Monthly Archives: September 2015

Stuffed Wildlife

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Last week I had to return a speaker to Leiser’s Rentals in Bethlehem. Attached to the store is a “Don’s Wildlife Museum” where you can walk around and look at their collection of stuffed animals.

I have never understood hunting let alone stuffing the kill. I often ask myself what the hunter gets out of it. The answer I can come up with is that they hunt and display their “prize” because it fulfills that part in them that connects them back to nature. Just like the fish jumping out of the bucket in Eiseley’s piece, we all feel a subconscious need to get back to nature. So despite all of the development and advancements the human race has made throughout our existence, we all have a small part of us that wants to be wild again. I think this is why we have the desire to walk in the woods, feel one with the ocean when we’re swimming with it and why we feel relaxed when we spend some time outdoors. Despite all of the changes our race has made and will make in the future that seems to pull us away from nature, I don’t think that this instinct will ever go away.

It is because of this instinct that I assume that hunters hunt. They feel the thrill of getting a kill, maybe it even makes them feel as if they are a preying animal. They display the animal because it reminds them of an accomplish but part of it may even be because their instinct makes them wish they were still in the wild with this animal. 004

Nature controlling other nature

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This morning I went home for the weekend. I was interested to see how a month of Cultures of Nature would change my perspective on the nature I grew up in for 20 years. Sure enough when I stepped out of my car and did a 360 I noticed an Evergreen (pretty sure it is an Evergreen) tree in my neighbors side yard. It had been overtaken by ivy vines. It may be difficult to tell from these photos but the greenish blue of the Evergreen is barely visible because the ivy has just completely overtaken it.

In class we have discussed how nature has a tendency to take back control from humans (as we saw in Ginny’s Gorp a few weeks ago). Seeing this ivy vine take control of a strong and old Evergreen made me think about how nature can even take control over itself. Ivy is not the only plant that does so as we have seen along the Bushkill Creek, Japanese Knotweed is invading and controlling that environment.

Is this ivy another balancing act put on by nature? Should we let this happen or should my neighbor have intruded and trimmed the tree when he first saw the ivy growing?

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A Tree Firmly Rooted

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These images capture a phenomenon that fascinated me when I first saw it during a visit to my Story of Place location. The morning lighting and shadows beautifully highlights the leaves on the trees. But the real intrigue is that this tree has grown around and through rock! Two notorious features of nature, both of which may also be extremely old, existing as a unit tied together. It is fascinating to wonder how long this tree and this rock have been here. Also, what came first: the tree or the rock? The rock might have been there before the tree even began to grow, or perhaps it moved into the tree’s space as a sapling. How might this affect the health of the tree, as its roots are so firmly rooted and related to this rock formation? What a curious phenomenon.

Readings for Monday’s Class

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“The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or saw – even though the trees in the forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships” (Cronan 88)

-it can be easy to confuse wilderness with the most remote places of the earth; being able to find and appreciate the beauty of what surrounds us everyday

“Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has traveled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia” (Thoreau 186).

-the unfamiliarity of what surrounds us; how well do we really know about what is around us?; easy to forget the vastness of everything, the power of Nature

Unscientific science

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“I am reminded of how much citizen science can explore the edges, less constrained by scientific convention, lass afraid to look “unscientific” (149).

This line from Sharman Apt Russell’s Citizen Science, really struck me as an interesting idea. Throughout the book, Russell sort of struggles with the challenges of citizen science and how she must over come the obstacles and precedents set by traditional scientific practices.

Citizen science is less refined, and though, as Russell points out, you might be able to become an expert on any given topic in a week, this is not the reason why people practice citizen science. There isn’t necessarily an intent to become an expert on any given topic but rather an interest shared by others who might wish to observe and practice the same things. They don’t necessarily require being able to name every species of tiger beetle but it doesn’t hurt. The point of citizen science is getting people involved on a level that doesn’t require mastery of a topic but can be done in an afternoons research or weekend hike. This is what gives it the potential to be so great. The freedom that comes with public curiosity is the most powerful tool a citizen scientist has at their disposal.

And at the same time, not being a true scientist allows you to take liberties and try the unconventional.

Flying Through The Galaxy Zoo

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I think I just found my new study break activity…

I promised myself that my next blog post would be a reflection on trying out one of the online citizen science projects mentioned in Diaries so I decided to try out Galaxy Zoo. When you first get to the identifying, you are presented with a fairly blurry image of space with a galaxy in the middle of the image. On the right side of the screen it gives you the options “smooth”, “features or disk”, or “star or artifact” paired with visuals. Depending on what you first identify the image as, you’re led to different options to further describe the image.

I was hoping to come across a never-before-identified galaxy so I could name it after myself, but I guess the odds of coming across that in the first 10 minutes on the site are pretty slim. I would get a strange rush of excitement whenever the image that popped up was more than just a circular blob. I got a few galaxies with spirals, one or two that may have been an image of a disc on it’s side, and a few totally irregular formations. I’ve even found that just spending 10 minutes on the site got me familiar with the terminology that they use. I would see an image and think “ah, definitely a star or artifact” without having to glance to the right to see the diagram. This is a shockingly relaxing activity, and it’s easy to forget that by participating in this brain break, you’re contributing to the knowledge of the universe.

I have found it difficult to cease marveling over the existence, success, and potentially massive impact of citizen science. It’s SO EASY to go on to Galaxy Zoo for a few minutes, bang out some identifications, and then go on your way. It’s also SO MUCH MORE BENEFICIAL TO SOCIETY than scrolling through Instagram or watching a cat video. I vow to use Galaxy Zoo as my goof-off tool from now on. I also feel like Galaxy Zoo has refreshed my mind without facilitating a loss of working momentum. Imagine if every college kid did 10 minutes of Galaxy Zoo as a study break! We could classify an exorbitant amount of images!

I challenge all of you guys to do some Galaxy Zoo when you need a few minutes between homework tasks!

 

Tossed

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I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this yet, but last Saturday I had the glorious opportunity to return home. Not home as in New Hampshire, but home as in the sea. Each September, the Lafayette swim team (and this year the divers!) pile in cars in the wee hours of the morning and head to Belmar, New Jersey for a charity swim benefitting brain cancer research. It is important to us to support the swim team that puts on the event, but it is also a fun-filled retreat of sorts for our little tribe.

Anyway, so the “race” is a mile long ocean swim and it is absolute madness. In an attempt to coordinate the insanity, the race directors have competitors enter the water in “flights” but this just results in a frenzy of those in later flights literally trampling those who leave first. It is a thrashing, crashing, splashing, clawing brawl of bodies. It takes from 20-30 minutes but it feels like an instant because the entire event is a campaign for survival.

I love it.

It dawned on me this year that amidst this chaos, I felt supremely content. Swimming has always been an important part of my life, and so has the ocean, but only a few years ago did swimming (in an athletic sense more than a splashing-around-in-the-waves sense) become a passion for me. It is so vastly different from pool swimming, or even lake swimming. It is colder, obviously saltier, and so much more threatening. It is beautiful.

Usually when I go for a longer swim in the ocean, it is with the lifeguards I have worked with for many summers. We all enter at the same time and battle our way through the waves before we get just past the break and chart our own courses. It is far more independent than the ocean swim we participated in on Saturday. To enter the mindset in a hypothetically present tense:

I am entirely at the mercy of the single most powerful entity on this earth. I am intimately aware of my fragility and yet astounded by the willingness of the sea to cradle and rock me with each set of waves that rumbles toward shore.

This kind of experience is something I hope never to take for granted. Amidst the hundreds of flailing, violent, churning bodies a few days ago, I almost lost track of this feeling. But after a moment or two, I could surrender to the Atlantic, the beautiful Atlantic, and it didn’t matter how many scrappy boys scratched my legs or grabbed my feet, I was home.

Plight of the Birds

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Earlier on in the blog Julie mentioned her frustrations with the bird problem on campus and a possible solution in the form of window tinting that helps to prevent collisions. I commented on Terri’s post talking about how at one time or another in a meeting or class we had discussed some additional creative solutions to this problem that have been proposed, and I wanted to share them and see if you guys had any thoughts on these different solutions. While researching some of these creative solutions I stumbled upon some additional information about the issue throughout the US that I found to be fascinating.

A recent study on bird-building collisions in the US performed by the Migratory Bird Center of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Oklahoma State University found that up to 1 billion birds die a year in the US as a result of window strikes (Loss et al. 2014).

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1

Many of these birds are just stunned initially and will fly off and die of internal bruising or internal bleeding soon after.

In addition, there are three noted types of collisions. The first are daytime collisions that occur as birds see the reflection of their surroundings in the windows and assume it is a continuation of the landscape. The second type of window-bird collision are nighttime collisions in which nocturnal flyers are somehow lured by the lights and it results in collision (still not fully understood). The third collision type generally occurs during breeding season when birds are trying to protect their breeding territory and will attack their own reflection in windows during the daytime (generally occurs in the springtime). I am guessing we are generally seeing the first type of collision on our campus, but I am curious to know if we see much of the other two.

Some additional solutions that I have heard about in discussions on campus include things like mesh stickers on large windows on campus, bird decals on windows, and taut netting in front of windows to prevent fatal collisions.

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In discussion it seemed like much of the push-back for these solutions involved the aesthetic disruption they might have on campus and maybe the cost of certain solutions, and I wonder if you guys have any thoughts on that as well? It seems like there must be some solution that would not be too much of a disruption and would be worth it to save all these birds.

This site where I got a lot of interesting information on the issue lists a variety of creative solutions and more information!
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/why-birds-hit-windows-and-how-you-can-help-prevent-it/

“Until the road ends.”

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Like Tory and many others in our class, I am a longtime fan of the tiny homes movement. Since first learning about them a few years back, I’ve always had a bucket list goal of giving it all up and living somewhere for the place rather than the possessions.

While I love the idea of tiny homes, I also value the concept of nomadic living. Although I’ve blogged about it before, I’ve never felt more connected to the road then when I was on a road trip across the US after freshman year. I think that a road trip emphatically symbolized the concept of a home on wheels. You are moving from place to place not to live, but to explore.

2010-ford-4x4-sportsmobile-front-right-sideWhile camping in Yellowstone National Park, my friends and I came across a very friendly Santa Claus lookalike and his wife at the campsite next to us. They didn’t have a tent or an RV, but what they called a sports mobile. Sports mobiles are a variation of a DIY camper that is crammed into a small van (almost like the modern day VW equivalent). Just like the tiny homes movement, these converted vans have gained huge amounts of popularity amongst today’s adventure seeking community. These vans afford the amenities of a tiny house in an even smaller, yet incredibly mobile manor.

sportsmobile_interior_3The coolest part about the sports mobiles is their ability to get off the “beaten path.” Unlike a typical RV, they can climb over rocks or press through the snow just like any SUV. When we asked our campsite neighbors about their plans with the van and where they were headed, they simply replied, “Up to Alaska until the roads end.” They wouldn’t once stop in a hotel or probably even a city for that matter. All they needed was their tiny home on wheels and the view out of the windshield.

I’d love to build my own sports mobile some day. Having the ability to roam free and focus on whats around you rather than normal suburbia would be liberating.