Am I Important?

The weatherwoman said this weekend would be peak colors in Duluth. Perhaps she is right but it is hard to know with the foggy drizzle. I went for a walk near a stream I monitor hoping not to get shot by hunters and wishing I had worn my favorite color instead of my navy blue raincoat. Entire families on 4x4 off road vehicles went by. The people on the noisy vehicles appeared to be having fun in the mud but they sure tear up the roads around here. White throated sparrows call out. Woodpeckers are drumming on the trees. Crows and ravens are chatting. A rooster crows. I noticed a trail going through the woods on my left. Last time I was here I figured out it was a beaver trail. I saw the ferns and tansy stems near the stream on the right side of the road were all flattened toward the water. I saw a big deep rut in the road and I figured the beaver carried a heavy log.

This is where I suspected the beaver carried that log. A river otter would be cool but I think otters would have a narrower trail.

Lo and behold! A brand new dam built by busy beavers. Already the water is a good six inches higher above the dam. Beavers are an important part of our ecosystem. I don't know what impact this beaver dam will have on the plants and animals and birds and fish and reptiles around here but I suspect it will be helpful. Beavers are herbivores. I eat herbs too. In fact, as I walk along and snap off the yellow tansy heads I gather rosehips in my pocket. Like a beaver, I am preparing for winter. Are these beavers a young couple or have they been together for a few years? I hope the giant beaver is selected to be the state fossil this year. The milk from the mother beaver is 19 percent fat. Does this couple have baby beavers and if so, how many? A beaver can hold it's breath for 15 minutes. I am lucky to hold my breath longer than 1 minute.

If beavers are an important part of our ecosystem, am I an important part of my ecosystem?

 

Places To Go, Streams To Monitor

Last night we had a storm. Two buildings, a church and an apartment building, were struck by lightening closer to the downtown area. I got 1.4 inches of rain on my tiny deck. I decided today would be a good day to monitor my streams. I am getting ready to go when I see my neighbor mowing his lawn wearing flip flops. "Dude," I think to myself, "Wearing close toed shoes would be good when mowing your lawn." I gather all my stuff, rain boots, rain coat, short list of things I need to buy, a cozy sweater and I head out. Across the street in the newly mowed lawn are two tables and one shelf filled with hand blown glassware. Glassware is not on my list of things to buy today. But I go look. I see beautiful glassware. I see one giant vase and in my mind I see a $150.00 price tag on it, at minimum. I look anyway and I see a piece of green tape that reads $8. My mind was blown. I talk to Alisha, my neighbor, about a glass. She says it's 2 bucks. I say it's 5 bucks. She read it upside down. I only have 4 bucks. She takes 4 bucks. The cup is clear with blue and green. In the picture it looks yellow but that is because it set it on top of my wet car. This glass is so heavy and beautiful and will make my Duluth water taste even better. What a deal I got here. Then I go to Walgreens to buy calcium tablets and to break a twenty dollar bill so I can buy vegies from my farmer. After my first monitoring spot on the Cloquet River I go to the farm with a ten dollar bill to buy tomatoes and squash. I must have tunnel vision laser focused on the tomatoes because I don't see the farmer waving at me from the corn field. He looks like Santa Claus if Santa wore bib overalls and carried a hoe. I wave back. A bellow behind me makes me jump. There stand Elsie the cow with her sweet brown and white face standing there with her boyfriend, Elmer. I just walked past two ginormous cows and didn't even see them because I love tomatoes that much.

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Turkeys in the hay, turkeys in the way, turkeys in the straw, haw, haw, haw!

If you were an apex predator with color blindness, these turkeys would really blend in. I bet these birds were freshly hatched this year.

What did the angry turkey say to the other turkey?

Go pluck yourself! At my second river the water was much higher but not high enough to say the level was high. I marked it as normal because I have seen this entire road covered in water. Some turtles just hatched here and I could see their shells. These could be snapping turtles or maybe some other kind. I brought my nippers along because I want to make a fall bouquet. I snip off some maiden hair ferns, some fireweed stems, some balsam boughs and some sassafras stems. I also use my nippers to clip off some invasive tansy to make up for what I take out of this public forest. This will make a nice bouquet. I start to head home. I stick to my plan and just buy what is on my list. No more impulse buying for me. I get home and bring my things inside. I kept one dollar to repay the neighbor. I go to the neighbor's house again with my dollar bill and only my dollar bill because I am not going to buy anymore glass no matter how beautiful and how valuable.

I meet the Dude who mowed without shoes. His name is Jake. He blows glass at Canal Park and I have always wanted to take a class there. He says I can ask for him when I sign up for a class. He says he sold $400 worth today. He says he wants to get rid of his inventory. He says he will trade me for something. I eye the olive oil dispensers. His olive oil dispensers are gorgeous and functional. I mention I am infusing olive oil with garlic, peppers and orange peel. He says he will trade me, my olive oil for his olive oil dispenser. I run home and grab my olive oil which is actually delicious but it sitting in a $2 bottle I bought at Savers. He takes my spicy olive oil. His girlfriend is making lunch. This will go good on his sandwich. He asked me if I grew the peppers and dried them. I say no, I bought the peppers but I did peel the orange. He goes inside to get his sandwich and says to me, "Take what ever you want on the table. You don't have to take the olive oil dispenser I pointed out." I take the one he pointed out. I thought it was pink but in the sun it's orange. OMG!  Win/win bargain here.

I take most of my tomatoes and all the squash I bought from the Santa Claus farmer and bake them with onion, garlic cloves, plain olive oil, salt, pepper, and basil for an hour. I eat a quick lunch and go for another walk to get some exercise. I walk through the University campus. I monitor the Tischer Creek for the city of Duluth. Tischer Creek is at .4 inches. Even though we got all that rain, the creek is still very low. I would guess all the critters  who live in this creek are breathing a sign of relief that we finally got some rain. Football players are playing football. Baseball players are playing baseball. Tennis players are playing tennis. The campus seems to be coming alive again after the pandemic. I think back to my freshman year of college. I lived off campus. I would not be watching football, tennis, or baseball, I would probably be hanging out with other girls I see sitting in hammocks by the music building. These girls are sitting cross legged in hammocks jabbering away. I can't sit cross legged very long anymore but I can do it for a couple minutes. My right hip can tolerate that position longer than my left hip. Maybe I should buy a hammock? I keep walking. I have never been a big sports fan so I just walk through the crowds humming a song in my head (Nancy Sinatra-these boots(sandals) are made for walking), eager to get home to drink water out of my new glass.

 

In The Market For A Better Bucket

An acquaintance asked me what I was going to do tonight.  I told her I would monitor a creek, go the gym, monitor a river and go home to relax.  She asked about monitoring the streams.  I told her I check the clarity of the water, the temperature of the water, the recreational suitability and whether the stream was low, normal or high in volume.  She asked why and I responded that I did this for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.  She asked why again and I explained that we want to monitor if the water is polluted or not because pollution makes it harder for the fish, frogs, turtles, birds, and people who use the river.  If the pollution is worse, we want to know that so we can take steps to improve the water quality.  If the pollution is better we want to know that too so we can continue to keep up the good work.  So when I went to monitor Coon Creek this afternoon, I had good intentions.  I threw my metal bucket over the edge of the bridge to collect enough water to fill my secchi tube.  When I pulled the rope back I got very little resistance.  I thought, "Oh, oh."  I pulled up my rope and saw that only the handle to my metal bucket was attached.  I walked to the other side of the bridge and saw my bucket bobbing along in the water.  I thought about crossing the bridge, trespassing in someone's yard, pushing my way through the brush and tall forbs down to the river bank, stepping into the creek, and retrieving my bucket. I considered my options. Yeah, no.  I'm dressed in my work clothes.  I'm wearing expensive shoes.  I'm probably not fast enough to catch up to that bucket. The stream was high because of all the rain that has fallen lately.  I watched it float away thinking, "Great, I've contributed to the pollution of this creek and the river it goes into.  I've added a metal bucket to all the other trash.  How ironic.  While volunteering for the Pollution Control Agency, I polluted."  Well, I had good intentions.  I meant well.  Better to loose a metal bucket than a plastic bucket (I think).  I'm in the market for a better bucket.

Reader Interactive

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Have you ever looked at the clouds on the horizon at sunrise and pretended they were mountains?

Stream Monitoring

All summer I volunteered to monitor water quality on the Rum River in Anoka. The Pleasant Street bridge is my station. I had to buy some equipment to do this job. I needed a bucket, a rope, a long tape measure, a plumb bob, and a thermometer. Once a week I would park my car on the bridge and subjectively measure the river quality. I'd rate the appearance from 1 (clear) to 5 (muddy and green). I'd rate the recreational suitability from 1 (very good) to 5 (would not even swim in it). I would throw the bucket over the bridge and bring up a sample from the middle of the stream. Once I threw it over and did not notice some anglers in a boat. They told me they were tempted to pull back on the rope and I'm glad they didn't because that would have scared me half to death. I pull the bucket up trying not to rub the rope against the bridge. I pour some into a transparency tube. This tube is 60 cm tall. You can see in the graph above that most of the time the Rum River was very transparent. Things started out clear in the beginning of May. By the end of May, the water was cloudier. Things got a little clearer for a while until June 29 when I got my lowest reading ever of 34.4 cm. I remember that day. I even had a big green glob in the tube. By the middle of July the water cleared up and stayed clear the rest of the season. After transparency, I would measure the water temperature which varied from 58 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Finally I would measure the depth of the stream. I used the same place on the bridge railing to measure how far down the surface of the water was from the railing. This figure never varied more than a foot. The Anoka dam is just downriver from Pleasant Avenue so that keeps the depth of the river from changing very much. I also measured the rainfall from my home every day. My work is done for the season and I turned my figures in to the MN Pollution Control Agency. In reviewing my data, what I don't understand is why river water is less transparent in May and June. Lakes, from my experience, start out clear, worsen as the temperature increases, are at their worst transparency during the dog days of August and clear up again in the fall. Why aren't rivers the same? This week I'm starting another Master Naturalist course and I'll try to get an answer to that question. In the meantime, I'm taking a break until Project Feederwatch starts in November.

Disturbing the Swallows

I started monitoring the quality of the Rum River this spring for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. On Monday evenings, I park my car on the Pleasant Avenue bridge. First I rate the river quality on aesthetics (would I swim in it, etc). Then I throw an empty bucket tied to a rope over the railing and haul up a bucket of river water. I pour the water into a secchi tube that holds 60 centimeters of water. I see if I can distinguish the black and white pattern at the bottom of the tube. If I can't see it, I slowly let water out until I can see it and measure how deep the water is in the tube. Then I look for the screw in the bottom of the tube. If I can't see that, I slowly let water out until the screw becomes visible. I measure the temperature of the water in the bucket. And finally I take a large tape measure with a plumb bob taped to the bottom of it and measure how far down the river is from a specific spot on the bridge. While I'm doing all these things, I have drawn some attention. Several people have asked me if I needed help. I suppose they thought my car broke down and that is why I'm parked on the bridge. Several teen aged boys have asked me what I'm doing. I tell them the boring story and they bike away without asking too many questions. Once an angler in a boat said he was going to pull on that bucket to surprise me. I didn't see him because he was anchored out of my sight under the bridge. I guess I surprised him first. There is one group that becomes positively irate and agitated when I monitor the river quality. The cliff swallows fly into a rage every week, squawking and moving at me aggressively. The rope and the bucket must be threatening to them. Tonight the water was clearer than last week. Maybe the rain in the past week cleared it up.

Snapdragons

http://www.thisgardenisillegal.com/flower-quiz

I'm glad to be a snapdragon. I've always liked snapdragons. When I was a kid I lived across the street from an open field. In the fall, the owner of the field and some men friends would torch the field and slowly burn it from east to west. We played in the empty field. I enjoyed the wild yellow snapdragons that grew there. I would pinch the little snapdragon cheeks to make the mouths open. I don't know the evolutionary purpose of a flower design that would open when squeezed from the sides at exactly the right place but it sure was entertaining to me as a child. I still squeeze snapdragons to make their mouths open. I planted some pink and yellow snapdragons at the bottom of my deck steps and yes, I've been pinching them. Take the quiz to see what flower you are.

Mailbox survey-please comment!

I have decided to repaint my mailbox. This is something constructive I can do that does not interfere with my medical restrictions. Right now my mailbox is yellow with red polka dots. How should I repaint my mailbox? I am eager to hear your suggestions. My daughter has suggested a hamburger (ruled out because I don't eat meat), a watermelon sliced off at the front and back, a kiwi, or purple with blue stripes. I am thinking a hunter orange with frogs. What do you think?