March 21, 2014

     We got out of the house too late this morning to see the beavers, but as we were walking down the Narrow Trail up to the Pond, we were able to enjoy this brace of wood ducks from a big distance. Only after looking at the telescopic views of the ducks were we able to identify them.

The watercolor reflections were fine enough to make the picture. Wood ducks didn't ruin it too much, though.

Fish have returned to the Pool.

Only reflection here.

Quercus virginiana

Pear tree in the old garden

Morning coming through Ulmus crassifolia

March 9, 2014: Evening

Tuesday, December 3, 2013: we saw sign of beaver activity in the form of several small trees (willows?) felled in the upper reach of the Creek near where the eastern rivulet empties from the Pond into the Creek.

Friday, March 7, 2014: we heard in the late evening the sound of a beaver slapping its tail on the waters of the Pond.

Saturday, March 8: we finally saw a beaver swimming in the waters on the east side of the Pond.

In what is a book on the subject of ancient burial practices in this Central Texas area (Hunter-gatherer Mortuary Practices During the Central Texas Archaic, by Leland C. Bement), we read as a series of side notes some interesting theories about the flora and fauna of our region before, during, and just following the most recent ice age.

Paleoenvironmentalists work to create a series of changing pictures of plant and animal life over periods of long ago by observing such data as can be found in the pollen record and in protected caves, for instance. And during the period known as the Wilconsin Fullglacial (22,500-14,000 B.P.), the giant beaver (Castoroides sp.) lived and felled trees within the forests that covered a much cooler and wetter Central Texas than the one we inhabit. This was the same period in which lived the mastodon, the tapir, the long-nosed peccary, and the bog lemming (this last species being found today only in the colder, wetter northern region of our continent).

Here are some of the recent periods, their years back from us, and the Central Texas ecology of the time:

Late Quaternary period — 33,500 B.P. to the present

Wisconsin Interpluvial — 33,500-22,500 B.P.
cooler, wetter grassland with herbaceous plants and a few scattered conifers. For our area, probably tall grass prairie with pine and aspen growing in canyons such as ours.

Wisconsin Fullglacial — 22,500-14,000 B.P.
“conifers and deciduous trees expanded their ranges, reducing the grasslands of central Texas. Pollen data from west and central Texas show a rapid increase in the percentages of spruce and pine pollen, as well as pollen from basswood, maple, poplar, and alder. Specifically from central Texas, pine and oak pollen percentages are low during the Fullglacial period. Support for a forested central Texas during the Fullglacial is provided by faunal species such as the giant beaver.”

Lateglacial — 14,00-10,000 B.P.
a drier and warmer climate with “reduced woodlands and parklands and increased scrub grasslands. . . . Certain tree species, including willow, birch, spruce, basswood, alder, tupelo, and ash, were gone from central Texas by the end of the Lateglacial period. This is also the period of extinction for many of the large mammals, including the Jeffersonian mammoth, American mastodon, saber-toothed cat, dire wolf, and Harlan’s ground sloth.

Postglacial — 10,000-0 B.P.
warmer and drier, with pollen analysis revealing a decrease in woodlands, except for the increase in oak pollen, suggesting a post oak savanna much more like what we have today, with greater variation in the climate than before.


Below is a good summary of glaciation on this continent. This is from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s site (http://www.epa.gov/gmpo/edresources/pleistocene.html):

“Several times in the history of the earth huge sheets of ice, or glaciers, covered large portions of its continents. The most recent episode of glaciation, the Pleistocene epoch, is commonly referred to as the Ice Age and began approximately 1.6 million years ago. During that time there were a number of advances and retreats of the glaciers, which are termed glacial and interglacial stages, respectively. The glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are remnants of the last glacial advance, and we presently live in an interglacial stage termed the Holocene epoch. With the end of the Pleistocene (and the beginning of the Holocene) about 11,000 years ago, the Ice Age ended in name only. It is very likely that the earth will experience another glacial advance, perhaps in the next 10,000 to 20,000 years, and that the glacial/interglacial cycles will continue. Geologic history shows, however, that ice ages eventually come to a complete end and do not occur again for several hundred million years.

"There is debate in the scientific community about what caused the glaciers to advance and retreat, but current theory attributes it to astronomical causes. Because of variations in the earth's orbit, average summer and winter temperatures change with time. There are periods when winters are colder and summers hotter, followed by periods when winters are warmer and summers cooler. The latter are thought to produce glacial advances, because the cooler summers are not adequate to melt all of the previous winter's snow. The result is that snow and ice begin to accumulate from one winter to the next. During periods when summers were warmer, and winters cooler, the glaciers are thought to have retreated. During the Pleistocene epoch, two or more centers of glaciation in Canada probably joined to form one large sheet of ice. . . .

"The southern limit all of the glacial advances, not including the Rocky Mountains, is approximately the present day location of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, although the last (Wisconsin) advance did not reach as far south as some of the previous advances. The glacial advances and retreats also had a dramatic effect upon the geology and ecology of areas south of the glaciers. It took so much water to form the glaciers that the world sea level fell approximately 140 meters (425 feet). This exposed the flat continental shelves, now covered with water, as dry land. This lowering of sea level has the same effect as raising the land, which caused rivers to begin eroding deep valleys. . . .

"The leading edge of the glaciers was an ice cliff, sometimes hundreds of feet high, and cold dry winds swept down from the glaciers. As the glaciers slowly spread south, they pushed the climatic zones Exit EPA Disclaimer farther south. Just south of the glaciers was a zone of tundra, next was a zone of shrub tundra, then scrub birch forests, then boreal forests, and finally mixed deciduous forests. Approximately 18,000 years ago, when the Wisconsin stage glaciers were at their maximum southern extent, the Gulf Coast climate was colder and drier. The mean annual rainfall in southern Louisiana was possibly as much as 40 inches less than it is today. Boreal forest Exit EPA Disclaimer, similar to those now found in Canada and the northern U.S., extended as far south as northern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The north central Gulf Coast was probably covered by sparse forests of northern pine, similar to portions of southern Wisconsin or New England. Oak and hickory forests, similar to those now found in Kentucky or Missouri, probably covered the river bottoms. Florida was drier and its mean annual temperature may have been as much as 10 F colder. It was covered with sparse, scrubby vegetation, sand dunes, and steppe-like open grasslands. There were some scattered pines and broadleaf trees. Central Texas was probably covered by tall grass prairie, Exit EPA Disclaimer with pine and aspen growing in the river bottoms. The high plains of west Texas were most likely covered by short grass prairie Exit EPA Disclaimer and semidesert. These prairies were probably similar to those of the present day Canadian Provinces of Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta.”

All this is to say that our beaver’s lineage goes way back into a time that was much more hospitable than the present.

This about their burrows is interesting:

“In cold regions, beavers live in houses constructed of sticks and mud and enter and leave them by means of underwater tunnels or "plunge holes"; in Texas they may burrow into cut banks of streams or lakes. Burrows examined in the Rio Grande in the Big Bend section of Texas were large enough to admit a man and were 10 m or more in length. Burrows as long as 50 m have been reported. Burrows, or houses, are used for loafing, sleeping, and rearing the young.

“Beavers feed on a variety of vegetation, but the inner bark of willows and cottonwood seems to be their mainstay. In summer a number of herbaceous aquatic plants and sedges are eaten. In central Texas, where willows are absent, beavers in winter utilize as first choice such trees as button willow, juniper, and pecan and rely heavily on Bermuda grass, beard grass, ragweed, and yellow water lily in summer. Thus, the plants eaten and their order of preference depend in large measure on availability.

“Breeding begins in January or February, and the young are normally born in May or June after a gestation period of about 107 days. Beavers are usually monogamous, and normally only one litter of three to four young is produced each year, but some females produce a second litter in August or September." ( http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot1/castcana.htm)

Newest remains found on the west side of the Pond
this evening, along the narrow trail directly across the
water from where we saw the beaver.

On the evening of March 9, while on the small trail beside the Pond, we did not see a beaver. But we did get to stand under tall cedar elms and watch a female ladder-backed woodpecker (Picoides scalaris) working her way around a high limb while the last light of day sank over Whitman’s Rough. This is one of our year-round residents, content with the species’ typical preference for riparian woods, canyons, and arid country. At first we were thinking she might have been a downy or hairy woodpecker, but after looking at the photographs and video, we can easily see the mottled sides of her belly and chest instead of otherwise clean white parts found on the other two woodpeckers.

This afternoon I burned brush and old lumber on the edge of the Stone Field, smelling burnt cedar and listening to splintering stones as they expanded to their breaking point beneath the flames. When we returned from not seeing a beaver in the late evening, the burn pile had sunk to hot white ash and a sizable orange core.

Just got word that this winter has been the third driest one in our regions's history. The flow in the creek doesn't indicate any such fact, nicely enough.

First Week of March, 2014

Sunday Morning, March 2, 2014.
At 7:59 this morning north winds heaved into here suddenly with another arctic blast, displacing the muggy pre-front oppression. The wind channeled down the small Canyon as it bends in front of us, laying near-flat last year’s dried grasses and small willows and poverty weed along The Creek. These plants tended horizontal southward to my right, yet plants up here on the wooden deck of the house barely showed leaf movement, such is the route of northerly winds.

At 8:09 we saw two ospreys working the winds between us and the opposite bluffs. They’d hang in the gray air like toy kites, head into the gusts, body sloped downward, but remaining nearly still in the air. Then they’d retract their disproportionately long wings, bending them in toward their bodies, and fall sloping downward, only then to extend the wings and let the wind pull them quickly backwards and downstream. They’d rise again, circle over the house, and pull out of view behind us. Hopefully this year they’ll stay the season. In 2013 I saw one osprey on October 4. In 2012, twice: October 6 and 12. Before that, we had at least one regularly for longer periods. Of course, I hope these two find a reason to stay.

The “Norther” and the two ospreys suggest movement of the Great Seasonal Swap in which That leaves us and This joins us. One plant blooms while another beside it withers. One bird migrates north while another migrates south. Vulture eggs are laid up on the stoney ledges across The Creek, skin colors deepen under wet scales, cold-blooded stirrings awaken coiled bodies, purple buds expand and crack, familiar constellations appear now earlier or later, tree shadows find new angles of repose, last year’s live oak leaves fall and are replaced on the Great Tree in the yard, oxygen levels in the water slowly decrease, spider webs hang heavier around the porch light. Yesterday was shirtless and dusty sweat; this morning we were back in woolen sweaters while near-freezing rain continues to fall.

All things change, and even the nature of their change changes. Last year this time we were seeing white larkspur on the east end to the orchard, but I haven’t seen any this year. This winter has dropped us more freezing hours than previous years have. Even the dayflowers, Linheimer Texana, and the mountain laurel were blooming last year long before this year. Last week, about the only blooming plants up the hillside were the verbena, yellow wood sorrel, and hen bit.

(We’ve said it on this blog before, but our friends tend to minimize the extent to which the days of our seasons are different from one another, resulting in the common expression that Central Texas either doesn’t have seasons or to the superficial observations such as, “nothing is blooming now” when what is meant is that the Texas bluebonnets are not in full swing. Old news there.)

~

Last week I fertilized and pruned the peach trees which are just starting to show pink blossoms. Yesterday I fertilized the Hundred-Foot row of blackberries as they are setting out new green leaves. And also yesterday I planted another peach tree and another fig tree just at the bottom of the hillside between the house and the chickens. The plan is to try to grow fruit in a different soil, given that the loose sand of the orchard hasn’t proven to be very effective in the way of producing fruit or vegetables.

This new soil completely surprised me, however. I knew that it was generally blacker and much more full with organic matter that falls and washes down the hillside. It lacks the really loose and fine sand of the ground between the house and the Stone Field. That’s mostly soil that was washed into the area by floods, and it contains little if any organic material. But as I was digging the second of four holes yesterday, I quickly came upon a light-colored clay, unlike any soil I’ve yet seen on this property. Take a hand full and squeeze it. It holds together with the moist imprint of your clinched fingers. No other soil on the place could even come close to doing that. It’s slightly higher than the sandy soil, so the obvious implication is that flood waters rarely have reached that high, and when they did (every five hundred or so years), the current was too slow to have carried sediment. So we’ll see what it does for these new trees.

Also during the last couple weeks I made encouraging progress on the greenhouse: completing the two raised beds; installing an exhaust fan (on a separate thermostat); tightening and securing the plastic to the side rails via “wiggle wire”; and planting spinach, beets, onion sets, broccoli, and mustard greens. Because this is an experiment, I will be mixing in not only different varieties but also planting a mix of warm and cool crops to see what happens in this new indoor environment. The sandy soil has been amended with dirt from the base of the hill (black stuff composed almost entirely of aged oak leaves) and two pickup truck loads of bought compost. Inside the human-house, a flat of pimento peppers and ancho chills are still sporting their first leaves, and another flat of tomatoes are upwards to five inches tall under the grow lights. One afternoon last week when the outside temperature was about eighty degrees, the inside temperature of the greenhouse was one hundred. We are already working on constructing a “water wall” as an evaporative cooler. If we can’t keep the temperatures down to a manageable degree this spring and summer, then that will be part of the experiment as well.

(For more progress on the Greenhouse, please return to the "End of January" entry.)

Temperatures.  We've pointed it out before, but here's a chart that tends toward a visual explanation of what we experience when Austin shows 36 degrees, Marble Falls 33 degrees, the top of the Hill 30 degrees, and down here at The Creek 28 degrees.

~

The Creek remains fish-free except for a few minnows in the shallower sections. Nothing at all was seen in the Pool. I cannot imagine what is going on. The water is somewhat turbid in an algae-green sort of way, but because we haven’t had recent rains, I’m skeptical about natural causes. My plan is to hike up The Creek for several miles, trespassing as I go, to see if I can find any activity to explain the situation. If you know neighbors upstream of me or if you are friends with the Law, please remain quiet just for a few more days. Thanks.

~

The 1950 Fields Medal in Mathematics, Atle Selberg, wrote that “it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.” The statement suggests a useful way of explaining the bulk of intellectual and religious history—which, of course, spearheads the rest of history: its wars, persecutions, politics, education, and family life. Ideas, especially when they are few in a man’s brain, become sacred things. Their supposed antecedents may or may not have their place in a real universe, but their idea will fix solidly to the walls of a mind with such foolish adhesion that the rest of the mind sometimes can show little other activity than the wasted effort to justify that fixed idea.

Science is the human effort to avoid the fixed idea. It’s the effort to expunge any notion that we must collect any sort of data to justify the ideas we had before we entered the laboratory or the field. Science is unlike other kinds of thinking primarily in that it moves in an opposite direction. Where science will attempt to begin with the world as it’s given to us and then move towards the theoretically “fixed idea” that best describes the world, all other thinking generally begins with the fixed idea and recklessly sets out to defend it by citing as evidence any shifting shadow on the cave wall.

Down here along The Creek we are less concerned with the history of fundamentalist thinking as it’s made manifest in our politics of discrimination or our wars of unbridled nationalism. But it’s hard not to hear the prejudices of our friends up the hill, down the road, and in the town. Our townsfolk are good, common people with common prejudices, unimpassioned enough to be dangerous.

One of these benign prejudices (passed on to us by people who live up north, generally) is that Central Texas doesn’t have dramatic seasonal changes, and when we do identify general seasonal changes, they remain the same year to year. People here recognize that Heat makes us miserable in the Summer, and that the rest of the year Heat is only sporadic. Our two seasons: Not So Much Heat (which comes before all the flowers bloom), and Much Heat (comes after all the flowers bloom). Besides that, people here know that Spring (First Days of Heat) has arrived when they see tourists parked on the side of our highways, photographing their impatient infants and toddlers in glorious swaths of bluebonnets. Jackpot if they find a broken wagon wheel to set within the frame.

Vulture Nest

     Yesterday (February 16) in the early afternoon, I climbed up the bluff the other side of the creek and discovered a vulture nest with one egg.  Years I've been looking for one. This was exciting for me.

     In the first photograph below the view is northwest, with the green-colored Pond to the upper right and the darker green Great Oak to the top left and mostly blocking our home. My camera has been broken, so I've been confined to the iPhone camera lately.

     Anyhow, I still don't know if this is black vulture (Coragyps atratus) or turkey vulture (Cathartes aura).

     Our turkey vultures seem always to be with us here in the Small Canyon, and that fact confers for me a familial sort of feeling akin to hearing a familiar voice in a distant room of a large house. When fish come and go (more go than come, this winter), and flowers bloom for their season and wither away like the grass of the field, the vultures can nearly always be seen teetering on their great dihedral wings above us or perching opposite the Creek or behind the house. Summer, autumn, winter, and spring the vultures remain with us. Only a few miles north of us runs a line demarcating the extent of their year-round range. From Central Texas up into southern Canada the turkey vultures visit only in the summer.

     Here are a few more pieces of information we know about this favorite bird of ours:

• That dihedral shape to their nearly six-foot wide, outstretched wings (both wings tilted slightly upwards) enables them to soar with greater ease because, like the dihedral wings of an airplane, when the bird or plane tilts to one side, that wing receives the stronger force of upward air movement and this rights the bird or plane once again. Stability in what is known as “roll axis” is part of the function of this wing-shape. Not every soaring bird (eagles, for instance) have this dihedral shape, though.
• The part of the brain responsible for smelling such things as carrion is much larger in our vultures than in other birds. They can detect odors carried by several molecules out of a trillion. (See John James Audubon and his 1826 experiments to test the smell of the Turkey Vulture.)
• Perhaps because of its lack of any conventional bird-nest-in-a tree, it will usually scrape aside a small area in an inaccessible spot, often on the edge of a cliff. Like the one we saw. If attacked, at least the parent vulture would only have to defend against one side of the nest. 
• One to three eggs are set in this “nest,” with two being the norm.
• Incubation can last five weeks, after which time both parents (who mate for life) share in feeding the young.
• The young will fledge at sixty to eighty days and continue to be fed by the parents for another one to three weeks. At twelve weeks they will leave the area.

     And then (on Saturday, February 15) we picked up three Texas dall sheep (all ewes here) to start a small flock. We'll work on getting more later and perhaps a ram, though our preference is to rent out one when that time comes around.

Resuscitating the Waning Taste for Life

     From Loren Eisley’s The Immense Journey and his chapter entitled “The Judgment of Birds,” we read the following:

     “It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.
     “The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted. We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves quite ordinary creatures. Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life. His great news services, his world-wide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain that it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give—a natural revelation.” (pages 163-164)

     I’ve copied this passage to remind me of the following primary assumptions of my life:

•      Nature is our home, both archetypal and actual.
•      Most things in our artificial world unwittingly conspire to have us forget this.
•      And when this world is too much with us, getting and spending, we can return to nature even if is only a shadow of the wilderness it used to be. We are made better every single time we walk through woods or a prairie, stalk mushrooms across a floor of moss and fern, strain through binoculars to identify waterbirds in a marsh, or slowly pick over a rocky creekside in a small canyon. I always feel my emotions and intellect elevated by the end of such forays, and for hours afterwards I am alive. I am alive.
•      We cannot leave nature after these times unchanged for the better, and often the change can be translated into our language as some corrective to how we have been living or thinking. It is not an unhealthy thing to return to the world of people. It is perhaps necessary and what we bring back may be the boon for which the people have been waiting.
•      This is the true religion and the corrupted source for every other one.

End of January: Cold, Fishless Waters and a Greenhouse

  I guess one of the disturbing observations this month has been the absence of any fish in The Creek.

  Perhaps the concern is more a product of my poor memory than any fact of a mid-winter abnormality.  Water flow remains better than average, with plenty of water-rock sounds filling the little Canyon.  Water clarity is normal. Water temperature feels cold. Algae grows in the swift and richly oxygenated current as well as in slower pools. And macro-invertebrates of a variety of species continue clinging to the darkened undersides of submerged stones. So where are the minnows, carp, gar, bass, and perch?

.

(This juvenile green sunfish was actually found February 4 and added to the
blog entry later. No other dead fish have been found. No living ones either.)

  This month we began construction on a twelve- by thirty-foot hoop-style greenhouse to help us moderate the extreme temperatures (freezes up into the second week of April and one hundred degrees by the end of May), the rapacious jaws of grasshoppers, and the stray chicken.  

1. Level a spot.
2. Fasten together four two by sixes of treated lumber to form a frame that will help hold together the base of the house as well as support a couple raised beds on the inside.
3. Dig post-holes.
4. Insert five-foot sections of one and five-eighths inch seventeen gauge pipe, set three feet into the ground and standing two feet above.
5. Level these support pipes and secure with concrete.
6. Then fasten the support pipes to the two by six frame.
7. And, finally, insert arched one and three-eighths inch pipe (actually, two of these pipes joined to form one complete arch) into the tops of the support pipes and secure with screws.
8. Then it's simply a matter of building a door, framing up the ends, and securing everything again and again.
9. One big sheet of plastic comes next.

Mixing concrete for each support pipe

Note the single pipe down the middle, connecting all the ribs

Bending pipe on the deck

Chickens supervising the process 

One of the ribs secured to the top of
one of the support pipes and fastened
with a couple stout screws

A hole full of concrete (cheap insurance)

Top pipe fastened in the middle

Top pipe fastened at one of the ends

Framing up one end, beginning with a door

Part of the end framing, notched and
screwed to an end piece of arched pipe

Framing at one end

A lower corner of the door

The middle of the door with wires crossed
diagonally and tightened to form a firm door

  Below is a series of images showing construction of a wire fabric fastened along the lower two feet of each long side so that the plastic will be able to be pulled up without also allowing grabby hens to enter the greenhouse.

.

Clear plastic sheets for the two ends. Marking a line to cut.

With some old trauma shears from work.

Duck tape along the rough edge of the panels to avoid
tearing the plastic film that will come into contact with it.

And screwing the clear panels to the frame on the end.

.

Adding U-Channel to the sides. The plastic will be fastened to this.

Wonderful TEK® screws used all over the greenhouse.

Then fastening the plastic to the U-Channel with "wiggle wire"
(or Stainless Steel Spring, as the good people at FarmTek call it).

Advice: please hesitate to secure plastic in any other way.
This really does work well. Easy installation, too.

Amending the loose, sandy soil with peat and compost.

And framing in the two main beds with 2x6's.
Planted on the left: spinach, cucumber, pole beans, onion sets,
broccoli sets, beets, and mustard greens.

Beautiful cold weather for greenhouse construction.

.

.