tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-332424962024-03-13T23:26:45.498-07:00yellowfield biological surveysbotanical, wildlife, rare species, wetlands, and natural areas surveysUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-9408624181830081012021-01-26T13:56:00.000-08:002021-01-26T13:56:27.617-08:00That Clawing Feeling<div style="text-align: justify;">It is said, if the earth were to experience all-out nuclear war, the only living things that would survive would be cockroaches. Some have said that lawyers should be added to the list, but others argue that they cannot be classified as living things. We hear that the matter has gone to court. </div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">If that were to be true, it would be worth proposing that the cockroach be the official life form of planet Earth, in the way the state bird of South Dakota is the Ring-necked Pheasant - an alien, introduced bird that dominates the agricultural center of North America, a region once teeming with Prairie Chicken, Long-billed Curlew, Upland Sandpiper, Marbled Godwit, Trumpeter Swan, Ferruginous Hawk, and a hundred others, no make that a hundred and four and one more line of type and it's a hundred and fifteen. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Similarly, if Earth were to have a global animal, any competent ecologist would propose the ubiquitous French poodle, of the genus <i>Canis</i>, whose global range exceeds that of all other species with the exception of its host, the human being, <i>Homo sapiens</i>, otherwise referred to as bloke, dude, bud, tellurian, featherless biped, naked ape, soft machine, state-building animal, mall rat, or one who burns his own home. The poodle is genetically depressed, filled with maladaptations, sickly and frail, insufferably optimistic, with poor motor skills, vestigial frontal and temporal lobes, and whose persistence despite the pressures of natural selection vexes all zoologists who study it. It is a wonder why it hasn't been buried by time and pressed into flat pages of the fossil record and filed away in the basement of a shuttered museum. Its persistence threatens to unravel the entire intellectual construct supporting the assertion that natural selection produces fitter species. It is Exhibit A. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If Earth were to have a global bird, a case might be made for the plastic bag, which is seen flying overhead in all regions that experience weather, but, despite its organic chemistry, filled with carbon rings and hydrogen, it does not reproduce, respond to stimuli, metabolize, or adapt to its environment. As a result of this, some proposed that the plastic bag is a form of lawyer, but the proposition was quickly withdrawn when it stimulated powerful, self-replicating litigations. At which point, a case was made for the drone, another ubiquitous species, now seen rapidly populating National Parks across the world. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If Earth were to have a global flower, judging from economic impacts, it has been suggested that it might be some variety of <i>Cannabis</i>, commonly called Lime Pillows, Butter Flower, Shmagma, Sinsemilla, or Almohada, but there has been an utter and sustained lack of interest in the suggestion. How that is possible blows the mind. Field corn (<i>Maize</i>) would be another candidate. It is also known as steroidal grass, night squeak, gene pool red, and conscience plant, the one that gauges the moral character of civilization. When humans feel humane they feed it to the hungry, as they devolve into their reptilian state, they burn it as fuel, feeding this intercontinental species commonly called "the economy." </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ah, the economy. Like it or not, whether or not the economy is a living thing has been a matter of debate for centuries, and the debate will likely continue into the future, right up to the point where the beast incinerates humanity in a blast of its hot atomic breath. The thing replicates like the European rabbit, overwhelming its habitat and spilling over natural boundaries, digging under fences, hitchhiking in shipping containers, crawling into airplane cargo bays, establishing indomitable populations on every continent, at every latitude, and every altitude. It is omnivorous, consuming everything in its path, inorganic and organic matter, abstract and concrete objects, the living and the dead - vegetation, animals, birds, copper, coal, aquifers, open space, privacy, patience, generosity, kindness, and peace of mind. The heat it generates is said to be so intense - get this! - it can alter the <i>weather</i>. It responds to real or perceived injury by inducing global panic, blockades, and war. And, most remarkable of all, it is nearly unidentifiable - ask any economist to describe it - being able to adapt to any environment, occupy all niches, switching with ease from predator to parasite to prey to keystone species and all points in between. While it slips from our mental grasp, it is gorging on scientific truth and excreting virtual mountains of vile, pestilential disinformation. Unfortunately, our relationship has become symbiotic, and we have developed a taste for disinformation just as it has developed a taste for us. The current theory is, natural selection, operating in a disinformation-biased environment, selected for humans with disinformation-tolerant genes. Gradually, humans developed a dependence upon an amino acid only found in disinformation. Diets lacking this amino acid have been shown to cause loss of hypervigilance, aggression, confirmation bias, and illusory pattern perception, traits that are highly advantageous in a disinformation-based ecosystem.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well, it has been argued that the sole objective of the economy is to convince us that it is not a living thing. Corporations are corporeal. They have civilian rights. This thing is respiring, circulating its black, oily blood, shifting roles, developing resistance, metastasizing everywhere, metabolizing everything. It's alive, but not in a way we know or understand. Like the frozen monster in science fiction, it may look dead, but that's its competitive advantage, its advantageous trait, its survival strategy. It's alive. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We know the feeling. There are tales of humans who were thought to be dead, who were buried alive, and clawed at the casket until they ran out of air. We are tailored for this earth, we fit well, a custom fit, like an Italian suit, a bright man-sized life. But the air is getting thin. We are running out of oil, water, timber, space, patience, peace, air, even adjectives to describe this whatever it is that is eating it all. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hey, but before we go, we have to say, it's no contest. The biological representative of our shrinking Earth, this transformed, terraformed, shell-shocked, anthropomorphized house, beset by centuries of radical reconstruction, nearly unrecognizable to anyone who knew it decades ago, it's the economy. No argument here, it's like we were made for each other. Now, if we can just claw us both out of this jam. </div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-73403057477364609772021-01-22T23:45:00.001-08:002021-01-22T23:45:07.512-08:00Parting Thought<p> <span style="text-align: justify;">It is always a cheery thing to reflect on the fact that humans are not currently fitted with shock collars. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">As a crowd masses at an international border, pressing up against the gateway to a purportedly safer country, held at bay by armed guards, yet another stream of refugees fleeing from some armed conflict over differing versions of reality, a hawk flies over the crowd and enters the airspace of the safe country. It has violated the airspace, yet no passport was presented, no fighter jets scrambled, no shots were fired, and nobody was led away in leg irons to a holding cell. The hawk disappears over the ridge. Say goodbye. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Zoologists will fit animals with radio collars to monitor their movements. Pet owners will fit dogs with shock collars to prevent them from traveling into a restricted area, like the neighbor's garbage can. Police will fit errant humans with ankle bracelets to monitor their movements and prevent them from traveling into a restricted area, like Shorty's Tavern. Yet, we see no herds of migrating humans outfitted with shock collars. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Incidentally, despite the short step from ankle bracelet to shock collar, most humans willingly fit themselves with cellular phones that monitor their movements. While our data is liberated from our accounts and pored over by men in trenchcoats with thick accents, we are deterred from entering actual locations and relationships. Don't walk on the neighbor's grass. Don't talk to the person next to you on the bus. Keep focused on the flat screen. Something follows this. We have all found out that the buzzing in the coat pocket often precedes an intense episode of humiliating interrogation by some older relative or salesperson. This is called conditioning. Do not imagine what is next.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Now, as noted, the restricted areas are often imaginary lines, ones invisible to sentient beings, with the clear exception of us wayward humans, who have the unique ability to perceive things that don't really exist and to wage war with those who perceive a conflicting unreality. This battle over unrealities is called the <i>March of History.</i> It is the unenviable load of historians to attempt to describe what is not actually there in such a way that the reader segregates it from fiction. This is unsustainable. This is why most history books are ephemeral, like a shimmering mirage in Death Valley, filled with the bones of millions of men and women who crawled across the sand convinced that it was a real freshwater lake filled with real schools of promise. Enter the next dynasty, the one with a conflicting version of unreality, and the books are revised, banned, or burned. A new mirage appears and another crowd forms on the imaginary shoreline. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The fences in the field create fences in the mind. Thoughts in isolation do not thrive; this is not an original thought. It's like the ghost image of our schoolteacher that appeared when we closed our eyes after staring at her standing in front of a black chalkboard for 20 minutes. Life reproduces phantom life in the mind. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Here is a paradox: inbreeding depression is the effect seen when a population becomes isolated and breeds with closely related individuals. They become unfit, less likely to survive. Thus, if children had been segregated according to hair color, while we would experience no suprise if blondes were to wage war with brunettes in the near term, in the long term, after several generations of blondes interbreeding with blondes and brunettes interbreeding with brunettes, we would expect bad traits to arise, an upwelling of deleterious characteristics. Sloped foreheads, brow ridges, palm hair, whippy little tails, and a host of deleted or duplicated parts like extra sets of legs, cartoon hands, or the proverbial Third Eye. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Dagnabbit, this keyboard is too small for all these fingers. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">At the same time, isolation of populations is said to drive what is called </span><i style="text-align: left;">speciation</i><span style="text-align: left;">, the creation of new species, which develop traits and reproductive behavior that renders them incompatible with their parent population. Think leopards and jaguars, dingos and coyotes. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Don't get too excited. Looming over all of this is the <i>March of Science,</i> in which the scientific method seeks to establish a more perfect conception of reality. Michaelangelo once stated, "</span><span style="text-align: left;">The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material." That is art, that is science. The hard truth at the center may be: we are still in the quarrying phase. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Despite the provisional status of ideologies, angry crowds full of assumption push to the front of the line. If variety arises from isolation while isolation creates unfit varieties, the question arises, What happens to us? Better check your watch. There is a huge mob forming at every international border and each side perceives the other side to have deleterious characteristics - their shape, color, language, gestures, height, weight, the way they laugh, the way they greet, the way they think. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Militias arrive with truckloads of shock collars. Say goodbye. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-33019750485842136172021-01-14T23:40:00.002-08:002021-01-14T23:40:14.209-08:00King of the Beasts<p>There is no doubt that the author of the book, The Ecology of Sasquatch, does not exist.</p><p>It is a fact, the evidence of the author is scant and what little is produced has been misidentified. Most experts believe he is a storefront mannequin, a shaved ape, a manatee, or a man-shaped balloon from the 1928 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade that came unmoored and drifted away, landing in Tercentary Theater at Harvard University where it was awarded an honorary degree in Hyperbole. That is not an exaggeration. </p><p>There is a lot of wind in his book, enough, it is said, to power 1,600 wind generators, enough to power all the homes in the city of Denver, Colorado. Not only that, the wind is strong enough to force the winds coming out of Canada right back up into the Arctic, where it compresses and warms, adding to the catastrophic melting of permafrost. Global warming is caused by hot human breath!</p><p>This just has to be true because one can read it right here right now and this was passed along by 453 virtual friends - they could be if they were. This is the definitive description of nothingness, the absence of something. </p><p>Looking to fill the void, one fires up the television machine, leans forward, and squints at the grainy, minute-long film of a man in a rabbit-fur suit, look, the zipper is visible in the front. There he is again, the ape-like creature, swinging his arms, punching Gorosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Gigantophis, Pterodactylus, sea serpents, and Godzilla. The imagery is high definition, the sound is stereophonic, and the subwoofer shakes the living room floor as he roars and stomps across the land. Our hands sweat, our heart pounds. </p><p>The problem is, studies have shown that actors can actually get lost in a role, like that circus clown in the corner booth at the cafe who sprays the waitress with his lapel flower and eats his hat. A 2019 study concluded, "portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a 'loss of self.'" Another study from the same year observed, "simulating others changed self-knowledge, such that the self becomes more similar to the simulated other." Uh oh. </p><p>There are two sides to this story. The man in the rabbit-fur suit made our palms sweat and heart pound. He transformed our perception of the world around us. This becomes clear after one has watched the ape-man terrorize members of the actors guild and the theater audience for two hours and then steps outside into the dark night. The shadows between the buildings, the rooftops beyond the streetlight, the dark, empty space between the parked cars, the back seat in our automobile, each has taken on a threatening aspect, has become less secure, less devoid of danger.</p><p>The problem is, we have learned that Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah are not real, no more than the lonely, impotent Mr. Sasquatch. A few miles down the highway, listening to elevator music, our mind ejects the ape-man in the back seat. He flies off into space. Our hands dry off, our heart settles down. </p><p>In the 1940s there were newsreels that showed images of carpet bombing in Europe. In the 1960s, the nightly news showed identical images, in color, of carpet bombing in Southeast Asia. Acres of pockmarks, like ground acne, a moonscape right here on earth, air force lakes, Swiss Cheese School of Landscaping, just like Bonny and Clyde's bullet-riddled gangster car. Today, the nightly news shows images of a scarred earth, with roadside bombs, melting Greenland, oil spills in the Niger Delta, coral bleaching, mounds of plastic garbage on remote beaches, and the daily street battles between opposing ideologues pitching tear gas canisters at each other. </p><p>One sits back and turns off the imagery. After a few miles, a few kitten videos, a few minutes of elevator music, his hands stop sweating and his heart settles down. He has recovered his self-knowledge. The monster is ejected into outer space again as he drives away. </p><p><br /></p><p>Brown Steven, Cockett Peter and Yuan Ye 2019. The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: an fMRI study of actingR. Soc. open sci.6181908. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181908</p><p>Meyer ML, Zhao Z, Tamir DI. Simulating other people changes the self. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2019 Nov;148(11):1898-1913. doi: 10.1037/xge0000565. Epub 2019 Apr 29. PMID: 31033322.</p><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-24593108083983599942021-01-10T23:50:00.002-08:002021-01-10T23:50:19.453-08:00Status Migrainosus<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Languages die. Or it is has been said. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">When a language falls into disuse, when the last native speaker has uttered his dying word, when there is no society to carry it, the language has become dead. Any interest beyond that is academic, like archeologists digging in a graveyard exposed during the construction of a museum. But deadness is highly prized, like cadaver teeth to a Civil War dentist</span></span><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Dead things don't move, aren't subject to change, thus, a dead language is a very useful container for those who would want the linguistic meaning of their work to be stable. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Latin is a dead language, having fallen out of use centuries ago - with the exception of quaint Latin Clubs and the Latin Church, whose leaders bemazed onlookers with a theatrical display of it until the 1960s. That's the reason scientists selected Latin as the language to name and describe living things, geologic formations, and scientific processes. These words would be fixed and stable for all time. Yes, our name is <i>Homo sapiens</i>, and we are stuck with it until we de-evolve into simple primates. Comparatively, the English word "human" is subject to change. At this point in history, the meaning of that word has mutated under tremendous selective social pressure and it bears little resemblance to what it meant just a few decades ago. Just look around.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Memories evolve. Or so we think. Cornell University published a study in 2002 in whi</span><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">ch they showed participants an advertisement describing Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld. Bugs was called "an impossible character" because there is no Bugs at Disneyworld. Bugs is under contract with Warner Brothers, not with Disney. Were he to be spotted, he would be escorted from the premises, face legal action, and his stuffing would be found floating in a canal south of Lake Okeechobee - blown to bits by a cartoon bomb. Authorities said that this was the fate of Bug's older brother, Fritz, whose dismembered foot was found in San Francisco bay - attached to a chain. His movies were destroyed in the 1934 fire at the Burbank studio, destroying valuable evidence. Only some original production drawings remain. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, after viewing the phony advertisement, thirty percent of the participants said they recalled meeting Bugs at Disneyworld as a child. The suggestion of an impossible event, bolstered by fabricated evidence produced a false memory. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be a memory is to know war. From conception until death, memories are under fierce selective pressure. Only the fittest memory is able to survive REM sleep, the dark hours when the mind stalks and preys upon the daily storylines, purging the weak, culling the herd, a brutal nightly assault that makes us toss and turn, grind our teeth, and jolt up straight in bed, screaming at the shadow suspended in midair above our bed. In the morning, we don't remember a thing, but we have a slight headache. That's the hole where reality was. In the mind's war between reality and desire, the difference is what is recalled. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we put our words in Latin, hoping to fix and stabilize the ideas, but Latin does not determine the nature of the idea. We only imagine that reality does not die. "Reality" is a word that has mutated under intense selective social pressure. At this point in history, the meaning of that word bears little resemblance to what it meant just a, well, a few nights ago. Just look around. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">As we indulge our desires, knowing what we wish to know, sinking deeper into a post-truth world, where outlying data is given equal weight to the preponderance of data, where science is believed to be opinion, where the loudest voice is equal to truth, where two plus two equals five and it's that cabal of billionaire mathematicians just trying to control our minds, we are heading toward one <i>massive </i>headache. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, as the reality of real reality escapes us like a madman twisting out of the grasp of hospital orderlies, running into the street, screaming, we imagine that he has lost his mind, but he is just trying to get away from us. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-49395377200445107642021-01-01T22:22:00.002-08:002021-01-01T22:22:28.634-08:00Vacation Getaway!<p style="text-align: justify;">Well, the numbers are in and the winner is. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">There continues to be talk about a manned mission to Mars. It's been in the planning stage since about 1877. That's when Giovanni Schiaparelli described canali, or waterways on the Martian surface. In 1892, Camille Flammarion ran with that idea and described an entire race of superior beings. In 1950, Ray Bradbury chronicled his tours of the Martian cities. Over the years, various motion pictures were made on location. Many motion picture stars died in horrific battles on Martian soil and in the Martian skies. Alas. Today, millions of the faithful travel to Area 51 in hopes of spotting one of the reclusive aliens that inhabit the region, and if not, they may see a dead singer or two not far away in Las Vegas. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Meanwhile, Venus goes unnoticed. Mars is half the size of the earth, further away from the sun, covered with red dust, no surface water, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than the Earth's, composed almost entirely of CO2, with an average temperature of minus 60 celsius. Still, there are thousands of people camped outside of the launch pad gates, hoping to be some of the first in line to buy tickets to fly to the Red Planet. Vacation in the red rocks, lose pounds instantly, get a tan, feel the stress melt away.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Venus, on the other hand, has a similar mass, radius, density, composition, gravity, year, and day as the earth. It is about 2/3 the distance to the sun. Leave the crowds on Mars - picture yourself out on your deck, cold drink in hand, basking in the Venusian sun. This could be you! </p><p style="text-align: justify;">We need to work out a few ergonomic issues with Venusian travel, however. The surface temperature averages 465 degrees celsius, the air pressure is 90 times that of Earth, the sky is obscured by clouds of sulfuric acid, and the windstorms are legendary, at least as bad as those in Livingston, Montana where it can blow 90 miles an hour on a clear day, and perhaps as bad as those in North Dakota, but we are not so sure since communication there has not advanced much beyond the telegraph - the singing wire! - and all accounts seem to have been inflated by at least as much wind as was said to be in the storms. We have heard that a North Dakota man lost his hat in one storm coming hard out of Canada, which blew his hat straight to the south. It went clear out of sight. He stood there and looked at his watch. A minute later he turned around, faced into the wind, and caught his hat blowing right at him from the north.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Anyhow, life on Venus is not. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Returning to earth, where the aliens landed, apparently in search of oxygen and a spot of shade - and, we might add, apparently victims of species profiling because all humans seem to think that all aliens have teardrop-shaped heads, large glowing eyes, small mouths, wasting musculature, holes where there were once ears, and they whisper and point at everything - here, back on this climate-controlled earth, we find that our air conditioning has seized up and is pouring out smoke. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The numbers are in for 2020: </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Total acres burned in the United States: 10,274,679. This beats the modern-day, Smokey-The-Bear-Era record set in 2015. And that's just the US. This year produced some grim satellite imagery of the earth on fire, from the Amazon to Siberia to Austraila and North America. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">I think I saw one of those aliens in that line at the launch pad. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">https://nyti.ms/2L0F2Cs</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-45145493344450770142019-11-08T21:40:00.000-08:002019-11-08T19:40:54.773-08:00Time InWe have returned.<br />
The blogs have been compiled into a book, <i>How the Earth Was Lost</i>. It has most of the absent essays plus new essays, illustrations, and photographs. 25 chapters plus an introduction. It even has footnotes. That is more reading than doctors advise in a day.<br />
This may or may not be good news.<br />
We hope to create more blogs on the gyrating world of ecology, but that depends. If the public outcry is too severe, we will hang it up.<br />
In the meantime, you can find it at <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578520427/ref=sr_1_13?keywords=schmoller&qid=1573261672&sr=8-13">Amazon</a>. It is in print format but we hope to have an ebook version out shortly.<br />
Thanks.<br />
- Us<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-1574065025607518782018-01-14T10:55:00.000-08:002018-12-09T09:27:33.884-08:00Spring Ephemeral<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That's large-flowered bellwort (<i>Uvularia grandiflora</i>), from the Chequamegon National Forest, in Price County, WI. Photo 5/11/07.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One way or another, most life on earth depends upon light from the sun. Over the course of a year, a tremendous amount of solar energy reaches the earth’s atmosphere – many times the </span>amount<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> energy used by the human race in a year. Of that, about one-third is reflected back into space and one-half is absorbed </span>at<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> the earth’s surface. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Lately, there is a lot of energy being poured into the conversion of solar energy into electrical energy. Solar panels. Their useful life is about 30 years and then they become waste. It is estimated that Japan will produce 10,000 tons of solar panel waste in the year 2020. Recently, the production of solar panels in California produced about 5,000 tons of contaminated sludge and water per year. It is estimated that the human race will produce 60-78 million tons of solar panel waste by 2050. Some electronic waste is burned to recover valuable minerals but the smoke is highly toxic. Most of the electronic waste in the US is stacked in garages and closets, pausing before it enters what is called the "trash stream", which, from where we stand, looks an awful lot like an actual stream with actual dead fish that is emptying into an actual dying ocean. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, at the earth's surface, plants capture solar energy and, through photosynthesis, convert the light into sugar, which is then used for tissues, structure, growth, and reproduction. Solar panels. A leaf has a useful life of no more than a few years, in the case of evergreen species. Deciduous leaves are good for less than one year. Once their useful life is over, they become waste. The leaves turn shocking hues of red, orange, yellow which stun and bemaze onlookers, flutter to the ground, are dismantled cell-by-cell by trillions of unpaid organisms, and are completely reabsorbed into this thing called an ecosystem, enriching the soil, enabling growth of yet more plants. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Light is life. Plants will orient their leaves and stems toward the light, following the sun across the sky and jockeying for patches of sunlight that have slipped through the forest canopy. In temperate latitudes, when those deciduous trees and shrubs lose their leaves in the fall, it exposes the forest floor to the sun’s rays. When spring returns and the sun rises higher in the sky, daylight and soil temperatures increase and snowmelt moistens the soil. Trees and shrubs break out of their winter dormancy. But before the light and temperature are sufficient for trees and shrubs to leaf out and cast shadows all over the forest floor, a special group of plants lying beneath the leaf litter reanimate and emerge, taking advantage of the open canopy and bounty of sunlight. Found in North America, Russia, and Japan, these are called spring ephemerals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Plants are like shift workers; different species are active at different times of the year. Spring ephemerals work best in cooler temperatures, those found in the early spring. The spring shift. They photosynthesize at high rates and absorb water efficiently when the soil temperatures are low, when most deciduous trees and shrubs are just beginning to move sap and produce leaves. Thus, while many other plants take an entire growing season to produce leaves, flower, set seed and go dormant, spring ephemerals are able to accomplish this in a matter of 6 to 8 weeks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">After these weeks pass, spring ephemerals have stored enough carbohydrates for the next growing season. By then, soil temperatures have become intolerably warm for these species. This signals the end of their shift. Their flowers fade, leaves wither, nutrients are recycled from stems and leaves, and seeds are set. Just as the rest of the forest is leafing out and gearing up for a busy summer of solar alchemy, the summer shift, spring ephemerals are retiring for the season, spending the remainder of the summer in a dormant state. They disappear from view. Where there were once carpets of trout lilies (Erythronium americanum), Carolina spring beauty (Claytonia caroliniana), and Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), there is a shaded forest floor beneath a dense canopy of trees and shrubs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">What a life. No punch clock. No boss. No litigation. No indentured servitude, remediation, arbitrators, hazardous materials, safety violations, labor riots, lockouts, sick leave, hostile takeovers, unfunded mandates. No maintenance schedule, failure points, recalls, noxious fumes, spaghetti code, obsolescence, incompatibility. And no patents. This technology is free for the taking.</span></div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irena.org%2F-%2Fmedia%2FFiles%2FIRENA%2FAgency%2FPublication%2F2016%2FIRENA_IEAPVPS_End-of-Life_Solar_PV_Panels_2016.pdf&h=ATMIzZOx0-SkukwpS1TL043DwGS_lE73WcEz9pJGGrT2w0x9QLrmuWbz-bi0wpuXD6dE4B5hc8G1IPxff8U_FOPX0u9hVLffDSVO2zNKgHq-kDWSpqyjIuugL5WQAcu3lgynyuRkeFgjOM7m9lRgDjHtYfkdWseVMATf2eIRkUdLZL_6Wux1QkymDi9isVjMifACmqj3pFgmptY_Znl06YkeJODYfX7clTrx9SJTEss4cMAeNN_sQ5Xa5q_SKE53o4HbJ_86gO-9dzAJXSVeOwxuhgkxzEb1Zwi-" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">http://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2016/IRENA_IEAPVPS_End-of-Life_Solar_PV_Panels_2016.pdf</span></a></div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fasia.nikkei.com%2FTech-Science%2FTech%2FJapan-tries-to-chip-away-at-mountain-of-disused-solar-panels%3Fpage%3D2&h=ATPRJu8oYh3KotA2KOUIJ8YIqlMcj9Szwggcg2V4KM8ys92CW4fSz9LnNH6pZBjDFyG6xniYRM-H6MD65_FiR083dVVYAxb7nFZa2gZlF_DPS5ei2k_rN06vEjDi2toMNUCJ_TxqaOKmOAvAAu3AFIRimIQtt1F_OaW1eZ4yEmo8OrZbOYwQiQPpYXzxPOSisNt5epysSLOWXVqUuuLbQ7BdIoxNtoc5i-r1IrD-8A9grLQ2kDE8UXDXP7XGj2PL6F9tfIaG0jhMP4Y7YCGgF55S2EcGKlj2ln8l" href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Tech/Japan-tries-to-chip-away-at-mountain-of-disused-solar-panels?page=2" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">https://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Tech/Japan-tries-to-chip-away-at-mountain-of-disused-solar-panels?page=2</span></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-88845387950160277532018-01-01T13:13:00.000-08:002019-11-08T21:47:42.995-08:00Fires to Date<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Photo 8/26/12 near Fairmont Hot Springs, MT. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Probably from the Mustang Complex Fire along the Montana-Idaho </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">border. It burned 332,000 acres or 518 square miles, about twice the size of Chicago or 2000 times bigger than Disneyland, which may have a thrilling, all-ages amusement ride involving fire and Bambi, but we are not certain. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">It is the end of the year and this is a good time to review the list of the wildfire acres in the US for the past 58 years (data from the National Intera</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">gency Fire Center).</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">You will note that the past year was the third worst fire season since 1960. And you will note that the average acreages have about doubled since the 1960's and the top ten fire seasons have occurred since 2000. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">*** Update: Since this was posted on January 1st, the final numbers for the 2017 fire season came in and it proved to be the second-worst fire season since 1960, surpassing the 10 million-acre mark for the second time. *** </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Plot this on a graph, describe the slope of the line, and see where it leads you in say, 20 years, at which time you may reminisce about the days when you didn't camp in fireproof tents.</span></div>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-61294909825732196052018-01-01T13:02:00.000-08:002018-01-01T23:07:10.053-08:00Spoon-leaf sundew (Drosera intermedia)<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">These are carnivorous plants, inhabiting fens, bogs and peatlands in the northern latitudes. Pretty as they may be, these peatlands are killing fields. Insects are attracted to a sweet mucilage secreted by the glandular hairs on the sundew leaf. The hairs are thigmonastic, that is, they move in response to touch or vibration. The hairs converge on the struggling insect. The musilage co</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">ntains enzymes: chitinase, esterase, peroxidase, phosphatase, protease. The mucilage secretion is stimulated by specific molecules. A quote from Matusikova 2005: "The reaction of sundew leaves depends on the molecular nature of the inducer applied." And from Gallie 1997, regarding pitcher plant (<i>Sarracenia purpurea</i>), another carnivorous plant found in fens and bogs: "Hydrolase expression is induced upon perception of the appropriate chemical signal."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This is to say, the glistening tentacles of sundew respond to touch and the chemistry of the insect that lands on them, inducing the plant to produce enzymes and to curl the tentacles around the insect. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The purpose of all of this is to convert the insect into digestible material for the plant, enabling it to live in a nutrient-poor habitat, such as bogs are. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Yes, like a cold fog, death creeps across the sodden moor. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">That is not all. These northern bogs have two other carnivorous plants. Pitcher plant traps insects in a leafy vase filled with rainwater and enzymes. The vase is lined with sharp spikes, like concertina wire, preventing any escape. Bladderwort (<i>Utricularia</i>) has a submerged bladder under negative pressure that has a trap door and a lever. A water flea or mosquito larvae that touch the lever open the trap door, sucking it into the bladder within tenths of a second. Once again, it is bathed in digestive enzymes. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The insect dies within 15 minutes, and it is safe to say that these are the most horrifying 15 minutes of his brief, hapless life, as the powerful enzymes attack his defenseless, softening body and reduce it to a soupy meal. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">We are pleased that insects do not scream, at least in a range heard by humans.</span><br />
<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpubmed%2F16049675&h=ATPvk350JYZgg0XmhijfC5S_tdP08bxUNIu45YJkpelvC68CiD5XNvGsT57UzBGi6i9IcMYBGYSBc7p8vLrY9aQJh5Pe40bhoGdgyRzk5L1k5KLelz8oVZXFxyZDsbxBJn8Sc-4FyGnNimhl6Yr-OCkJV4G8NHymQNvN-Ty5kupKivyTEeQXbOQWGsv02mijsrLkIpqdA9I3SrDboPpykLQ-a24YqeCs97yZjNcyeBZwgTbrmqmV1yFG0OIh6xGGoEJBCfQ78o8BqpxNaehbCgFmP7VJs-P1wg6Xd5Eb3PLM" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16049675" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16049675</a></div>
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</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpmc%2Farticles%2FPMC158611%2Fpdf%2F1151461.pdf&h=ATMU1dZGtsxIHlCoBCYVU8DZafmZodj-iPxiaiarO3qNckIuDPT-XNjn6kSEYdXyrqIzCSLyleaYjjxhbh1FaNenrP39KhIXtKxL9en6_vw4nXrhfzc3cGZ6ZLuKKbNC3yIQN8fTofIk1VsdTLwHtI4a4mR8GdPpyIBVDloYUer6gTUh13SPsx_V9T9OgOyoZtosUtml6IRGa1QWjFqsBnH3rebxKuemkLJq8Z8lNg20wylDum4QLJeMhLWgErBZsZGae_PJaioMQ0gZJQmgcB_nW6rYvJwyUqL2uoR7qvZg" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899;" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/…/ar…/PMC158611/pdf/1151461.pdf</a></span><div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-51756827230999114592018-01-01T12:59:00.000-08:002018-01-01T20:15:34.928-08:00Seed Bank<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YbeSoLmxaYY/Wkqg-duRB1I/AAAAAAAAAtM/WzXCWq-H1OkOkVQRS9BH71hREklzsBFmQCLcBGAs/s1600/overview.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1245" data-original-width="1000" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YbeSoLmxaYY/Wkqg-duRB1I/AAAAAAAAAtM/WzXCWq-H1OkOkVQRS9BH71hREklzsBFmQCLcBGAs/s640/overview.jpg" width="512" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Flowers are desert chicory (<i>Rafinesquia neomexicana</i>), pebble pincushion (<i>Chaenactis carphoclinia</i>), golden evening primrose (<i>Camissonia brevipes</i>), desert dandelion (<i>Malacothrix glabrata</i>), showy gilia (<i>Gilia cana triceps</i>) to mention a few. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Soil seed bank, to be precise. These are flowers in Death Valley, many of which are annuals, germinating from seeds in a rare year when rains are sufficient. Look up "Superbloom." The seeds have been in the so</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">il for years, waiting for the right rains to come. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Soil Seed Bank is the repository of seeds in the leaf litter, soil surface, or soil layer. They are like a bank in that they are available for germination in a landscape that has failed to produce seeds in one growing season or more. This failure can happen in times of drought, fire, landslide, floods, hail, human disturbance. The seeds in the seed bank may germinate when favorable conditions return, restoring the historic array of species. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">That is, as long as the seeds remain viable over the course of the unfavorable conditions.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Seed banks are found wherever plants, animals, wind or other vectors deposit seeds: in the black prairie soils, the bottom of lakes, the muck in swamps, bogs, and marshes, dunes, badland soils, and even permafrost. Some species of seed may be viable for decades, even centuries. In 2012, Russian scientists regenerated <i>Silene stenophylla</i> (narrow-leaved campion, a plant found in Siberia and northern Japan) from a 32,000-year-old late Pleistocene seed that had been buried in the permafrost. Although this specimen wasn't regenerated from a seed, it indicates a potential for ancient germplasm in ice-age seed repositories. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Some of the seeds in our modern soils may have a very long viability in the seed bank. In 1879, botanist William Beal put seeds from 20 species in glass bottles and buried them 20 inches deep. Every 5, 10, or 20 years scientists have dug up a bottle of his seeds to see which ones germinate. In 1980 they were able to germinate moth mullein (<i>Verbascum blattaria</i>), common mullein (<i>Verbascum thapsus</i>) and common mallow (<i>Malva neglecta</i>), over 100 years after their burial. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">So, the natural cycles of disturbance may play within these time limits, but we are not convinced that anthropogenic disturbances play by the rules. Like the story of the Romanov family, we have the alarming capacity to eliminate a whole lineage in one dark night.</span></div>
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-54583730701895566822018-01-01T12:52:00.000-08:002018-01-01T20:23:52.202-08:00Hell Creek Formation<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Hell Creek Formation badlands below the red line, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Ludlow Formation Badlands above the red line. </span><br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8WVxVTfW2Pw/WkqceymOuJI/AAAAAAAAAs8/V68On_vLz98pM2k3CPMAhUB3-9yWCf5tACLcBGAs/s1600/Hell%2BCreek%2BLMNG%2B2005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8WVxVTfW2Pw/WkqceymOuJI/AAAAAAAAAs8/V68On_vLz98pM2k3CPMAhUB3-9yWCf5tACLcBGAs/s640/Hell%2BCreek%2BLMNG%2B2005.jpg" width="478" /></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Of moving-pictures fame, the Hell Creek formation is a series of greyish, mostly bedded, freshwater claystone, siltstone, mudstones, and sandstones and lesser amounts of lignite. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start;">Notice the rust-colored rocks in the foreground. In our travels, that has been a telltale marker of the HCF. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">It was deposited during the Cretaceous period at the end of the Mesozoic Era. It contains sedimentary features such as siderite nodules, mud cracks, raindrop </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">impressions, ripple marks, and bird and animal tracks. It has produced many excellent and renowned dinosaur skeletons, including Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Ludlow formation is of more recent origin and lies on top of the Hell Creek formation and dates to the early Paleogene (Tertiary) period at the beginning of the Cenozoic Era. Much like the Hell Creek formation, it is composed of bedded claystones, siltstones, mudstones, and sandstones interlayered with lignite. It is distinguished from the Hell Creek formation by the persistence of lignite and a brownish hue.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The fossil is likely to be a fragment of a Triceratops shield, with what appear to be the blood vessel tracks. There are innumerable Triceratops fragments scattered across the Hell Creek Formation. Ultimately, the species was the victim of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event, wherein three-quarters of the earth's plant and animal species went extinct in a very short period of time, including almost all dinosaurs, many marine invertebrates, many land animals, and many angiosperms. Current theory holds that it was caused by a celestial Doomsday Machine, a meteor that hit the Yucatan Peninsula with the force of 100 million atomic bombs, incinerating terrestrial life with an infared radiation pulse, dusting the planet in iridium, shrouding it in darkness and sulfuric acid aerosols, and plunging it into an impact winter. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Photo 9/28/06, Corson County. SD</span><br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9AsGmA_3PHY/WkqXOxlNk1I/AAAAAAAAAso/2sAvWvImjJcIZbwrD4k2mFPnoidQuODlwCEwYBhgL/s1600/Ferruginous.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: white; clear: left; display: inline; float: left; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="646" data-original-width="900" height="286" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9AsGmA_3PHY/WkqXOxlNk1I/AAAAAAAAAso/2sAvWvImjJcIZbwrD4k2mFPnoidQuODlwCEwYBhgL/s400/Ferruginous.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This is probably a Ferruginous Hawk (<i>Buteo regalis</i>) nest. It's made out of Artemisia cana sticks, in an isolated location, no closer than 1.43 miles from any human habitations. No bones, feathers, or other signs of activity at the time of the photo. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">No surprise. In the early 1900's, North Dakota was referred to as the "ferruginous-rough-leg state" because of the abundance of the species. At that time North Dakota had vast, unbrok</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">en prairie, ideal Ferruginous Hawk habitat. The hawk thrives in expansive, open, arid grasslands and shrub-steppe communities. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">But that was then. A century of agricultural, residential, and commercial development has degraded their habitat. Thus, their numbers have declined across their range. </span></div>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Here are some details: Ferruginous Hawks are very susceptible to agricultural or human disturbance. They will select nest sites to avoid human habitation, avoid nesting within 0.7 mile of an occupied building, and may be less productive in areas with disturbance, or may abandon nests if disturbed too often by human activity. Historically, nests were most often ground nests on grassy overlooks in native prairie, less often in trees or rocks, occasionally in peripheral, isolated trees. More recently, due to pressures from predators, their nesting preferences have become isolated trees, haystacks, and power line towers.<br />This preference for large, unbroken habitats suggests that Ferruginous Hawk is an interior species. Interior species are adversely affected by highly fragmented habitats and prefer the interior of large, unbroken, relatively undisturbed habitats. Here is a quote from the USDA:<br />"Fragmentation of a landscape reduces the area of original habitat and increases the total lineal feet of edge, favoring species that inhabit edges at the expense of interior species that require large continuous patches. Ecologists, such as Wilcox and Murphy, believe that habitat fragmentation is the most serious threat to biological diversity and is the primary cause of the present extinction crisis." </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Extinction crisis. That's for another day. Should I live to see it.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-4194010712159087142018-01-01T12:21:00.003-08:002018-02-13T23:15:48.015-08:00Bullion Butte, ND<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">Southwestern Billings County, ND. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">Photo 6/3/03; </span><i style="color: #1d2129;">Penstemon albidus </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">in the </span>foreg<span style="font-family: inherit;">round<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">. </span></span></span><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-H0Qdm2RsJq4/WoPfo-54FkI/AAAAAAAAA78/Gqs8OPAE_PA9Fenyl3K3HHnRipfmqYgGQCLcBGAs/s1600/Bullion%2BButte%2B500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="500" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-H0Qdm2RsJq4/WoPfo-54FkI/AAAAAAAAA78/Gqs8OPAE_PA9Fenyl3K3HHnRipfmqYgGQCLcBGAs/s1600/Bullion%2BButte%2B500.jpg" /></span></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">There be better buttes but this be a butte.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">This is a 3350-foot tall butte, rising about 1000 feet above the Little Missouri River which is 1.5 miles to the northeast. The cliffs along the rim of the butte are about 120 feet high. Prairie Falcons nest in the rocky rim and the overhangs and caves have sheltered mountain lions. The winds get strong up high on the prairie, nothing hol</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline;">ds them back.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">This </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">butte</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"> is one of several dozen prominent buttes in the western Dakotas (Thunder, Sentinel, Square, Round Top, Haystack, Castle Rock...). They are the product of differential erosion, where erosion occurs at differing rates in a unit of land due to varying hardnesses of the surface material. The harder material that remains while the rest of the softer surface material erodes away is called a caprock. The landform that is created by the caprock is called a butte, a reminder of the elevated plateau that once was.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">Climbing to the summit of Bullion Butte in low hanging clouds and a cold mist, one might expect to discover a lost world of Titanotheres, Oreodonts, and Entelodonts peacefully grazing on the short grasses as a giant meteorite streaks overhead towards Chesapeake Bay. No, not today. But, these summits have some unique plant species generally not found on the surrounding plains that may be relicts of the pre-Pleistocene Ice Age landscape, the elevated plateau. One species is <i>Phlox alyssifolia. </i>The sideslopes, scree, and talus surrounding the butte have thousands of specimens. But it is not found on the surrounding plains. It is thought that the species had a wider distribution on the elevated landscape that was eroded away. These remaining populations are relict populations, like the buttes, reminders of what once was</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">.</span></div>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-5558869278025917432018-01-01T12:10:00.000-08:002018-12-09T08:28:51.240-08:00Keystone Species <span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; text-align: justify;">Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia), McKenzie County, ND. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; text-align: justify;">Photo 8/11/15. </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-60v1el0Vy88/WkqsQ789KuI/AAAAAAAAAuA/MaVQkoadFD43F6shWAIrTjUly_56OEfswCLcBGAs/s1600/B%2Bburrowing%2Bowl%2Bb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: white; clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="487" data-original-width="676" height="287" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-60v1el0Vy88/WkqsQ789KuI/AAAAAAAAAuA/MaVQkoadFD43F6shWAIrTjUly_56OEfswCLcBGAs/s400/B%2Bburrowing%2Bowl%2Bb.jpg" width="400" /></span></a><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Although widespread and numerous, their numbers are declining. They are considered rare in some western states and Canada. These birds are strongly dependent upon prairie dog town burrows.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">This is the story: It is estimated that there were 1 billion prairie dogs in North America before European settlement. As a result of widespread deliberate poisoning, conversion of prairie to cropland, and the introduction of sylvatic plague, the acreage and population of prairie dogs saw a 90-98% decline from the year 1900. This eradication has had unintended and unforeseen consequences. The landscape features created by prairie dogs support a host of other species, including the Burrowing Owl. A quote from Miller</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">, 2000:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;"><br /></span> <span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">"Nine of the species depended on prairie dogs. Abundance data for an additional 20 species indicated the opportunistic use of prairie dog colonies, and abundance data for another 117 species was lacking on or off colonies, but their life history indicated that they could potentially benefit from prairie dog activities." </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;"><br /></span> <span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">In so doing, the prairie dog is considered a keystone species. Quoting from Miller again, a keystone species "must exert an effect, the effect must be larger than predicted by their abundance, and the effects should be unique." In other words, they have an outsized influence on the species around them and an exceptional number of those species rely upon them. </span></span></div>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-biJ5aju4XuQ/WoPc1VCbTOI/AAAAAAAAA7g/EA8cWlGGHMY_meT_X3QNGvlb8uM69e18wCLcBGAs/s1600/Prairie%2Bdogs%2B500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="500" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-biJ5aju4XuQ/WoPc1VCbTOI/AAAAAAAAA7g/EA8cWlGGHMY_meT_X3QNGvlb8uM69e18wCLcBGAs/s1600/Prairie%2Bdogs%2B500.jpg" /></span></a></span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">The unintended and unforeseen consequence: As prairie dogs declined, so did many of those 146 species around them. The most notable example of this was the black-footed ferret, which dines almost exclusively on prairie dogs. As prairie dogs were eradicated, the ferret followed, nearly to extinction. By 1981, only one small colony in Wyoming remained, and in 1985, it barely survived an outbreak of canine distemper, another introduced disease. Today, there are about 300 of them at captive-breeding facilities and they have been introduced into the wild at 28 locations to date. Four locations have self-sustaining populations. It is estimated that there are hundreds of ferrets in the wild today. Distemper, plague, and inbreeding threaten to usher them out of existence and into museum displays. </span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">At one time there were tens of thousands. </span></span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fs.fed.us%2Frm%2Fpubs_other%2Frmrs_2000_uresk_d003.pdf&h=ATNzobOqH8Nj_I9XLtQhxlHZ5DPmQTc0d_a7MH9vHjDYhQSsVqsZRog5VcUWHO7I9BkChTooJYIWscsVQ9-tD3cyozpB2abHU4RK2gbLz1KJmNp9nqw4p8-3U8jFO6wt0H0UkVp24OPuGPhVZFWRxiaUbIwbR-KBt2Y3pWPgBivbFta0LjWwnqqAcpxZ6vBT3gxROVjkKPPonlydcTRsIMHa_UAQ8b5JPK5N5og0Lj2tvS7AIfMvEHEWZwzuRtvnlpsCJyGf5hmmytJPf-emr-ge4P9LLSdbyc4aV2UmoXKO" href="https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2000_uresk_d003.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit;">https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2000_uresk_d003.pd</span><span style="color: #365899;">f</span></a></span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-79968756945588921702018-01-01T12:07:00.001-08:002018-01-01T23:19:34.574-08:00Stone Circles<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">McKenzie County, ND. Photo 9/14/09</span><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-alt_lFEw5mA/WkquBQ8BneI/AAAAAAAAAuM/4jBzWvWtQ-YUPm3bYtfWsOwGLORbF3smgCLcBGAs/s1600/Stone%2Bcircle%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="702" data-original-width="1000" height="280" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-alt_lFEw5mA/WkquBQ8BneI/AAAAAAAAAuM/4jBzWvWtQ-YUPm3bYtfWsOwGLORbF3smgCLcBGAs/s400/Stone%2Bcircle%2B3.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Easily overlooked, they appear as random stones to many who walk across the prairie. Circles of stone in the prairie grass, often on ridges, overlooks, four-star views, sometimes hidden by accumulations of soil and thatch. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">There is some debate about their purpose and use. The understanding in past centuries was that they were used for holding down the edges of the tipis used by plains Indians. As you pass through the northern Great Pl<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">ains, you may note that the winds remind you of those found on Jupiter, especially as a low-pressure system passes through in the colder months. But today, some take issue with the term "tipi ring", believing they may be ceremonial arrangements of stones. Hence, they are no longer called "tipi rings" by some. </span></span></div>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">In any event, the Hind Expedition of 1858 observed:</span></div>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">"On the banks of the valley the remains of ancient encampments in the form of rings of stones to hold down the skin tents are everywhere visible, and testify to the former numbers of the Plains Cree."</span></div>
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Another anthropologist stated in 1889:</div>
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"The Indians claim that the stone circles mark the places where in former times the tepees of their people were located, and that the bowlders held down the edges of the skin tents in place."</div>
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Nicollet observed in 1838:</div>
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"One mile from the Traverse des Sioux, and on the bank of the river, are the remains of an Indian camp; the circular area of which is still indicated by the heaps of stones around each lodge."</div>
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Barrow observed this firsthand in the 1880's:</div>
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"The typical tepee was a conical lodge of specially tanned elkskin stretched over a framework of perhaps twenty-five skin peeled lodge-pole pine. The bottom of the tepee was held down by stones."</div>
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And so forth.</div>
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Here is a bulletin from the Smithsonian that contains numerous testimonials:</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Frepository.si.edu%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10088%2F22113%2Fbae_bulletin_173_1960_62_417-473.pdf&h=ATNMBdN2MWc4SPLQXaY4pemU8WwL9tdG37eXCzTxX7LkN1E6S4yIkiz0xC7CfFnKpLJG_GrSEPk9FWows3Msm9mZYDPMESp8Ud0lyz3sfFEuzBljgsND9QaKjICoUI65zu9b2Z2kR7vxQ9jKj2ILTXK7yGP6IE875N_1ba0maTM8Jk7kddrpIT_oruQG_OsHzMmy1FrO8DO7lkabgnu_tRN54j7lQrIlrAEKquEVzrcWMdI-3g4-pBLClF5jAuo97zWBnKpr4MMlAevIChO5vtAXqayBCgAhHreBKc8u1xsC" href="https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/22113/bae_bulletin_173_1960_62_417-473.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://repository.si.edu/…/bae_bulletin_173_1960_62_417-47…</a></div>
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And an 1889 report describing ceremonial stone sculptures near Watertown, SD:</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fonlinelibrary.wiley.com%2Fdoi%2F10.1525%2Faa.1889.2.2.02a00040%2Fpdf&h=ATNqDwI4mTI5dWu5E2qXSGS4Fv30AVqY467qaXLcS5GORIsxPInxtN_FTn1S3y2YcaRO_I76cbd3k95145VXOqVXDCSRg5cHP-KVqua6g13Q7_jEb7oFPqtQqmQJsdOWS_zkA7mDkNPLw7mi0koyZhTeg1J6bil1Ci3103A-NTAGCROic_7KW2OGbg7EctTRWSxy0jdem233uTXnUj-XHG5GsHDYPBK0p-aiua8gtDq_c9oMb48a3j-lYyf0pbU7AiqHK-_CL1QVOkLLCaMPqUjnpri3zfjy1g6yv5zDi3jW" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1889.2.2.02a00040/pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"></a><a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fonlinelibrary.wiley.com%2Fdoi%2F10.1525%2Faa.1889.2.2.02a00040%2Fpdf&h=ATNqDwI4mTI5dWu5E2qXSGS4Fv30AVqY467qaXLcS5GORIsxPInxtN_FTn1S3y2YcaRO_I76cbd3k95145VXOqVXDCSRg5cHP-KVqua6g13Q7_jEb7oFPqtQqmQJsdOWS_zkA7mDkNPLw7mi0koyZhTeg1J6bil1Ci3103A-NTAGCROic_7KW2OGbg7EctTRWSxy0jdem233uTXnUj-XHG5GsHDYPBK0p-aiua8gtDq_c9oMb48a3j-lYyf0pbU7AiqHK-_CL1QVOkLLCaMPqUjnpri3zfjy1g6yv5zDi3jW" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1889.2.2.02a00040/pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…/1…/aa.1889.2.2.02a00040/pdf</a></div>
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-9861584194992127222018-01-01T12:05:00.001-08:002018-01-01T14:01:45.952-08:00Short-horned lizard (Phrynosoma douglassi)<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Photo 7/31/08, Billings County, ND</span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A0RluOah950/WkqUeCVJBJI/AAAAAAAAAsM/VMmHiS6pwYMKSY69yjUYVD6b5bSuVTlJACLcBGAs/s1600/Horned%2BLizard%2B2008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="718" data-original-width="1200" height="238" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A0RluOah950/WkqUeCVJBJI/AAAAAAAAAsM/VMmHiS6pwYMKSY69yjUYVD6b5bSuVTlJACLcBGAs/s400/Horned%2BLizard%2B2008.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Declining across its range, imperilled in SD and Saskatchewan, vulnerable in MT, and there was talk about tracking it or listing it on the Dakota Prairie Grasslands. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">About 14 species of the lizard in the US. They are found in the western US, in hostile environments. Hot, dry, barren. In ND, they are found in the western badlands. </span></div>
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This is a big monster in a little body. They do pushups and other feats of strength when approached by a human and, most alarmingly, they squirt their foul-tasting blood from the corner of their eyes for a distance of five feet, a terrifying act made possible by their ability to increase the blood pressure in their head. Currently, we are glad that they are not the size of humans.</div>
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-4725493274752644942018-01-01T12:03:00.000-08:002018-01-01T14:02:49.053-08:00Bird Mortality<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
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Here are some studies about bird mortality in the US.</div>
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Bird-Communication Towers - 6.8 million birds/year.</div>
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"The resulting estimate of mortality at towers is 6.8 million birds per year in the United States and Canada."</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fws.gov%2Fmigratorybirds%2Fpdf%2Fmanagement%2Flongcoreetal2012communicationtowers.pdf&h=ATOaG1yHgTPOLLw0n8v6FqyqdDe6XKEl-y6rMpaRF_R81tKFbVT5AZm-vl-iC0zst707DH7iCQ6LxOZ6WYd-aERDqgbCaqnnxdRzoRmuBKYX74hJ6F6Vq_-65yzwS9fr-OWaveU9nyYltNcx9bRcGWtVOWHcWcB-z23JuCU9v6o6LI8zbx1eRH-bc_Q35ryvD4F5Z6iHxNX9-Ix1-qB0tEWSgE-4OPFB74Ia-Z52BJ4e0gKkT9wh8HK8bWoWvOn-qnrSSkGnhr66qW2BB8K2SGSmoEucm0N_0EzQTu9xdsXS" href="https://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/pdf/management/longcoreetal2012communicationtowers.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.fws.gov/…/longcoreetal2012communicationtowers.p…</a></div>
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Bird-Vehicle - 89 million birds/year</div>
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"We estimated that between 89 and 340 million birds die annually from vehicle collisions on U.S. roads."</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fpublication%2F262492542_Estimation_of_bird-vehicle_collision_mortality_on_US_roads&h=ATP14LUTXmIAoJL4XCqBq4htu_O_JAQKN19onLAZW_zKUhjtJIYMnC4CWUcJrslAv03V3f-JseWS7B3hN6eOtbCeF23j_rQ-F_Koecolc1RZ9fY200F_2v0z4EL4GuXqDmUeC5Mx2LFvY0W4jrPOHeW488BhKQOLwzRmlQcYhmGQYIw0prf6Jc0T3njdsK5Lh6AKAj-IfJAPPyWnPdwM2k812OJNt4priCZ3zsPYcUqHezT_-Wyu1cKEx4_YLxY-xla-g-4BdG1B3uGjRZRL-x-x86rY3y_oGmciEGU9G66_" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262492542_Estimation_of_bird-vehicle_collision_mortality_on_US_roads" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.researchgate.net/…/262492542_Estimation_of_bird…</a></div>
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Bird-Building - 599 million birds/year</div>
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"We estimate that between 365 and 988 million birds...are killed annually by building collisions in the U.S., with roughly 56% of mortality at low-rises, 44% at residences, and,1% at high-rises."</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.audubon.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fdocuments%2Floss_et_al_bird-building_collisons_condor_2014.pdf&h=ATO3kyjVX_MpbO8FGbPqHKJdNcvvaQwIyYMb-bDUiY9Z83RuuYr4cNrC3HWl6TFSLsOkMPfoJjlK-xpi6lqOlpaQ3IR6pttL-ZBWANPyhaXeC0TtPOof-hEx7UNUjmo1FMKYEUj5ebVV3qrNc72ml1pZqU8uPT7eR5_iRKPGrrqaRhuMFHyv9hjzVIpB9whYy0ZdCAEHuAArHlBxH9NaVSV8NeVpSSUYN9gbgqAeCEjah9hBEqXh2T3OG-AspIYCm9twDzDlAK8zqGXeXYXwc61yLyoq5rARUt1tfWmKBPdK" href="http://www.audubon.org/sites/default/files/documents/loss_et_al_bird-building_collisons_condor_2014.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">http://www.audubon.org/…/loss_et_al_bird-building_collisons…</a></div>
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Bird-Wind Turbine - 234,000 birds/year</div>
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"We estimate that between 140,000 and 328,000 (mean = 234,000) birds are killed annually by collisions with monopole turbines in the contiguous U.S."</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS0006320713003522&h=ATNSzjvYbz9HkZ5ktnsAdo73PlZPSR07IDKPz-o-gwepYM0QDj0GFVa035ozj-HtvBD-y9O1V9kKx49WwObIzeaROXSC-cPqQYnbfmaQ8-y0zJQ9yZnsK4NfNHdRga7G4sNMd-nlVrOmE0FeWnN-i2xM2sJNi19v920H1T-qCvyz-U2UKDUw1uCfDV8Ojl5HGAxZiT8rua6mNxHysThZpBYFNeCVzMd-Y0Ak3_l6T2BuwiXBnIp0BEdSjS439mAC-G3MOf7JertdFE8LjMMvk51OxyfOt1gF0nwTp0_cSOJi" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/artic…/pii/S0006320713003522</a></div>
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Bird-Power Line - 26 million birds/year</div>
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They "estimate that between 12 and 64 million birds are killed each year at U.S. power lines."</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpmc%2Farticles%2FPMC4081594%2F&h=ATMf7nO8Mcu8gLbNUKgdumNpnGRdafawOOsu3IP4agAkekvB6cgsEx-93iUrNuPOQL5Ggykm5gEb8ts2gYB7MxEUAb5jPUFtuh7BdDH3Iki1vz3UuBKitRVUJ9R1bKO_BHSC73yttrwCyjfro5mnA9vCSmB8zo-ad-wPXU5n8pd4Tyj_3EUzAKjO2lnBIabk85diKAz36dmsUJK-UcoHWMtBTj-8eOevCtkdvawuanZCBDIqnBcMz8V1H7RY5AU34QLM6lzf-o8ylOtUuLCnFlBtC3F6HH5hurHskJo7Rt9U" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4081594/" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4081594/</a></div>
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Bird-Aircraft - 13,668 in US in 2014</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FB9780081000939099933&h=ATO6Sa29gAYdldHHFFKh-srvkTmG5E41TrCvKBasU20R6s1XaRorWoEwiT7xTbaLUp2_VQHIrT-BGZI0_d9UHS16nT8am4uWGVhmdbrQ6vfHmoVq_lXhIaY99J43ThjP7B5gtZf5LM258urCAeho4AC2tkUmzyt5kjtXC9z-glJBapq-d99aQV2vjGqPnJA8HHnF4K6LSSNUsynEHKXhTvs3utE-D504gvYMsftjwWZ1eHVHMJ-BOPLcbJjrDE2Gd08xVZJATE-E7OD3zo6YdEdJawttNZvnYcILel-eep_5" href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081000939099933" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">http://www.sciencedirect.com/…/art…/pii/B9780081000939099933</a></div>
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And, lastly, I must throw cats into the mix:</div>
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Bird-Cat - 2.4 billion birds/year</div>
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"We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually."</div>
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This study has been contested. Professor of Anthropology Barbara King complained about "demonizing cats with shaky statistics."</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fncomms2380&h=ATNXlJcpiPtcMPTx5AEMfnQTVLBx-yGetV9umew4b7KsVycLLW-UUMqKRA7RtVQ6KSlgixS42nFRZwJz0NPab2u4QE6PkLd24gXxs0Jkm5oPesM1MLvSJrNxkYKhGPsNUXky4NR5I6wt42GBhlCyxjf8ymSp2r2Z8i9rZAJGVRPNFkgOU0atT0rBW-dkC_eI3IRBfX8LUKZCSoMiX4rkkmdit5618JUpCC9T43gIVHrVtHL883rUObQxjdJorjP8lGJLoeONkKElQ0j9dB2_ObkKQNNHJP7SbXDujLhoyGMe" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380</a></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iFtNg5K9r7w/WkqT0iGhhYI/AAAAAAAAAsI/eOP4KDulm6UCZSwBP5fsiiQrIfRdfkWnQCLcBGAs/s1600/Dead%2BHawk%2B1998%2BSteele.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="633" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iFtNg5K9r7w/WkqT0iGhhYI/AAAAAAAAAsI/eOP4KDulm6UCZSwBP5fsiiQrIfRdfkWnQCLcBGAs/s320/Dead%2BHawk%2B1998%2BSteele.jpg" width="252" /></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-87151834937434580472018-01-01T11:56:00.002-08:002018-01-01T23:25:18.943-08:00Fassett's Locoweed (Oxytropis campestris var. chartacea)<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1ZWcsrnlt64/WkqRP2dd1oI/AAAAAAAAAr8/GD18qT3RFpcIr-BFJpwQV3RQmXVkP_dGwCLcBGAs/s1600/Oxytropis%2Bcampestris%2Boverview.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1100" data-original-width="825" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1ZWcsrnlt64/WkqRP2dd1oI/AAAAAAAAAr8/GD18qT3RFpcIr-BFJpwQV3RQmXVkP_dGwCLcBGAs/s640/Oxytropis%2Bcampestris%2Boverview.jpg" width="480" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">WI endangered, Federally threatened.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Photo 6/23/09. Western Bayfield County, WI</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A story: Notice the secondary taxonomic ranking, a variety. Species within the <i>Oxytropis campestris </i>complex are found around the northern hemisphere. This variety is disjunct, that is, distant from other <i>O. campestris </i>varieties - the nearest variety is <i>v. gracilis</i>, some 340 miles to the west. At one time this was considered to be identical t<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">o <i>v. johannensis</i>, a variety found near James Bay and the Saint John River. However, genetic studies showed that the Fassett's locoweed samples descended from a common ancestor and the variety is a sister to<i> v. johannensis</i>. Thus, it was more isolated than some had thought. </span></span></div>
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It exhibits high within-population diversity and low among-population differentiation. This leads to the notion that this species is a relict of a wider pre-Holocene distribution, possibly along the shores of large glacial lakes in the region. Glaciers receded, populations became isolated and differentiated.</div>
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Today, <i>v. chartacea</i> it is limited to the sandy, exposed, sunny shores of shallow, seepage lakes in WI. In times of high-water tables, when shores are submerged, the plant will be absent. Some may panic, thinking that it has been extirpated, or has become locally extinct. However, when periodic drought resumes and the exposed shoreline expands, the dormant seeds buried in the substrate, the seed bank, will sprout and the shoreline will be repopulated with the species. </div>
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This was the case in 2009, as northern WI was in the midst of a 9-year drought and seepage lakes were shrinking dramatically. Although surveys a few years earlier during high water had revealed no Fassett's locoweed, and a grave sense of alarm was growing, the surveys in 2009 revealed approximately one gazillion specimens. </div>
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Interestingly, the low water conditions exposed old corduroy logging roads that may have been constructed during the drought of the 1930's. </div>
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Rain comes and rain goes.</div>
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<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpubmed%2F15548281&h=ATP_pzA9aEECDFudaVDWnb-Y7fnz3JtSzIN6kj8sS4QOj5kKi0gGCBFW_99duwcGa497XI33U4efhvxwoz58_huq0peYMx6pBvZML_ymgt15Do9rms7Gs0YzC_jaIgr4VoD4lKGBUdzXjfXzVLnQ8S5Rxy1pCAfv_Qx-CVg0NKqGKZUpMN6cbIDGusbm_kE7pn9YCGH5YKwzcHL-kzvKR9SQ6Li9JfO8fhftjpPa184DWAYx-0Lzzk8yT5i3NbbsPhO5_gZ5C4uJ6-xc-LwzWw86w1V8Ge5DYoMJjERKEgBF" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15548281" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #1d2129; display: inline;"></span></a><a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpubmed%2F15548281&h=ATP_pzA9aEECDFudaVDWnb-Y7fnz3JtSzIN6kj8sS4QOj5kKi0gGCBFW_99duwcGa497XI33U4efhvxwoz58_huq0peYMx6pBvZML_ymgt15Do9rms7Gs0YzC_jaIgr4VoD4lKGBUdzXjfXzVLnQ8S5Rxy1pCAfv_Qx-CVg0NKqGKZUpMN6cbIDGusbm_kE7pn9YCGH5YKwzcHL-kzvKR9SQ6Li9JfO8fhftjpPa184DWAYx-0Lzzk8yT5i3NbbsPhO5_gZ5C4uJ6-xc-LwzWw86w1V8Ge5DYoMJjERKEgBF" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15548281" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15548281</a><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></div>
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-46518209340762093392018-01-01T11:30:00.001-08:002018-01-01T23:25:56.196-08:00Dakota buckwheat (Eriogonum visheri)<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Grand River National Grasslands, Perkins County, SD</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">Photos from August 2013 and 2014. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Rare across its range. Limited to the western half of the northern
Great Plains. </span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Edaphic endemic, annual. Endemic means unique to a geographic
area, in this case, the north-western plains. Edaphic
means specific to a particular soil, in this case, exposed, often disturbed,
badland claystones, mudstones, siltstones. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">These mobile, elusive populations
shift across a given badland outcrop from year to year. It is our suspicion
that the location of the following year's population is partly determined by the
prevailing direction of the strongest winter winds and the direction of
runoff during rains and snowmelt. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Being an annual with such particular tastes, it is inherently at risk of extirpation. One bad stretch of weather, disturbance, or pathogen and the seed bank viability may have lapsed. This is the life of an annual in the wild. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">That being so, viabilty of the seeds in the seedbank is essential for the survival of this species. Apparently, it has innate dormancy, some seeds resisting germination despite ideal conditions, ensuring the survival of some seeds into the next year in the event that the current crop fails. It has been observed that </span><i style="color: #1d2129; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Eriogonum annuum</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> has one of the largest seed banks in the Nebraska Sand Hills, yet only 6% of the seeds germinate in any given year. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">As always, it is worth noting that there are several other species of <i>Eriogonum</i> out there that are very similar in appearance to <i>E. visheri</i>, such as <i>E. gordonii, E. trichopes, E. corvilleanum, E. cernuum, E. rotundifolium, </i>and <i>E. gracile. </i></span><br />
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5206852.pdf">https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5206852.pdf</a></span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qnOMO3vQp78/Wkr9yvQrQ8I/AAAAAAAAAv0/8csFRlcur48N-ukfglg6W44a92bA_Dj7ACLcBGAs/s1600/Ervi%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="900" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qnOMO3vQp78/Wkr9yvQrQ8I/AAAAAAAAAv0/8csFRlcur48N-ukfglg6W44a92bA_Dj7ACLcBGAs/s400/Ervi%2B2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vedD5Y7ci48/WksYtBtrsqI/AAAAAAAAAwU/snHYsfDhCTY4M6evN72PO2LGz6q7YsDaQCLcBGAs/s1600/Eriogonum%2Bvisheri.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vedD5Y7ci48/WksYtBtrsqI/AAAAAAAAAwU/snHYsfDhCTY4M6evN72PO2LGz6q7YsDaQCLcBGAs/s400/Eriogonum%2Bvisheri.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qnOMO3vQp78/Wkr9yvQrQ8I/AAAAAAAAAv0/8csFRlcur48N-ukfglg6W44a92bA_Dj7ACLcBGAs/s1600/Ervi%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-48907878113501593842018-01-01T11:30:00.000-08:002018-01-01T14:04:00.271-08:00Barr's milkvetch (Astragalus barrii) <span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Scenic Basin, SD, June 1993</span><br />
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USFS Sensitive species; S1 NE; S3 SD, MT and WY. </div>
</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
A perennial, regional endemic found on exposed, eroding soils in western SD, southeastern MT, northeastern WY, and northeastern NE. The largest population, found near Scenic, SD, numbering possibly 12 million specimens, showed a predilection for a specific badland formation, the Chadron Formation claystone. When in bloom in such numbers, the air was perfumed like a field of clover. Which it nearly is, being a legume. Most occurrences are in the Powder River Basin in WY.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NX6EF-8o9OA/WkqMMj5eOqI/AAAAAAAAArk/HWJskbNgryoNlAe0Lpk4VLRoV1mN_4i3ACLcBGAs/s1600/astragalus%2Bbarrii.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="596" data-original-width="900" height="263" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NX6EF-8o9OA/WkqMMj5eOqI/AAAAAAAAArk/HWJskbNgryoNlAe0Lpk4VLRoV1mN_4i3ACLcBGAs/s400/astragalus%2Bbarrii.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-89106039837022357392018-01-01T11:27:00.001-08:002018-01-01T22:15:02.264-08:00Michaux's sedge (Carex michauxiana)<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Northern Bayfield County, WI. 7/5/05</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Rare in parts of its range - Wisconsin, Massachusetts.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Along the exposed, sandy shores of a seepage lake in the Moquah Pine Barrens. This was during a prolonged drought and the lakes were very low.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The barrens are on a dry, sandy outwash plain. It is a fire-dependent ecosystem, ordinarily dominated by low-lying plant species. But 60 years of fire suppression resulted in widespread encroachment by trees a</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">nd shrubs. It is a USFS Research Natural Area. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Carex are distinct from grasses, usually having three-edged stems and a bottle-shaped bract surrounding the female flower and seed. The bract is called a perigynium and the fruit is called an achene.</span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ERzljmPN1xM/WkqLggA02oI/AAAAAAAAArc/vLOpfmFH9ksifx4T16Hx35majQ_onVW5QCLcBGAs/s1600/Carex%2Bmichauxiana%2B3%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: transparent; clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1199" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ERzljmPN1xM/WkqLggA02oI/AAAAAAAAArc/vLOpfmFH9ksifx4T16Hx35majQ_onVW5QCLcBGAs/s400/Carex%2Bmichauxiana%2B3%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-85368083198263746772018-01-01T11:24:00.002-08:002018-01-01T22:20:40.718-08:00Hooker's townsendia (Townsendia hookeri)<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Rare in the northern Great Plains, secure in the remainder of its range, typically found in elevated, gravelly, badland exposures.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Perennial from a branched caudex, forming a tuft of leaves. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Very difficult to distinguish from another species, <i>Townsendia exscapa</i>. The species identity may best be indicated by habitat: <i>hookeri </i>is usually on badland exposures, <i>exscapa </i>is usually in the thick of prairie grasses apart from badland exposures</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">. This is a fairly consistent phenomenon. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The legend of this species is that two botanical experts on <i>Eriogonum </i>disagreed on the identity of a single specimen of <i>Eriogonum</i>, one calling it <i>hookeri</i>, the other calling it <i>exscapa</i>. The solution was Solomonic: Cut the species in two and give it back to everyone; the authorities deemed <i>both </i>of the species as rare and be done with the squabbling.<br />This photo was taken on April 14, 2016. The population was engulfed by the Ridge Road Fire on April 14, 2015 and was back in bloom exactly one year later. Not a scratch. Prairie forbs have most of their biomass below ground, protected from fire.<br /><a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcatdir.loc.gov%2Fcatdir%2Fsamples%2Fcam031%2F94034787.pdf&h=ATM3UzDD_7yBSvb0f13z6oOmTcgVR76XyjAZ_hJfIlwcNlniol0s_N2wEndUP9KRLTir8noj0IFxrd_Ir3VXwLbxI582eIuIsz_wOMUQATA6tvQQfgv3q-Lx8XkyL_UjE0ssBtD5xU3O49eQt8rds3jtLYgqIKUkjTa6_8gbXKvKxP1zjJwpRKolrQQUFrYljG0h5MWurpvoNNHFnswwiDIFqmVDP8alhCrOvFI98zrGItR45-Ofado6lWGxUSUIFSMODBv6Rkl33jYfEejkuxNdGN6Du3Qn7ll2RVMLGHkq" href="http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/94034787.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/94034787.pdf</a></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-88184269242618391392018-01-01T11:22:00.000-08:002018-01-01T23:54:33.652-08:00Western prairie fringed orchid (Platanthera praeclara) <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Sheyenne National Grasslands, Ransom County, ND.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Federally threatened species; rare across its range.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">A tallgrass prairie species, occupying the edges of prairie
wetlands, this species declined, along with many others, as almost every square
yard of the tallgrass prairie was converted to cropland. All that remains are a
few weary patches in cemeteries, railroad right-of-way, and small, embattled
preserves.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Notice the Fi</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">bonacci sequence, a sum of the previous two
numbers to infinity. This is how matter is packed into space with minimum
wasted space. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="color: #365899; font-size: 10.5pt;"><a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="async" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencenews.org%2Farticle%2Fmathematical-lives-plants&h=ATN_1MK8XAUK6joP2-Sin4dS9m_sJ-MxP-fRh3nNIhCyfz7BBgUorn7l1YlQzuf9YpmnYN_mlHyHcubBWvLQvXwhkU3Y8LmW3jt8YKRsRkOHx45-odvhpI1nMh4Y_C_Wg9Vu9Y1cO5bws1sGa7WN3uYw1uE6oO_2qsTddde-4dJ80QLglkByrnEz7Xdgu1TT3WLLeKXukStXGpB1GKj9_3Dw2KBMrvmVUhia9kIqmFzvud4zfA37-wLe242DE0kF6mZtSOa99lANWxiz-eY2mVoD7YHlive719sMNfWDrs8Z" href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mathematical-lives-plants" style="color: #365899; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.sciencenews.org/artic…/mathematical-lives-plants</a></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_qzJTh87XSU/WkqKMuh8WgI/AAAAAAAAArI/mj6mauJNyb4f4NsxopW6zbxbhxgSTiJ2ACLcBGAs/s1600/golden%2Bangle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" data-original-height="898" data-original-width="900" height="398" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_qzJTh87XSU/WkqKMuh8WgI/AAAAAAAAArI/mj6mauJNyb4f4NsxopW6zbxbhxgSTiJ2ACLcBGAs/s400/golden%2Bangle.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-44009300572728062502018-01-01T11:10:00.002-08:002018-01-01T14:07:46.327-08:00Smooth Goosefoot (Chenopodium subglabrum)<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Photo 8/3/07, Perkins County, SD, Grand River National Grassland</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This specimen was found in parabolic and blowout sand dunes in Northern Wheatgrass-Needlegrass Plains. These are apparently eolian sediments derived locally from weathered Ludlow Formation sandstone and/or sandbars deposted by the Grand River.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The species is rare across its range in the Northern Great Plains.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">It is an early successional species, stabilizing active sand dunes such as dune slacks, blowouts, river banks, and disturbed sandy plains. It is vulnerable due to dune encroachment. Grazing animals maintain suitable habitat. </span><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kLopmgv6-iM/WkqHHnt4MFI/AAAAAAAAAq4/Zcjz-Dul5Eog5lPTNr0XNiIPFCkh-584QCLcBGAs/s1600/CHSU%2Bflower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="852" data-original-width="1000" height="340" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kLopmgv6-iM/WkqHHnt4MFI/AAAAAAAAAq4/Zcjz-Dul5Eog5lPTNr0XNiIPFCkh-584QCLcBGAs/s400/CHSU%2Bflower.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33242496.post-8136795545237871622018-01-01T11:06:00.001-08:002018-01-01T22:23:27.293-08:00Dry Falls<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Photo 5/12/17</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This is in Dry Falls State Park, WA. Shrub-steppe habitat. At the head of Lower Grand Coulee, a large canyon without a river.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This, as far as we know, was the largest waterfall on earth, 3.5 miles wide. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The broad valley with dry falls was formed when the ice dams at the south end of the Cordilleran ice sheet broke, draining Glacial Lakes Missoula and Columbia, at one time rivalling Lake Michigan in size. There may have been 25 or more of these Missoula Floods. The wall of water is estimated to have been 300 feet high, travelling at 65 miles per hour, an intensity required to move the garage-sized boulders downstream. The floodwaters filled the Willamette Valley, depositing rich Palouse Silt, before exiting at Wallula Gap, the chaos giving rise to millions of apples. This is how the earth farms itself. </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0