The Horehound War

April is the Month of Soft Soil, when our heavy clay soil is soggy from snow melt, before it hardens in the summer.

It is the month to set wooden fence posts, transplant trees, and this year, to pull up and dig up the horehound that took over an area around the guest cabin during the drought year of 2002.

I had been mowing it, but it still spread, sending down its tap roots, and choking out every bit of grass and wildflower.

I filled the wheelbarrow six times over with horehound, thinking now and then of the New Mexico writer Jesse Wolf Hardin's own battle with it.

Elsewhere he writes on the tricky issue of "invasive" plants,

Just as bad was the horehound incursion, seeds hitchhiking up onto the mesa stuck to our socks, moving through the rest of the county in the tails of horses and the alfalfa hay they eat. It looks so lovely at first, in patches of short ground-cover that smell sweetly when walked upon, pungent leaves perfect for brewing up a batch of old-fashioned horehound cough drops. It isn't long however, before they form a solid crusty plane of yard-high vegetation too thick to walk through. Where the ground around our cabin and below the cliffs were once graced by desert mariposa and soaptree yucca, soon there was only horehound.

One More Blizzard?

After 13 years' residence in the Wet Mountains of Colorado, I have my own personal weather lore that says it usually snows only one more time after the first broadtailed hummingbird arrives.

The first male hummer arrived on Wednesday the 13th. Dare we hope? It has been a long, snowy winter.

Meanwhile, Roman rabbits

I usually think of "invasive species" as a New World problem, but here is archaeological evidence of the introduction of rabbits to Britain by the Romans, a significant change to that island's ecosystems>. (Via the archaeology blog Cronaca.

Buffalo dreams

The "Buffalo Commons" idea put forth in the 1980s lives on: a lightly populated area of the High Plains whose economy, at least partly, would revolve around bison.

The Buffalo Commons will be a restored and reconnected area from Mexico to Canada, where we humans learn to work together across borders that were artificial in the first place. The Buffalo Commons means the day when the fences come down. The buffalo will migrate freely across a restored sea of grass, like wild salmon flow from the rivers to the oceans and back. Settled areas can --like they do in Kenya-- fence the animals out, not fence them in.

That's the dream.

Sustainable blogging

Four Seasons is a blog tracking issues in sustainable agriculture, connecting consumers with local foods, and issues in nutrition and health.

Either way, you burn

This AP story summarizes the situation in the West: California and the Southern Rockies are wet, while the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies are dry. Either way, the result could be a bad fire season. As an additional wrinkle, fewer National Guardsmen may be available to back up the professional crews due to the war in Iraq.

Thylacine bounty madness!

Channel-surfing in a motel recently, I found an Animal Planet show on the possible survival of the thylacine, or "Tasmanian tiger," a marsupial predator whose last example supposedly died in a Tasmanian zoo in the 1930s.

The show was all pointless animated graphics, shots of attractive people dashing around SE Australia in a Jeep, and other people with with electric auras surrounding their heads--a high ratio of razzle-dazzle to actual information, but it did make this point: stockmen and others keep seeing what look like the thylacine or finding animals killed by a big predator. And other than feral dogs, it's the only possibility for Australia.

Now the Australian media are getting into the quest, with publications offering bounties.

The Bulletin magazine has offered a $1.25m reward, to celebrate the publication’s 125th anniversary.

However a report in the Mercury newspaper said another offer has topped it.

“We’ve been gazumped by the Bulletin so we’re going with (our $1.75m reward) now,” Stewart Malcolm of Thylacine Expeditions told the Mercury.

I an testing to see if this appears-- if it does I will be contributing.

Food blogging

After all, what is more natural than food. I've been Googling food blogs, and I won't even begin to try to list them all. It's a perfect marriage: A blog is perfect for discussing your particular place in detail, and so is the idea of trying to support local producers as much as possible. You could even make an argument (in some cases) for local "commercial" produce over "organic" avocados flown in from Chile, for example.

Some blogs critique industrial agriculture, for instance. I like that. But I also like "cooking for engineers" -- must be a "guy thing," but this makes sense.

Greens and Guns

Ted William's recent article in Audobon lambastes hunters, anglers, and environmental activists for failing to make common cause.

In political and financial strength, the 47 million Americans who hunt and/or fish are to environmentalists what the NFL is to Pop Warner football. So you'd think that the environmental community would be doing some manipulating of its own—or at least communicating. But it consistently blows opportunities.

Yup.

The cranes are coming

National Geographic provides a live Web camera for watching the cranes' spring migration on the Platte River in Nebraska. Dawn and dusk (Central Time) are the best times to check it.

On the San Luis Valley flyway here in Colorado, the town of Monte Vista is preparing for annual Crane Festival. You can also read about last year's crane festival in this article by a first-time visitor.

"Environmentalism" is dead

The assertion that "environmentalism is dead" rocked me back for an instant, but I see the authors' point. (Registration required, or use Bugmenot.com.)

Their paper asserts that the movement's senior leadership was blinded by its early successes and has become short-sighted and "just another special interest." Its gloomy warnings and geeky, technocentric policy prescriptions are profoundly out of step with the electorate, Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus say.

"We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live," they wrote. As proof, they cite the debate on global warming and the largely unsuccessful push for federal regulation of industrial and automobile emissions.

They avoided making tactical prescriptions, but they did chide the movement for its limited efforts to find common ground with other groups, like labor and urged their compatriots to tap into the country's optimism.

Yup. Rants and jeremiads will get you only so far. Look at my other post for today; there is plenty of, um, energy to be tapped into.

Loving the trees

These young Scandinavians are taking the idea of erotic nature religion to its logical conclusion. Their public actions get attention too. (Not safe for work.)

Count birds in your own backyard

Want to do a little science but not have to spend too much time on data collection? Sign up online for the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, February 18-21. The bird sightings that you collect will go into a continent-wide database and "help build critcal information on long-term trends in bird populations," says Paul Green, director of citizen science for the Audubon Society.

The art of snow

What was forecast to be an 8-10-inch snowfall turned into three times as much last weekend. With no telephone service to call the man with the backhoe, the only way to open a Jeep-wide trail to the plowed county road was by hand. I reckon my wife and I moved about 600 cubic yards of snow with our one Ames snow shovel, a tool that I have to cherish these past few years.

Keeping my mind occupied beyond the mantra of "Scoop, scoop, scoop, step," I started inventing T'ai Chi Ch'uan moves: Bend Knees and Scoop, or Toss Snow Like Cloud. It was either that or drift back into humming one of Tenneesee Ernie Ford's greatest hits.

Forgotten pollinators

The state of North Caroline is beginning to realize that without bees, agricultural production plumments.

Other voices have been proclaiming this crisis for some time.