Best Views, Best Intentions, 2010
Filed under: About & reflection, Crabtree Creek, Exotica, Gems & Surprises, Greenways & Parks, Nature Lore, Pecans & Mistletoe, turtles — Tags: Acadia National Park, birding, Buckeye Trail, Crabtree Creek, hawks, Milburnie, snapping turtles, trees — raleighnaturalist @ 9:00 pm
Glory in the Morning. all pictures by John Dancy-Jones
All pictures click to enlarge
It has been a slow year at Raleigh Nature, squeezed by my Meniere's Syndrome, classroom teaching, other online interests, and gardening. Here are some nice images from 2010, some with notes on the separate posts I would liked to have written with them. Thanks for checking in and we'll keep plugging. Have a great one!
snowy trees on White Oak Road, December 2010
The snowy holidays were great fun and a white Christmas seemed like an enticing treat from the Climate Change Coming. We are still working on raising food year round at the Person Street urban homestead and the chickens have been a spectacular success and my best excuse for not being out in Raleigh nature.
Esperanza, our combless Aracauna, with her friends, out for a stroll
Fall pond at Oak View Park
I am truly grateful for Get To Know a Park, since I would rather concentrate on out of the way places, but there are still plenty of park rows to hoe. Besides Oak View, there is a small new one on Honeycutt Road, and little gems like Hymettus Woods at Wade and Dixie. One of my biggest regrets of 2010 is not getting over to the new section of greenway emerging by the beltline on House Creek, where I have been specifically invited by a reader (lo siento 😦 )
Fall colors at Oak View
boulders in Cemetery Branch at Brookside Drive
Cemetery Branch
Crabtree on east Buckeye Trail
There is always a lot of nature lore to explore, and 2010 was no exception.
woad blue mold after heavy rains
Raleigh Swamp mallard hen
sunlit slider on Middle Crabtree
my TFA science classroom's pet box turtle
Oakwood hawk with a diappointingly invisible captured squirrel
biggest gall yet!
snapper in the Wilmington creek beside Dorian's apartment
There is a lot I would like to cover from my travels outside Raleigh as well. The Maine post went well, but my mountain traveling has been heavy, and there is always just sooo much to tell.
Boulders on 64 in western NC
rock sculpture at UNC-A's Botanical Garden
ballon from rest stop on 40
Bass Harbor, Maine
There are so many things happening with parks and green amenities in Raleigh. I had hoped to write about the beginnings of the Neuse River trail, which starts at Fall Dam and eventually hits Anderson Point, the river's intersection with Crabtree. This wonderful, under-used park has been the source of many a stimulating walk and deserves multiple posts. Halfway down that trail (where it joins the existing one) is Raleigh Beach and the Milburnie Dam, which is up for possible removal. Now THIS topic I would have preferred to address at Raleigh Public Record, and I may yet (the project is on a back-burner currently).
Milburnie Dam
raccon midden at Milburnie Dam (hat for scale)
Happy New Year and here's hoping again for an invasive species page, a record trees map and more straight street pieces in 2011 – and if we're lucky, Marsh Creek Part II ! Love, John
Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan probe American character
Filed under: About & reflection, Exotica, Gems & Surprises — Tags: Acadia National Park, Hetch Hetchy Valley, Ken Burns — raleighnaturalist @ 1:37 am
How radical is the idea of national parks? Dayton Duncan, Ken Burn's partner in the National Park series, opens the series stating that entering one of these natural spaces crosses a boundary where human individuals are not the masters. Yet we as a society DO control the existence, present and future, of the spaces themselves. Their existence depends on democracy, while typifying the best element of democracy – universal access to high aspirations. The PBS series initially focuses on John Muir's highly spiritual perspective on the value of experiencing nature, and the contemporary writers who talk in the film extoll the very long term value of saving these spaces, whether humans ever visited them or not – just for the sake of their existence. Yet the Burns series, in segment 3, "Empire of Grandeur," portrays the eventual development and permanent protection of the parks as an evolving response to economic forces, development and use trends, and patriotic fervor expressed by some of the richest folks in the land.
public domain image of Hetch Hetchy Valley from Wikipedia
John Muir died in 1914 knowing he had failed in protecting his very favorite nature spot, Hetch Hetchy Valley. Part of Yosemite National Park, it was flooded by the creation of a reservoir in 1913. This loss, still controversial, is portrayed in the Burns film as a trigger or rallying point which instigated and motivated much support for the parks and the emerging Park Service, which would provide organized regulation and protection of park lands and wildlife – wildlife being an afterthought in some roots of national parks thinking. Muir inspired a strong and still-present reverential perspective on the natural landscape, but the national parks themselves were captured and developed by a very different mode of operation.
Stephen Mather was the first of many very rich men to support the National Park System, and perhaps the most devoted to its cause. His vision, implemented through years of quasi-volunteer government service with crucial assistance from Horace Albright, saw economics and patriotism as the twin keys to developing the national parks. "Popularize to Protect" was the slogan of his very successful PR campaign to promote the parks. If enough people visited them and enough philanthropists claimed them as causes, they would be safe. Mather rescued the parks from a variety of unsavory commercial interests and activities, but also allowed railroad interests to pursue park politics, Native Americans to be marginalized, and a group of populist patricians to dominate the selection of park sites.
No one can argue with the success of the national parks, nor their importance, nor the profound satisfaction we as Americans can take in their existence and permanent status. The paradox clearly stated by Dayton Duncan, who wrote the film, is in the tension between the enjoyment of them by The People and the unimpaired future existence of the natural features. Duncan compares the broad parameters of the National Park charter to the Constitution, in that both allow for "movement into the future." We've evolved from "white men with property" to (almost)everybody, and so our view of national parks can perhaps transcend Major Tourist Site.
The are glimmers of such vision embedded in the film. Dayton Duncan gets a little teary describing his reaction, as an Iowan, to seeing new land on Earth created in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. ( Mark Twain jump-started his journalism career as one of the first visitors to Kilawea). The spirituality of Muir endures well beyond the earnest pieties of the Serria Club. Enos Mills and the Rockies, Charles Shelton and Alaska – the list of inspiring heroes and their meccas will continue throughout the massive film. But if there is a truly radicalizing element in it, it is the off chance that watching it will provoke one to go experience one of these places. One of the best reviews points out that many Californians could actually travel to one of several national parks in the time they spent watching the Burns film. I hope you get out and find your special nature spot soon. Take your time, and let the planet speak to you. The message might be life-changing.
National Parks: America's Best Idea
30 minute preview show
(selected footage from many parts of the project)
Long Lake in Acadia National Park
Raleigh Nature posts on the Ken Burns film
Maine Course, Thoreau on the side
Filed under: About & reflection, Exotica, Gems & Surprises — Tags: Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island, Thoreau, travel, trees — raleighnaturalist @ 8:55 pm
Cara and I stayed in Bar Harbor, Maine the last week in June, exploring Acadia National Park and the coast of Mount Desert Island. We had some wonderful nature adventures, and I made use of a unique opportunity to read about Thoreau's Maine travels while in the context of that landscape. He traveled there 3 times 1846-57, and wrote essays collected as The Maine Woods. I purchased a sumptuous guide book based on his trips in Central Maine , and though Thoreau's travels were inland (mostly traveling by canoe over lake water), he was a great spiritual companion for my Maine experience, especially when I returned home and read my copy of the original Thoreau book.
It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid, small red berries and strewn with damp and overgrown rocks, – a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams. H.D. Thoreau, Ktaadn
We experienced terrain much like he describes on our visit to the Blagden Nature Preserve at Indian Point, pictured above. The Nature Conservancy holds a strip of land that stretches past private properties down to Indian Point, an outcrop jutting into the Western bay that is home to the largest population of harbor seals north of Boston. We went at high tide and couldn't see the seals, but we could hear their grunting and jostling through the foggy bay waters.
Indian Point, Mount Desert Island
Most of our time in the island's interior was spent in Acadia National Park itself, which was founded by George Dorr with huge support from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Rockefeller loved designing and building roads and bridges, but he didn't like automobiles much. The covenant he set on the 47 miles of carriage roads he built and donated still protects the park today.
The carriage ride showed us 5 of the 14 stone bridges in the park. Our driver was a horseman from Pennsylvania who uses these horses for logging in the winter and hauls eight of them to Acadia each summer for some productive exercise!
We did use our car to travel to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the huge, glacier-scraped slab of granite that is Mount Desert Island. We caught a brief respite in the cloudy mists that enveloped us much of the week and were able to see upper Frenchman's Bay, the location of our cottage, the town of Bar Harbor and it's namesake island, whose sandbar constitutes an extension of Bridge Street, accessible on foot or by vehicle during low tides, and Otter Point, whose cliffs make the beautiful scene photographed by Cara below.
Cara and I are both point-n-shoot folks, but we both had some luck on this trip, displayed in the photo albums linked at the end of this post. Below is my shot of upper Frenchman's Bay. The triangular protrusion just to the right of center is Sand Point, where we stayed. We could walk at low tide and see all kinds of barnacles, clams and sometimes starfish.
The geology available right below our cottage was also amazing. We saw smaller versions of the caves and natural bridges to be seen on the bay islands from our nature cruise boat.
Mount Desert Rock, 25 miles out to sea
The two boat trips we took showed us no whales (thus the double trip) but lots of interesting sights and tales. The official (and unsuccessful) whale watch took us all the way out to an amazing outpost on the continental shelf, Mount Desert Rock, whose intrepid lightkeepers maintained their residental post until the late sixties. We saw lots of harbor seals and some gray seals there. Our bonus nature cruise was just as foggy, but lightened by the salacious gossip of our nature guide, a grizzled native who had taught biology for 30 years but seemed much more interested in talking about the various owners of mainland and island properties than locating wildlife. Bar Harbor history and the development and donation of Acadia represents a fascinating portrait of big money, monster money, and the economies of land use. Pre-income tax money built an large array of mansions, styled (50 room) "cottages" by their wealthy summer inhabitants, but almost all burned in a massive 1947 fire and were never re-built. Modern billionares still have summer homes, but are likely to cooperate with the nature groups in maintaining the natural habitat around them. Acadia, the first national park east of the Mississippi, was founded by George Dorr, a wealthy wilderness lover whose namesake mountain we half-climbed. He, Rockefeller and others bought the many thousands of park acres one farm at a time. The pristine, forested small islands we saw on this trip were bare, sheep-mown homesteads well into the twentieth century, and modern conservation acquisitions focus on these . As commerce disappeared from the coastal waters and tourism rose as the leading industry, the island transformed from fishing and boat-building villages into Acadia-aligned restaurants, campgrounds, motels and services. There are still plenty of boats and a healthy lobster fishery, which history we explored at a local nature museum and lobster hatchery.
pregnant lobster at Oceanarium
The main respite we got from tourist crowds ourselves was on the state highways that follow the southwestern portion of the island. Indian Point was off this road, and we found the prettiest rocky coast at the farthest tip of the island. Bass Harbor and its historic lighthouse are shown below.
Mount Desert Island is a remnant of mountains that may have been as tall as the Alps, extending 80 miles beyond the current coastline. The shore is built of granite and metamorphic materials carved and deposited by glaciers up to a mile thick. The numerous bodies of freshwater are all long, narrow and aligned with the path of the glacier. We canoed on Long Pond, one of these, and took the pictures below.
Somes Sound is another of these long bodies of water but opens to the sea, splitting Mount Desert Island up the middle. Somes Sound is the only fjord on the Atlantic coastline. A waterfall that feeds it is shown below.
The trip was adventurous and contemplative, invigorating and still soothing to our teacher souls. I'll end with one of the more thrilling sights – a bald eagle perched on the edge of an uninhabited island. A close-up is at the top of the post. Please do check the photo albums – many more beautiful sights of Maine.
Maine photo album Part One
Maine photo album Part Two
a wonderful professional set is at sueannhodges.com
Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant , is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills. Thoreau, Ktaadn