Yesterday afternoon, Esther Gatewood Allen, naturalist, teacher, gardener and photographer passed away after suffering a stroke on June 13.

She took with her 93 years of experience outdoors, her great love of nature, her irrepressible curiosity and enthusiasm for plants, and her generosity in passing along her knowledge to everyone.

Active to the last, Esther had a “Keep going, Don’t stop” attitude that inspired everyone who knew her.  Perhaps she inherited it.  She grew up on a farm in Gallia County, Ohio, one of 11 children of Emma Rowena Gatewood who in 1955 at age 67 became famous as Grandma Gatewood, the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail alone.  By 1963 her mother had hiked the AT three times, the first person ever to do so.

Esther’s don’t-stop attitude gained her some fame including an interview with the Allegheny Front’s Justin Hopper and a chestnut tree planting on her 92nd birthday.  And she kept hiking too, though her goal was nature not mileage. Here she is chatting with George Bercik on an outing last summer.

Esther loved to teach.  I first met her in 1994 when I took her wildflower class at the Rachel Carson Institute.  I continued to learn from her by joining the Wissahickon Nature Club which she helped found in 1942 and where she taught at every meeting through her exhibits (pictured at top).

Esther knew everything about native plants — everything!  She was especially active in the Botanical Society of Western Pennsylvania whose members knew her better than I did.  Her home garden, which she tended by “letting it go,” was a joy and treasure trove to her fellow botanists.  If you needed to examine an unusual flower, chances are Esther could show it to you in her garden.  And any time we were stumped by a plant on an outing the cry went out, “Ask Esther!”

In the days before digital photography Esther took beautiful photographs which she used as slides while teaching and contributed as illustrations for the Botanical Society’s Wildflowers of Pennsylvania.  As in all things, Esther passed on this knowledge too.  Her photographic legacy is on this blog in beautiful photos by Dianne Machesney.

Esther leaves behind not only her family but a host of men and women she inspired with her enthusiasm for nature in western Pennsylvania.  We are Esther’s living, breathing legacy — people who love nature and want to pass it on.

I hope we can live up to her example.

We miss her already.

(Esther Allen teaching at a Wissahickon meeting, photo by Chuck Tague.  Esther chatting with George Bercik on a Wissahickon outing, June 2010, photo by Monica Miller)

I usually write about wild things but this is a story about domesticated nature:  an animal and a vegetable.

This winter Esther Allen gave the members of the Wissahickon Nature Club an assignment.  Each of us must plant seeds from the kitchen and bring the results to the April 14th meeting.

My attempt with tangerine seeds failed to germinate and now, with less than a month left, I am running out of time so I bought a small turnip at the grocery store to sprout in water.  It shouldn’t take long.

I don’t like turnips — never buy them — so this one was a novelty.  About the size of a small red potato, it’s white and lavender with a tiny tap root and emerging leaves on top.  At some point I showed it to my cat.  Her reaction was surprising.

Emmy sniffed it, put her ears back, narrowed her eyes and gave it a sharp whack with her paw.  I tried hard not to laugh.  I hid my face in my book so she wouldn’t stop her assault on the turnip but I needn’t have worried. There was no stopping her.  She kept beating the turnip until she knocked it to the floor where it rolled like an ungainly mouse.  She attacked it from below, then charged at it, chased it back and forth, and nearly launched it down the basement stairs.

I rescued the turnip and hid it under a plastic bag on the kitchen counter but before I set it down I sniffed it myself.  As far as I could tell, it didn’t smell.

The next morning I sat drinking my coffee and Emmy puttered around the kitchen floor when suddenly her ears went back, she narrowed her eyes and sniffed the air.  Sniffing, sniffing, she moved below the spot on the kitchen counter where I had accidentally uncovered the turnip.   She’s not allowed on the counter (ha!) but she jumped right up to the turnip.

I had forgotten about it but she had not.  Apparently the turnip has a strong scent and she doesn’t like it, not one bit!

How am I going to sprout the turnip with an attack cat in the house?

Maybe my excuse will be that the cat killed my homework.

p.s. Emmy is also called Emmalina.

(photos by Kate St. John)

16 December 2010

For the past 100 years Pennsylvania has been great habitat for forest-nesting birds.  We’ve provided the nursery for 17% of the world’s scarlet tanagers and critical breeding grounds for wood thrushes and black-throated blue warblers.

But this is changing.  Right now.

Pennsylvania is at the beginning of the Marcellus Shale gas boom which will last for 30 years.  Now there are less than 3,000 wells.  If the boom goes as planned there will be 30,000 to 60,000 more.

Each well pad is a five acre industrial site connected by pipelines, compressor stations and roads.  This Google map shows what it looks like near West Union in Greene County (map is current).

From above you can see that the forest is fragmented by empty dirt squares and roads.  The scarlet tanagers that used to nest here are in Peru right now.  When they return they’ll find their nesting sites are gone or compromised.  There will be fewer nests and fewer scarlet tanagers born in Greene County next summer.  This is death by a thousand cuts.

Fragmentation isn’t new in Pennsylvania.  We’ve been doing it for farming, residential and commercial purposes for a very long time.  What’s new about this boom is that the fragmentation is industrial and is no longer around the forest edges or in farmland.  The Marcellus boom is going to the very heart of our prime forest habitat because the State Legislature has ordered DCNR to lease the state forests for gas drilling.

What does a drilled forest look like?  Below is a satellite image of the forest near Snow Shoe in Centre County. All those lines and patches are gas drilling sites. 

Sadly this fragmentation will last longer than it needs to because Pennsylvania has no money to restore the habitat when the drillers are gone.  We could have had that money but our state leaders, especially our Governor-elect (Tom Corbett in 2010) and the State Senate, oppose a Marcellus severance tax that would pay for habitat restoration and remediate a host of other problems caused by the gas boom.

What will happen to our forest birds?  It doesn’t look good, especially for black-throated blue warblers.  Read more here in Audubon Magazine and this extensive report by The Nature Conservancy on the effects of wind and gas energy development (the Marcellus summary is on page 30).

Will Pennsylvania change course?  Only if we work to make that change.

As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

(satellite images from Google Maps of the land in Greene and Centre counties, Pennsylvania)

p.s. There are many Marcellus shale issues and many groups working on them.  See fractracker.org’s Resources page for a list of groups.  Check out Fractracker’s main page for information on Marcellus Shale drilling.

28 September 2010

Generally speaking I don’t like off-road-vehicles (ORVs), ATVs, “four-wheelers” and dirt bikes.  That’s because I usually encounter them when they’re breaking the rules:  driving in “No Motorized Vehicles” zones, blazing unauthorized trails, and driving on paved streets in my neighborhood.  They’re not supposed to do any of these things but the vehicles are advertised as “We Break The Rules” so of course they’re often used that way.

I mused about this during my hike last Sunday when three dirt bikes drove by me at top speed.  My first reaction was “Ugh!” but after they were gone I realized I was walking in a very beautiful area, an area that would have been inaccessible to me had the dirt bikes not blazed the trail.  Without them I could not have found my way in and I certainly couldn’t have found my way back.  Sometimes I benefit from their actions.

So there’s a contradiction in my mind.  Do I like what they do … or not? 

On my way back to the car I found a dead scarlet tanager on the ground, his body run over by a dirt bike. 

It made me cry.

(photo of dirt bike trails and mudhole by Kate St. John)

‘Tis the season to see Jupiter.

Last Wednesday morning (22 Sept 2010) just before dawn the Moon and Jupiter were side by side in the western sky, bright and unmistakeable.

Jupiter vies with Venus to be the second brightest nighttime object.  Last Wednesday I think he won.  I checked him with my binoculars and saw three of his four Galilean moons.

The moons of Jupiter changed our view of the universe.  In 1609 Galileo made improvements to the telescope invented in the Netherlands the year before.  Once he had something that cool to look through he checked the sky.  I can imagine his amazement to see Jupiter so well and to discover four tiny dots around it.  Every night the dots changed position.  What could they be?

Moons!

Jupiter’s moons and papal politics got Galileo in trouble and eventually put him under house arrest.  The moons proved there were celestial objects that did not revolve around the Earth, thus disproving the Catholic Church’s geocentric doctrine that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Galileo wrote several papers publicly supporting Copernicus’ heliocentric view — that the Sun was the center of the universe.  His most famous book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was very convincing and its tone was unflattering to the Pope.  Ooops!  Galileo wasn’t pardoned until 1992.

I imagine what I can see through modern binoculars is roughly what Galileo saw of the moons of Jupiter.  They are indeed fascinating and well worth a book or two.  😉

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(retouched photo of the moons of Jupiter by Don E. Stewart from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)

By now we take communication towers for granted but 15 years ago they were far less common. 

It didn’t take long after towers dotted the landscape to find out they were deadly for birds, especially along migration corridors like the Gulf Coast, but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) refused to consult US Fish & Wildlife about potential wildlife impacts and would not notify the public before they permitted new towers. 

After many petitions the American Bird Conservancy and Earthjustice sued the FCC for violating federal law by approving dozens of new towers every year with little or no environmental review.

In February 2008 a federal appeals court ruled on the lawsuit and ordered the FCC to change course.  They’re now required to conduct careful environmental impact studies and hold public comment periods before approving potentially deadly towers.

Fast forward to 2010.  The FCC wants to increase wireless broadband services.  (Their plan includes killing off 40% of over-the-air television spectrum — very upsetting to us broadcasters!)   More wireless service means new towers and changes to existing towers.  Though the wireless industry does not formally agree that towers kill birds, the upcoming flurry of tower activity brought both sides to the table. 

The wireless infrastructure coalition and three bird conservation groups (American Bird Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife and the National Audubon Society) negotiated interim standards for the FCC to use when permitting communication towers.  They sent their Memorandum of Understanding to the FCC in May.

The proposed rules will expedite the approval of bird friendly towers while requiring lengthy evaluations and reviews of new or changed equipment that’s likely to kill birds. 

So, what is a “bird friendly” tower?   It’s a tower that’s not tall (it’s under 350 feet), has no guy wires and is lit with a white strobe instead of non-blinking red lights. 

Steady red lights confuse birds because they use the sunset’s red wavelengths to navigate during nighttime migration.  Birds keep the red glow of sunset on one side of their faces to make sure they’re heading the right direction.  When they encounter a tall tower in nighttime fog, the steady red lights look like their navigational cue so they fly around and around the tower, hitting the guy wires or falling exhausted to the ground.  This is especially deadly at the Gulf Coast in spring when northbound migrants expect to make landfall but instead exhaust themselves circling the towers.  Five to 50 million birds die this way every year depending on the weather.

The proposed interim standards, when adopted by the FCC, will go a long way toward reducing bird deaths. New towers over 450 feet tall will always require an environmental assement and prior public notice.  Even changes to lighting systems from a more-preferred (bird-friendly) option to a less preferred option will require a public comment period and our comments (yes, we’re the public) may cause the FCC to determine that an environmental assessment is needed. 

I’m looking forward to the interim standards.  We — and the birds — won’t see so much red anymore.

(photo from Zhejiang Shengda Group, a communications tower manufacturer in China)