A Frozen Forest Above Santa Fe

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Ski Santa Fe to watch the forest as the sun began to set. 

The Santa Fe mountains seen from below. A few cloud shadows along the mountains ridge.

Shadows were already beginning to lengthen and fall on the opposite side of the road among some aspen.

Continuing up the mountain the amount of light began to decrease and the shadows lengthened even more.

I reached the base of the ski area and the temperature, according to my car, was 15 degree F but not much wind. It was almost like being dumped on top of a completely frosted cake; the raven on the top of the tree like a decoration.

Near-by trees exhibited their white frozen beauty against the blue New Mexico sky.

Above me the mountain with its clouds, a bit of blue sky and now shadows beginning to creep up the mountain side.

The mood of the day began to change as the sun continued to set.

The color change, at first subtle, began to become noticeable.

Trees beginning to catch the warmer colors of the sun with the white mountain behind growing to a warmer white.

The tops of trees near-by still getting some bright sun.

The sun began to set in the west. The trees became more silhouette-like and the blue in the sky darkened.

A pink cast in the clouds against the blue sky above the mountains.  

Twilight

Old Farm Equipment I have Seen

My wife and I recently went to see an exhibit, Becoming Van Gogh, at the Denver Art Museum. On the way to Denver we drove past many old abandoned farms and I took photos of old farm equipment that I could see from our car speeding along at 65 mph. 

We drove past coyotes,

past many windmills,

 

and past abandoned farm equipment.

 

 

The photo of a piece of equipment shown above appears to consist of an old hay rake and another part with large straight spikes. The latter part would appear to stab or pierce the hard earth as it was pulled across a field. Now I wish I could go back and look for the manufacturers name.

Understanding Albedo & Aspen Leaves On Snow

A few years ago, while hiking on a partially snow covered trail at about 9,000 feet in October, I noticed Aspen leaves had fallen onto the snow. Some of those leaves lay on the surface of the snow while other leaves appeared as if they had pushed the snow down in a manner exactly representing the shape of the leaves. 

Of course a single Aspen leaf is not heavy enough to compress the snow. It appeared to me that the leaves had absorbed enough sunlight to heat and melt the snow resulting in a depression in the snow with the leaf on top of the depression.

This of course is on a tiny scale what is happening in places like Greenland. The term albedo refers to the ability of a surface to reflect light. Pure clean snow has a very high albedo whereas snow covered with millions of soot particles has a much lower albedo and in fact in the summer many of these places actually melt holes in the ice creating uncountable  pools of water. 

I recently viewed the movie Chasing Ice and the photographer/scientist James Balog. He photographed many of those holes along with the dirt they contained. 

His website is http://extremeicesurvey.org/

Anagram : A Eggnog He

I began writing this in December 2011

Prior to 2012, I read a short piece in the The Boston Globe by James Carroll entitled, 'The harsh truth of the city on a Hill'. I never knew very much about the Puritans but reading this article turned out to be both an eye opener and a stimulus to learn more.

Carroll describes John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,  as a rigid theocrat, who excused/justified the violence against the native North American people by saying "God hath cleared our title to this place.  In contradistinction, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was our first proponent of separation of church and state.  In addition, he learned to speak the language of the native peoples and spent time with them.

The European Puritans after sailing to American remained Europeans albeit newly positioned in the North American wilderness. And as James Carroll states  "Yes, Winthrop and company were leaving behind Europe's savage religious violence; during the same period, in the Thirty Years War and the brewing English Civil War, nearly 9 million Protestants and Catholics would kill each other. " 

After reading Carroll's article I realized I wanted to know more about the Puritans.  His article mentioned Perry Miller as a great historian of Puritanism. I bought a copy of Miller's book 'Errand into the Wilderness' published in 1956.

Reading Miller's book was slow going for someone trained as a biologist. Lots of terms and concepts I'd not really ever used; many seemed to be related to Calvinism and were reprocessed through New England's transplanted divines from Europe.

One of the terms I came across was anagram. I used to play a game called Anagrams as a child.  In that childhood game all of the letters of the alphabet were produced on small black squares, one letter on each small square. All of the letters were turned down so only the back of each little square could be seen. Then, one would select seven black squares, turn them over to see the letters and then try to make a word out of those letters. The game would proceed with each person in turn taking new letters to replace the ones used. The process was repeated until all of the letters were used.

The anagrams I found in Puritan writings were different. For example, the first anagram I found was in Latin: Paradisus hostem?  This translates to, Does Heaven Have An Enemy?

Jeffrey A Hammond in Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture wrote in regard to anagrams "When applied to elegy, such devices as puns, acrostics, and anagrams were thought to be considerably more than mere ornament. Puritans saw them as extensions of the deceased’s textual legibility, and the verbal ingenuity required to discover them was equated with the spiritual insight demanded by proper mourning."

 "It was the anagram, the unscrambled message latent in the deceased’s name, that became the signature formal device of New England’s elegies."  See THE AMERICAN PURITAN ELEGY by Jeffrey A Hammond in Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. 

Anagrams, supposedly, were used to find the hidden or mystical meaning in names.  I wondered what hidden meaning might be present in my last name. I entered my last name into the Internet Anagram Server http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ and obtained a list of word sequences with each word sequence composed of the nine letters, each one only used once.

This resulted in 39 different combinations of words.

39 found. Displaying all:
Engage Hog
A Eggnog Eh
A Eggnog He
Age Egg Hon
Age Eh Gong
Age He Gong
Gage Hen Go
Gage En Hog
Nae Egg Hog
Gag Gee Hon
Gag Gene Ho
Gag Gene Oh
Gag Nee Hog
Gag Gone Eh
Gag Gone He
Gag Ego Hen
Gang Gee Ho
Gang Gee Oh
Gang Ego Eh
Gang Ego He
Hag Gene Go
Hag Egg One
Hag Egg Eon
Hang Gee Go
Nag Gee Hog
Nag Egg Hoe
Ago Egg Hen
Ha Gee Gong
Ha Egg Gone
Ah Gee Gong
Ah Egg Gone
A Egg Hen Go
A Egg En Hog
Gag Eh En Go
Gag He En Go
Ha Egg En Go
Ah Egg En Go
An Egg Eh Go
An Egg He Go

Where is the hidden or mystical meaning? Perhaps a comma carefully placed would help some combinations.

Ah, Egg Gone

The remainder seem to need more than punctuation. 

So, I tried rearranging the words:

Eh? gong age.
Go hag gene!
Eh, gag en go.
Gee, go hang.
Engage Hog?
A eggnog he.

Not much here that rearrangement can help except for 'A eggnog he'.  Hmmmmm. No verb. I don't think I qualify as an eggnog but I do like an eggnog made with rum, now and then.

What do I really think of such manipulations. Fun, but without any real significance. The Puritans did believe in these manipulations or found solace in them on the death of someone dear.

I do admire the audacity and the mind of one Puritan, Roger Williams.  He escaped from Massachusetts and possibly torture by either the  Puritans in Massachusetts or by the English if the Puritans sent him back to England. He made his way to what eventually became Rhode Island. Unlike the other Puritans, Roger Williams got along with the Native Americans.  He ultimately bought land from the native Americans and set up a truly free state (Rhode Island) and incorporated his wonderful idea to separate church and state.

I do recommend the book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M Barry published in Jan 2012.

More later.

Large Puff Balls - Jemez Mountains

When I was a kid, I liked to stamp on puff balls and see the smoke-like spores fly away from under my foot. The puff balls I remember were small. Those shown below are as wide as my size 10 shoe. These are by no means the largest puffballs; some puffballs are as large as a watermelon. 


Puffballs belong to the family Agaricaceae or true puffballs and are part of the Order Agaricales.

The puffballs pictured below were growing at an altitude between 9,000-10,000 feet in the Jemez Mountains exactly where I had spotted the dusky grouse. The area contained at least 5 puffballs.


Billions of spores are contained beneath the puffballs outer skin which begins to split as the spores mature. Once the skin splits open, the spores are blown out and carried away by the wind.


The sequence of three photographs (A-C)  show some of the changes that occur on the skin of the puffball as the spores mature. The photos were taken about a week apart and do not necessarily show the same puffball.

A.  The lip balm in the picture below is 2 5/8 inches long. Based on that length the puffball is about 4.5 - 5 inches across. A baseball is about 3 inches in diameter.

B. Note the warty appearance of the puffball surface but there are no holes in it yet.

C. The puffballs began to open up by the third week. Note, the puffball is full of billions and billions of brown spores.

Based on where the puffballs were located and on their size and appearance they appear to belong to the genus Calvatia or giant puffballs which range in size from a baseball to a basketball. Additionally, puffballs of the genus Calvatia are reported to form a warty surface and to disintegrate when they get old. That appears to have occurred with the puffballs pictured above.


Most puffballs are reported to be edible provided they are harvested when they are young and are all white inside (like all mushrooms, puffballs should only be collected for eating by someone experienced in their proper identification). Those in the pictures of this blog are much too old to eat.

A recipe for parmesan puffballs is available here. Parmesan Puffballs

 

Sooty Grouse? Dusky Grouse?

Today, we headed up into the Jemez Mountains to complete the measurements of the last of more than 100 trees making up a large wild turkey roosting area . On the way up my mind was wandering when I nearly walked into a small group of 5 grouse. They let us walk to within 15-20 feet of them before they began to move away. That was fun.

I thought that identifying this bird would be easy. So, I looked in the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, 5th edition. According to this guide and based on the presence of a terminally gray banded tail these are Sooty Grouse. But the Sooty Grouse are only found in the western coastal region of the US and Canada. The Dusky Grouse is found to the east of the Sooty Grouse as far south as Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

The Nov 2006 issue of the  Grouse News reports that in Colorado and in New Mexico the Dusky Grouse have gray banded tails (instead of solid black tails) usually with 18 feathers exactly like the Sooty Grouse.

The terminal gray band on tail feathers are clearly visible in the photo above.

In a recent research article on the genus Dendragapus there are the two previously identified populations, sooty and dusky grouse, and a new and previously unidentified division between the northern and southern dusky grouse populations. This may help explain the confusion in finding the terminal gray bands on the tail feathers of two geographically separated grouse populations; the west coastal sooty grouse and the southern dusky grouse populations.

Grouse Behavior

After a little background reading I discovered that others had found this grouse particularly unafraid. For example the following quote comes from the April 1936 issue of The Auk.

Dusky Grouse in the Chuskai Mountains of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico.

"On June 21, 1936, a pair of Dusky Grouse (Dendragapus obscurus obscurus) was seen eight miles southeast of Lukachukai, Apache County, Arizona, approximately four miles from the New Mexico state line, at an elevation of approximately 8,800 feet on a steeply sloping, southeasterly exposed canyon wall. The vegetation was dominantly ponderosa pine and Engelmann spruce with underbrush of oak, aspen, Symphoricarpos, wild rose, cliff rose, ferns, Cercocarpus, and small Douglas fir.

The hen was seen first at a distance of about ten feet. She merely clucked and walked slowly away among some clumps of underbrush and stopped behind a small bush about thirty feet from where she was started. Approximately one hundred feet up the trail the male was encountered. On being disturbed he squawked and flew about thirty feet up to a horizontal limb of an open ponderosa pine where he perched for about fifteen minutes jerking his head this way and that, apprehensive, but not excited. Both individuals were extremely tame and apparently had never been molested by human beings. The Navajo Indians inhabiting this area during the summer do not hunt game birds unless taught to do so by the white man."

Paul Phillips, U.S. Soil Conservation Service, Gallup, New Mexico

Others have reported similar experiences of this unafraid grouse. The following is a particularly sweet description of such an experience in the July-August 1904 issue of The Condor: A Magazine of Western Ornithology by Florence Merriam Bailey.

"One of our pleasantest field experiences last summer was with an old Dendragapus in the Rocky mountains, which, after a short acquaintance flattered us by coming to accept us as neighbors. We had a hint of the pleasure in store for us as we were packing up the mountains, for when my horse, leading the way for the pack horses, flushed an old cock grouse which had been dusting himself at the foot of a tree close to the trail, he lit again on a branch so near that we could see his small pointed head and craned neck as he watched us. “If they’re all as tame as that ‘“--I thought with a thrill of expectancy. When we had climbed to 11,000 feet we made camp in the blue spruces and established ourselves for our Canadian zone work. "

The complete article can be downloaded and read by going to A Dusky Grouse and Her Brood in New Mexico .

According to Wikipedia Florence Merriam Bailey "... became the first woman associate member of the American Ornithologists Union in 1885, its first woman fellow in 1929, and the first woman recipient of its Brewster Medal in 1931, awarded for Birds of New Mexico.

Rivers of Black

The two major fires of 2011 in the Santa Fe region have been extinguished. This past week I saw some of the after effects of the Las Conchas fire, the largest in New Mexico history, in the Jemez mountains.

Most of the damage to the forests was what one would expect from a large and very hot fire. What were previously lovely Ponderosa pine trees are now observed as resembling giant black toothpicks, some with and some without black branches, against the blackened mountain terrain. Other trees including Douglas fir and Southwestern white pine were also destroyed. 

In some areas, where the fire was particularly hot, the forest floor looks as if someone had swept away every bit of pine liter leaving a smooth black surface. As a consequence, the forest floor no longer absorbs water efficiently. New organic material will need to accumulate along with a succession of plants requiring many years of growth, death and decay, before the forest floor can again absorb a normal rainfall.

Note: In the picture above, the ground is smooth where the forest debris was consumed by the fire. A few dead pine needles and broken branches are beginning to accumulate anew.

Although our monsoon season has been short on rain this year, we have had some good rainfall in the past week.  On the way back from measuring Douglas firs in a wild turkey roost area we stopped at the Las Conchas trail head on NM route 4. This site is close to where the Las Conchas fire began.  The Las Conchas trail follows a little stream several miles into the forest.

That little stream, running down from the mountains from the direction of the fire, was like no other I have ever seen. It looked from a distance to be nearly as black as soot or perhaps resembling a river of black bean soup flowing downhill.

Note that the churning water in the stream at the Las Conchas trail head was very dark.

This black river was the result of the runoff from a burned forest no longer able to absorb a normal rainfall.  Instead, the rain carried tons of soot and soil from the once living forest floor down the mountain side to little streams that merged with bigger streams and eventually flowed into the Rio Grande. The cities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe suspended use of the Rio Grande water for drinking as it contained too many particulates to filter.

The scene above was repeated in many streams draining the thousands of burned hectares in the Jemez mountains.


I came upon this quote about rivers.

“Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.” – Mark Twain

Let's hope the little stream at Las Conchas recovers soon and returns that beauty.