July 21, 2024

Travels: The Great Dismal Swamp and a Rebellion

Last April, while visiting the Virginia coast for my wife's family reunion (more on that below), I held out for the one thing that I wanted to do — to see at least some of the The Great Dismal Swamp.

Despite the name, no Goths were spotted.
How could I resist that name? I have been reading about it for years. I kind of half expected that it would summon the Goth kids to drift through the cypress swamps, but evidently they prefer urban graveyards.

Even though the  112,000-acre Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and the adjacent Dismal Swamp State Park in North Carolina (14,432 acres) cover the heart of it, much is gone, drained for agriculture and logging. Part of that draining started in 1763, directed by one George Washington, who had enormous land holdings in Virginia, at least on paper. Canals and railroads were built to bring out timber.

The refuge was established in the mid-1970s on land donated by timber companies, and restoration work has been underway since then. North Carolina's park was created about the same time, with assistance from The Nature Conservancy.

M. and I tossed our day packs in the rented Prius and set out. Disappointment: the visitor center was closed, on a weekday. So no trail maps, natural history exhibits, or whatever the USFWS was hiding in there. No explanation was given online or by a sign posted on the door — just  closed.

Instead, we strolled a level path through a grove of loblolly pines. If I remember right, these were planted in the 1970s, so they have done well in fifty years. They are known for fast growth.

But the swamp! So we studied the signage at the parking lot and set out on a road toward the center. There is a large, fishable lake there, Lake Drummond, but since we were staying adjacent to Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, we were not looking for big water.


This was more like it: a boardwalk. While a few old cypressess remained -- they had been heavily logged -- most of what we saw were younger trees planted in the 1980s in wetland reshaped with heavy equipment. But they are doing well.

Early April was a good time to visit. The temperatures were mild (in the 50s F.), the sun shone, and there were no mosquitoes.

More loblolly pines on a nature trail.

The center tree is one of few old-growth cypress.
 

Cypress marsh.

Another walk took us down a straight-line former railroad beside a drainage canal.

Can't have a swamp without basking turtles.

Red maple is also common in the Great Dismal Swamp.

Mostly zebra swallowtails, I think.

We could have done more, but it was time to head back to the coast and rendezvous with the siblings-in-law for a seafood dinner in Norfolk, and since I came all this way, I was ready for more softshell crab.

Two of M.'s siblings have moved to Virgina over the years, but whose ancestors got off the boat somewhere along the James River? Mine. 

So I detoured another day through Surry County, on the more rural south bank, to take in the sights and snack on local peanuts, whose packaging indirectly commemorates Bacon's Rebellion (1676–77).

Go back and read it about it, and the rhetoric may ring a bell: "The coastal elites don't care about us and our problems! We're fed up! We're marching on the capital!" 

And so they did, torching the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, which was still the colonial capital.

You call January 6, 2021 an "insurrection"? That was an insurrection — and it was eventually suppressed with bloodshed.

The "Bacon's Castle" on the package was not Nathaniel Bacon's own house, but another manor that was occupied and looted by his supporters. It's not far away.

July 14, 2024

Now I Know Why Mosquitoes Love Me

 

'"Type O — yes!"

One day a few years ago, my wife and I were walking one summer's afternoon along the Riverwalk in Cañon City.  Unfortunately, various ditches and sloughs were providing excellent habitat for mosquitoes, insects created by the evil anti-god to plague us mammals.

Having forgotten to apply bug spray, I was being hammered while she walked along without much concern. Eventually, I had to tell her that I was going to back to the car, thus spoiling an otherwise pleasant stroll.

But there's a reason! Maybe it's because they like my smell:

That doesn’t mean someone who’s particularly fragrant to humans will always be a mosquito target — mosquitoes are sensitive to different types of smells, even ones humans can’t detect, Dr. [Lindy] McBride said. For instance, “mosquitoes love forearm odor,” she said. “No one ever thinks of their arms as being smelly.”

Or it's my blood type. I have Type O+, like 38 percent of the population.( But it's O- that makes you a "universal donor.") Both O types together make up 43 percent of the population.

Blood type may also matter, said Dr. Christopher Bazzoli, an emergency medicine physician at the Cleveland Clinic who specializes in wilderness medicine. Mosquitoes seem to gravitate toward people with Type O blood, he said, for reasons researchers haven’t confirmed.

Now this would be more interesting if M. knew her blood type. But she has never donated and never has been hospitalized, so she does not.

Clearly, mosquitos are optimized for the most common type.

Memo: pack the bug spray.

July 12, 2024

Milkweed with a Visitor

I leaned my spinning rod against a milkweed and then saw that someone was already there. It's a Tiger Swallowtail butterfly, but I am not enough of an expert to say if is is Eastern or Western.  Chaffee County, so on the Eastern Slope. Does that count as "west of the Rockies"? Or is it just "west of the Mississippi" that counts. Confusing.

The experts at What's that Bug? would seem to lean toward Western.  Butterflies and Moths of North America  (I am bookmarking that site) seems to agree.

OK, so Western. And Showy Milkweed. (There is no Shy, Retiring Milkweed, but there are Wallflowers. Around here, they tend to have orange blooms.)

July 11, 2024

Fog Coming over the Dam


 Fishing on Sunday evening at Lake Isabel far-west Pueblo County, Colorado. An upslope flow pushes fog up the St. Charles River — a reverse-spillway effect.