Here is a letter I wrote to "Wildlife in NC" the official publication of the NC Wildlife Resources Commission, in response to an Article in the December 2024 issue titled "When Disturbance is Good for Wildlife"

Your article about ecosystem disturbance in the December 2024 WINC was a timely reminder of the importance of fertile lands. I would like to share a few extra thoughts with people who value wildlife and the land fertility that supports it.

Disturbance is indeed something that natural systems are adapted to, and even take advantage of to increase production and diversity. Non-human disturbance such as storms, earthquakes, floods, and fires, are frequent enough that ecosystems have built-in mechanisms to deal with them, and sometimes even benefit from them.

The main difference between human and natural disturbance, is extraction—taking away very useful things of great value to the system. That is something that no natural lands are prepared for, and it creates infertile conditions long-term. The underlying rocks in most of NC are infertile as well, making it a slow difficult process to rebound from the theft of nutrients and fertility.

That is why I highly recommend NOT taking any materials out of our public lands ecosystems. Any trees that are cut should be left in place because they form the organic base of future soils. Mulching is fine, and laying trees and plants on the ground creates good cover, and also different shade and temperature conditions (aka microhabitats) that allow a diversity of species to thrive. The detritivore food web that recycles wood into soil, is a huge part of the overall productivity and life of any forest.

Also, and just as important, heavy equipment should NOT be used because it compacts soils. Soil compaction is a long-term problem with all our ecosystems, destroying fertility by eliminating necessary pockets that transmit and store water and air. This damages not only fertility, but also leads to more flooding, less aquifer recharge, and more surface runoff, eroding soils and dirtying streams. In addition to wildlife impacts, all of these results directly impact people and society.

Moreover, I highly suspect that extractive use, and the consequent loss of cover, organic soils, nutrients, detritivores, soil porosity, and water storage, are the real culprits in the dismaying decline of Bobwhite Quail (also mentioned in the same magazine) and other small game, and the decreasing fertility of NC public lands. The good thing: this is easy to fix—just stop extractive use on public wildlife lands.

Ants-away for Hummingbird Feeder

Ants on your hummingbird feeder? 

Here's a simple way to keep them off. Very durable, very simple, and very cheap. See disclaimer at bottom

Materials needed:

     (1)-Tuna Can or similar
     (1)-two inch long machine screw
     (2)-nuts to fit machine screw
     (2)-small rubber washers
     (2)-short (about 6 inches long) pieces of copper electric wire

Hints: 

   - CAUTION: wire must be wrapped tight around machine screw to stop slipping, which could break the feeder.
   - Pliers can be used to twist the wire around the machine screw.
   - Stripping insulation from wire probably not needed. I did to make it easier to wrap the wire.
   - The first set of rubber washers I used were much larger and stiffer, and leaked like a sieve. 
   - There's a rubber washer on the inside of the can (not visible)

Close-up shot:

 Connection on top:

 Connection on bottom

 Close-up of bottom connection (notice rubber washer next to can)

One possible source for washers (they come on the nails)

 Close-up on machine screw

 Close-up on washer

Disclaimer: For information only. Not responsible for any damage caused by using this setup. Metals have sharp edges and will cut fingers.

The Big Bang--Physics or Figment?

I just read Steven Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" for the first time ever. I had wanted to read it for a long time and it finally came to my library's digital collection, so I could borrow it without driving 20 miles to the library--I love digital libraries!

The book is an attempt to make some very extreme and difficult concepts in physics accessible to the layman, a noteworthy and praiseworthy effort! While it falls quite short in most areas, failing to clarify or simplify to the level where a Ph.D. engineer can understand most of the concepts, it does at least present the background information concerning early developments and basic knowledge reasonably well.

Is everything expanding? (The Red-Shift)
With the development of large telescopes that can see very distant stars, Hawking says a man named Hubbell in the early 1900's found what is known as a "Red-Shift" in the light that reaches us. In an overly simplified summation, stars have an atmosphere that absorbs some of the light they give off, and the elements that absorb the light do so for only certain colors. For example, (fake example for clarity) Iodine in a stars' atmosphere absorbs orange light, so the light we see in the telescope is missing orange, but if this missing-orange light is red-shifted, then the missing light is actually just a little redder than orange.

What causes a "Red-shift"? Hubbell found that as the distance to stars increased, the amount of the red-shift also increased, on average. So what caused this red-shift? The physicists of the time settled quickly on the Doppler Effect as the explanation. The Doppler Effect, simplified, is seen when something shooting a wave at you is moving away--it in effect stretches out the wave making it longer and causing a red shift in light. You can hear the Doppler Effect in sound (which travels in waves) as a train passes you. As it approaches the sound waves are crunched together, making the sound higher, and when it passes the waves are stretched out, and sound lower in pitch. Physicists, then and now, believe that the further stars are, away from us, the faster they are moving away from us, hence what is known as an expanding universe, which must have been all close together a long time ago, and leading to a belief in a "big-bang" at the "beginning of time". Not only that, but more distant objects appear to be moving away faster.

My own notes on the above the above facts and theory: If objects are moving away faster, the further they are from us, they must be accelerating. On Earth, whenever there is an acceleration, there must be a force that causes it, according to the basic physical law F=ma (Force =mass times acceleration). So, in essence, cosmologists(physicists that think about large scale stuff) maintain there is some basic, unknown, force acting on every bit of mass in existence, making it accelerate away from all other mass. Hawking never actually says what that force is supposed to be, or even mentions it in any way, probably because it does not exist, as far as anyone can tell.

Alternate hypothesis: (NONE of the material in this section is even mentioned in the book) Fortunately, there are other ways that light can be red-shifted. In fact, when Hubbell found the red-shift, an alternate theory was advanced which came to be know as the "Tired Light Hypothesis", in which light waves lose energy over time. This loss of energy produces just exactly the same red-shift as the Doppler effect would produce for an accelerated expanding universe. Light waves, as real physical things, it was thought by certain scientists, should not be perpetual motion machines, but should behave as all other phenomena ever seen on Earth, and lose energy over time.  In fact, light waves have now been shown by experiment to do just that, by a process called "particle creation" or "pair creation", where small amounts of the energy in light waves are converted to matter. Not only that, but as everything on earth appears to lose energy in proportion to how much it has, and the red-shift of light appears to be higher at higher energies, this energy loss precisely fits the pattern observed for all energy storages on earth.

When any theory is given a name, as unexciting as "Tired Light Hypothesis", it is likely doomed to be dismissed by people looking for pizazz and interest, and predictably this theory lacked much adherence or enthusiasm, and was ultimately mostly forgotten. Which is a real shame because it is so much more realistic and in line with all the observations of real systems on earth and nearby. All energy carriers lose energy over time in proportion to the energy difference between themselves and the background level. That is the second law of thermodynamics: in any real process there is an energy loss. But physicists, it seems, have chosen to believe the most bizarre and unlikely explanation. A real boon, no doubt, to science fiction writers, but a real bane to reality grounded engineers and earth-scientists.

Olbers' Paradox(Why is the night sky dark?)
According to Hawking, "The only way of avoiding the conclusion that the whole night sky should be as bright as the surface of the sun would be to assume that the stars had not been shining forever but had turned on at some finite time in the past." This was based on the assumption that the universe was infinite so there should be stars in any particular direction from us.

However, Hawking doesn't mention the very plausible explanation of light wave decay over time. Again, the Tired Light Hypothesis! Should a light wave be a perpetual motion machine? Should it behave differently than everything on Earth, which loses energy over time? If the Earth is the key to the universe, and things happen here the same general way they do everywhere else, if our laws of physics are the same as other places, there should be a loss of energy over time.

The Background Radiation
Hawking spends a great deal of time talking about the 3 degrees Kelvin background radiation. This radiation is extremely low energy heat waves. Just as you can feel heat radiation from a hot pan, these waves exist everywhere in space coming and going in all directions.

Hawking's explanation of where this background radiation comes from is, I have to say, pretty hard to grasp, but it seems to have something to do with some early conditions envisioned as part of the "Big Bang". He seems to imply that the existence of background radiation is some sort of proof that there really was a big bang. What this proof is, is never quite explained though, and simple laymen, engineers, and earth scientists, are left saying "Huh?"

Fortunately, we have again that tired old hypothesis, the Tired Light Hypothesis, to come to the rescue with a simple, consistent, and expected mechanism--degraded light waves from long ago. If there are lots of stars in all directions and their light waves are losing energy over time, then this background radiation would be expected. Our 3deg K radiation simply becomes the temperature of empty space, where almost all the light waves have lost as much of their energy as they can.

If the energy in light waves behaves as all energy on earth does, then it must be measured against a background level. The best example of this is thermal energy, which contains energy according to the temperature difference between a hot thing and the background temperature. Just as waste heat close to the background temperature can do no useful work, so, when a light wave loses enough energy, it becomes part of the background "soup" of spent light waves, and has no potential to do any more work. Therefore it has no more tendency to lose more energy.

Gravity and Entropy
Hawking talks at length about the elemental forces that we know exist in the real world
((To be continued...))

High Country Christmas Bird Counts

• WHAT?     Count birds!
• WHERE?  in a circle 15 miles in diameter, at several locations below.
• WHO?       Every able-bodied person who likes wildlife!
• WHEN?     a single day near christmas, between 12/14 and 1/5, determined for each count.
• WHY?       Know nature without harm, gather useful data
• HOW?       Count and record all birds on count day, inform compiler. Email badgerboy AT wilkes DOT net to sign up.
  

 (Click on the count name below for further details)

       Name                                   General Area                     Contact 

• New River                               Sparta, NC                     Lisa Benish
• Stone Mountain              Stone Mountain SP, NC         Guy McGrane
• Mount Jefferson                 West Jefferson, NC            Guy McGrane
• Upper Yadkin Valley             Wilkesboro, NC                Guy McGrane
• Grandfather Mountain              Boone, NC                    Judi Sawyer

Below is the altered version of the MJ CBC areas for 2020 only

The following is a test of the zoho calendar, imported from zoho, for sharing on the website of HCAS:

Conservation: the beginning

What pops up in your mind when you hear the word "conservation"? For many it means setting aside lands for the benefit of wildlife. For some it implies cleaning up our environment. For others it speaks to reducing fossil fuel use and for some it means having less impact on the climate system.

Have you ever heard the phrase "Zero-sum-game" bandied about? Its popular with political pundits and others concerned with influencing the human system. It means that there is a certain, set amount of stuff out there and whenever someone gets more, then someone else gets less. Oddly enough, that is the literal meaning of the word "conservation".

Conservation:- constancy over time.  The amount doesn't change. Its that simple.

So here's the question: Is conservation a good goal for ecosystems, wildlife, and the land's productivity? Should we keep the same amount of wildlife, productive capacity, and all the clean air and water, soils, biodiversity, that comes with them, in the future, as we have now? Can we afford to have less? Should we get more? Instead of promoting "conservation", should we instead advocate for INCREASED natural production?

These ideas are worth considering! Before reading on may I suggest stopping here and re-reading the above, then reading it again, and really thinking about these concepts before continuing?

________________________________________________________________________________

There's only one way to make sense out of the bewildering complexity of ecosystems with millions of plants and animals of all sizes and types--thats to go back to the basic principles that have taken thousands of years to learn and have stood the test of time.
First Principles:
1. The First Law: Energy and Matter are conserved.   In other words, they can't be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Unlike in Jay Leno's Doritos ad, you can't make more, and likewise, you can't get rid of any.

Q. But what exactly IS energy?  Matter is simple, you can see it, touch it, taste it, but not so with energy. You can't see it, or touch it, you can't directly feel it, you can't smell it or taste it. How do we know it even exists?
A. We only know energy exists by indirect inference. We see what it does, not what it is. What it does, is make things happen, or make stuff go. Any movement, any change, anything at all that happens, is caused by energy. Rain falls, rivers rush, wind blows, clouds form, waves crash, people run, moles dig, bugs buzz, birds fly, fish swim, stars burn, planets revolve, volcanoes erupt, black holes collapse, all using up energy, happening because of energy, and showing us that energy is there.

So the First Law says that Energy cannot be destroyed, the total amount is constant. Wait, can that possibly be right? I mean, the last time you drove your car, didn't you come home with less gas than you started out with? What happened to all that energy if it wasn't destroyed? Can you get it back? That's where the Second Law comes in.
  
2. The Second Law:  Energy is lost, whenever anything happens.
Wait, what? What does that mean? Is that a real law? Sadly, yes, in any real action, energy loses some of its ability to "make stuff go". The energy in the gas for your car still exists, but now is dispersed as waste heat that can never again make a car go. It has changed form from concentrated useful chemical energy to diluted waste heat which has joined all the rest of the heat on earth making atoms vibrate. It is impossible to collect that energy again.

So now you're thinking, "Hold on a second, what does this scientific mumbo-jumbo have to do with conservation, wildlife, and me? This "mumbo-jumbo" is the foundation of all knowledge and without it we are blind. Without it we haven't a leg to stand on. It will be the basis for all our further investigations, as in the next paragraph.

Ecosystems: Energy Use and Material Cycles:
This is what ecosystems do: use up energy and cycle materials.
Examples:
1. Leaves use up the sun's light energy, turning a little bit into chemical energy of sugar, and most into waste heat (2nd Law-Energy Lost). In doing so, they take CO2 from the air, and water from the soil, and cycle them into sugar and oxygen (1st Law--Materials conserved).
2. Herbivores use up the chemical energy in leaves, turning a little bit glycogen, and most into waste heat (2nd Law-Energy Lost) . In doing so, they process all the matter through digestion and deposit the resultant materials as dung (1st Law--Materials conserved).
3. Soil organisms, such as dung beetles, bury the dung and make it available to plants roots again (1st Law--Materials conserved).
4. Soil voles eat the dung beetles, turning a little of their biomass into vole biomass, most into waste heat(2nd Law-Energy Lost) and recycling their materials again to the soil (1st Law--Materials conserved) .


So let's throw away our cultural and evolutionary biases, emotional mechanisms for social survival, and see ecosystems for what they really are and what they do. Then maybe we can better manage them.

Essay: Grouse Numbers--the Long-term Ecosystem View

In order to grasp the main important concepts in the fluctuations of any wildlife populations, including Ruffed Grouse, it is important to see them as part of the larger system in which they are embedded. It is also important to recognize the scale of time and space on which the system is changing. Without the larger view there is no hope of making rational decisions on the management of our wildlife species, or of, at the larger scale, our forests.

A good simple example which shows this is the recent boom/bust cycle of wintering Evening Grosbeaks, which largely disappeared in about the year 2000 from NC after being quite common before then. People wondered why? Old data, however, revealed that prior to 1960 the Grosbeaks were almost unheard of in NC and the probable cause of their “decline” was large scale recovery of their Canadian forest habitat, after logging/budworm issues, which allowed Grosbeaks to return to their old habit of staying up north in the winter.

So to understand the large scale factors involved in land changes, we must examine the one thing that is causing massive changes in ecosystems across the planet—people. The first wave of human habitation in the eastern US about 20,000 years ago was marked by massive large scale use of fire in a place where fire was previously almost nonexistent. The regular and extensive burning of the forests of the eastern US by Native Americans was well noted and wondered at by the European explorers of the 15^th century. There is no doubt that this practice caused very large and long-lasting changes to the land and ecosystems, and that the animals present either adapted or perished.

But the first American people had not developed metal tools and did not clear the forests or till the soil on a large scale, and it is unlikely that their burning depleted or harmed the soils which were on the order of feet in depth even in the uplands. The soil structure at that time was very good and productive, so that the flush of growth after burning was extremely fast and lush. Those conditions are likely to have favored grouse and other ground-dwelling omnivores, which also benefitted by the extinctions and population crashes of most major large predators at that time. So grouse populations either boomed immediately, or they adapted to the new conditions and increased markedly over time. Grouse populations before then were likely much lower, and restricted to high elevation and northern forests which are subject to seasonal extremes, favoring low herbaceous growth.

In a historical twist, the forested lands of Eastern North America were largely abandoned for about 250 years beginning in about 1525 when American Indian populations were decimated by bacterial and viral diseases which they were not ready for. Then the forests had a couple hundred years free of fire and the vegetation grew densely again at ground level, surely making it difficult for grouse and similar species, and reducing their populations accordingly.

In the more recent past, the biggest single change to our ecosystems in North Carolina was the absolute destruction of the soil in approximately 99.9% of our uplands. It is only necessary to take a small shovel into any forest and dig to find bare clay, rock, or sand within an inch of the surface. This was caused by the clearing of the forests and tilling of the then-rich soils to grow food crops by the European immigrants with metal tools and draft animals.

The time scale for soil formation is several hundred years. Now, even our most mature upland forests are at a very early stage of ecological succession, because there is almost no soil. With no soils left, burning our forests does several undesireable things: it slows soil formation by removing the organic material that is so vital, it directly burns and destroys the top layers of soil, and destroys small plants whose roots hold the soil back against erosion. It also favors fast-growing successional species which produce very little refractory(or slow-decomposing) organic matter and therefore have very little long-term benefit for the soil. Clearcutting produces similar undesireable effects by resetting succession to zero.

So even though there is some evidence that burning and clearcutting our forests can lead to temporary increases in grouse populations, these practices are extremely harmful to the longterm productivity of our forests, their ability to provide clean air and water, fertile soils, and support diversity of wildlife. I would go so far as to say the longterm survival of even Ruffed Grouse and most of our other ground-dwelling omnivorous species, is directly threatened by reductions in forest productivity, from short-sighted, short-term thinking that resets ecological succession to zero and keeps our soils from regenerating.

Only by allowing the soils to be re-established over the long-term can we truly ensure the productivity of our upland forests, and their ability to provide us with clean air, water, and abundant wildlife.

Collettsville wildflower walk with Walt K.

On April 12, 2018, HCAS members took a field trip to the Burntfield Creek Trail, just off the John's River near the Johns River Camp, in Caldwell County, near the community of Collettsville. This blog entry is a record of what we found there.

To get to the site from Blowing Rock, the driving directions are:
-Take Business 321/221 into downtown and go straight at the traffic light onto Main Street.
-Go 0.4 miles and turn right on John's River Rd. (AKA Globe Rd., mostly gravel)
-Go 8.4 miles and turn left on Anthony Creek Rd.(paved)
-Go 1.0 mile and turn left on a road of unknown name, probably still Anthony Creek.
-Go 1.3 miles until passing Globe mountain road and continue straight
-Go 1.0 miles to a small, overgrown pullout on the left and park.
-If you get to Johns River Camp, you've gone 0.5 miles too far.

The trail is mostly unmaintained and overgrown, and it follows the creek up into the hollow for about  1.5 miles, with some parts quite steep. It passes by very pretty waterfall and ends up at a large cave below an overhanging rock mass.

With warmer weather the ticks and poison ivy are quite prevalent so its best to go in early spring. When we were there on 4/12/2018, no ticks were found and the poison ivy was all dormant. During a followup visit on 5/3/2018, I found about a dozen ticks crawling on my clothes and the poison ivy was very evident.

Also found but not pictured were Wild Bergamot, Stone Crop, and Wild Hydrangea. Here are some pictures of the cave at the top.

Looking into the cave with scale, our leader and host Walt Kent in the middle

View from inside the cave.

NOTE: Click on any picture to see it full size

Fire Pink shown here with a trillium

Closeup of Fire Pink

Great Chickweed 
 (aka Giant Chickweed, Star Chickweed)

Hen Bit

Robin's Plantain

Foam Flower

Catesby's Trillium

Large-flowered Trillium

Rue Anemone

Buttercup

Wood Betony (aka Lousewort)

Purple Phacelia

Hepatica (aka liver-leaves) leaves only;
 flower is another plant

Hepatica flower

Unknown plant

Fraser's Sedge

Golden Alexander

Golden Alexander-closeup on flowers

Small Bellwort (aka Wild Oats)

Showy Orchis

Maidenhair Fern

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Branch Lettuce (aka Brook Lettuce)

Rattlesnake Plantain

Partridgeberry leaves

Halberd-leaved Violet

Indian Cucumber

Red Trillium

Adam-and-eve Orchid (aka Puttyroot)

Nodding Mandarin

Virginia Jump Seed

Solomon's Seal
(I've been told this might actually be Bellwort)

Bloodroot leaf

Squawroot, aka Squaw Corn, Bear Corn, Cancer Root

Dwarf Crested Iris

Solomon's Plume