Naturally

It was time to feed the mosquitoes and take a walk in a state park.

A forager showed me some morel mushrooms—sponges on sticks. Another talked about collecting fiddleheads from ostrich ferns. This fern has a pronounced U-shaped groove running down the center of its stalk (similar to a celery stalk), paper-like brown scales on emerging fronds, and a smooth stem lacking wooly hairs. Know what you are eating.

I heard a spirited discussion in a tree and saw the coppertop battery of birds. The male brown-headed cowbird has a glossy black body with a dark brown head.

I watched ring-billed gulls fly invisible roads in the sky. The European Seagull Screeching Championship takes place at the Verloren Gernoare cafe near the Belgian coastal city of De Panne. I’ve heard ring-billed gulls called McGulls, dumpster gulls, landfill gulls, fast-food gulls and french-fry gulls. I think Gully or Gulliver would be fine nicknames. I associate the cries of these iconic birds with tranquil weather.

I gazed at a rose-breasted grosbeak eat sunflower seeds, cracking the hulls and spitting them out before swallowing the heart. It did so in an effortless way that would put any baseball player to shame.

Q&A

“Why are the maple tree helicopters red this year?” Those are maple helicopters, not Mayo helicopters. Those winged seeds of a maple tree are called helicopters, keys, whirlybirds, spinners, whirligigs, spinning jennies, whirlers, twisters, whirlwinds, wing nuts or samaras. Red maple samaras are red, in contrast to those of the sugar maple, which are green in spring when the samaras of both the red and sugar maples disperse. Norway, sugar and Japanese maples drop their seeds in the fall. The weather may have some impact on the color because the weather affects everything.

“Why did Noah send out a dove?” In the biblical story of Noah's Ark, Noah sent out a dove to determine if the floodwaters had receded. The dove found no place to rest and returned to the ark. Seven days later, Noah sent the dove out again, and it returned with an olive leaf, indicating the waters were receding. After another seven days had passed, Noah sent the dove out a third time, and it did not return. I’ve been to Israel and was told that yonah is the Hebrew name for a dove. A pigeon is a dove. For thousands of years, people have domesticated pigeons as pets and for food, feathers, racing and their ability to carry messages home from any distance or direction, despite adverse conditions. Carrier pigeons delivered messages in ancient Persia starting in about 1000 BC. Phoenician sailors used pigeons to send messages home, and the Greeks used them to announce the results of the Olympic Games. A homing pigeon, which gathers twigs to build its nest, would be the perfect recruit for Noah’s use. It could fly for hours and return reliably. Remember, yonah could be either a dove or pigeon because a pigeon is a dove, but the translation in the Bible was “dove.” It could have been the European turtle dove, but the rock pigeon would be better suited for the job. In Greek mythology, turtle doves pulled the gold chariot of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which made the species synonymous with devotional love. In the King James Bible, the Song of Solomon includes: “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of the birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,” heralding the onset of spring in what is now the modern-day Middle East. Turtle derived from “turtur,” imitating the cooing call of a dove. The New International Version of that text is “Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” The New Living Translation of the Bible reads, “The flowers are springing up, the season of singing birds has come, and the cooing of turtledoves fills the air.”

“Where are ravens breeding in Minnesota?” While most common in the northeast and north-central regions, they’re expanding south to Isanti, Chisago and Washington Counties and westward to Becker and Otter Tail Counties. I’ll bet the crows know right where the ravens are.

Thanks for stopping by

"A sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves."—Pope Francis.

“You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.”—Hal Borland.

Do good.

Commonly referred to as the Confederate violet, with its name coming from the color resemblance to the gray-white/navy blue color combinations of the Civil War Confederate States soldiers’ uniforms. This is a naturally occurring bi-colored variation of the common blue violet. This perennial flower always seems happy to see me. The feeling is mutual. Photo by Al Batt.