New Life

It's that time of year. Eggs laid in the ground two months ago are now hatching. Clifford and I made a fortuitous discovery while walking our dogs on some woods owned by friends of ours. A rare sight, because they are so secretive. These little guys (or gals) hatched into a dry world. We are in drought and the ground they were laid in is parched, the path surface, except in the spot where their mother had months ago methodically dug a small flask-shaped hole, was like pavement.

The two hatchlings still had their rear halves stuck in their eggs, the dryness made it difficult or impossible for them to free themselves. One had apparently done most of the digging to re-open the nest chamber, and was making his way across the path, pulling himself along with his front legs. The other remained in the nest chamber, his rear end similarly trapped.

We had some water in a canteen so we moistened them, allowing the flexible-shelled eggs to take up moisture and become pliable again, so that they'd be able to free themselves.

Baby box turtles in the wild are a rare sight and to find two in one day is a real treat.

Another herp sighting for the day was an unusually pale-colored toad.

High Summer

It's high summer in Georgia. Insects calling and jumping through my barely-mowed yard (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers cicadas). Black-and Yellow Argiope spiders, some quite large, are weaving their orb webs to glint in the sun and catch insects, some almost as big as they are. The silk anchor lines are amazingly tough and resist rather than break when I accidentally walk into them. There are many more dragonflies than last year and at dusk, a small army of toads (Bufo americanus and Bufo fowleri)emerges from wherever it is that they hide during the day, to hop in search of insects in the relative cool of the night. Most frogs seem to be done calling for now, but at dusk or at the suggestion of rain, the occasional Cope's Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis)will trill. I've been working on my Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina)research, doing some sketching and painting, strategizing about a website to promote my artwork and building a few rain barrels. Lo and behold, they work! I'm also working on a few new county records for some local herps, inspired by my volunteer frog call monitoring and the new Amphibians and Reptiles of Georgia, which I highly recommend. More on the new county records in a future post...

Pictured above is a newly transformed Cope's Gray Tree Froglet. I took this picture at my backyard frog pond last year. Perhaps this little gem is one of the ones I can hear trilling when it rains.

Terrapin Diary

Herps are waking up in Georgia. In the past few days I've seen several anoles and helped my first turtle of 2008 across the road--a musk turtle, Sternotherus odoratus.

I also learned about something called the Wayback Machine that has enabled me to find most of the Photo Diary of a Terrapin Researcher. I'm pretty happy.

Here are a couple of photos from the above mentioned site.

Snow

Snow today. Just a flurry by New York standards, but a big deal here. Large wet flakes swirled in spirals through the air. A mixed flock of birds at the feeder, which is not far from the tree pictured here last spring with a male cardinal in its branches. Included in the flock was at least one Brown-Headed Nuthatch, a species I'd never seen before moving to Georgia. Here it occurs along with the more familiar nuthatch that has a black head. The brown is a plucky little bird that doesn't let anyone bully him. There was a brilliant male cardinal too, though he seemed more interested in driving off the two female cardinals than he did in eating, or were they immature males--not sure what to make of that. Picture this area colored white and animated by busily feeding birds. Chickadees, yellow finches, a plump house finch that liked to hog the feeder. The cats enjoyed the show and Max, our ancient Pomeranian, enjoyed puttering around in the snow, something he hasn't done in almost three years. The winter weather seemed to give him added energy.

Ring around the moon

We're expecting 1-3 inches of snow tomorrow. Tonight ice crystals in the atmosphere enclosed the moon in a wide circle--the sort of thing that would be difficult to photograph at all and impossible to capture what it was really like, to be there and see the curvature of air delineated that way by moonlight, which is, after all, reflected from the sun, shining somewhere far away. It was fleeting, gone now, I don't know how long it lasted and I didn't try to photograph it. Maybe I should've.

This picture is (obviously) a saguaro cactus in bud. These cacti are held sacred by Native Americans, I've been told, who consider them ancestors in plant form--people who, after death, took the form of cacti. They are certainly about as humanlike as a plant gets, with their upraised arms and individual personalities.

Juxtaposition

Ice coated the needles on the pine trees along the road , catching the light as I drove to school--nature's fiber optics, transmitting a message of senseless (perhaps) beauty.

This picture was taken in Tucson. Arizona has several species of hummingbirds. Georgia has only the Rubythroat, and they are way South on their wintering grounds right now. I just thought it provided a contrast to the weather we're having.

Sleety night in Georgia

Snowflakes swirled all over campus this afternoon. I strode down the steps of the Biology building, past a woman with her umbrella. she expressed surprise, "Won't it get all over you?". Well, yeah. "Isn't it wet like rain?". Its made of water. People around here were in a panic about weather that I recognize as halfway decent by New York standards.

Still, it was possible to appreciate snow as magical because it was an event, not a constant presence accompanied by months of unrelenting grey skies.

I wonder how the lichens are doing.

And the turtles.

The picture was taken last spring and is of lichens growing on a fruit tree--Usnea strigosa and Parmotrema perforatum, which seem to frequently grow together. Lichens are fascinating, and if you ever have the chance to look at them under a dissecting microscope, do so--they look so strange, and yet they are everywhere (everywhere with decent air quality, that is) and often unnoticed. they are ecologically significant, yet ignored. Lichens are pioneers on bare rock, food for arctic animals, and have unusual chemistries and very complicated lives. They have to somehow coordinate reproduction of two different component species to make one lichen. They have strange and beautiful forms. There is a huge book about them by Irwin Brodo, well worth looking at if you get the chance. The lichen flora in this part of Georgia is more diverse than anywhere else I've lived, possibly even seen. Areas in Texas, such as Enchanted Rock, have interesting lichens, but Georgia is hard to beat.

Things you don't see in Georgia

A few pictures from back in Tucson--scenes and creatures you won't see in Georgia. Each place has its own particularities. The Arizona mountains, the Georgia piedmont. The destert tortoise, the gopher tortoise. Arizonia opuntias are different from Georgia opuntias, and yes we do have native cacti here. There were some growing in scant soil on the granite outcrop, alongside mosses and lichens. Related, but different species grow in the desert, as part of very different communities. Life goes on about its business, but only in particular places. It is delineated. It is particular. It is constantly changing, even if very slowly, slower than the pace of a tortoise or a cactus or a landscape.

Lichen Photos Delayed

It's been one of those days, so I never got yesterday's photos from the camera to the computer, but I will do it within the next couple of days. We may actually get some winter weather here in Georgia over the next couple of days.

You might think that these two images are a strange juxtaposition--a picture of the Grand Canyon and one of the late and much-missed Blizzie sleeping on the couch. Both are sources of inspiration and meaning. Many artists take inspiration from landscape in general, as well as particular places. I've done more so with individual living things in general, and in particular. Cats are wonderful sketching subjects, both for what they are and the shapes that they make (and because sometimes they actually stay still), and Blizzie was a great cat.

Visited the outcrop--pictures tomorrow

We went back to the outcrop today, and it was beautiful, but it was remarkable how much it had changed since the other day. The colors of the mosses and lichens had lost some intensity in dring. Indeed, some of the mossses had blackened up. The stream area was reduced. The light was different. Resurrection fern growing on the biggest cedar was lush and green. That growing on a smaller cedar a few feet away had already shrivelled and curled. A Virginia pine grew at the base of the outcrop, looking visibly different from all the loblollies. Pinus virginiana looks craggy like pines in a Chinese painting. Even stunted loblollies never look like that. This is a great place to look at vegetation zones. The plants and lichens grow in distinct pockets that relate to water and soil availability and probably other factors as well.

Tomorrow I'll get the pictures out of the camera and onto the computer. For now, this is an ink painting of a sleeping tabby cat. I did this a couple of years ago, using Chinese ink and a Chinese brush on Chinese paper. I'd been practicing painting orchids in the style I was learning in, you guessed it, a Chinese painting class. I was well warmed-up when I saw one of my cats dozing on a chair. I put a sheet of paper on the red felt and sketched her. SHe is constructed of her stripes. I had this image put on some items through Cafe Press.

Another picture

Didn't get to the outcrop today, we'll go tomorrow. Instead, here's another picture from the enchanting Joyce Kilmer Forest.

Nearby Nature can be Unexpectedly Outstanding

This afternoon, Clifford and I went on a little expedition to a granite outcrop community not far from where we live. A friend of ours knew of our interest in lichens (really cool organisms that are really two organisms living in close symbiosis) and such and told us about this place but didn't indicate how truly spectacular it was. It was a magical garden of lichens and mosses, many different species. There was an ephemeral stream still running across the bare rock from last night's rain. Massive cedars grew where there was enough soil. There was some invasive privet, but the place seemed to be holding its own much better than the other outcrop communities I have seen. This is the finest example of this type of plant community that I have seen anywhere, and it was hidden in plain sight.

The picture on the left is an example of how massive the Tulip Trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) are at Joyce Kilmer. This forest was never cut. This is what these trees can do. The ones in my yard and the ones from my childhood home, though not saplings by any standard, are still mere youngsters compared to these giants, these elders.

Tomorrow, I will return to the granite outcrop, this time with my camera. I wasn't expecting to be impressed enough to need it today, but astonishing things really do lie just outside the front door.

Another rainy night in Georgia...

Saw a toad hopping around this evening, before it started raining. Somehow, he must have known. The rain has been enough to refill the garden pond completely. The water had gotten really low, due to a leak. The pond must have been deliberately and cleverly placed in an area that collects water, 'cause we sure didn't get 9+" of rain! The frogs are happy to have their home restored. Perhaps more interesting mushrooms will pop up. Last time it rained, we got a crop of a really bizarre one I had never seen before, the dog stinkhorn. Brilliant red and resembling, not a dog, but a part of a dog, actually part of a male dog, to be more exact. They are in the genus Phallus.

The image here is one I took while hiking in Joyce Kilmer Forest back in July of '06. I have a huge backlog of digital photos, including pictures of box turtles for my research, to go through. The choice of this one was pretty random, but the image of an old growth forest does contrast remarkably with the 2nd growth I'm used to seeing. Read Maloof's Teaching the Trees. The Tulip trees in this forest are truly massive. The huge entanglements of roots are unlike what you see in 2nd growth. There is much more understory vegetation. It is good to be reminded of these things. I need to keep in touch with the 'small picture', especially since, in coursework at least, this semester deals more in 'big-picture' subjects--geography and earth imaging. You can see many things you never could before with these technologies, but must not lose sight of the familiar.

Academics

Today was the first day of the new semester. I'll be taking some subjects that are completely new and unfamiliar to me--GIS for instance. I'm already impressed with what a powerful tool GIS can be, with a very wide range of practical applications. Today my husband also got his paper published. It's based on his PhD research on children and nature and is published in the online journal Children, Youth and Environment, it's entitled "Fostering Children’s Connections to Natural Places through Cultural and Natural History Storytelling".

Here's, for no particular reason, an amusing little brush and ink sketch of Ernest, a somewhat mischievous and moody little cat. I was going to post a sketch of turtles mating, but I'll have to save that for another time, as the file is too large.

Rainy night in Georgia

We're getting some much-needed rain tonight in Georgia. The turtles will be appreciating that. Classes start tomorrow. I've been thinking about things that inspire me. One was the Photo Diary of a Terrapin Researcher, but that seems sadly, unaccessible now. I read some good books over break. One I particularly enjoyed was Vincent Dethier's Crickets & Katydids: Concerts and Solos--wonderful natural history writing about insects, acoustic biology and his early science career , back in the 1930's.

On rainy nights in very early spring, or late winter, Spotted salamanders embark on their breeding migrations. When I lived in New York, that time would be a couple of months away. The range of this species includes Georgia, and I'll have to find out when they come out down here. They are large salamanders, glossy black with bright yellow and sometimes orange spots. I did an illustration of one for a bookmark from Acorn Designs. The image here is a scratchboard drawing, the one on the bookmark is with a technique similar to the one i used with Big Mamma Snapper. Scratchboard involves India ink on a clay-coated board. The clay coating allows you to scratch out inked areas, so you can draw in black and in white at the same time, and also make changes without starting over completely.

Big Mamma Snapper

Another semester is about to start and I'll be TAing some introductory biology labs, getting started on my thesis project and taking a some geography classes. Since its late, I thought I'd pull something out of the ol' archive. I had this image made into notecards, which are available, just email me. The original is 22"X30"--a "larger-than-life" format for an animal surrounded by larger-than-life stories. The model for this drawing was a decent-sized gravid female that my brother plucked off the road just before she could step into four lanes of heavy traffic. I happened to be visiting that weekend so he brought her home in the back of his pickup to show me, and in hope that I'd know what to do. Evidently, she was trying to make her way from her home in the reservoir to some remembered or imagined nesting area across the road. When we returned to the place, all I could see there was a gas station and a parking lot, maybe she had her sights on something, some wild place beyond the gas station. The chances of her making it across were nil, nevermind that she'd then have to return to the reservoir or travel overland to another body of water. There were once days when these animals could do that. Not just days, but millions of years, and the impulse to do so remains. One thing people often exclaim when seeing one of these creatures is, "They look so prehistoric!" They do. Snapping turtles have looked like snapping turtles for a mind-bogglingly long time. A recent molecular study has shown a surprising lack of genetic divergence across the species' range. Its not really been explained yet why this is. I'd have to look at the paper again for the details. Their impressive ability to travel overland, at least before their habitats became so fragmented, doesn't seem sufficient by itself to explain this. Another mystery from a common animal that is becoming less and less common.

Their larger-than-life reputation has a dark side for them. A lot of people seem to think it justifies mistreating them. I stopped showing this image to any but a select few people for a while because of the number of gory snapper stories people insisted on telling me upon seeing it. The stories invariably ended badly for the snapper, and none of them were accidents. What made them think I wanted to hear their crap? I spent many hours carefully rendering the many different textures, and noticing how remarkably they contrasted with the eyes. The eyes of a snapping turtle are so beautiful--four tiny perfect compass points in each, and sparkling, and set into the massive head, the big inverted basin of a shell, the wrinkled and scaly skin. The whole animal is capable of disappearing or going unnoticed in a moment if in the right habitat. They know the use of motionlessness, and of resembling mud.

Its not inevitable that people react negatively to them. My nephew, who was about 9 months old at the time was delighted with her, watching her intently and waving his arms and giggling whenever she moved. He saw no need to conform to someone else's nonsense.

We debated what to do with her. Usually, if it is safe for you to do so, you should help a turtle across the road in the direction they were headed, as turtles are notoriously committed to their decisions, but in this case there didn't seem to be any nesting habitat for her to head for. Translocating turtles is problematic, because they need a habitat that they know in detail in order to survive, and because moving a sick animal (which may not even look sick at the time) could introduce a disease to a healthy population, as has happened with the desert tortoises and gopher tortoises. Removing them from their habitats is wrong and often illegal as well. In the end, we returned her to the reservoir and watched her swim off, kicking up a cloud of mud as she went, and hoped that she found another place to nest--one where she'd be able to make both the nesting and return journeys, where her round, white eggs, buried underground, would be warmed by the round, white sun, and unnoticed by predators, to hatch into minute versions of their mother and fathers, emerge from the ground, blink the soil from their eyes, and head for the water.

You may kiss the shell...

Here are a couple of watercolor and pen-and-ink sketches of the head of a juvenile box turtle, done on the Ecus paper I mentioned in an earlier post. The original images are both very small, which is why you can see the grain of the paper. They are about life-size or slightly larger (the originals relative to the turtle that served as model, that is). I did these a couple of years ago.

Box turtles are an animal with a most unusual type of charisma. I was reading the paper today and came across an article that mentioned something called The Box Turtle Bulletin, in a context that seemed to have nothing at all to do with our chelonian friends. It turns out that a speechwriter for some senator included a line about how gay marriage would lead to some sort of slippery slope (it would have to be pretty darned slippery) resulting in people marrying box turtles, and this line made it into a national newspaper. I'm not sure what led this speechwriter to look beyond the barnyard and into the woods and prairies. Maybe he or she was tired of the same old livestock all the time. Archie Carr once said "Everybody loves box turtles", but I don't think that's what he had in mind. Anyway, the publisher of The Box Turtle Bulletin was evidently taken with the remark and saw some useful metaphor in it. I like to collect quotes about turtles in general and box turtles in particular and I have to say that this was a new on on me.

Recent turtle sketch

Here is a recent sketch, a portrait of an Indochinese Box Turtle, Cistoclemmys galbinifrons, who resides at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. I did this sketch a couple of weeks ago (12/21/07). I'd done a few sketches already that day and was standing near this animal's aquarium, and she (I think she's a she) called to me. I don't mean with words, or even any sound at all--she just seemed to look like "draw my portrait". I intended to sketch her quickly and then move on to the other exhibits, but that wasn't to be. She stayed very still, one eye cocked downwards, watching me watch her, the entire time. I'm pleased with the result, which doesn't happen all the time--most sketches have good elements and not-so-good elements, I'm either "on" or I'm not, this time I was "on", or I should say, we were "on", because I think that this little turtle participated in this venture at least as much as I did.

This species is also called the Flower-Backed Box Turtle, because of the beautiful patterning usually present on the shell. This individual is less gaudily marked than some I have seen in photos, and what she has is partially obscured by algae, but she certainly has a captivating personality, an endearing and winsome face. This species also used to be placed in the genus Cuora, but evidently, recent re-examination of their evolutionary relationships, probably using molecular data, has landed them in the genus Cistoclemmys. Regardless of how we call them, they are among the species caught up in the Asian Turtle Crisis. Don't know what that is? Try http://www.chelonia.org/ for starters.

I did this in a 7"x9" hardbound sketchbook using Pitt brush pens, one of my favorite sketching media--they are very responsive and come in a good array of colors, and they are lightfast and waterproof and don't usually bleed through sketchbook paper, and they don't have that nasty chemical smell of some markers. I like them because they require (or allow) me to be both fluid and committed at the same time--no erasing with permanent marker. All lines are permanent, so you have to be open to creating a drawing that includes all the lines you made, or you have to start over. Bente King used to tell us about an art professor she had back in Denmark--he didn't allow the students to use erasers in his class--"If you can get it right the second time, you can get it right the first time", he would say. I'm not opposed to erasers--I use them when I draw in pencil, usually planning something more formal than a sketch--but there is something liberating about the discipline of not using them, at least after you've made the proverbial "first 1,000 mistakes".

A strange thing happened while I was sketching --I kept getting referred to as "he", usually by parents explaining to their children what I was doing. Now, I have short hair, but no shorter than a lot of women have, and the lighting in the exhibit space was pretty dim, but seriously...

Back after a long hiatus...

Well, I'm about to start my 2nd semester of grad school, and to get my box turtle field research underway. I've taken many digital photos in the past year or so, but only now am I finally getting around to uploading them. I'll post current natural history photos as I take them and include some from the past year's archives (read: backlog, avalanche, etc.). I'll also include examples of my artwork, both current, recent and archived. Here are some examples of artwork from the past 4 or so years...To the left is a Paphiopedlium orchid in ink wash technique, a method that involves building tone very slowly with many layers of dilute India ink. I learned this technique from the late Bente King when I was at Cornell. It is a very meditative way of working, and while I don't do it often enough, I've done some of my best work with it. For ink wash, I like Canson Montval paper best, though when I do watercolors, I prefer Arches or Ecus (hard to find but great for watercolor with pen-and-ink). If anyone knows where I can get some more Ecus, let me know...