Naturally

Curly dock stands 3 feet tall in the ditches. Its rust-brown seed stalks are hard to miss. Butterfly weed is there, too. It’s a stunning hardy perennial with bright orange flowers that butterflies love. Native Americans used it for healing lung ailments and wounds, earning it the name “pleurisy root.”

I watched a pod or a squadron of pelicans feeding. They were up to their bills in bullheads.

Swallows flew low over the lake. Because they eat as they go, swallows tend to migrate by day. Most songbirds migrate at night.

A gray catbird could be called euryphagous, meaning it eats a wide variety of foods. Earlier in the season, catbirds yelled at me for picking raspberries. They claimed ownership of the delectable fruit. Recently, I watched a catbird eat the berries of poison ivy. Mothers tell their children, “You eat like a bird.” Kids don’t do that, and they shouldn’t. Besides poison ivy berries, catbirds eat ants, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, midges, caterpillars, moths, spiders and millipedes. They eat cherries, elderberries, strawberries, grapes and other berries. In his 1942 short story titled "The Catbird Seat," James Thurber featured a character who used the phrase, “In the catbird seat.” The legendary baseball broadcaster Red Barber made the expression famous, using it to mean sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him. The catbird might have been sitting pretty on the poison ivy.

September 1. It’s on every calendar. Look. I’ll wait. Welcome back. See? It’s on every proper calendar. I remember visiting the Smithsonian Institution to see Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons. She was named after Martha Washington. Martha lived alone during her last years at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her keepers roped off her cage to prevent visitors from throwing things at her to make her move. She died at age 29 on September 1, 1914. Her body was shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was skinned and mounted. With her death, the passenger pigeon was officially extinct. It’s a sad tale. When Europeans first arrived in North America, there were somewhere between 3 billion and 5 billion passenger pigeons. In 1860 in Ontario, a flock of passenger pigeons 300 miles long flew overhead for several days. How could a species go from billions to none in a brief period? While loss of habitat made a dent in the passenger pigeon population, overhunting was the primary cause of its demise. Hunters reportedly shot up to a quarter of a million of them in a single day for food and sport in 1886. Why do I circle the date of Martha’s death, which also was the date a species went extinct? Because I want to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.

Q&A

A student asked me what my favorite dinosaur was. It's been nearly a lifetime since I was asked that question. I said it was the pterosaur. Pterosaurs were reptiles, close cousins of dinosaurs. They were the first animals, after insects, to evolve powered flight. The pterodactyl is a genus of pterosaur. All pterodactyls are pterosaurs, but not all pterosaurs are pterodactyls. Pteranodon is a pterosaur, but not all pterosaurs are pteranodon. Over 200 species of pterosaur have been discovered. Pterosaurs and dinosaurs are related, but dinosaurs didn’t evolve into pterosaurs, and pterosaurs didn’t evolve into dinosaurs. Birds developed from dinosaurs, which means pterosaurs aren’t their ancestors. I’ll have to change my answer to the stegosaurus, which is considered to have been docile due to its lack of predatory behavior and a tendency to form herds. The stegosaurus is thought to have been a gentle giant. Despite its heavy build and the large plates on its back, it was a peaceful, social animal that moved slowly and took little notice of others unless threatened.

“Do all birds drink water?” Some desert species don’t drink water in the way we think of drinking water. Their sole source of water is extracted from their food. The cactus wren builds a nest the size and shape of a football in cacti. Because canteens aren’t made in a size suitable for wrens, they rarely, if ever, drink water. They get all their liquids from juicy insects and fruit, but not from Juicy Fruit gum.

Thanks for stopping by

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”―Ferris Bueller.

“As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.”―David Abram.

Do good.

This beautiful black and yellow garden spider or Argiope aurantia, has a zigzag part to her web, known as stabilimenta, which may have the purpose of discouraging birds from flying through and damaging the web. It’s also called a yellow garden spider, golden garden spider, writing spider, zigzag spider, zipper spider, black and yellow argiope, corn spider, signature spider, Steeler spider and McKinley spider. Photo by Al Batt.