Thanks to Susan Loredo of Audubon for providing this inside look at BP executives in action.
The Notebook is still a bit chaotic, but by June 21 we'll have it ready.
Sneak Peek at the Notebook
I haven't had time to blog lately because we've been so busy getting the Notebook ready for its season opening on June 21.
We've set up bookcases downstairs and are filling them with the more than 1,000 natural-history titles we've added—one of New England's biggest and best collections. Art workshops and photography hikes are being planned. Our Congolese bonobo has moved in. A bird canopy is rising. The Natural League baseball standings board (a.k.a. the Little Green Monster) is up and operating. Dogs and elephants are in the house. I am trying to learn how to levitate the Earth with my hands (you'll understand if you visit).
E.O. Wilson, the renowned naturalist, sits at the top of the staircase smiling at us as we tote art supplies and the makings of an ant world up to the second floor. E.O. has discovered more than 300 species of ants himself and has studied how a massive ant colony can function as single super-organism. As Pamelia, I and two wonderful College of the Atlantic students, Haley and Sarah, worked together yesterday, I felt as though we were our own super-organism, carrying each piece of the new Notebook to exactly the right place.
At day's end I stopped to see our friend Betty, who has been making beautiful knitted goods for the shop. She gave me the sort of gift I didn't often receive in my pre-Notebook days: a beaver skull with one loose tooth. She'd found it on the ground near her cottage. We will add it to the Notebook's growing collection of specimens.
If any of you happens to be a small-animal dentist, please stop by this summer.
An oil-covered bird at East Grand Terre Island, off the coast of Louisiana, as photographed by Charlie Riedel of the Associated Press.
The Power of One Photograph
The Sun Chip Composting Test
By my mathematical analysis, the new "100% compostable" Sun Chips bag is at least seven times louder than the chips themselves. That is, if I chomp down on a jaw-stretching stack of seven Sun Chips, the crunch! is still nowhere near as loud as the heavy-metal concert of crumpling noise produced if I merely touch the bag.
Such is the price of progress. No one will be able to sneak out to the kitchen for a midnight Sun Chip anymore without waking the dog, the kids and possibly the neighbors.
But that's probably a good thing—as is, I hope, the new Sun Chips bag. It is made of PLA, otherwise known as polylactic acid or polyactide. That's a polyester created from corn starch or sugarcane. I was proud to see that a Maine company, Woods End Laboratories of Mount Vernon, had helped Frito-lay (the maker of Sun Chips) develop and test the new bag. Woods End sounds like a progressive place; it's big into developing an energy source called biogas—methane captured from processing organic waste.
I've got plenty of waste. Assuming I'm a more or less typical American, I produce about 4.4 pounds of trash per day. Much of it will sit in tact in a landfill for between 500 years (a plastic grocery bag) and a million-plus years (a piece of styrofoam). Even longer if it's a piece of styrofoam buried inside a plastic bag.
I try to atone in part by maintaining a compost bin for organic matter. And that is where, at 8 this morning, I launched the Great Sun Chip Composting Test. I placed an empty Sun Chips bag onto the compost heap, covered it with grass and leaves, and dumped a bowl of kitchen slop on top. According to Frito-lay, if my compost bin maintains an optimal internal temperature (about 130 degrees) the bag should totally decompose in 13 weeks.
The composter.
Side order of chips with those leftover cooked fiddlehead ferns?
Saving the planet ain't always pretty.
I'm not going to take my compost's temperature, but I will eagerly check in on the bag's condition. (Cue the composter's anthem: We will... we will... rot you!) Let's look ahead to a summer of nasty blog photos and circle Total Decomposition Day—September 1—on the calendar.
Just one question: What do you do with a Sun Chips bag if you don't have a compost heap?
Notebook News...
People keep coming into the shop even though we aren't opening until June 21st. We've had groups from the Atlanta area (including a naturalist for the state of Georgia), Minneapolis and Toronto, all of whom loved the place. A good omen, I think...
Any of you ever try to correct a mistake in a Google map listing? Google has shown the Notebook as being in Bar Harbor, not Seal Harbor (huge difference) ever since we launched the shop. I thought I had solved the problem, but now Google shows TWO Naturalist's Notebooks, one in Bar Harbor and one in Seal Harbor. (And the lovely review that someone wrote about the shop is attached to the Bar Harbor listing.) All suggestions welcome!
Memorial Day Animal Picnic
I learned today that the name raccoon comes from the Algonquin word arakun, which means one who scratches with his hands. The fellow in the photo showed up early—the first diner at our all-day critter picnic—and lived up to his name. Unfortunately, he was joined by not only the usual squirrels and chipmunks but also the guy below...
...a woodchuck, or ground-hog, who started nibbling our perennials. He had a lot of swagger to him. He just stared at us and kept chewing as we got within several feet of him. Our dahlias are suddenly in grave peril. Any suggestions on how to non-violently persuade him to move elsewhere?
The raccoon asked for a feeder refill (sorry, pal!) before heading off to enjoy his Memorial Day holiday. I hope you all enjoyed yours.
I saw these huge bullfrog tadpoles (at least seven inches long including tail) hanging out in Little Long Pond, less than a mile from The Naturalist's Notebook. They weren't part of Arthur Haines's walk, but they were one of my favorite sightings of the week (see bottom of column).
Tadpole Buddies, a Plant Genius and My Lonely Yellow Warbler
Who could pass up a chance to go exploring with a really cool botanist who was once described in a newspaper headline as the Gonzo Biologist?
Not Pamelia and I.
Arthur Haines earned the gonzo label from the Portland Press Herald for the gusto with which he pursues his passions. Those range from primitive skills to jujitsu to—most of all—plants. According to the Press Herald, Arthur, a research botanist for the New England Wild Flower Society and the director of the Delta Institute of Natural History in Bowdoin, Maine, is a sort of nature-inspired Indiana Jones who'll fearlessly scale a cliff to just find a plant specimen he can study...or perhaps eat.
Now, Arthur did nothing that daring when we joined him for a plant walk on Mount Desert Island the other day. He did pull out an impressively large knife, but only to peel a piece of burdock root, which tastes like a bland carrot and can be cooked like a potato. (Interesting side note: The design of the burrs from one variety of burdock inspired Swiss engineer George de Mestral to invent Velcro half a century ago.) Arthur demonstrated how to start a fire with a bow drill, guided us through the nibbling of leaves of hawthorn bushes, oxeye daisies, even horribly sour-tasting burdock ("The guidebooks tell you that you can eat [burdock leaves], but nobody on the planet is eating these,” he said) and regaled us with a tale of how native Americans saved French explorer Jacques Cartier's scurvy-afflicted crew with a tea made from an evergreen—a generous act that did not deter Cartier from seizing six of the natives as specimens to bring back to Europe, where they were put on display and died.
Pamelia learned the hard way that burdock leaves are painfully sour.
Throw in Arthur's friendliness and his scientific expertise on the medicinal and nutritional value of flora and you see why the 20 or so of us who walked with him along a dirt road and through a meadow for two hours came away considerably enlightened, thoroughly entertained and highly impressed with the expert in our midst. We had gained a new appreciation of the uncommon properties of common plants, from staghorn sumac to Northern white cedar to invasive nuisances like the Japanese knotweed.
After pondering how eagerly homo sapiens slash, burn, hack, poison, mow down, plow under and pave over whole fields of diverse flora species that we lump together as "weeds," I could come to only one conclusion: The rest of the world is gonzo and plant defender Arthur Haines is the sane one.
Haines will be leading other walks on MDI over the summer, sponsored by a splendid new environmental organization called Anaskimin. That name is a native American word for acorn, which is apt: Haines has been known to whip up pizza with a crust he makes from acorn flour and tomato juice. He may be giving a seminar at the Delta Institute later this year on how to make flour from acorns.
Arthur has an excellent plant book coming out. I'll let you know when it's released.
That's a dreaded Japanese knotweed in front of Arthur, who nevertheless had a few good things to say about a plant that has been ranked among the world's 100 worst invasive species.
Three Sightings of the Week
I hope this guy finds a mate; his daily songs seem to have gone unanswered.
1) The yellow warbler. Almost every morning when I wake up and look out the bedroom window, he's sitting in the brush with the bay behind him, singing. If you want to hear his call, go to http://www.birdjam.com/birdsong.php?id=17
2) The two gigantic bullfrog tadpoles sunbathing together on a lily pad in Little Long Pong. According to the two naturalists I was out with, Billy Helprin and Tom Vining, the largest of the tadpoles probably wintered over at the pond. Which reminds me: I read a wonderful book a few months ago called Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, by Bernd Heinrich. If you ever wondered how animals stay alive in cold winter climates, give this book a read.
3) The Babson Creek bluebird. Sure, Eastern bluebirds are common. I've seen many. But this particular male was an especially gorgeous blue (males are bluer than females) and was perfectly framed by the forked dead branch on which he sat at the Maine Coast Heritage Trust's Babson Creek Preserve. He flitted off for a moment and came back with a super-sized caterpillar, which he eventually downed for breakfast. I walked away reminding myself: Appreciate the ordinary. And remember that nothing is ordinary.