Weed from the ninth circle of hell

That would be Japanese Knotweed. The existence of this scourge should convince everyone, including Ken Ham, that there is no intelligent designer. Its existence in Japan was tolerable because, naturally, since it's indigenous to the islands there are many insects and other creatures there that eat it. But in Europe and North America, there aren't any, not a single one.

The plant spreads vegetatively, via rhizomes. It outcompetes every other plant, and it forms dense thickets where nothing else can grow. It is extremely vigorous and thrusts up through gaps between paving blocks, destroys roads and oh yeah, destroys the foundations of houses. It is extremely difficult to eradicate because it grows back from the rhizome and if you leave even 1/2 inch, it will reappear. It is particularly fond of riverbanks and can totally destroy riverine habitats.

This is what it looks like when it newly sprouts:











And here's what it looks like in bloom.



If you have knotweed on your property, your real estate is literally unsaleable. Eradicating it takes years. You have to keep cutting it down and poisoning it, over and over. If you see any, start killing it now, and expect you will be devoting yourself to the project for a long time to come. Most homeowners, we are told, will be unable to cope with a large infestation themselves and will need to hire expert help.

The bad news for me is that there are extensive stands along the state road near the center of my tiny little town. The biggest stand is on the edge of a cornfield, which makes me wonder if the farmer has all his marbles. I haven't seen any in my neck of the woods but presumably we will at some point.

Gypsy moths, Russian olives, barberry, Asian long-horned beetles, emerald ash borers, woolly adelgids, knotweed -- who knows what these woods will look like in 20 years. I think we have no choice but to try to fight back by introducing natural enemies of these pests. Yeah, maybe that will backfire but I don't see how it can make things any worse.

A serious glut

Last year we had an extreme breakout of gypsy moth caterpillars, for the second year in a row. They do best in fairly dry conditions, which means that the trees along the roads were devastated, while the  deep woods weren't as badly affected. But when I say devastated I mean it -- miles of dead oak trees, particularly along the state roads. So the DOT sent crews along this spring to take them all down, leaving immense piles of prime firewood.

There is so much of it that the landowners took to putting up signs saying "Leave the wood!" because they couldn't get around to processing it themselves or hiring someone. It's still disappearing very gradually.

So my neighbor has three dead oak trees along his driveway, and he has a crew taking them down right now. This afternoon I'm going to go over there and start sectioning it and bringing it back to my house to split and shed. I figure I'll end up with enough for the next two winters. I believe I mentioned that I already had a grandmother maple tree come down on my own property so I have a  head start. The bad news for a lot of hardworking young guys is that the price of firewood is obviously going to tank. Selling firewood is no way to make a living anyway, but now, forget about it. But, if they can keep it shedded, maybe it will be worth something in another year.

The good news is we have had an exceptionally wet spring. In fact we set an all time record for the most rainy days in April. The caterpillars won't be back this summer, but still, we lost millions of old trees. The landscape will never be the same.

Top Soil

As I believe I may have mentioned, my  neighbor owns hundreds of acres of woods  and I keep his roads open in exchange for the firewood. This involves chainsaws and a tractor that I use to load big pieces into the truck and pull logs to more accessible locations. The tractor also has a backhoe, which comes in handy for my neighbors at times.

So yesterday I took the day off from work to have my car serviced and my neighbor and I took advantage of the opportunity to dig out a culvert. It carries a stream under one of his roads near the property of the town historical society. The stream is runoff from a cornfield.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this sort of situation, what can happen is that if the stream slows down at the entrance to the culvert, silt will fall out of it. Once this starts to happen it's self-reinforcing. The ridge of silt slows the stream down further and more and more silt falls out until the culvert is completely obstructed and the water is forced to flow over the road.

So I dug out what must have been a ton of the most beautiful black topsoil you ever saw. The farmer sprays the field with synthetic fertilizer every spring, and as the topsoil washes into the Shetucket he just keeps spraying more. That's where the corn comes from -- a factory that uses natural gas both as fuel and as feedstock to manufacture ammonia. About 2-3% of the world's natural gas consumption is used for this purpose. So to be clear, you are eating fossil fuel, while the world's top soil washes  into the ocean.

State of the Forest Report

Two weeks ago the top of a huge maple tree on the edge of my woods broke off. I cleaned up the top, which had about 40 feet of trunk. Well, mostly. I still have to split it and shed it. Anyway I had to borrow my neighbor's chain saw with a 25 inch bar to fell the trunk, and that was still pretty difficult since it's a good 36 inches in circumference four feet up where I made the cut. It came down quite nicely though. I measured it at 32 feet so the total height of that tree was about 76 feet. It was senescent, with a hollow bole, and it was hollow where it broke off.

So that tree had reached its natural life span. I looked it up and that could be anywhere from 100 to 175 years depending on the environment. Since it was in the woods, away from any noxious environmental stress, I'd lean toward the high end. Since it was in a moist environment, it hadn't been defoliated by gypsy moth caterpillars, at least not since I've been here.

There are a few mature trees like that around. The predominant species is oak. I have one oak tree that's more than 4 feet in diameter. It has a long scar from a lightning strike but otherwise seems sound. Red oaks typically live 200 years but can live much longer. Most of my oak trees --

Oh, I just stopped to watch a red fox ambling through the woods --

Anyway, as I was saying, my oaks are mostly about 18 inches or so in diameter, some 24, I'm guessing a little over 100 years old. This land does not appear ever to have been farmed but some of it was evidently used briefly as pasture as there are stone walls. (The stone walls did not function as property dividers, as some people think, but just as a dump for rocks.) Anyway, what happened is that the New England forest was largely cleared for charcoal in the 19th century. They would leave a "grandmother tree" here and there, for shade and also to  anchor the block and fall they used to pull stumps. That's what the big ones are. The forest regrew after petroleum largely eliminated the market for charcoal, so the math works out. This is a second growth forest but it's reaching maturity.

There are real problems however. Invasive species are number one. The woolly adelgids are killing the hemlocks, and outbreaks of gypsy moths have severely stressed the oaks. In fact there are so many dead oak trees along the roads them state has been out cutting them down and vast tracts of oak logs line route 14. The gypsy moth outbreak was more severe along the roads. As I say, in the deep woods they don't seem to thrive as much. Now we're threatened by the Asian long horned beetle, which hasn't made it here yet, and the emerald ash borer. The chestnuts and elms were wiped out long ago. The white birches were almost exterminated by a blight but there were some resistant trees and they've made a bit of  comeback. I have a few, I'm happy to say.

I already mentioned the deer overpopulation as a major threat to the forest. Still, it's come back enough that the wildlife has recovered with it. We'll see how long it lasts.

Pride in Dixie

I was at the local auto repair shop the other day and Russ and his friends were there sitting around the cracker barrel. They were discussing a story in the Norwich newspaper (there still is one, believe it or not) about our first selectman who had apparently allowed himself to be photographed in front of a Confederate battle flag at an outdoor meeting in the neighboring town. Evidently the flag just happened to be there, a homeowner was displaying it. The meeting was about building codes or some such anodyne matter.

So Dan should have known better but the interesting question for me is why we see so many Confederate flags here in northeastern Connecticut. The people who display them have probably never been south of New York. Not too long ago I saw a pickup truck in a restaurant parking lot. The front license frame proclaimed the owner to be the town fire chief. Instead of a license plate, it contained a Confederate battle flag. For a while it was fashionable to fly a U.S. flag on your pickup. Some guys actually had a U.S. flag on one side and a Confederate flag on the other. There's a house on a road that's heavily traveled because it connects Windham Center with North Windham, where there's a commercial district. This guy has a lot of old heavy equipment rusting in his yard, and a huge Confederate battle flag hanging from a tree.

I don't think I have to tell you that Connecticut did not join the Confederacy. Connecticut was in fact the home of many noteworthy abolitionists including, of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lincoln won the state's electoral votes in a landslide. The state lost more than 4,000 men in the Civil war.

So what point are these clowns trying to make? There must be some intention behind the gesture. Unlike southerners, they can't pretend they're honoring their ancestors or remembering their dead. What do they want us to think of them?

Okay I'm back

I keep wanting to maintain this blog as a sort of personal diary, mostly concerned with the nature around me and somewhat with the people. For reasons into which I have no insight, I keep abandoning it. But I'm going to try again. I don't expect to post every day but my goal is to post at least a couple of times a week.

It was a bit late in coming but we finally have some real spring weather, even with some frost free nights. I haven't made a fire since Friday, and the house is very comfortable just from solar gain. No  green shoots yet to speak of, although the daffodils I planted in the fall have come up. Any time now I expect the grass to start greening up.

While that should lift my spirits, nature is definitely out of whack. Mostly, there are too many deer. Far too many. I see flocks of them every day and they are preventing the forest from regenerating. Wildlife has come back during my lifetime -- not only deer but turkeys, black bears, and coyotes are far more numerous than when I was a child. There are also foxes and bobcats around here, and other creatures that are elusive but I know are around. I saw two foxes strolling across my lawn a while ago, first an adult and then what I assume was her kit. The problem is there aren't enough predators and what there are don't prey on deer. People think they're cute but somebody needs to start shooting them. By the thousands. Literally.

And by the way I'm a vegetarian. There's no contradiction. I would eat sustainably harvested wild game. It's the meat industry I object to.

The National Bird

A big flock of turkeys just went through my yard, apparently finding plenty to eat. They poke their beaks into the ground finding grubs and seeds and who knows what. There were maybe 16 of them.

An oddity about turkeys is that they seem to have largely random flocking habits. You'll see them all alone, in pairs, in groups of any size up to enormous uncountable congregations. In the summer of course you will see a hen with her chicks. Sometimes two hens will go about in pairs with their broods. According to the Wild Turkey Federation (yes, it exists) they have actually formed stable single-sex flocks by this time of year, but evidently the members don't always hang out together. The flock that went by my house was female.

In mating season, in the spring, they form huge mixed sex aggregations where the males strut and display. It's sort of like a singles bar. This once happened in my yard and it was quite a spectacle. The Wild Turkey Federation doesn't actually mention this but I can tell you that it happens. Unlike their deformed domesticated brethren wild turkeys can fly pretty well, but they don't do it much. They will actually climb trees rather than fly up into them. I think they fly only to escape predation. Since they feed on the ground anyway, they might as well save energy and stay there.

But they do get taken by surprise sometimes. Once in a while I'll find a bunch of feathers, and once I even found remains. We have foxes, bobcats and coyotes, and I would imagine some feral cats although I haven't seen any. Of course human hunt them as well. Still, the turkeys don't act as if they are at all worried.