Mark Wiley, Radford, Virginia, shares this near-noon photo with us of a black bear taken June 6, 2009,in Floyd County Virginia
There is abundant information about the black bear and much more has been added in the past 20 years by Dr. Michael Vaughn and his graduate students and colleagues at Virginia Tech.
I continue to explore business potentials for a black bear related group within the designed Rural System.
Mark Wiley, Radford, Virginia, using remote cameras got this excellent picture of a bobcat in Floyd County, Virginia, 4:13 am, May 15, 2009. He said, "I've seen a bobcat in Floyd on 2 occasions - once while climbing the ridge while I was hunting and another time ambushing a turkey." Mark's about 50 so such sightings, even clear pictures, are rare.
I have dreams of a rural enterprise related to bobcats. They are scarce and with coming land use changes, they are likely to need intensive management. We know much about them now but a major sustained research program is needed for them to clarify their population status, likely impacts from housing and industrial development and carbon storage and biomass production, their disease relations (rabies, etc.), effects of an increasing coyote population and the effects of hunting and trapping on the state population.
I just have to call spear points “arrowheads.” That’s the way I was “brought up.” It probably does not make any difference. The arrow is a much more modern invention than the spear. Sharpening a long stick was a major advance by primitive people over using a rock for collecting fish, reptiles, and small birds and mammals. Tying a sharp rock onto a stick must have been a great day for the remembered praise for the inventor. The practice surely spread rapidly, regionally, and only by personal demonstrations. Before people added rocks to sticks they were throwing spears with incredible force using the atlatl (pronounce it at-ul-at-ul)
The atlatl was a throwing stick, a device with a hook at the end that went into the end of the spear. The device added distance to the thrown projectile and force against large prey.
It was a spear “handle” that effectively gave the thrower a longer than natural arm. Later a doughnut shaped stone was added to the atlatl. With each throw, the stone slid from the hand up the atlatl toward the spear. These had to have been the first delvings into applications of ideas about centrifugal force.
A sport has emerged and there are pockets of interest. An association exists and I think new interests will be gained from people traveling less, becoming more attached to their past, and becoming more interested in primitive weapons and survival techniques and surviving.
I have plans for a Spear-Throwing Group within my dream of Rural System.
The New York Times, May 6, 2009, in an editorial asked "Who Will Protect the Forests?" Their's is a title, I know, but the wrong questions invariably produce the wrong answers.
The National Forests (within the US Department of Agriculture) have wilderness and related areas and these are "set aside" to be preserved and protected from major uses such as timber cutting. Hunting and recreation are permitted and protection of a sort is provided but in general these areas are following their natural processes.
It seems lame to continue to make these distinctions in such areas but the needs are real when it come to citizen input, the understanding of Congressional staff, and judicial bodies. The needs are understand that these National Forests are very different. I contend that every 10 x 10 meter square area of them is unique. It takes supremely educated foresters to analyze and prescribe for each such area. That action is part of their management, a type of control to achieve diverse citizen benefits from the lands and waters for this and next century ... then beyond. Preserving and preventing uses is at one extreme of the decision options. The decisions can be sequenced. There are thousands more of other options between that and the other extreme ... to burn, to doze, to trade, to sell.
Intensive site-specific management (and the legislation and budgets that supports it) is needed (often with GIS and computer assistance), not sweeping set-asides. Failing to get the needed management, then the set-asides" (call them "protection") may be all that can be achieved. Protecting forests from fire, trespass, insects, diseases, erosion, vandalism, air pollution, visual blight, and thieves are all part of management. Protecting them from wasteful or inefficient tree removals is also good management. Preservation efforts can reduce some protection, add significant, often-essential other protection. The decisions on what to do on the land need to be in the hands of the resource managers. (of course informed by the public about their ever-changing objectives). Modern sophisticated National Forest management includes protection.
Years ago I climbed trees to sample insects high in the canopy. Here is a picture of (part of my boot and) colleague Tim Dilworth, now a PhD. We suspended sampling devices (sticky boards) a different levels and recorded species at each level through an Ohio hardwood. We found unknown insects.
Importantly, the experience gave me true “new perspective.” I had lectured on "the world from 5-feet up," a common human viewing height. To understand the natural world requires snorkeling and digging in earth pits and laying prone on the forest floor for extended periods for things change rapidly. It requires seeing the blended layers of the forest canopy for just as mammals and some birds defend territory and are area and habitat specific, many insects, bats, and birds are layer specific. The world is not flat to them but three dimensional and they know the bounds inside of their “box.”
Animal density, the numbers per unit area, may not be the appropriate expression for analyzing populations animals per unit of available quality volume may be the measure. Its use will reduce variation in studies and help understand and predict future populations.
Skinks are lizards in the family Scincidae. A spectacle, this large male broad-headed skink, Eumeces (or Plestiodon?) laticepts, was photographed by Brad Rimbey, Homosassa, Florida, near the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge. It's 3-4 times the length of a common screen-door skink. This male seemed to be fighting with another male over a female (as reported by others) just before the picture was taken.
I saw my first and only one in 1947 in Lynchburg, Virginia. Their range is from southern Pennsylvania to Florida and westward to Central Texas. Their olive skin and orange head suggest that energy conservation is not a dominant evolutionary strategy of the species but is one more like that of the multi-colored gaudy tropical birds high in treeswhere this skink is most commonly found.
It’s a woodland species and usually lives in tree-holes suggesting older forests as most suitable for it. It’s also found in rotting forest debris where it eats insects and similar creatures and even small mice or bird eggs. The female lays 8 to 22 eggs and defends the nest. The bite is said to be painful but not poisonous even though the skink has been called a scorpion (which it is not.) It’s tail, which as in other skinks easily breaks off and re-grows, is likely to have toxic properties to mammals, thus the source of its local name.
Over fifty years ago my botany professor took a picture of oats (Avena sativa). I scanned it and when I saw the enlarged sepia image I may have seen the beauty that he saw in such plants.
I was on a walk into the Rich Hole Wild Area
(then being proposed) in the George Washington National Forest ,Virginia, with wilderness and watershed management great, Bernard Frank. He surprised us all when, flat on the ground, he began describing the insect “highways” he was seeing, commenting on the similarities in our lives and those of the creatures he was observing. I devised from that brief experience an experiment with students on a pleasant day on a class field trip. We formed a circle and then all lay down and described to each other what we were seeing with our eyes six inches from the ground. We were not experts in entomology so our comments were general. I was most interested in them realizing the world view of foraging ruffed grouse and wild turkeys, the impacts that intensive recreation, mountain bikes, horses, or fire might have on a food supply … or on organisms busily breaking down the forest litter on its way, dissolved in root waters, to re-enter trees. I was interested in them appreciating “biodiversity” and ecological “richness” terms that were rarely used then. They readily saw that their small on-abdomen-world would look different if seen through hand lens or a dissecting scope.
I know that the world looks different to people when viewed from high places and with their eyes at about five feet. I also know that the world looks different to squirrels and most birds (with their eyes on the sides of their head, probably preventing 3-d perception). Insects only see select color spectra. Television with special lenses can allow us to see what insects “see.” The microscope changed the world. Electron microscopy expanded human perception significantly. There is much more “out there” than ever imagined, ever seen. New sights and perspectives are the stuff of the new technology of the new enterprise.
“Have you lived here all of your life?”
“No, not yet.”
I’ve lived in Virginia most of my 75 years. Maybe I’m provincial for I am influenced by my environment in Virginia. Virginia does not have high rank in many lists of desirable characteristics, accomplishments, strengths, and desirable human conditions. It’s OK, but that word may be a pseudonym for “provincial.” There are political forces here that influence education and the people around me. There are abundant people in poverty. Tax bases for the State as well as communities are limited. Turn-over rates in employment and thus ideas and innovations are low. Central Appalachia is not a happy place, in song, dance, art, or ideas. It is a place to survive, to keep on keeping on. Lynchburg, in the Piedmont, where I grew up was a black racist and white snobbish place, out-competed by Roanoke, and without a vision. It and its surrounding communities was a provincial small province of Virginia. I had every right to be provincial.
Television changed some of that. It let the light in. The differences became clear, beyond what could be taught in a few hours of schooling (about 5000 hours is my wager). The differences between what we had and what others had were shown to us on the monitor. Some of us were “dissonant,” troubled by the difference between the present and the possible. Others, poor and powerless, knew well how to survive. There is no entitlement; life just is. It is a waste of time to think about the impossible. People live what they have or are given. Some inherit more than others. That is the way it is.
I went to Oregon in 1952 and saw Douglas fir trees. Each tree, an enormous thing, had more wood in it than any acre of forest I had seen in Virginia. Engineers were hired to move these complex masses out of the forests. Conditions for growth are very different in different parts of the world.
I went to Idaho in 1965. I had come from mountains and I had lectured and pleaded with landowners to try to stop erosion from their slopes. My Virginia hills were millions of years old, well-rounded, eroded away Himalayan-sized mountains. They eroded badly in some areas but in Idaho I saw young mountains from shifting lands and volcanoes and they eroded whole sides of them, carved deep valleys, and left deep house-covering “earthen fans.” Erosion was out of scale; day-log events moving the same amount of earth as year-long processes back home. The effects, amounts, residuals were unimaginable. They had to be seen on site.
I went to China in 1991 and saw what was meant by a “human population explosion” and “tables of human density data.” One night I asked a conductor on a train speeding through the countryside of Northern China, “Do you like your job?”
My translator told me that the man could not comprehend my question. He had a job. That in itself was a good condition. In those years there were no alternatives. Any job is your lot in life. You live what is; what is given.
With Blair Jones, Charles Smart, and others I developed for Virginia a statewide geographic information system before such things were called a GIS. It changed the scale of my thought from a state map on the wall or a fold-up in the glove compartment of the car to map cells or picture elements (pixels) of about 27 acres each. In my computer I “knew” 50-100 factors about each cell in Virginia, all 1,013,902 of them. I was no longer thinking about my back yard, the town, the county … but about the best place for a power corridor … one among the thousands of possibilities between two designated points … and then “what if one of the proposed points (for delivery) was changed?”
I have a pottery chard on my desk from a sand dune in Nigeria, 1990, a dune half covering and engulfing the home of a family. The desert was on the move. Deserts, once forests, were now on the move in China too. I met the person in charge of stopping them. He would fail, for he did not have the time, money, or staff for the necessary action. Areas in the US are now becoming deserts … and climatic warming speeds the process.
Maybe I’m “provincial” because of where I have lived and maybe thoughts are not fashionable or off-centered. I doubt if I’m called “self centered.” I know I’m not as well educated as I would like to be and I’m hardly sophisticated. I’ll not try for the latter and continue work at the former. Or maybe I cannot comprehend the question: Just what does it mean to be provincial today in a globalizing world?
