Time for Noah's ark?

(The webbing between my toes is now nearly complete.)

Yesterday's downpour was the most rain I have ever seen fall at my house in Ithaca in 29 years, maybe the hardest rain I have ever seen in my life. It came down in sheets for a solid 30 minutes. It is exactly the kind of rain in parts of the West that results in flash floods that kill people. I had water flowing on my property in places where I have never seen moving water. And of course, it rained almost every day in June, much of July, and now more of the same in August. Fortunately, we live near the top of the hill surrounded by forest, so the chances of sliding off into an abyss is small. If this is the new normal, I may as well live in Costa Rica where I can find really good rice and beans, and cheap rum.

How wild animals endure these weather events is not clear to me, because who wants to be out there trying to find out? I have hummingbirds all over the place this summer, and I assume they are sitting under the protective cover of some tree branch. But it would be fascinating to observe the exact location and position they assume. After the rain, I walked through my woodlot and saw water flowing through a buried hollow log that I know is a runway for short-tailed shrews. Where the heck did they go? On the other hand, these large slugs we have in abundance this summer must have popped the top on a cold one, closed their sun umbrella, and rolled over on their backs to get more comfortable. It would have been a great time to make more slime!

Only time will tell if our summers become more rainy in general due to climate change, but more extreme rainfall events are predicted for the Northeast (see http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap3-3/sap3-3-final-all.pdf). Is this summer a hint of what is to come? More rainfall will result in shifts in abundance or geographic ranges of plants and animals over time. So, will we have more slugs and fewer shrews? More water cress and fewer tomatoes? More umbrellas and less moisturizing cream? Just a thought. But in the meantime, I am searching Google Do It Yourself sites for "arks".

That damn Mike's Cigars

(I love to fondle my cigars before smoking.  Smokers' foreplay.)

I wish Mike's Cigars would stop sending me email specials about their products. About three times a week I get these enticing offers on samplers of cigars. Usually I can resist, because how many cigars do I need sitting in humidors at any one time? My inventory now is probably 200 cigars. But those sticks are not just for smoking. I love to open the lid of my special humidor containing cigars I have carefully aged at 70 degrees F and 70% humidity and just fondle them. I used to collect coins and stamps, but who wants to fondle stamps or coins?  But a collection of cigars has a special appeal, because you can admire the item in the short term, and then use it at some future date. They have such interesting and beautiful labels, which often become collector's items, and each cigar was carefully hand-rolled by some latino in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, or some other tropical place.

Some day, Cuba will be truly open and their stash of top quality cigars will come flooding back into the U.S. I can hardly wait. I have to think that the U.S. cigar smoker was hurt much more than we ever hurt Cuba by placing an embargo on this product. Would we ever have placed this limitation on Cuba if they had been the world's only producer of zinc, or oranges, or computer chips? Of course not.

But cigar smoking is all about enjoyment. If I get all wrapped up in a political discussion about Cuban cigars, I get tense, and I drool more, and the tip of the cigar I am smoking gets all soggy. That ruins the smoke, because a wet head on a cigar then absorbs more of the chemicals in the tobacco resulting in an acrid flavor. I end up throwing the thing away at that point, and that makes me drool even more. Then the scotch is affected, and the result is dilution.  Therefore, avoid political discussions when smoking a cigar.

So I am studying Mike's email ad of today over and over again, because it is better than usual. To buy or not to buy? To delete or not to delete? The stock market is boring in August, so I have more time than normal to think. I never had time to fret like this when I worked at the university. Let me check that ad one more time.

Spores and insects

(Black knot fungus.  This is the scourge of DrTom's plum trees.  "Out, out, damn spot!")

This is the year of the fungus. We have had double the normal amount of rain this summer, and spore-producing organisms apparently love it. The tomato blight is sweeping through the Northeast, eliminating September caprese salad for many; I even received a special email from Johnny's Seed Company a week ago warning of these infestations and what to do about it. Fortunately, there are only two vegetable gardens within a mile of mine, and they are both down wind. So my tomatoes have been spared, for now.

But I have black knot fungus on both my plum trees, mildew on my Cortland apple tree (completely dead?), and apple blossom rot on the Ida Red apple tree. In addition, Colorado potato beetles are all over my squash plants and Japanese beetles are devouring plum leaves. I spend considerable time squishing these pests between my fingers as I peruse the carnage. I notice that the Japanese beetles also love to spend time on wild raspberry and elderberry plants along the edge of my forest not far from my gardens, so there is an endless supply of new insects to meet the demise of my digits. Often the potato beetles and the Japanese beetles are in copulo when I squish, so I get a twofer in those cases. I'm not sure this squishing helps, but I get great satisfaction from actually doing something.

Of course, there is the possibility that this new rainfall regime will be the new normal. In that case, maybe I should plant water cress. Make lemonade from lemons.

The beginning

(It doesn't get much better than this.)

During 2008 I had a website where I posted thoughts, news releases, conservation messages, relevant books, photos, etc. about ecology, natural history, and the environment. I spent a great deal of time on that website and I began to develop a following. Then, in January 2009, my collaborators in Thailand who kept the site running technologically inexplicably took the site down without warning. I have never heard another word from them, and most of the content of that site is gone forever. From time to time, I will reproduce some of the blogs with an environmental theme that I managed to save from that effort. But to be honest, I simply don't have the "fire in the belly" to try to convince anyone any longer about the plight of the natural world and what we should do about it. Occasionally, I might start preaching out of habit about how screwed we are, so I apologize in advance.

All I want to do now is describe the incredible biological wonder and beauty that surrounds us, most of which anyone can see with eyes wide open and a piece of land to gaze upon. At the same time, I need to make money in retirement, which I attempt to do by trading equities online almost daily. My life is pleasantly interspersed with two activities: 1) sitting at my computer pushing buttons that effect a buy or a sell of some publicly traded companies' stock, and 2) working on my property to produce some food, some firewood, some lumber, and tons of enjoyment by observing some of the thousands of biological stories playing out all around us. It really doesn't get much better than this!

At the end of almost every day, I sit somewhere on my property and have "Happy Hour", which consists of sipping a single-malt scotch and smoking a cigar hand-rolled in some Latin American country. And it is well past that time today, so I must pour that drink, light that stick, and see what the night sky hints about tomorrow's weather.