Yearly Archives: 2012

Best View In The Parking Lot?

Mammals
Elk herd at the Elk Country Visitors Center, Benezette, PA (photo by Paul Staniszewski)

13 October 2012

October’s a good time to take in fall foliage and the autumn activities of Pennsylvania’s wildlife.

If your travels take you to Elk County, stop by the Visitor Center on Winslow Hill Road in Benezette to see Pennsylvania’s elk.

You might get lucky and find them in the parking lot, as Paul Staniszewski did above.

On the other hand, elk are pretty busy right now and more likely to be in their natural setting.  This is their mating season.

Click here for Elk Country information and here for Paul’s guide to photographing elk … when they’re not in the parking lot.

(photo by Paul Staniszewski)

p.s. Today I’m hiking at the Quehanna Wild Area in nearby Clearfield County. The fall foliage is colorful but it is *cold*! The growing season just ended with 23 degrees this morning.

How’s The Water?

Musings & News, Water and Shore

Southwestern Pennsylvania’s waterways are scenic but in many places the water is bad.  This photo of the notch where Stony Run meets the Conemaugh River is a case in point.  See the orange tinge on the river bottom?  That’s bad water from abandoned mine drainage.

How prevalent is bad water in our area?

PittsburghTODAY recently published a map of non-attaining waterways in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Using Department of Environmental Protection data, the yellow lines show where water quality is compromised by abandoned mine drainage, agricultural runoff, sewage, and other causes.  The good water is blue.

Even in this thumbnail it’s easy to see that most of Allegheny County has bad surface water while most of Greene County is good.  The white space in the middle of Allegheny County is the City of Pittsburgh where the streams were buried as the city was built.  Click on the image to see the large map at PittsburghTODAY and drill in for a close-up.

The region’s bad water affects both our quality of life and the natural world.  Where water’s impaired aquatic life is poor, there are fewer fish, fewer birds, fewer mammals and bad water for us to drink.

So why is a lot of the map yellow?  It’s the legacy of coal.

During the heyday of deep mining in the early 1900’s Pennsylvania had weak or non-existent environmental laws and the state did not collect money from industry for clean up of the inevitable abandoned mine drainage.  Pennsylvania eventually enacted laws to prevent new damage but there’s no money to turn all of the yellow lines into blue.

One would hope that Pennsylvania learned from this history but in my opinion (not necessarily the opinion of WQED) our state has not.  Though damage is predictable from new industrial threats like Marcellus shale drilling, the state still begins with weak laws, suffers new damage, then changes the laws after the damage is done.  (Click here for examples of bad water and changed laws.)

So… how’s the water?
Sad.

(photo by Tim Vechter; map from PittsburghTODAY.org.  Click on the map to see the details)

They’re Baaaaack!

Crows & Ravens

Pittsburgh’s crows are back!

The winter flock is building.  Hundreds gathered last evening near Bigelow Boulevard at Craig Street.  As sunlight faded in the western sky they left to roost  … where?

This morning Tony Bledsoe dodged the “rain” from their roost in the trees near Clapp Hall.  His guess at the size of the flock?  500.   And this is just the beginning.   By November they’ll build to a crescendo of crows.

Where do they gather at dusk?  Leave a comment with the news … or tweet me the location of Pittsburgh’s crow flock @KStJBirdblog  (hashtag #pghcrows)

 

(photo of hooded crows in Denmark, by Jens Rost via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)

Making Waves

Weather & Sky

These rare Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds look like waves on the ocean.

In fact they are breaking waves generated by the same fluid dynamics that creates wind-driven waves on water.

Both are caused by Kelvin-Helmholtz instability which occurs at the boundary where two fluids flow by each other at different speeds or densities.  The air above these clouds is moving faster left-to-right than the air below them.  The boundary is very turbulent and becomes more so when the waves break.

Kelvin-Helmholz instability can be described mathematically and its effect plotted over time.  This silent video by VanjaZ shows a yellow fluid on top flowing faster than the black fluid on the bottom.  Talk about turbulence!

 

We rarely see K-H clouds because the atmosphere has to be just right to make them stand alone. The curling waves disappear in seconds, wiped out by chaos as soon as they break.

(photo by GrahamUK on Wikimedia Commons; video by VanjaZ on YouTube)

How Stakes Hurt Trees

Schenley Park, Trees, Winter Weeds & Trees


Every day on my way to work I pass this unusual tree in Schenley Park.  It was planted with care, probably more than 40 years ago, when stakes were provided to stabilize the young tree.

But the stakes were never removed.  The tree grew and grew.  The trunk had nowhere to go except outward.  Slowly it engulfed the stakes.

Now this tree’s in a world of hurt.  The rubber guide and wires disappeared long ago.  The stake on the right is still outside the trunk but only a short length of wire is visible (below).

 

The other stake is completely surrounded.  Its top is inside the trunk.

And now the stakes can never be removed.  Though they’ve created a weakness in the trunk, they’re the only support the tree has at that spot so they have to stay.  The damage is done.

It’s too late to save this tree, but you can help others.  Examine staked trees to make sure the guides are not girdling the trunk.  Remove the stakes 1 to 2 years after planting.

For more information see Bartlett’s plant health guide for newly planted trees.

(photos by Kate St. John)

 

Mile-A-Minute

Plants & Fungi
Mile-a-minute fruit (photo by Dianne Machesney)

Pretty berries, right?

Wrong.  You don’t want them!  These are the fruits of mile-a-minute weed (Persicaria perfoliata), an invasive species that earned its name because it grows really fast — up to 25 feet in a single growing season.

Mile-a-minute arrived in Stewartstown, PA from Japan in the late 1930’s and spread from there.  Because birds and animals eat the berries, the plant spreads easily to new and remote locations. I’ve seen it growing on top of Laurel Mountain; Dianne Machesney photographed these berries at Green Cove Wetlands.

Mile-a-minute can take over a sunny spot very quickly and choke out every plant that underlies it.  You can recognize it by its triangular leaves, barbed stems (it’s called a “tearthumb”) and cup-shaped shield leaves at the stem joints.

Mile-a-minute (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Because mile-a-minute is an annual with shallow roots you can eradicate it if you’re vigilant.  Put on stout gloves and pull it out.   If it’s gone to seed — as it has by now — collect the seeds first, then pull.

Here’s what to do in a fun video from the Home and Garden Information Center at the University of Maryland Extension.

(photo of fruit by Dianne Machesney, photo of leaves in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons, video from University of Maryland Extension)

Bluebird Open House

Bird Behavior

Friends who have bluebird boxes tell me it’s very common to see small groups of bluebirds checking out the nest boxes in the fall.  They aren’t going to nest, so what are they doing?  I don’t really know but I imagined …

Maybe autumn is real estate Open House time.  The bluebirds stop by each home and inspect the interior.  “Look at that carpet!”  “I like how they remodeled the kitchen.”  “The living room’s too small but the bedrooms are nice.”

Or maybe, as Marcy Cunkelman suggested, they’re asking …

“Is this where we grew up?”

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Peregrine Hunting Dunlin

Peregrines
video by MartinJMuller on YouTube

5 October 2012

Have you ever seen a flock of shorebirds fly up in a tight ball and waited for the drama to unfold?

On November 28 and December 4, 2010 Martin J. Muller brought his camera to Samish Flats in Skagit County, Washington where thousands of shorebirds rest and feed at high tide. The concentration of dunlin attracted two peregrine falcons looking for a meal.

Martin’s 10 minute video condenses 11 hours of observations.  In the background are the mountains of Puget Sound and the Olympic peninsula.  In the foreground, the drama of the chase and lessons learned by an immature peregrine.

(credits are in the captions)

p.s. Speaking of ubiquitous human noise, the occasional roar on the soundtrack is the noise of passing cars, not the birds.