Site Discussions

Yesterday I found 2 light green stems, maybe 2 feet apart in piney woods, with 3 lily-like buds on each, which are pointy at each end, fat in the middle, growing up maybe 3 feet high. Any help with id?

I have tried, I have really tried, during the 13 years I have lived in northern New England, to understand and respect the practice of hunting. It did not exist where I come from.

Intellectually, I get it; but emotionally, it still grosses me out. I found this story particularly sickening but realistic, and I’m glad someone put it up to show the raw logistics without any romance.

I just heard from a neighbor who recently had a Catamount in his yard (He has a plaster cast of the paw print) that a Catamount was hit and killed on the Warren Mtn road. Not sure if on the Warren or Roxbury side. The largest one (7 feet) taken in the state was killed in Roxbury in 1821. ANR doesn’t want to admit there are cats out there, but I’ve had too many sightings around my house in Roxbury to ignore. 4 neighbors so far have seen them over the past 20 years.

Indiana took their sweet time in OWB ordinances. Still, IDEM passes it on to the municipalities instead of enforcing what they voted in. Rural victims are especially left out of the support needed to breathe fresh air.  Villages and hamlets are choking on the smoke.  But this is about me.

Burners need to sit in their neighbors living room, on their porch, garden with them, see what the smoke and fumes are like if they are told there is a problem.  Work together. Try to find the solution.

In my perfect world.

A GARN sounds great, if I get the chance I would choose this manufacturer.  But I would never have one that is too close to my neighbor or affects my life.

Every single day I suffer headaches, sore throat, swollen glands, hot thick-feeling skin, smoke all over me just from going out the door. Am I too sensitive, as the commissioner of Indiana has proposed might be the case “some people are more sensitive to smoke than others….”  Well, with that sensitivity I have now have breast cancer. Can’t blame it on the smoke though.  It’s just that all my good living efforts of organic gardening, feeding birds, walking my dog on the property, swimming in my pool, were coupled with deep breathing smoke and fumes for all the months since we moved in. Sensitive?  How about furious too?

While next door beneath a canopy of trees and right next to thousands of acres of woods, a rickety old OWB smolders grey-white smoke continuously, then every forty-five minutes it billows smoke assaults over the garage roof into our property which never leaves during most weather.  Thrown in are cat litter boxes, carcasses, household trash, plastic, leaves, branches, wet wood, pine and unseasoned wood.  The man doesn’t have the sense we need for it to be operated right. He says creosote built up because his stack was too high.  We actually paid to put it up there to save ourselves then he changed his mind and knocked it down and beat on it a few weeks later.  His answer for operation is load it as full as possible and leave it smolder all day, even in 110 degree heat index and high humidity. No thought required.

Ordinances, protection, support must come from somewhere but where?  Why is he allowed to do this to us?  Why do we have to spend $10,000 for an attorney to take it to court if there could be enforcement?  Why do we need to leave our home to take a walk?  Move away to breathe?

Don’t tell me I am sensitive or need to move back to the city and breathe smog.  I have breathed it right here on my lovely wild property in the country 24/7/365 days a year.

If your neighbor says they are having a problem and need some resolution - please listen to them and help.

Thank you for listening.

Nice reminder, Steve, of 40 years ago when I was doing research at UB Med school with TTX and one of its cousins BTX.  In a bit of turn about, we were exposing frog skin to TTX and BTX, both in live specimens and in isolated frog skin chambers, to explore the impact on the short circuit current.

Steve,

I enjoyed the article on the toxicity of amphibian skin.  Since many wading birds and some snakes eat toads and frogs, do they have a way of neutralizing the effects of the secreted skin chemicals?

Your story has me thinking back to last weekend where, north of the camp on Whiskey Brook by Island Pond, a skilled teamster and a strong Belgian mare yarded our cow moose roadside without incident. Best luck to those still looking to fill tags!

great article, I am a teacher and referred to it in biology class!

In the mid-1950’s, my dad hand-dug and transplanted three 1” diameter maple trees from a rural roadside location into our front yard in western NY state. He chose the trees because of their colors: yellow, red and orange. The trees have changed to those same original colors each autumn for more than 50 years, as I assume all maple trees do. Perhaps we are being misled that there is some advantage to being red or orange. The color change may just be an unintended consequence of the production of anthocyanins for a completely different purpose.

I have been developing and testing a system of stand structure classification for stands in the southern and central interior of British Columbia since 2003.  This has grown into a PhD thesis at the Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia.  The concept is based on reverse cumulative distributions of trees per hectare and basal area per hectare with respect to increasing diameter (i.e. basal area and numbers of trees per hectare greater than or equal to a diameter threshold, where the threshold increases from 0 cm dbh up to a maximum dbh.  The classification was built using these metrics in a cluster algorithm.  I have built a compiler to classify new plots and/or stands.  I have evaluated the classification in the PhD for the purpose of looking at different stand succession patterns, and I have used it to characterize forest inventories extending over 1 million hectares.  I think that much of the complexity you speak of can be related to these distributions, particularly when they are extended to account for differences in species composition. I hope to finish my work at UBC in the spring of 2012.

I have several butternut trees on my 20 acres here in western PA. Some are advanced in their canker disease, but still producing nuts. This year many of the nuts had husks that were very full of bright yellow maggots. I have been unable to find anything about these prolific worms. I am most curious to know what they are and what they will turn into. They do not seem to be harmful to the nuts, but make the job of husking rather revolting.  Anyone know what they are ? thanks, Tom

Be it protection from insects or UV rays, fact remains that “since the leaves are pretty well spent and about to be discarded, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper for the tree just to let them get chomped?”

Surely the observation that foliage is more brilliant in years with sunny autumns should lead to all manner of PhD research projects to investigate the reasons for such associations.

In my neck of the woods we have lovely autumn colours too, but I take my hat off to the Appalachian area, which succeeds brilliantly every fall without any help from the Local Lords of Commerce.

Get out and enjoy!

Hi Pamela

As far as I know sturgeon are only found below the Turners Falls dam in Montague and I was only writing about the river from the Mass border up river to the Lakes. You are right though they are an astounding fish and some few can be seen from time to time in the raceways at the Conte Research facility in Turners Falls.

david

Rhodoxanthin is another red pigment, found in conifers and lower vascular plants (and is the pigment in the “fruit” of Taxus or yew), and is thought to protect chlorophyll from photooxidation. (that was my conclusion from my Ph.D. research on Selaginella many years ago)  But this is lipid soluble and found in the chloroplasts (like the carotenoids).  Anthocyanin, however is water soluble and is in the cytoplasm.  Thus it may be protecting the metabolic machinery or DNA rather than protecting the chloroplasts.  This makes sense, since it is the energy derived from mitochondria (as directed by DNA/RNA) that will be needed to carry out the process of carbohydrate transfer to the stem.

I really liked this, but was quite surprised that Mr Deen failed to mention the mighty sturgeon that are known to live in the darker, deeper depths of the Connecticut.

Thoroughly enjoyed this article.

Your article reminded me of an article in the New Yorker years ago about the evolution of the apple tree.  The author traveled to a location in western Asia perhaps the Carpathians where apples grow wild.  I seem to remember it being mentioned that ice storms were common in the area.  It occurred to me that human pruning of apples tend to mimic the effect of ice storms.  If you want to see the effects of continuous ice storms look at the vegetation in the Niagara Gorge just down stream of the falls.  The freezing mist makes the trees and bushes look like a giant has crumbled them and in a way it looks like they have been pruned like an orchard.  As our cold dusty snow winter climate warms up to one with more ice storms I wonder if birches that gather ice so eagerly will give way to compound leaved trees with thick twigs more adapted to an ice loading.  Not a good time for the ash trees to be eliminated from our woods.

There’s a terrific amount of knolwegde in this article!

Hi Laurie.

I suggest you check out the USDA’s plant database online. They have distribution maps that will surely help you with your research. http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=MOUN3

I guess you are “American”. Your account of the measurement is very good, clear, concise and useful. But in paragraphs 4 and 5 you show your flag colours. If it was long established in Europe, first, and then standarized at 1.3 m; why don’t you use that? If “Europe, Canada and most of the rest of the world” agree, why do you do it differently?
Thanks for sharing.