"Gettysburg"

The Brandos' "Gettysburg" was one of my favourites when I was DJing at WLUR-FM in the late 80s.

 

The battle's last and bloodiest day was 150 years ago today. I used to spend a lot of time at Gettysburg, and on the banks of Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. These are two locations that rather bolster the traditional Native American view that whatever happened at a place is in a sense always happening at that place. Or, as William Faulkner put it, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Purple

Late April again: Not fields of lavender in the French countryside, just mint growing wild in a fallow cornfield south of Lincoln.

Red fox kits

I meant to post these photos a while ago; they were taken in late April, after the laptop came to a violent end, and it's taken me this long to get around to it. Too blurry, really—it was pretty dark, which necessitated slow shutter speeds, and I wasn't using a tripod—but I think the result suits the subject: foxes often seem a bit blurry, a bit mysterious.

 

A friend alerted me to the den site, and Jess and I spent several evenings watching the foxes. (Date night for the Farrell-Churchills: sitting quietly in the Subaru waiting for something to happen.) There were at least three kits and the vixen present; the den was in a culvert running under the road down to the corner of the pond you see behind the kits. The vertical slash in the lower picture is a signpost: "NO FISHING, SWIMMING OR SKATING". Well, they weren't.

Europe on less than a dollar a day

A belated (much-belated, but I hope not too-belated) plug for my friend Francesca's travel blog, Amsedavi. Francesca is a family friend, one of my very favourite people in the whole world (right up there with Jessa and Ellie), and holds the distinction of having once saved my life. She and her friend Cami are touring Europe, presumably on more (maybe not much more) than a dollar a day, but they've invited me (and you) to come along (vicariously) for free. I'm not completely caught up yet, but I can vouch for this: it's a bargain at twice the price.

(They were having a special on brackets/parentheses. So sue me.)

Le plus ça change…

 

Just west of Big Branch Marsh NWR on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain, between the towns of Lacombe and Mandeville, is Fontainebleau State Park. The structures shown here are all that is left of a sugar mill built by the dissolute French Creole nobleman, developer and politician Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville on his Fontainebleau Plantation.

De Marigny made his primary residence in New Orleans, but maintained Fontainebleau as a summer retreat away from the crowds and slightly more extreme climate of the big city south of Pontchartrain. (The North Shore has always served as a sort of playground for New Orleanians.) But much as he may have enjoyed country life, he was not about to let the land sit idle. He actively developed the town of Mandeville, just to the west of Fontainebleau, and the plantation itself was one of the first large-scale sugarcane operations in what became the United States. Another of de Marigny's commercial interests was a brick kiln, which presumably furnished the materials for the mill.

Alas, de Marigny was too unstable to enjoy success for long. His political career peaked when he became president of the Louisiana Senate; he subsequently ran for governor three times and lost each election. More significantly, he also gambled away his fortune and died in poverty. (Though one suspects, given his connections, that it may have been a rather genteel poverty.)

But if Bernard de Marigny had a checquered career, consider the political changes that swept through the North Shore (many of which de Marigny lived through):

• Part of French Louisiana until 1763
• Ceded to Great Britain after the French and Indian War, became part of the British territory of West Florida
• Ceded to Spain in 1783
• Became part of the independent Republic of West Florida in 1810
• Annexed by the United States 90 days later
• Louisiana seceded from the United States and became the Republic of Louisiana in 1861
• Louisiana joined the Confederate States of America soon thereafter
• Louisiana once again part of the United States in 1865

That's seven national flags, with one repeat, in just over a century. One of those flags pulled double duty: the flag of the Republic of West Florida resurfaced later, on an unofficial basis, as the Bonnie Blue Flag of the early Confederacy. (Evidence for the two flags representing "relation by descent" as opposed to "convergent similarity" is the fact that the Bonnie Blue made its first appearance in Mississippi, part of which had been included in the Republic of West Florida. Occam's Razor would argue against coincidence, as secession-minded Mississippians might very reasonably turn to an historic symbol of independence from their own relatively recent past.)

 

Note also that this part of Louisiana, administered by Spain and not France in 1803, was not part of the Louisiana Purchase (though some in the States argued at the time that it was). St. Tammany, in which Fontainebleau is located, and the neighbouring parishes are known as the Florida Parishes.

I like the timeless feel of this particular spot, with shrubs and vines slowly reclaiming what is left of the sugar mill, and Spanish moss-laden live oaks towering nearby. The woods and even the parking lot close to the beach further down the road are haunted by Cooper's hawks and barred owls. The heat, and the humidity, and the creeping greenery and the birds and the bugs are, and I suspect always have been, the true masters of the North Shore.

Vieux Carré

 

 

 

Big Branch Marsh

A few shots from Big Branch Marsh NWR in Lacombe, Louisiana:

[The refuge is named for the marsh, but the longleaf pine woods in the uplands—"uplands" being a relative term—represent arguably the most critical habitat, as they shelter a population of endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers.]

 

[Looking out over Lake Pontchartrain.]

[Laughing gull.]

[Blue crabs. The ice chest is admittedly not their natural habitat, but made for a better picture.]

[Marsh grasses.]

[Electric-blue damselfly.]

[Caspian terns, laughing gull, and gull-billed tern at the mouth of Bayou Lacombe.]

[Topminnows, I think. I watched an alligator gar hunting these, but couldn't get a good picture without moving, which would have ruined both the photo opportunity and the gar's lunch.]

[A fare-thee-well (or so I'll assume) from another laughing gull.]

A handsome little devil

Like the last set of green anole pictures, these were shot in a fairly ordinary location. (Aunt Debbie's house in Lacombe this time, though we did get out for beignets again.)

Wood and water

Some city parks have swings. Some, apparently, have bald-cypress swamps. We found this one, in the town of McGehee in southern Arkansas, charming even before the baby raccoon showed up. More municipalities should set aside spots like this...not exactly deep enough for ivorybills, but better by far than a lawn with a few shrubs and park benches.

 

Olde Towne Slidell

Lampposts and crape myrtles,
The night-blue sky,
Loom and recede,
Loom and recede,
And the chains in their eyebolts creak their joyful song.
She beams under a floppy straw hat,
Describing an arc
Like the carpenter bees of childhood
Tethered with horsehair and straining for the sky.
We are all children once in a while,
Or ought to be.

Here's your sign > ; )

"Southland in the Springtime"

My apologies for the scarcity of new material recently. Jess took a fall down the basement steps a while back—she's fine, but the laptop took a hit. Flyover Country is back for the moment, thanks to some help from Ellie. Here's one for (and from) the road, by the Indigo Girls:

"Freedom"

"Sometimes I feel like I'm almost gone..." And now he is. Richie Havens has passed away at age 72, but this piece of music will live forever.



If anyone is still looking for music to put on an interstellar probe, I nominate this.

Bad career move

Red-tailed hawk takes on nesting bald eagle. Even for a juvenile redtail, this seems like a spectacularly optimistic (or perhaps desperate) attack, and it ends exactly as badly as you might think. If you haven't seen the video already, be warned it's somewhat graphic...as nature often is.

Season's end

A funny thing happened today. After yesterday's blizzard—the forecast was for about an inch, but we got six inches or so, with winds gusting around 45 miles per hour—today was glorious: pleasantly warm, sunny, and dead calm. Perfect hawking weather. As I fed Stekoa on the fist in the back yard this afternoon, basking in sunshine with my boots in the snow, it occurred to me that, with daylight saving time having just begun, I could easily have gone hawking after work. But I didn't—and I was surprisingly okay with it.

Technically, the hawking season goes through the end of the month, but we usually end early so as not to interfere unduly with the rabbits' breeding season. Wise hunters don't like to impact next season's production any more than farmers want to eat their seed corn. But there was more to it than that...it was simply enough.

Our flying time this season was severely limited by my work schedule, not much more than weekends really, but despite that I consider it a very successful year. Stekoa was both stylish and efficient, a six-times intermewed gamehawk in his prime. Thanks to several factors—a decent rabbit population after several below-average years, more careful weight management, and perhaps a more judicious selection of hawking grounds—Stekoa caught fewer mice than ever before, reflecting a keener focus on rabbits. From the NAFA meet in November through the end of January, I don't remember coming home without at least one rabbit in the bag—taking game is not my definition of success, but it is a pretty good indicator. And even when he didn't score, he always showed good sport.

What I now believe was our last hunt of the season, on Saturday, is a case in point. In the field were Jessica, Ellie, Pat and Shea Stull, and Shea's friend Rachel. [Photo by Pat above.] Just a day before the blizzard swept through, the temperature was in the 60s, and I was a bit concerned that Stekoa might opt to sit in a treetop and sunbathe rather than hunt with us; instead, he followed as brilliantly as ever. We flushed half a dozen rabbits—rabbits that, having survived into March, must be considered the most difficult of the season—and got good flights on all of them. Nothing brought to bag, but I was exhilarated. The hunt was followed by a sociable dinner back at the Stull's house (thanks, Trisia!), and when the snow and wind came overnight, I was content to sit the day out, and to contemplate a long series of days off.

A good hawking season behind me, a spring and summer's worth of fishing, garden projects, perhaps some travel ahead of me...I'm contented, and I find it wise not to underestimate the significance of contentment.

Dekes

J: "So what's with all the decoys, anyway? You fly hawks, but you don't shoot, do you?"

M: "Those are for the bathtub."

J: "You know, most people just have the little yellow rubber duckies."

M: "I like them better grown up."

Spillover reviewed

The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.

—David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

I've been looking forward to this one for a while now, and Spillover was not a disappointment. My wife commented, "I can't believe I got you a disease book for Valentine's Day." I responded that Spillover isn't a disease book, it's an ecology book, and I recommend it be read in that light. One of my favourite science writers (Song of the Dodo, Monsters of God, and a couple of essay collections from his "Natural Acts" column), Quammen establishes a few central recurring themes in the first two pages:

• "The subject of animal disease and the subject of human disease are, as we'll see, strands of one braided cord."
• "...Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health."
• "...Everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere."

Throughout the book, he delivers well-researched facts leavened with tales from the field and his dry humour, often in the form of asides to the reader. There are fairly extensive endnotes, but Quammen (or possibly the publisher) has chosen not to clutter the text with superscript which could interfere with the flow of the story—and there is a flow, for Quammen is a good storyteller. (He's published several works of fiction as well, though I haven't read these.)

The first section, "Pale Horse", is about Hendra, a relatively obscure virus originating in fruit bats and affecting horses and, to a lesser extent, humans. Quammen uses Hendra to introduce the overall topic of zoonosis as well as to define related concepts such as reservoir hosts and amplifier hosts, spillover and emergence, and to make the case that "they [outbreaks of zoonotic disease] are not simply happening to us, they represent the unintended consequence of things we are doing."

The tension increases with "Thirteen Gorillas", starring the much better-known (if not much better understood) Ebola. This one may also come from fruit bats and, as devastating as it can be on humans, its rapid lethality has kept it from making the leap from epidemic to pandemic. However, it may be affecting our close relatives, gorillas, on the population level. (If anyone wants to see foreshadowing here, I won't discourage them.) This section concludes with a key quote: "People and gorilla, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together."

Quammen touches on the mathematics of contagion in "Everything Comes From Somewhere"—that phrase again—employing the vehicle of malaria and, mercifully, making us sit through very little mathematics. One of the topics addressed is the differential effects of even closely related diseases, for malaria is several. (Differential effects will come into play later, in the chapter on HIV.) "Dinner at the Rat Farm" examines SARS as a lucky escape, an epidemic that could have been so much worse than it was (and one that may yet get another bite at the apple).

Bacterial zoonoses such as psittacosis, Q fever, and Lyme disease get their turn in "The Deer, the Parrot, and the Kid Next Door". I particularly like the section on Lyme disease, which makes it clear that even those who do appreciate disease outbreaks as an ecological phenomenon often fail to grasp the ecological particulars. Although Lyme disease is closely linked in the public mind with white-tailed deer, the rise and fall of deer populations is almost irrelevant to the incidence of Lyme disease—it's the population of certain small mammals that make the difference, and the disparities between intact and fragmented ecosystems. ("The unintended consequences of things we are doing.")

In "Going Viral", however, we return to the group of pathogens likeliest to cause The Next Big One. The chapter begins with herpes B in macaques, goes from there to the larger topic of viral biology in general, and then to RNA viruses more particularly: "they jump species a lot". The succeeding chapter, "Celestial Hosts", explores the ongoing research into why so many viruses—including Hendra, Nipah, SARS, Marburg, and probably Ebola—seem to be linked to bats.

The longest chapter, "The Chimp and the River", is about the history and origins of the current Big One, HIV. It includes an extended imagining of a crucial spillover event; the passage dealing with Quammen's hypothetical Voyager is a bit out of character with the rest of the book, but it deals with an important dichotomy. The biogeography and genetic diversity of the human immunodeficiency viruses indicate that there have been at least a dozen separate spillovers from primate hosts into human ones, but the global AIDS pandemic (HIV-1 type M) results from a single event—a single event recently pinpointed in both time and space with a surprising degree of accuracy, though we're probably at the limit of resolution.

As with malaria, HIV is a family of pathogens, some more transmissible and more virulent than others, rather than a single entity. HIV-2 has never really expanded much beyond west Africa; most of the HIV-1 types are even more limited in scope. But for that one spillover event, HIV-1 type M remains, at least for a time, a virus of chimpanzees, and AIDS an unrecognized condition, barely distinguishable from the background noise of disease in central and western Africa.

The book closes with "It Depends", in which Quammen tells a tale of tent caterpillars taking over his Montana town, devastating the town's trees, and just as abruptly vanishing, victims of a virus. It is in this chapter, with Quammen noting an important ecological similarity between the tent caterpillars and humankind, that he writes "this book is to make you more smart", for there is an important ecological dissimilarity between the caterpillars and us as well. Can humanity's behavioural flexibility prevent, or at least postpone, humanity's own meltdown? As the chapter title notes...it depends.

Highly recommended, especially as a companion/followup to Laurie Garrett's wider-ranging The Coming Plague (1995).

Related post: "Stellaluna and Wilbur will kill us all"

Kitties!

Chas aptly describes these pictures as "somewhere between 'very interesting' and Paleolithic nightmare territory." Click the link. Do it.

Useful

J: "Well, I think you’re useful. I like all the ways you’re useful."

M: "Right, I’m like a Swiss Army knife: useful, versatile, pretty sharp..."

J: "And you’ve been around for ages!"

No one said life in the wild would be easy...

Jess sent me this yesterday:

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
For promis'd joy!

—Robert Burns, from "To a Mouse"