Ten years ago last spring

4/22/01

Spring Floods

Here is another thing a Midwesterner knows.  After an evening thunderstorm, the cool air will have a specific smell.  A weather man may tell you this is the smell of ozone, or of damp earth, but a Midwesterner will know the smell for what it is.  It is the smell of earthworms, flushed up from the soil by the rain. 

After the storm, children may come out to splash and play and sing, cool for the first evening in days.  Their parents may come out too, in town calling to neighbors from porch to porch.  And even through the dimmest twilight, after the storm, the birds will sing to each other urgently, as if they have been held back from singing to each other all their lives, and now there is suddenly so much to sing about.   Tonight, I imagine they are singing about worms.

The creeks will rise, and water will not so much flood their banks as that the banks will become some deep, small part of the creek.  When the banks reappear they will be new black earth, not the pale yellow straw they were before.   Where the creeks were ditched straight, across the fields, they will reappear like curled peels, dark black across the corn-stubbled fields, loosened from their straight lines by the rush of the flood.

The creeks will rise, and then, if the ground is still frozen and the rains melt the snow and then they keep coming, rivers will begin to rise too. 

When the rivers flood, you still know where the banks are.  The cottonwoods that line the banks may now stand hip deep in water, but they hold their places for a long time, until the twisting flow of the river pulls the banks out from under them and then pulls them down too.  What is harder to know is where the road has gotten to.   

This spring, all the conditions were set up by February for the hydrologists to predict April floods, and sure enough here they are.  Late winter and early spring have been cold, and thick drifts of snow were still standing on the edges of roadsides and in the north-facing swales of the glacial moraine.  Ice out is later than anyone can remember, and although the fishermen had to have their icehouses off the lakes by early March, they would have been plenty safe for another four weeks.  When the rain started, the ground was still frozen, the rivers edges still held some ice,

The Cannon River, hydrologically flashy as it is, flooded quickly after the rains.  By April 8, it was over its banks, onto the fields and the river-edge roads, over the lower trail in the arboretum, and 2 feet deep over the college’s baseball field and over the old municipal lot.  College kids went canoeing on the baseball field, a friend who lives on the flood plain tells me that a Hmong family was wading across the old municipal lot and caught a half-dozen carp, bare-handed.  The lawyer who was soon to open a new bar on his riverfront patio had a major set-back – the bar will be a pool of muddy water for another three weeks.

But two weeks later, the excitement is mostly over for the Cannon.  At least for now.  Yesterday Ginger and I walked through the arboretum, me trying to stay on the upper trails, Ginger seeing, or smelling, the ponds on the floodplain and plunging down the steep hill to go swim and roll in the mud-and-algae soup.  At the Iron Bridge, the floodplain is full of sand dunes, attesting to the river’s disregard for its banks last week. The dunes form gray sandy arcs across the black soil, each holding a puddle in its arc.  Migrating plovers filled the puddles, but flew off in a white-rumped flock everytime a car crossed the bridge, or of course, every time Ginger came near. 

Yesterday and today, the Cannon through town was decidedly back in its banks.  But today’s steady drizzle and tonight’s thunderstorms will bring the Cannon back up, maybe as early as tomorrow morning.  How far up?  Wait and see. Neither the USGS nor the state monitor data or provide forecasts for the upper Cannon, so it’s anyone’s guess.

While the Cannon rose and fell again quickly, the Minnesota River has crested slowly, and more dangerously, and has stayed high over the last two weeks.  Official crest in Mankato was last Wednesday, in Shakopee, on Thursday.  The state highway 169 has been closed for more than a week.  Part was reopened on Thursday, but will probably be closed again by tomorrow.  Both bridges in St. Peter closed, and are probably still closed, and my morning commute has been extended by 20 minutes of going around the long way. 

Early last Sunday morning, 2 brothers on their way home from a party in Shakopee thought they might be able to drive across a closed stretch of Highway 101, through the rising Minnesota River.  How deep could the water across the road be? Surely not more than a couple of inches?  In the dark, they must have lost track, or lost the road, and they were suddenly in deep enough water that their engine stalled.  The inevitable sobering effect of this was perhaps not sobering enough: they got out to push the car back out of the water, and all three, two brothers and car, were swept away by the river.  One brother was rescued from the line of trees along the river bank at 6 am.  By eight o’clock  the rescue team deemed it too dangerous to continue searching for the other brother or the vehicle. 

Other than that, in daylight and sober, Minnesota River towns have been mostly okay, not because the flood isn’t extreme, but because after the big floods of ’93 and ’97, most of the towns raised and strengthened their levees and dikes.

But a flood on the Minnesota River doesn’t end on the Minnesota River.  It goes on to become first, a flood in St. Paul (the St. Paul airfield, down on the floodplain, was closed last week) then in Hastings and Red Wing and Wabasha, and on down the Mississippi.  Today the flood wave was due to hit Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, some 100 river miles below St. Paul.  Tonight’s rains have been extensive, a large thunderstorm system dumping more rain everywhere in the Upper Mississippi drainage, a huge triangle of weather – both rain and snow storms- wheeling across the plains toward the Great Lakes and beyond

This is not good.  This is not just the drainages of the Minnesota, the St. Croix, the Upper Mississippi –all now within a few cubic feet per second of bankfull or already long overbank  - this storm system will boost the headwaters of the Missouri, the headwaters of the Ohio.  I’m no flood hydrologist, but it doesn’t take much to know that this is not a great way to start up the spring flood season.

Right now, at ten pm, the flash flood watch for a region that stretches across Morton, Redwood Falls, New Ulm along the Minnesota River, across Itasca and the upper Mississippi, across the border and the St. Croix drainage to Wisconsin.  And west of here, the Red River Basin is expected to get 3-5” of wet snow.  It’s April 22, Earth Day, more than a month after the first day of spring.  In Fargo, flood season is just beginning.

First Wednesday of the Month

Tornado Season

Here is a thing Midwesterners know.   Sometime in the middle of the day, often the middle of a sunny day, maybe right after lunch, the sirens will sound.  Tornado sirens.  It’s right after lunch, the sun is shining – it can’t be anything to worry about, on thinks.  Then, remembers.  Oh of course, it’s one o’clock, it’s Wednesday, it’s the first Wednesday of the month. 

On a college campus, where students may be arriving in the fall from all sides of the country, or of the world, there might be a small panic.  Until a Midwesterner explains to these new foreigners that the sirens are always tested, in every small town in the Midwest, on the first Wednesday of the month at one o’clock.   Then they know, too, and forever after, once a month, will feel that same startle, then will check the sunny sky, check their watch, and relax, maybe smiling at themselves and at their new knowledge.  Simple.  One o’clock first Wednesday of the month.

Visuals

There are days and weeks and months when I am not exactly too busy to write, but too busy to stop and think about what I've been doing and seeing, long enough to have anything to say about it.
But I have been taking photos. Of students and rocks and --of course-- birds.

On Monday I went paddling along the lakeshore with a friend - me in my spinning-in-the-wind river canoe, and she in a wooden sea kayak she built nearly 20 years ago (check out www.pygmyboats.com, my latest object of boat-lust). Suffice to say that I worked a whole lot harder than she did Monday AM.

Along the way, she pointed out an eagle's nest along the south shore, within the boyscout camp.  Even without binoculars, we could see 2 eagles, apparently juveniles, perched on the edge of the nest.
Tonight, Sue and I took friends out on the pontoon to look for the nest again.  Which we found, with no eagles.  Folks in another pontoon pointed them out in a tree along the shore -- two adults.  Later, we did see one of the "babies" on a branch near the nest.
So I took photos.  And then, we went up to the head of the lake to spy on the pelicans.  Still there.  More photos.

Ω

So for my first blog in ten weeks, here are photos of them, and also of a trip I took last month to Bear Lake, on the Utah/Idaho border, during some spring migration.  The osprey, red-throated loon, and hay field shots are from there.

Also in this set, my NEMESIS, the red squirrel that lives in the big ash in the back yard.  Last week, this squirrel pulled down the suet feeder and dragged it up to the front yard.  I don't have it back up yet -- of course I haven't seen the downies since.

This flock has been hanging out at the mouth of the Cannon River, on the west end of Lake Byllesby, since the big flocks passed through in March.  There are about 20 in this group.  I don't know if some are nesting in the area, but it seems likely. Check out the kingfisher on the tall snag.

++++
The rest of these are from Bear Lake, on 5/20/11

I think this must be a red-throated loon, given the loon shape and lack of a neck ring. They winter in Cabo, and breed in the Canadian arctic.  Just passing through.

Hope

"Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up." -David Orr

I admit I have been near-speechlessly gloomy and disheartened by, but not quite resigned to, the Fukushima disaster.  This reminder, from one of the most articulate environmental thinkers of our time (and one whom I have had the pleasure of knowing personally) has helped.

Trombone Swans

The only thing clear from these photos of trumpeter swans at the mouth of Prairie Creek is that I need a better lens.  I shot these through my binoculars.

Yes, I'm pretty sure they are trumpeter swans, rather than tundra swans, for two reasons:I didn't see any yellow on their beaks (my binoculars are much better than my lens-plus-binoculars), and the ruckus they were raising was a few octaves lower than any of the recordings of tundra swans I'm finding online today (maybe they should be called trombone swans).

There were sixteen of them in this flock, six bright white adults and ten gray and white juveniles.  The juveniles spent most of the time I was watching popping their heads up and down and calling - trying to get some action out of the adults, who were trying to enjoy a Sunday afternoon nap.

Kestrels and other Wild Things

Dandelion needed to get out of the house when I got home this afternoon, too early for me not to get some more work done.  So I bribed him with this and that: toys, otherwise forbidden socks and shreddable bits of cardboard, the best of all treats from the pet store: dried unmentionable parts of cows (steers, actually, but already that’s more information than I wanted to mention) all of which bought me less uninterrupted time at the computer than I wanted.  Although the day has been dismally gray and didn’t really suggest itself for a long walk, eventually I relented. 

We took the usual route to the boat launch, where I’ve been pausing to assess the ice, or more nearly my confidence in the ice.  It all depends on what the ice fishermen have been up to, which I read from their truck tracks.  If it looks like someone drove out on the ice recently, I figure that anything that can hold up a half-ton Chevy will likely hold me and a small dog.  Today it wasn’t so clear.  Tracks in frozen-up slush covered with a dusting of snow  – I am sure that these guys would think I’m ridiculously over-cautious.  On the other hand, my mother would think I was dangerously reckless to edge out on to the ice even a few feet, to where I know the water is only knee-deep.  Finally, Dandelion made the decision.  Too much good smelling stuff back on shore, dead grass and dog piss, trash from the ice houses, and sticks and fallen honey-locust pods to shake and pounce on and bury in the soft snow. 

As the dog was busy taking all of this in I heard a sharp, close “kiiiw” overhead, and looked up expecting a red-tail, but hoping for an eagle.  It was neither:  instead, a small, straight-tailed falcon, with rust-speckled pale belly, shot low over the trees and across the lake.

I recognized it instantly -- it was the second time I’ve seen a kestrel in the neighborhood this winter.  The first time, I saw it punch the thistle-seed feeder by the back door, just out of the corner of my eye, and  just in time to see it fly off with an awkward load, to the boat lift pulled up in the neighbor’s back yard: it had taken a goldfinch right off the feeder.  Before that, I didn’t know that kestrels hung out all winter in Minnesota.  And I certainly didn’t know they fed at bird-feeders.

I love seeing kestrels; they somehow capture that pure essence of wild-ness, despite their closeness to our everyday life. They were one of the things I enjoyed about my long commute from Northfield to Saint Peter ten years ago, seeing one every few miles, reliably holding down telephone wires along the route, completely oblivious to me, my car, and my binoculars when I stopped for a better look.  Right there, a few feet away across the road, but so intensely and completely focused on small movements in the grass, or in the gravel on the roadside, that they might as well have been a hundred miles away.  There is so much wild-ness in that intention, and in that focus, the reptile gaze that sees, reacts, hovers, strikes.

It’s easy to find, or imagine, that wild-ness in faraway places and unlikely things – in sheer cliffs, empty deserts, ocean storms, in the ferocity of snakes and cougars. But sometimes we can find it just right there, on a telephone wire, or at the bird feeder.  I imagine it’s that desire for proximity to wildness that makes some people want to keep wolves as pets.  As for me, I have a poodle, and a great pair of binoculars.

Of course, I can’t really claim any original discovery about kestrels here.  My response to them, my sense of their wild-ness will always be drawn by my response to the amazing, visceral wildness of “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem.  And I don’t mean that his dapple-dawn-drawn falcon is wild, I mean the poem itself, which is wilder than lions and tigers and Tyrranosaurus Rex all combined. 

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Google Earth Images - the neighborhood

These 2 images show the small-scale elevation changes left by the wide braided river system I blogged about yesterday.  The snow accentuates the relief: in some places, deeper snow fills channels and they show up as brighter white traces.  In other places, the channels are darker - probably because on warmer days, they hold moisture that melts the snow.
Both are screenshots from Google Earth.  If you want to explore the area, search either for Randolph MN or Stanton MN.

Puddles, Gravels, Pebbles, Cobbles, and Knowing Too Much

 

We had a couple of warm days this week, and three big liquid pools appeared in the ice.  Three of them, just offshore of the back yard.  None of the neighbors has these windows to lake; in fact, the guy two doors down was still driving his pickup out to his ice fishing house the day the pools in the ice appeared.

At first I figured they were probably just puddles on top of the ice.  But they got bigger and bigger, and bluer, and then there were four of them.  On a warm afternoon this week, I walked out onto the dock to see them better.  Of course the dock is pulled up onshore in the back yard, the end of it resting on the sandy strip we’ll call the beach this summer, but it’s a good six feet off the ground right now,  so it’s a better vantage point for viewing the pools in the ice.  Even from there I couldn’t quite tell.  So I  climbed down to get some pebbles. Or maybe they were cobbles.  Pebbles, cobbles whatever.  Stones, for the purpose of throwing.  One missed the mark, and stopped on top of the ice just before it hit the water.  I threw the next one harder and sure enough, it disappeared with an extremely satisfied ka-gloop, sending wide ripples out to the edges of the pool.  Definitely not just a puddle, a gen-yoo-ine hole in the ice.  That meant the end of walking the dog on the lake, as far as I’m concerned, though he hasn’t quite agreed with me yet and keeps wanting to head in that direction on our daily walk.   But the next morning, the dozen or so ice fishing houses we could see from here were gone, and the collective human wisdom will prevail.  After all, we are taller and can throw rocks and therefore see better the distinction between puddle and open water.

So I’m thinking probably have some springs in our 150-ft slice of lake, pumping warmer groundwater upward under the ice.  If I am right, it is a wonderful stroke of luck, that just offshore of our backyard some springwater will be flowing upward, keeping our stretch a little cooler and a little cleaner than it would otherwise be this July. 

If I’m not right, and instead what’s seeping up under the ice is leakage from our septic system, then something very different will be going on out there in July. Probably something very different, and unpleasantly green and soupy, will be happening by April.   

This is science at its best:  you see how I did that? I created multiple working hypotheses.  Testable in a few short months.  Clear water or green soup.  The trick will be to remain objective if one of the testable hypotheses turns into stinky and expensive  disaster.

Today is bright and cold and back down to the 20’s and a few ice fishermen are out again, but without their houses.  They walked out, and they’re just sitting on buckets on the ice.   The pools are shrinking today, and may ice up again before tonight’s storm hits.

I don’t know what will stand out for my readers in the preceding story (probably the stinky and expensive green soup), but for me what sticks is my inability to just call the stones I threw in the puddle “stones.”  I’ll tell you, there are some very wonderful things about knowing a thing or two or three about geology, but there are some irritations too and one of them is that I have to force myself to use the word “stones.” 

The things I picked up off the ground to toss into the pools of water are, technically speaking, pebbles, but big ones, almost big enough to be cobbles.  In the world of geology, and particularly in the world of sedimentology (the specialization of my training), the distinction lies at 64 mm.  Or if you prefer, 2.5 inches. Or, if you are reading this because you are one of the extra-lucky few people who know about Krumbein’s Phi Scale (maybe even because I taught it to you), right around φ = -6.[1]  The stone still sitting on the ice out back looks to be just about exactly that, as was the one that is now at the bottom of the lake.  So, you see, I am stuck not knowing quite what to call them.  Pebbles or Cobbles. 

Anyone who has spent too much time in school specializing in one thing or another runs into this trouble.  I imagine some astronomers are unable to see constellations as the rest of us can, knowing (as they do) that Alnilam, the center star in Orion’s belt,  is a blue-white supergiant, 1300 light-years away, much farther than Mintaka (900 light years) or Alnitak (800).  And that Alnitak itself is three stars, one of them a blue supergiant.  Already, see, there’s really no possibility of simply seeing these three stars in a straight line in the sky ever again.   You know too much.

My sister the Latin scholar posted on Facebook today something I did not know, but now do:  that the word “science” derives from a word meaning “to know.”  Now that I know that, it’s not too far a stretch to see why for many people the word “scientist” means “know-it-all.”  And not in a good way.

But the rewards of knowing a few things about science are usually worth these minor annoyances, annoyances like not being able to use a perfectly good word like “stone,” or not being able to see Orion’s belt as a two dimensional line ever again. 

In the case of my back yard, the pebbles, or cobbles, are part of a much bigger picture, a wonderful unlikely story.  A really big story actually, about a wide gravelly rush of melted  glacier that came charging through what is now the Cannon River Valley on its way to the Mississippi.  The big river flowed through steep rapids and drops, constantly tumbling and shifting all of this gravel from one side of the valley to the other, keeping any encroaching tundra vegetation to a minimum, and eroding away the edges of the white sandy hills at the valley’s edges. For a few hundred years, this river was probably most dramatic during the summer, when the ice was melting.  Glacial melting would have slowed or even stopped during the cold winter months.

Eventually, though, summer by summer, the glaciers that covered Minnesota with a mile-thick slab of ice finished melting.  Then, the wide, wild river calmed and narrowed to the trickle of its former self we call the Cannon.

How do I know it was fast, and steep, and powerful?  Because slow flat lazy rivers don’t move cobbles.  They move mud and silt, and during spring floods, maybe some sand.  Consider this 1902 photo of a gravel-bedded braided river in Alaska.  Imagine the mountains in the background are huge melting blocks of ice.  Now you're close to the picture I have in my head. 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_Floodplain_1902.jpg

 If I can figure out how to post a Google Earth image to this blog, I’ll show you what the ground looks like along the road to our house – it’s a myriad of low ridges and sluiceways, running roughly parallel to the course of the Cannon, that made up the gravel bars and channels of the wide braid plain of the pre-Cannon riverway.

 Now the mile-wide gravel plain underlies the well-tamed towns of Stanton and Randolph, the Stanton airstrip, the Syngenta experimental fields, and the irrigated cornfields of the big farm on the corner by our house.  Irrigated because gravelly soil is well-drained soil -- too well drained to grow corn without extra water. *

So this is what science does, at least for me.  It takes me from the pebble I tossed off the dock to this image of an Alaskan river, and puts it right in my back yard, with a brief detail to Krumbeins logarithmic phi scale.  Not bad for an afternoon of blogging.  

It's a good thing, this knowing.  

---

[1]Okay, if you truly want to know:   use this formula,

D = D₀2 ^{− φ}
where D is the diameter of the particle in question and D_o is a reference diameter of 1 mm. 

The value on the phi scale is the exponent of 2 that gets you to the diameter of interest times (-1).Why the multiplication by (-1)? It’s a convenience invented for the majority of sedimentologists, who deal more often with particles smaller than 1mm.  The gravel and conglomerate aficionados, like me, just put up with negative phi values, happy to know we are in the minority, and no one is trying to hone in on our macroscopic turf.  

*Also just a little too well drained for me to ignore the possibility that my septic drainfield may seeping warm water below the house’s foundation and out to springs under the lake. I'll keep you posted.  Check back at Stork Raving in three or four months. 

Ephemeral Winged

An adult mayfly.  Image Source.

 

A student in one of my classes rafted down the Mississippi River last summer, and made a movie about it.   I don’t know much about the journey, and the film isn’t done yet, but as you might imagine, this is a student whose mental wheels are always in motion.  In class last night, during a lecture-turned-conversation about population biology, she asked if I knew anything about the millions of insects that rose from the river, clouded the air for a few days, then disappeared.  Mayflies, I said.

What I knew last night about mayflies will fill this short paragraph.  They hatch all at once, they live as adults for a day or two, they mate, they lay eggs, they die.  All of them at once.

After I described what I know about the life cycle of  mayflies, another student asked the obvious:  “What’s the point?”

If I were an ecologist, or an evolutionary biologist, or had just about any different credentials for teaching about populations and ecosystems than the ones I have, I might have had an easier answer, which might have involved an explanation of the genetic drive to pro-create.  And if I were a little more new-agey in my professor persona, I might have appealed to an explanation about the nature of the life-force, the chi of the mayfly.  But my intellectual training didn’t feed me either of these lines of argument.  I scanned my brain for anything else I might possibly know about the Mayfly.  I came up with this extra data:

They’re a bit bigger and bulkier than a dragon fly, but not pretty, brown with long transparent wings. I have an image from my childhood of a small clear lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, its clean sandy bottom littered with millions of dead mayflies. That’s it.

Nope, I said, as far as I could tell, no point at all.  A younger, more idealistic group of students might have been dismayed, even horrified, by this answer, and I might have spent the rest of the semester back-pedaling, apologetically trying to work the philosophy of It all in to the rest of the course, trying to demonstrate that the world isn’t a harsh careless no-point-at-all kind of place.  But my students now are hard working-night-school-attending adults, and not afraid of harsh real-world answers.  “nope, no point at all” was a perfectly satisfactory answer for most of them, and instead of dismay or despair on their faces I saw chuckles, sighs, acceptance.  One student helpfully suggested: well I suppose they feed the fish and birds while they’re at it.  I agreed. 

But this morning I am left with the feeling of a good question not fully answered.  So I Googled:  Mayflies, meaning of life.

Image Source

I was surprised, as I often am by Google, at how many hits this query produced. A fellow blogger finds the meaning of Mayfly life in getting them to transfer from a tree to himself.¹ 




But I had to keep looking. 

And I have learned a lot in the past hour.  It all fills the next long paragraph.

The mayfly is not a single species, but an entire taxonomic Order called Ephemeroptera.  Ephemeral, winged.  Those taxonomists who came up with the name for this Order knew how to get to the heart of things.  But mayflies actually go through multiple life stages, and only the final stage is ephemeral, and winged.  The eggs hatch into nymphs, and some species go through as many as 28 separate nymphal stages. The nymphal stages can last up to four years. This starts to look like a pretty rich life.  As nymphs, they can eat, swim, and be eaten. Some species burrow, others live under rocks. Doubtless if they wanted to, these nymphs could form meaningful bonds with other nymphs, could appreciate the beauty and peril and joys of their nymph-ness, looking forward to future life stages, including contemplating their species’ imperatives to swim or burrow or live under rocks, harboring envy or hatred or unrequited love for other species of nymphs.  But it’s doubtful that they would want to.  Another Google search -- Mayfly consciousness – does yield some interesting links to the possibility that honeybees have enough neural networks to be able to count ².  Not quite the level of self-awareness we have in mind if we want the Mayflies to find meaning in their lives.  But certainly their brains are big enough for mayfly purposes.  Importantly, their brains are sufficiently large and sophisticated that they can sense the perfect conditions for moving into the next phase of life, a collective urge strong enough to bring their selves to the water’s surface en masse, to become full-fledged full-winged adult mayflies, hungry for survival of the species.

I admit, I am a little less dismayed or horrified (idealistic youngster that I am) by the brevity and singularity of purpose of their short adult lives.  Even though it is unlikely, these nymphal stages comfort that part of my imagination that wants there to be more to it .  If the Mayfly’s life has any meaning for us, it may be simply that while the end goal is vitally important for survival, the rich, multi-phased nymphal processes of getting there are where it’s at. 

¹http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/2010/06/they%E2%80%99re-baaack/

² http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1228661/Insects-consciousness-able-count-claim-experts.html

The Stork-billed Kingfisher

I chose the Stork-billed Kingfisher as the mascot for this blog, mostly because it's just incredibly cool-looking.  Moreso than any of the images of various actual storks I found.  

Like most midwesterners, I have never seen a Stork-billed Kingfisher.  They populate Southeast Asia, from Nepal to the Philippines, living on heavily wooded lakeshores and riverbanks and mangrove  -- er -- groves. 

One website from Singapore describes their hunting habits:
"Stork-billed Kingfishers eat mainly fishes, using their large heavy bills to good effect to catch and kill their prey. From their perch, usually about 2-4 m above the water, they will plunge into the water.... Prey is brought back and whacked senseless against the perch.*"

This, I want to see.  A bird takes its its prey back to its perch and whacks it senseless.  Especially one that has this crazy over-sized scarlet beak, a yellow body, and bright blue-green wings.  Now there's a mascot for you.  Three parts deadly killer and three parts pure circus.  

With animals like this on the planet, why would anyone ever need to write fiction? 





 *http://www.naturia.per.sg/buloh/birds/Pelargopsis_capensis.htm

Welcome

Welcome, whoever you are, to Stork Raving, a blog about science, nature, education, and as the blog title implies, whatever I might have to say about it, rants included. 

Almost guaranteed: observations of what's at my birdfeeder today, the weather (rants included) labradoodle tricks,  landscape, wind turbines, and especially when the ice thaws, about living on the lake.  Boats.  The garden.  Compost.  Vegetables.  Things sacred, and not.

Unlikely topics: the Superbowl, television, Facebook (we have Facebook for that).  Tea Party politics. 
But no guarantees.