Tag: Nature

Posted on

A metamorphosis, in progress

When we moved to WNY way back in 1981, my grandmother visited and noticed that our new backyard had a lot of milkweed in it. She told me that milkweed is a preferred plant for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, and we should go out and see if we could find any. And we did! Quite a few, even. She helped me modify a jar (by punching holes in the lid), and after picking a few milkweed leaves and stalks, we had ourselves a habitat for a caterpillar. In this way she showed me how to nurture a caterpillar all the way to the formation of its chrysalis, and then to monitor the chrysalis for the shifts in color at the end that indicate that a butterfly will soon be emerging. At that point we would open the jar and put it outside so the butterfly could escape when the time came. I never did get to actually witness the moment of emergence, but it was still an amazing bit of participation in the natural world. It was also, I imagine, the kind of participatory lesson that is passed on from generation to generation, not unlike catching fireflies in a jar for a bit or learning to fish. (I never learned to fish, by the way. Not every lesson gets learned by everyone. And no, that’s not a complaint. Fishing looks like a lovely pastime, but it’s not one where I feel like I’ve missed out.)

Why do I bring any of this up? Well, a few years back a milkweed plant managed to seed itself in the mulch bed right outside our front door. We’ve let the milkweed grow each year, and this year it finally happened. This past Saturday we met this individual:

And then our friend disappeared. We wondered where the beastie got to…and then, yesterday when I got home from work, I found the beastie’s new digs. Right on the siding. I wonder why (s)he built there and not in the safety of the milkweed…but I suppose it’s fine.

The wheel turns.

 

Share This Post

Posted on

At the Ridge….

Highmark Stadium and the city of Buffalo, looking north from Chestnut Ridge Park

For the first time since Cane died last September, I went hiking at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday.

Chestnut Ridge is an old park whose development by Erie County began back in the late 1920s, and a lot of the park’s original infrastructure, quite a bit of which still stands, was built by work crews of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Chestnut Ridge is a very large park–at more than 1100 acres, it is 300 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park–and it covers a lot of rugged terrain, ranging from forested hills to steep gorges through which streams run. The most famous feature in Chestnut Ridge Park is the Eternal Flame waterfall, which is just that: a waterfall behind which there is a small grotto into which natural gas seeps from underground. This gas is almost always aflame, and if it happens to be out, you can literally reach in behind the water and relight it, if you’ve brought a lighter with you.

Chestnut Ridge was a common destination for Cane and I in our weekly nature walks and hikes, and we covered a great deal of the park’s terrain and trail system over our years of trekking there. My last visit to the Ridge with Cane was last July, I think…which was therefore the last time I was there at all. Shortly after that visit he started limping slightly, and that was the beginning of his end.

Yesterday was my first trip there alone in many years.

Being up there yesterday was many things. It was beautiful, obviously, and being in nature was honestly what the doctor ordered after what’s been a trying few months recently. I kept thinking, though, of the presence I was missing; I’d walk a hundred feet and suddenly realized that I hadn’t had to stop three times for a greyhound to smell this tree, that bush, this patch of dirt, that rock. When you’re used to walking those trails with one hand always holding a leash, it’s a bit strange when that hand is unoccupied. And when I made my way down to the side of the stream at the bottom of one of those gorges, there was no watching as Cane found a deep spot to lay in–you know, to cool off–and to drink.

I won’t be staying away from Chestnut Ridge this long again…but it’s not going to feel the same there again, is it?

Photos:

Stream in Chestnut Ridge, from a bridge. It’s been very dry the last six weeks; usually there’s much more water than this, this time of year.

The trees that I call “the Fallen Sisters”. Again, note how dry the stream is. This time of year that whole streambed is flowing.

Inside an old pump house. The pump is long gone.

It was a good day, a good walk in the woods. There was even time for a touch of whimsy, like plucking a few wildflowers and wearing them in the bib of my overalls. One should always strive for a touch of whimsy. At least, that’s how I see it.

 

Share This Post

Posted on

Sounds of Ice

We had a big ice storm rip through The 716 the night before, and it had the usual effects of ice storms: thick coatings of ice on everything, resulting in tons of power outages from lines collapsing, or tree branches collapsing onto lines, and so on. We were without power at home for thirteen hours, starting about 1am Thursday morning. Luckily I slept through a chunk of that, and then I went to work, so when I got home the power was back on.

Oh, and that modification I made a few months back to our back-up sump pump? It worked! My extra-long pipe discharged the water far enough away from the house that for most of the outage we avoided the recirculation problem and thus the backup was actually able to cycle, rather than run continuously. Eventually, however, that amount of water still started making its way back in, so I added the other ten-foot length. And even that eventually wasn’t able to discharge the water far enough away to keep it from making its way back into the pit, so we’ll need to make a permanent fix at some point and tie the backup sump discharge into the main storm line. That’s a problem for another time, though.

Meanwhile, the landscape itself after the ice storm took on a quality we don’t see all that often, since we don’t get ice storms like this too frequently. Some of the trees started to look like something out of Doctor Zhivago. And everything sounded differently, too! I actually thought to record some of this, hence the video below. First, my feet, stomping not through snow but a thick crust of ice. Second, removing the ice shell–more than 1/4-in thick–from the railings of our deck. And third, from late last night, when I went to let Carla out for her last bit of outdoor business before bedtime. It sounded like it was pouring out, and she tried to come right back in, but I gritted my teeth and stepped out with her…to discovered it wasn’t pouring or raining or anything at all. That was the ice in the trees, breaking through and raining down.

I’m not a fan of ice storms, but they do make the world look and sound very different….

 

Share This Post

Posted on

The deer next door

Our next-door neighbors have taken to feeding the local deer from the woods behind our neighborhood. It’s nice to see them over there in their yard, eating away. Our Carla, of course, thinks they are Big! Scary! Beasts! that need to be shooed away with much barking, but I think they’re getting used to her because where she used to be able to scare them all off, now only a few go when she goes running out there. (Our yard is fenced, so she can’t actually get at the deer.)

(The photo’s resolution isn’t great because I used the 10x zoom on my phone, as opposed to the optical zoom on my good camera.)

Share This Post

Posted on

Nature Video Friday

No, not a new weekly feature, but for lack of anything else to post, here’s a nature video I saw on Twitter earlier, about a beast I’d never heard of before: the grasshopper mouse. These little guys are…scary.

Warning: some of this is kind of disturbing, in that “unvarnished look at nature” way.

 

Share This Post

Posted on

First Spring adventure

Last Sunday, Cane (the Dee-oh-gee) and I went out for a Sunday walk in the park for the first time since December. Why no outings since then? Well, we got back from Oahu just in time for the weather to shift into a much colder and snowier pattern; where the WNY winter until the end of December had been very mild, it pivoted hard in January to being snowy enough and cold enough for Buffalo to take this year’s title as Snowiest City In America. Oof. Plus, there’s the fact that Cane isn’t a spring chicken anymore. He’s 9-and-a-half as I write this, and while he’s still got tons of spunk and energy, he’s not as springy as he once was, so I have to be a bit careful about our adventures. I can’t just throw his leash on him and go for a four-hour hike someplace.

But still…he was thrilled to get out!

[Insert Morgan Freeman delivering monologue about hope]
Someone peed here.
Posing him for the camera remains a challenge.

We went to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite haunt of ours in East Aurora. Even though we’re over a month into spring, in this part of the country we’re only just now starting to see the first hints of spring’s awakening. We’re getting there, though. Today is May 1. It can only get greener from here. (I’ll spare you my usual rant about Spring being WNY’s worst season.)

And if you’re wondering why Carla rarely gets featured in these walks, it’s mainly because she really doesn’t like riding in the car, for reasons we’ve never been able to figure. That sucks! She loves being in new places and being outside, but she is so miserable in the car that we always feel terrible about that part of things.

She is enjoying the greening of our yard, though. Witness:

Elmer Fudd can have “Wabbit Season” and “Duck Season”. Carla is all about “Mud Season”!

As I’m writing this it’s a sunny Sunday morning, but there’s rain in the forecast in the next couple of hours. Sigh….

 

Share This Post

Posted on

Dispatches from a Lovely Autumn Morning

Here are some photos from Knox Farm State Park several days ago. We’ve been enjoying a warmer and dryer than usual fall so far, but according to the Weather Gurus, we’re about to have a significant shift to the colder weather we’re more accustomed to here in November.

While fall foliage is now well “past peak” in terms of color (and this year was kind of an odd one in terms of colors, as we never really even had that glorious peak of fall color when it looks like all the hills are singing in fiery pigments), but that doesn’t mean beauty isn’t there to be found….

The Dumas Bridge. I rather like this shot! This angle, with the color and the leaves on the ground, really suggests that D’Artagnan and friends might come galloping around that corner, thundering on their steeds on their way to foil the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu….

This time of year, Knox Farm is very busy with families having their Holiday family photos taken by local pro photographers. I actually love watching the photographers themselves at work.

 

 

Not sure what caught Cane’s eye, but I do like how I turned out here, I must say.

I suspect that photographic dispatches from my nature walks will soon be back to including snow. This doesn’t bother me, really, but I do miss autumn when it gives way to winter, a little.

Share This Post

Posted on

Sprung?

 I’ve long been of the belief that as delightful as three of the four seasons in Buffalo Niagara are, the last one is usually just annoying. It might surprise you to learn that the one I don’t like is not winter, but rather, spring. I stand by this! Spring in these parts is not a welcome return to warmth, but rather it is generally a two-month affair of temperatures remaining stubbornly in the mid-to-upper 40s. Spring in Buffalo Niagara is usually a pretty gray affair, as the clouds maintain their stranglehold over the sun until mid-May at the earliest. It takes forever for trees and bushes and everything else to come back to life, to the point that green isn’t the dominant color here until Memorial Day at the earliest. The snowpiles in parking lots and at the ends of streets endure, in their dirty grayness, and it seems like mud is everywhere.

And yes, it usually snows in April around here. Last year it even snowed not near Mothers Day, but actually on Mothers Day.

But we do once in a while get to enjoy a day like today in springtime around here, a day when it is warm and sunny out, when we get to open windows and switch out the stuffy indoor air for fresh outdoor air, when we can walk the dogs multiple times, and when the sun shines from sunrise to sunset.

Geology and astronomy may be in agreement that it is spring here, but it’s just not. Not yet. Not in a way that feels real.

That’s not stopping nature from looking like it’s embracing the early wake-up call….

Larger view of the stream at Chestnut Ridge

That’s Chestnut Ridge park, just this morning. It’s one of my favorite places, where The Dee-oh-gee and I visit often on our weekly Sunday morning nature walks. That particular stream is a combination of two streams that tumble from the upper reaches of the park; this is at the park’s northern, and lower, end. Here it tumbles down through what’s left of a deep ravine, and under a steel-deck bridge before it flows on, winding its way toward Lake Erie before it finally empties into Eighteen Mile Creek, which then flows on to Lake Erie. A lot of that water will eventually flow out of Lake Erie, down the Niagara River, over the Falls, and out to Lake Ontario…and on and on, eventually to the sea.

There’s still snow up there (Chestnut Ridge is in what the weather people call “the upper elevations” when they are threatening snowfall for some of us), and as of now there hasn’t been enough warmth to cause the grass to really start greening or for dormant trees and bushes to start budding. But it’s tempting to look for those things.

Spring in Buffalo Niagara. It’s here…kind of.

Share This Post