Last Friday I hiked the Gull Point Trail at Presque Isle State Park with Mary Birdsong, Sarah Sargent and Julie Dell.  Last winter’s storms blew down trees, eroded the northern shoreline, and inundated the trail but Friday was Mary’s second shorebird monitoring trip so she’d already found the best way to get to the Point.

Before we left for the park, Mary said I’d need knee-high waterproof boots.  I don’t own any, so she loaned me her extra boots shown on the left.  They are really tall, nearly up to my knees with a 13.5″ shaft.  Mary has true knee-high muck boots with (probably) a 16″ shaft, like those pictured on the right.

It took us a long time to get to Gull Point on the driest route.  As Julie walked ahead of me I felt great about my borrowed boots.  They were perfect!

And then we got to this spot.

As you can see, the water really is knee high.

I picked my way with my hiking stick and then … uh oh!  The water overtopped my boots and rushed into both of them.

On dry land I pulled off the boots and dumped them out, wrung out my socks and put everything back on. Sarah’s calf-high boots were inundated too but she changed into her hiking boots (see them over her shoulder).  Mary and Julie were fine with their 16″ knee boots.

The water was just 1″ higher than 13.5″ boots could bear.  I’m not sure why Lake Erie is so high right now but if it gets deeper the 16″ boots will be too short as well.

If you’re venturing to Gull Point, be prepared.

Squish, squish.

I’m glad I wore wool socks.

(photos by Kate St. John; Camouflage Muck boots photo from the Original Muck Boot Company)

p.s. Check out Mary Birdsong’s blog: Feather, Spade and Spoon

If you’ve never flown over southern West Virginia on a clear day and looked out the airplane window you won’t have seen this stark evidence of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geologic epoch, the point at which we humans did not just leave traces of our actions but began to alter the whole earth system.  An international working group is studying the evidence to determine whether the new name should be formally accepted.

For evidence of humans’ earth-altering activity, mountaintop removal strip mining can’t be beat.

The video above from Kanawha Forest Coalition starts and ends at airplane height showing just one mountaintop removal mine in late 2015.  It is so large that the bulldozers are dwarfed by the site.

As the video description explains, “the original mining permit proposed stripping 3,113 acres, but was reduced to 2,265 after legal challenges. What you see here is fewer than 500 acres that have been mined so far.  Many of the surrounding mountains and streams will be destroyed if this mine isn’t stopped.”

We humans use bulldozers, explosives, drag lines and dump trucks to level mountains and fill nearby valleys.  To see this in action watch this 2006 excerpt from Bill Moyers Journal.

Recent research by Duke University says that “40 years of mountaintop coal mining have made parts of Central Appalachia 60 percent flatter than they were before excavation.”  Click here for a satellite view and zoom out to see how much of West Virginia has been touched by this activity.

The geologic alteration, habitat destruction, social upheaval and health impacts of mountaintop removal are deep and permanent.  All of it is caused by humans.  We ought to stop.

Do you think there’s enough evidence to call this epoch the Anthropocene?

I do.

p.s. The Spruce #1 Mountaintop Removal Mine is only 202 air miles southwest of Pittsburgh.  It is closer to us than Philadelphia.

(videos by Kanawha Forest Coalition on YouTube)

11 January 2016

Earth’s life history is in its rocks, layer upon layer, each one with a name.  Even if we can’t name all the geologic periods, we know at least one of them because of a movie — Jurassic Park.

Geoscientists identify epochs by the fossils and minerals they find in them.  Even the boundaries are interesting.  The Cretaceous period ends in a thin line, called the K-Pg (was K-T) boundary, that contains iridium from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. There the Cretaceous period (K) ended and the Paleogene (Pg) began. Above the line are seven epochs including the Holocene, the most recent 11,700 years in which human population has expanded and thrived.

Now pretend you’re a geoscientist 10 million years in the future and you’re identifying epochs in the rocks.  You see the K-Pg line and the seven epochs, and then on top of them, everywhere around the globe in rocks and ice, you find a layer containing substances never before seen on Earth or in outer space:  aluminum, concrete, plastics, fly ash (below) and nuclear fallout.

The substances are so unique that, as a geoscientist, you must define this layer as a new geologic epoch and name it for its distinctive feature. The substances were created by humans. The epoch is called the Anthropocene.

Since atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first proposed the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch in 2000, the idea has taken hold in the scientific community. An international working group is studying the evidence to determine whether the epoch should be formally accepted into the geologic time scale by the International Union of Geological Sciences.  Their recommendation is still postponed.

Meanwhile, the Anthropocene Working Group reported last week that the evidence is overwhelming.  Here’s their description of the epoch from an earlier report:

Members of the international working group formally analyzing the Anthropocene suggest that the key turning point happened in the mid-twentieth century. This was when humans did not just leave traces of their actions, but began to alter the whole Earth system. There was a ‘Great Acceleration’ of population, of carbon emissions, of species invasions and extinctions, of earth moving, of the production of concrete, plastics and metals.

— Science Daily: Did the Anthropocene begin with the nuclear age?

Official or not, we’re certainly in it.

Welcome to the Anthropocene.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the captions to see the originals)

• “anthropo-” = Greek for human,  “-cene” = “new” and is the ending applied to all the epochs in the current era, the Cenozoic.
• The geologic terms epoch, period and era seem to be interchangeable but epochs are short time frames, periods are next in size, and eras are the longest.  Click here for definitions.

I usually don’t chase rare birds because it often ends in disappointment.  If I don’t find the bird, the trip was wasted.  If I do find it, it’s a let-down because the bird — or my view of it — is less exciting than I anticipated.

However, at dawn on New Years Day 11 of us piled into three cars and drove to Medina County, Ohio to chase the brambling.

If you’re new to birding, you may not have heard of this slightly eccentric activity. Chasing involves lots of hurry, planning, travel, high tech communication and patient waiting.  It does not mean we approach our object closely.  If the bird feels threatened it will fly away and no one will see it so those who approach too closely are told to back off.  Humans do freak out when we’ve spent time, money and anticipation on a spectacle that another human is about to wreck!

The rarer the bird, the more people chase it.  Bramblings (Fringilla montifringilla) are exceedingly rare in Ohio so this finch has attracted hundreds of people per day.

Common in Eurasia, bramblings nest from Norway to Siberia and spend the winter in a wide swath of Africa, Europe and Asia.  Sometimes one makes a wrong turn in the fall and migrates south through our continent. Solo bramblings usually end up in northern coastal or north central states.  This adult male is the first brambling in Ohio in 28 years.

And so we made the trip.

Our group arrived just after the brambling had visited the feeder and disappeared. The parking lot was emptying. We found good standing room in the viewing area.

And we waited.  The group swelled to about 60 people.

We’d heard that the bird appeared every 30 minutes.  Not so!  At just below freezing we were not dressed for a long wait but no one wanted to leave.  After two hours the bird appeared for three minutes.

My first view was similar to this photo by Donna Foyle.  That’s how I’ll remember the brambling.  I didn’t see the clear view Shawn Collins obtained above.

Through my scope I did see the bird’s back just before the flock scattered, as in Shawn’s photo below.  The brambling is very well camouflaged on the ground.

And then the flock lifted off and he disappeared.

But I saw him!  Fortunately everyone else in our group did, too. Others who missed the bird stayed behind to wait, perhaps for another two hours.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of birders have seen the brambling in Medina County since he was announced on December 28. Read more about his fame and discovery at Cleveland.com.

(photos by Shawn Collins and Donna Foyle)

A timely science lesson for New Year’s Eve.

p.s. Don’t try this with champagne!

p.p.s. Do you hear the bird singing at 20 seconds into the video? Sounds like a Common Blackbird (Turdus merula).