Exploring Nature Blog

There are few things I dislike more than very, hot, muggy weather. A week of summer that stays above 90° and doesn’t cool off at night is enough to send a cold weather person around the bend. To make it worse, hot temperatures bring out the deer flies in such fierce, thick clouds that its hard not to think of biblical plagues. Yet even as I sit in front of the fan at my drawing table contemplating a trip to Siberia, I know this weather will have one great result that even I look forward to every year… It warms our northern lakes enough that even a tenderfoot swimmer like me can go for a long swim across the lake.

Oddly kids don’t seem to notice that the lake is cold and will jump right in in June and swim until their lips are blue and their teeth are chattering enough to cause lockjaw. I chalk that up to being too young to realize that they are hypothermic. And this doesn’t account for my girlfriends who swim in Lake Champlain every day — all winter. Seriously. They enter the water where Camp Dudley bubbles the water to keep it open around their docks and swim laps along the ice floe. I haven’t worked up the nerve to witness this in person, but I’ve seen pictures. But either they are demigods not disguising their Poseidon parenthood very well or they just don’t have nerve endings. For the rest of use mere mortals, swimming in cold northern lakes becomes much more of a pleasure after the water reaches 75°.

I even discovered that on a cool 60° morning that same lake — feels very warm as its several degrees warmer than the air. It’s surreal to slide into a warm lake that just a week before elicited a shriek that startled neighbors a mile away. Early in the morning, that warm water condenses into a fog that covers whole lake. You cannot see the other side or the sky, just a wall of white mist. Everything is utterly still.

So it was, when I waded in up to my chin this weekend at dawn. Floating weightless while the loons called somewhere off in the fog and sank to where my eyes sat right at water level.

From that vantage point I could see where the fog met the water in the distance. And that was when I saw them. There were millions of them, everywhere… water striders.

I have always watched water striders as they moved here and there in a seemingly aimless dance and even wondered idly what they were accomplishing with their perpetual motion. But I had never seem how many of them were actually out there doing their thing. It was the backdrop of the fog that made their colossal numbers come into focus. Intellectually, I know they don’t bite humans, but I still had to quell a momentary urge to run screaming from the lake. It was amazing really to watch them. How many times have humans pondered the skill they so effortlessly display?

Their ability to use water tension to stay afloat is nothing short of miraculous. And their sheer numbers are astounding. So there was a profound nature moment… floating at dawn in a warm lake… surrounded by silence, fog, loons and a million zigzagging beings walking on water, just because they could.

Have a profound nature moment to share?

I just found out this morning that Dennis Aprill died suddenly yesterday of pancreatic cancer. He was a long time journalist for the Press Republican writing a column on the outdoors. He also wrote books, several of which I illustrated over the years.

The sad part for me was that we had just signed a contract with History Press to do a new book together called Adirondack Tales on his animal columns.

He’d been having terrible back pain which came up suddenly this winter and had delayed him getting the manuscript completed (and much of his outdoor activities). He was also trying to solve the mysterious pain so he could go to Alaska this month with his daughter Carolyn.

I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago, after we’d finally come to an agreement with History Press to go ahead with the book and signed all the paperwork. He’d had an MRI which had explained his pain by revealing a bulging disc. It obviously was not the only issue.

So early this week he went to the Adirondack Medical Center when the pain got too much to bear. His pain must have been significant as this man once walked down his long driveway in an ice storm to meet an ambulance when he was in the middle of acute appendicitis. Sadly this time they discovered that he was harboring late stage pancreatic cancer. He lasted less than a week.

I am so sorry for his family and for all of us who enjoyed his columns, endless energy and obvious joy in experiencing the outdoors and sharing it with us. Dennis, you will be missed.

This weekend I had the opportunity to take a group of people out to explore the Forest Floodplain area along the Boquet River in Whallensburg, NY. This was a hike sponsored by the Northeast Wilderness Trust who, with the help of Eddy Foundation, are working to preserve this ecologically important area located off the sharp turn on Cook Road East of Back Kettle Farm.

We were a mixed-aged group (the youngest was a baby in a sling) with different backgrounds, but all wide-eyed in anticipation and ready to explore. We started by walking down an old road, which was little more than a logging road now covered in moss and ferns and very wet in some places. It was bordered on the left by a mixed forest of maples, beech, hemlock, white pine, hornbeam (musclewood), hophornbeam (ironwood), witch hazel, paper and yellow birch (among others). On the right, it topped the rise above the Boquet River floodplain. Thanks to the sharp eyes and short stature of one 8-year old, we spotted bloodroot, partridgeberry, trout lily, wild ginger, spring beauties, and lots and lots of red trillium dotting the forest floor.

At the end of the “road” we reached a wetter area, heavily used by beavers with many pointed stumps all around. A small stream meandered though the area, bordered by cattails, and through the trees we could see the bright green of an agricultural field marking the northern most boundary of the preserved area. At our feet, sharp-lobed hepatica, herb Robert, and sensitive ferns were poking through the leaf litter. We followed the edge of the water as it swung back around to the south again and came around the corner to an expansive beaver pond with two houses rising out of the water. There was also a lot of invasive moneywort around the pond unfortunately, but it didn’t detract from the real beauty of the area.

We started back south then, exploring between the beaver swamp on the left and the steep slope to the upland forest above on the right. There were lots of wild leeks (ramps), squirrel corn, wild oats, hepatica, bloodroot, trout lily, blue cohash, toothwort, ferns and moss covered logs.

There was also a collection of black maple, something very rare in this area. Here the photographers went to work shooting the myriad wildflowers on their hand and knees as the rest of us explored.

Finally we reached the banks of the Boquet River and followed it down past blooming wild cherry trees, several potholes full of frogs and a sandy riverbank covered in animal tracks (deer, raccoon, coyote). Climbing up away from the water, we came over a rise to a lowland back swamp and all stopped to stare. The whole swamp was covered in new, bright green, false hellebore. It was stunning.

As we covered the last quarter-mile back to our starting point, we stumbled across an old stone water cistern hidden in the hemlocks and covered with soft, green moss. It was strange to think that there have been people living here for more than 200 years and their signs are just under the leaf litter if you look for them. Amid the rapidly disappearing wild forests of the world, I suppose it is our hope that there will be people walking in these same woods in another 200 years looking at the signs and wondering about us. It’s a goal worth pursuing.

(Thanks to Laura Dikovsky Smith and Kathy Kelly for taking pictures!)

For ten years growing up, I lived on Long Island, a vast expanse of suburban sprawl intermixed with parks, malls and “sumps”. What on Earth is a sump, you might ask. I will explain. Long Island had a water table so shallow that when it rained hard (which it did a lot) all the sewer drains would overflow and the water would run like small rivers down the sides of suburban streets. Most towns of that era had “sumps,” large football field-sized depressions that were fenced in and served as water overflow areas in many neighborhoods.

They also turned out to be breeding grounds for unwanted goldfish. Apparently people who had outgrown their pets, would toss them into the sumps where they did quite nicely, some growing to astonishingly large sizes. They could live there for quite a while fattened up on insects and debris. Then there would be a hard rainfall and the water would overflow from the storm sewers and sumps and flow down the streets, along with… the goldfish.

When we were kids these goldfish-laden streams would run down our streets right in front of our houses. We would use any tool and container available to collect them. The favorite was the tennis racket and mixing bowls full of rainwater would was ad hoc holding tanks. As the goldfish came flowing by, we would net them with the tennis racket and whip them into the mixing bowls. Game, match, point. In an average rainstorm we could collect upward of fifty goldfish of varying sizes.

All the kids on the block took part in the collection, it was like a carnival game where you actually got to keep the goldfish. Except that most parents didn’t let their kids bring the fish home afterward. They called them sewer fish. We, however, being an equal opportunity wildlife collection household, were allowed to keep ours. We also inherited the goldfish catch from all the kids on the block.

The goldfish would go into a large fish tank in the den where we kept them until they died off, one by one, probably from depression since this relatively small box was not the large, mucky sumps to which they had grown accustomed.

This brings me to the real reason for this trip down memory lane. The concept of Rain Gardens. This is a relatively new concept that, from my previous story I realize, has been around in practice for a long time — though rain garden sure sounds more romantic than sump!

The idea of a rain garden is simple. It is a garden you plant in your yard with water-loving native plants to which you direct all the water that runs off your roof, driveway, and lawn. It collects like a little pond for a few hours and then drains away into sandy soil and safely back into aquifers (underground water sources) avoiding storm water flooding.

This is useful for several reasons, but the main one is that storm water running off of roofs, sidewalks, parking lots and other hard surfaces carries pollutants and litter and washes it all into our waterways - rivers, lakes and the ocean.

Many communities have discovered that small rain gardens can virtually eliminate storm water flooding in their neighborhoods. Developers have begun to catch on and are adding these to newly constructed communities because they can actually save money on storm water drainage systems. Don’t you just love win win situations?

If you are interested in developing a rain garden in your yard here is about the best reference I have found to date, though there are many out there: http://www.uri.edu/ce/healthylandscapes/raingarden.htm

Let is rain… Let is rain… Let it rain!

I’m not much of a swimmer, even in the best of times, but the idea of floating free in cool water on a hot day sounds pretty good about now. So this week we headed up to Connery Pond, a wild, isolated little haven in the shadow of Whiteface Mountain, to see how I would do in the water.

This is a beautiful spot, so even if you are just floating around in a mindless stupor, you have an unobstructed view of the top of Whiteface and all the surrounding Sentinel Range at which to gaze. There are a pair of loons that breed on the lake so you can catch glimpses of them and hear their occasional calls as you float by. Sometimes you might even find yourself being checked out at close range by the unexpectedly large waterbirds and their disconcerting red eyes. There are also osprey and kingfishers calling on Connery and I once saw a bald eagle being pursued by crows not far from the dock.

But this time, when I approached the dock to try my first swim of the summer, I was not looking at the scenery. I was looking at the looming steps, the uneven rocky terrain, the wooden dock (aka splinters), and all the other potential disasters a hopping person thinks about. (I won’t even describe the comical dance involved in getting into a bathing suit on one leg.)

Yet finally I was suited up and on the dock, where I scrambled, crab-like, across to the edge and launched myself out into space landing with a splash into deep water. A floating devise, in this case a half surf board decorated with the “hot wheels” logo, was generously tossed my way and with my arms firmly wrapped around it, I began to carefully paddle away from the dock.

It felt like… well… (sorry to be trite) the way you might imagine a butterfly feels when it finally sheds that tight, hot, uncomfortable chrysalis, stretches its stiff limbs and flies away. I felt free, unfettered by gravity, my healing ankle gently rotating in the cool water almost like it used to. I paddled and paddled. I was careful, of course, but still, it felt… amazing.

The freedom of deep water is that you can kick your feet like a spastic idiot and never have to worry about hitting the bottom — which for a healing break would be… um… bad. So I floated and sighed and whirled around like an amphibian, letting time pass and ignoring any comments from shore about the weather coming in. Finally after the clouds blocked the sun and a sharp wind started blowing and my husband suggested that blue lips and chattering teeth were a pretty good sign that swim time was over, I head back into shore.

When I felt the gentle touch of sand on my good foot, I inched forward to the dock and using one hand for support hopped in until I was high enough to scoot up onto the dock. I wrapped a warm towel around myself and sighed.

I was back on land and subject to the rules of gravity again, but for just a couple of hours I had been the whole, healthy person I was before the broken ankle. With luck, I would be there again in a few months, but for now I would just have to visit the memory via dog paddle on hot days in Connery Pond.