Recent Things

Pumpkin.

Glam caterpillar on fennel.
Honeybee on zinnia.


Bumblebee on sunflower.

A neighbor's strange enterprise.

Rat-hunting target practice?

Bumblebee & borage.

Harvest.
Grandpa Ott morning glory.

The Pesto Factory.

Sencha and Wren conducting a Field Study.

Daddy Longlegs & old Mason jar.

A really big shoe (and a really long worm).

Aster. A most September-iferous flower.

Honeybee Flower Fake-out!

A diligent honeybee checks out the tulip-like visage on a plastic watering can.

A Vacation

Wren and I had a great vacation last week, which accounts for my unannounced break from blogging. It was 10 days of pure real-world, off-line, away from desk—loving every minute of it.
We enjoyed sunny meadows.

We (belatedly) discovered the glorious delicacy that is purple-flowering raspberry—a divine wild plant that takes raspberries to a whole new level.

We were visited by our friends Eva and Deb. Eva and Gumdrop did some serious communing. Later in the day, we communed with the blueberry patch across the road.
We also enjoyed a visit from our friend Andrew of Andrew's Honey and Bees Without Borders, and his pal Kelly, shown here displaying a nice hunk of beeswax.
Andrew provided some wonderful mentorship during a visit to our hives. Along with teaching me a thing or three, he assured me that I'm not the world's worst beekeeper after all. Whew!


We walked the rails-to-trails near Roxbury. This old rail marker indicates the mileage to Kingston, New York. The old train line ran from Kingston to Oneonta, according to a local historian we ran into during our walk.

During another walk in a nearby forest, I was thrilled to find this old metal sign half-buried in the mud. Finders keepers.
The forest is now NYS land; these trees were, presumably, planted with the sawmill in mind. Fortunately, destiny has spared them: they are now part of what is called "a demonstration forest." It's a beautiful, rich woodland area just over yonder.

Each day, we spent quality time with Sencha and made sure to do plenty of trespassing. ("This land is your land, this land is my land, etc.")

We visited Mountaintop Arboretum in Tannersville. The aboretum is working to revive the glorious, blighted American Chestnut, which once dominated the Eastern forests.
The chestnut "nursery."

We nearly drove off the road when we saw this sign on our neighbor's farm. The skulls say it all.

We made a pilgrimage to John Burroughs' Woodchuck Lodge. The place, it seems, is always closed and lacks quality signage or walking trails (we think Burroughs deserves better). After briefly communing with the adorable exterior of the house, we bushwhacked down the hill to a beautiful pond/bog where—after inadvertently scaring the bejesus out of umpteen bullfrogs—we lay in the sun, interrupted in our mellow thoughts by a doe who appeared out of nowhere to drink at water's edge. Very Burroughsian.

We got the car washed (and bought brownies) at the local firehouse fund-raiser.
We checked out the cool trucks.

We met new bugs and continued the ongoing effort to Learn Our Trees (finally getting various oak, beech, fir, and maple species under my belt).

We got some serious altitude on the Windham High Peak. (Wren doesn't consider it a bona fide vacation unless she force-marches me up a steep mountain.)It was quite a beautiful hike, with diverse forest communities, fabulous mushrooms (like the comb tooth below) and many interesting wildflowers I'd never seen before (and am still trying to ID).Up top, we met a couple who'd just minutes before witnessed what sounded like a major bee swarm in a balsam tree. Sadly, we missed that excitement, though the honeybees kept us company all the way up the mountain, wherever there was sun enough to support goldenrod.

We also had a nice chat with a Search & Rescue guy who said that the best way to handle a bear encounter is to stand with your arms up, stretching out your shirt or coat over your head to look as large as possible, make a lot of noise and—if charged—bat the bear really hard on the nose with a big stick; woodland-survival tips we sincerely hope we'll never need.

All in all, a fun and informative vacation! Here's to the next forced-march up the mountain of rest & relaxation.

NRDC Takes EPA to Task

This lucky honeybee has a friend in NRDC.

Mounting evidence that pesticides are implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder certainly hasn't moved the EPA to action (not that EPA is doing much of anything these days). Under Bush&Co., the EPA has transmuted from Environmental Protection Agency to Enabling Polluters...Again (or might that be Entirely Pathetic Always? I'm sure there's no end to the unflattering acronyms we can apply in this instance; feel free to post a comment suggesting your own).

Fortunately for the bees, us, and the tattered remains of our ecosystem, the Natural Resources Defense Council (of which I am a proud card-carryin' member) is on the case and today issued the following press release announcing its new lawsuit against the EPA:

EPA Buzz Kill: Is the Agency Hiding Colony Collapse Disorder Information? NRDC Forced to Sue to Get Public Records on Bee Mystery

WASHINGTON, DC (August 18, 2008) – The Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit today to uncover critical information that the US government is withholding about the risks posed by pesticides to honey bees. NRDC legal experts and a leading bee researcher are convinced that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has evidence of connections between pesticides and the mysterious honey bee die-offs reported across the country. The phenomenon has come to be called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD, and it is already proving to have disastrous consequences for American agriculture and the $15 billion worth of crops pollinated by bees every year.

EPA has failed to respond to NRDC’s Freedom of Information Act request for agency records concerning the toxicity of pesticides to bees, forcing the legal action.

“Recently approved pesticides have been implicated in massive bee die-offs and are the focus of increasing scientific scrutiny,” said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo. “EPA should be evaluating the risks to bees before approving new pesticides, but now refuses to tell the public what it knows. Pesticide restrictions might be at the heart of the solution to this growing crisis, so why hide the information they should be using to make those decisions?”

Get the full story here and please consider lending your support to NRDC's work.

Recent Things

Morning walk.

The web.

Pumpkin.

Hail!
Freaked out rabbit in hailstorm's aftermath.

Fallen moth.

Garlic harvest.
Daisies at the end of their rope.

Blueberries.

A morning walk in the forest.