and female in separate plants, although the females flowers may have sterile stamens).  At least superficially, it looks like convergent evolution. 

The top photo is a newly discovered species at Brawley Creek.  The bottom one I’ve know about for years, but never caught it in flower—well , never paid attention to the small flowers—so it was a good day.  It would be easy to confuse them, the first one is a “thicket forming shrub” while the other is a bush with many stems.  I never thought of the two of them as having anything in common before.

I’m sure somebody on this list already knows what they are, but here’s what I found.

The top one is Northern Spicebush (Lindera benzoin).  It was flowering back in the brush, and I never would have found it except for these small flowers in an otherwise pretty gray world.  I didn’t know we had any of them and we are are the fringe of their range, but I’m happy to discover this one.  It’s the host of the Spicebush Swallowtail.  I’ve not seen any of those butterflies around here.  Not surprising…first the host, then the butterfly, but I miss a lot of what goes on around here.

The bottom flower is Aromatic Sumac (Rhus aromatica) in the Cashew family (Anacardiaceae).  I’ve know about a few small clusters of it for a number of years, but never caught it in flower before…just not paying attention, I guess.

O4mar ~ Time waves

I’ve been spending time in the woodworking shop of late.  You’d think their isn’t much biology in there, but of course there is wood and it gets worked.

That working exposes the structural detail of the various species of wood that I work with, most of it spruce, pine, or fir for obvious reasons, and on this particular occasion, I needed to cut the end off of a gray and weathered bit of a nominal 2×10 (really 9.25 x 1.5”).  

I confess to checking out the fresh cuts looking for beauty the way a normal person might habitually check out the classifieds looking for an apartment.  This time, I was struck by the reddish color of the heartwood and the rapid growth recorded by the annular rings laid down in its first several years as a sapling.  In those years, the annular rings record a 1/2”increase in radius each year, but in its 20’s only 1/16” per year.

I start to suppose that this guy grew in a plantation with full sunlight for his early years and he became “under-funded” as its cohort grew and his access to sunlight restricted by adjacent saplings.  Supposing that any of that is true, the increased size of the rings at the extreme right, hints at the possibility that the stand of young trees was thinned after about 25 years of growth a the rings become thicker.  The best anyone can say is that the growth pattern is consistent with my imaginings.

None of this is unusual, but the sweep of the concentric rings and the blush of his early years really got my attention.  There is a strong impression of motion, and I had the sense that I was holding the record of an archived explosion.

The second photo is included because of the surprising illusion, particularly on the left, that the most dense regions reveal deep grooves, even though the surface has been planed smooth by the blade.  That illusion persists even though the diagonal scratches on the surface mimic a cartoonist’s shorthand for transparency, done to imply window glass rather than just open space, and it makes the grooves look like they are bands of plexiglas seen on edge.  I’d never thought of any part of wood as even moderately transparent.

26feb ~ Ahh Spring!

The Woodcocks are courting, the frogs are singing, and it’s time to see what happened in the woods while we weren’t paying attention.  That’s where we find the remains of creatures that didn’t make it through the winter for various reasons.  Most disappeared without a trace, but armadillos leave their bony carapaces, still wrapped around their true skeleton.  

I lived most of my life in armadillo-less areas and I find them entirely fascinating.  Last April I posted some detail of the carapace.  This year’s find was further advanced toward its status as humus before begging its next life.  Happily, it was less stinky and more disassembled, with the skeleton still inside—sort of an armadillo taco.  But the carapace was coming apart so I got to see something of the bands.  This is after all a Nine-banded Armadillo, and these are three of them plus part of the front carapace.

The second photo of those bands of dermal bone provide detail of two overlapping bands that provide protection with flexibility that a turtle might admire, to an otherwise inflexible torso.  The still-winter afternoon sun revealed exceptional detail.  It took me a while to decide why they looked so familiar, but they look a lot like a horse’s incisors, and now I can’t see anything else.  

You’re welcome.

In the lower right corner, you can see something of the mechanism that provides flexibility.  I can’t say know much about armadillo anatomy so the following suppositions are based on just this photograph.  But, having just installed some door stop, that thin band on a door jamb that keeps the door from moving through the door frame, here’s my guess.

The two rows of bands are joined by tough, flexible, but elastic skin.  The front row slides over the back row during normal activity, but when the armadillo enters into a defensive curl, like a pill bug, the downward curl at the edge of the front row, comes up against the ridge of the second row, stabilizes the whole structure.  I’d guess that ought to lock all of the plates into very tight shell, and minimize muscle exhaustion.

Oh.  That little shriveled, brown speck on the back row?  It’s the exoskeleton of an insect—most likely a Dermestid Beetle that helped clean up the skeleton for us.

19feb ~ “Nevermore” once again

Printing some old photographs, I happened on this one.  I posted a slightly different treatment of this frame in December of 2007, under the subject line,“Nevermore” fortunately the statute of limitations for Raven photographs is just 16 years, so here it is.  Anyway, it’s the best I have to offer during this week of snow and cold.

I reworked the original image to extract these two views.  The memories released with this photograph are powerful. Of course I can provide only the image and a narrative, but I remember taking the photo at Mesa Verde. I was Artist-in-Residence for a couple of weeks and Gina and I were on top of the mesa. The Cliff Palace ruins, sheltered within an enormous vault was about 100 feet beneath us and a storm was threatening with the wind blowing.  All of that was consistent with the special place held by Raven in the culture of some Indigenous peoples mixed with a hint of Edgar Allen Poe.  Of course we see things through glasses tinted by the associations that we’ve gathered and mixed over the years.  It was a peak moments for us, enriched by those associations.

All of that aside, the aesthetic power stems from the funereal ambience, the hint of color on the dead branch only accentuates the lack of it elsewhere.  Plus, a Raven is a tough customer, so the intense black and shaggy look is consistent with his persona.

12feb ~ Inside out

I work with wood.  In shop slang that makes me a “wood butcher”.  To be sure, I cut and split firewood, the sort of thing that comes to mind from the term.  But among woodworkers, it refers to guys like me who spend time making things out of wood.  I particularly like to “rescue” old wood and repurpose it with a surface planer.  A planer is a real life Fountain of Youth that makes old wood young.  This is a sawn piece, split from a plank of weathered Eastern Red Cedar, that shows old and gray outside but still in the prime inside.  The weathered outside is beautiful too, but the newly exposed wood releases the pleasant aroma associated with that wood, along with rich color and delicate markings.

I ended up with this piece that is partly sawn and partly split along naturally weak zones.  I needed a spacer of exactly the right thickness, so I took a scrap of cedar, made a 6”cut with the grain, and split off the piece I needed.  The top photo shows the inside and outside of that piece.  Long introduction, huh? 

I’m always surprised by the beauty just beneath the weathered skin—each time it’s like unwrapping a present.  The right side of this photo has the look of drifted, iron-rich sand, compressed into sandstone that is now eroded and breaking apart along its fault lines.  The lower left shows the tracks of the saw teeth, and in that area you can see the annular rings, most noticeable when seen in cross cuts, and they mark the boundaries between the darker summer wood, and the lighter spring wood. Those rings continue through the rough part, of course, even though they can’t be seen.  It looks to me like the deepest fracture lines coincide with them.

Maybe best of all, even though it is barely visible in this cut, one can see the exquisitely thin, light grey patina from weathering. that appears completely opaque in the first photo.  It’s thickness is calculated at 150µ (0.15mm).  It seems like every creative activity reveals something new if you are paying attention, and begin to wonder about how it came to be.

p.s.  Happy birthday to Charles Darwin who would have been 215 today.