KirstenMortensen.com

I’m working! But I couldn’t resist trying for this pic :-)

I usually compress files a bit more but he lost too much of his definition when I did — sorry if the image loads kinda slow . . .

I haven’t found one of these since I was a kid . . .

Isn’t it gorgeous?

Most the ladybugs we see anymore are non-native species that were imported by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture in the 70s to control agricultural pests.

Sounded like a good idea at the time, but they’ve driven out many of our native species.

The law of unintended consequences.

And look what else I found: Cornell University is asking kids to find and photograph native ladybugs and submit the photos with a little supporting data (date and time seen, location, habitat).

To be able to help the nine spotted ladybug and other ladybug species scientists need to have detailed information on which species are still out there and how many individuals are around. Entomologists at Cornell can identify the different species but there are too few of us to sample in enough places to find the really rare ones. We need you to be our legs, hands and eyes. If you could look for ladybugs and send us pictures of them on Email we can start to gather the information we need. We are very interested in the rare species but any pictures will help us. This is the ultimate summer science project for kids and adults! You can learn, have fun and help save these important species.

The website tells about how a couple of kids found a nine-spotted ladybug in Virginia in 2006 — the first sighting of this species in the Eastern U.S. in 14 years. Isn’t that cool?

And what a great environmental science-based summer activity!

Glenn Reynolds has been advocating the adoption of flex-fuel technology for our cars. The basic idea is that if our cars could run on ethanol and methanol as well as gasoline, we’d reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

The cost to convert our cars would be about $100 per.

Leave aside the ominous suggestion–on odd one coming from the good professor–that the technology be government-mandated, and it may well be a fine idea. But there’s another option that would be simpler to implement and would cost a whole lot less.

I first read about it in this article about hypermiler Wayne Gerdes.

Hypermilers try to improve their gas mileage by changing the way they drive.

Gerdes has taken the idea to an extreme–including doing things that are arguably unsafe.

But there’s still something here for the rest of us those of us–stuff like not accelerating so quickly at green lights, using cruise control for highway driving, and coasting to stops when possible.

The upside: according to this article on CNN.com, adopting some of the hypermilers’ techniques could reduce our national gas consumption by 35 percent.

It would help, of course, if we could get immediate feedback on how much gas we’re using, as we use it. And we can: according to Gerdes, it would cost only $10-20 to install fuel consumption gauges in our cars.

Personally, I don’t want our politicians mandating any auto upgrades–too much potential for mischief. But I’d gladly spend an extra $20 myself to be able to monitor my gas consumption in real time.

And hey, if that 35 percent figure is anything like correct, the gauges would about pay for themselves by the time we get home from the new car lot.

Technorati Tags: hypermilers, flex-fuel, gasoline consumption, foreign oil

Salon has published an article excerpted from a new book titled Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger; the piece argues that environmental alarmism has “had the opposite of [its] intended effect,”

provoking fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among readers and the lay public, not the rational embrace of environmental policies.

Ya think?

Not to mention the out-and-out backlash — the ridicule (richly deserved much of the time) and “there you go crying wolf again” reaction every time we’re served yet another predication of environmental disaster.

The article makes quite a few other points I’ve raised myself for years. Here’s a taste:

The eco-tragedy narrative imagines humans as living in a fallen world where wildness no longer exists and a profound sadness pervades a dying Earth. The unstated aspiration is to return to a time when humans lived in harmony with their surroundings. That tragic narrative is tied to an apocalyptic vision of the future — an uncanny parallel to humankind’s Fall from Eden in the Book of Genesis and the end of the world in the final Book of Revelation.

Original sin, anyone?

For many environmentalists, Science is and should remain at the center of any politics aiming to overcome ecological crises. It is outside of history, society, and values. It is environmentalism’s touchstone, the central criterion on which the value of environmentalism should be judged. But to believe that the sciences were behind the passage of environmental laws is a faith — a scientism, not a science — one that overlooks the specific historical and social conditions that gave rise to the ecological values.

Amen!

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal printed a piece by Stephen Moore last Friday that relates these findings from a new United Nations report called “State of the Future”:

* World-wide illiteracy rates have fallen by half since 1970 and now stand at an all-time low of 18%;
* More people live in free countries than ever before;
* The average human being today will live 50% longer in 2025 than one born in 1955;
* In 1981, 40% of the world’s population lived on less than $1 a day, while today that percentage is only 25%, adjusted for inflation;
* At current rates of growth, “world poverty will be cut in half between 2000 and 2015″;
* Trade and technology are closing the global “digital divide”.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger conclude their article by calling for a “new politics” which, they say

requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment.

Excellent idea. And isn’t it nice to know we don’t even have to fake it. We just have to learn to discount pronouncements from gloom and doomers as a matter of course ;-)

(Oh, and a little tax revolt to wake up our politicians might be nice for a quick change of pace!)

Technorati Tags: environmentalism

Well, part of my lawn. It turns out I didn’t order enough compost.

Here it is scattered in its little piles.

Next step: I had to rake it all to spread it — or more precisely, knock it off the leaves of the grass so it won’t kill it, which would have rather defeated the purpose.

About halfway through doing this I realized that I am, as my English sweetie might put it, “barking mad.”

Composting a lawn?

There is a reason that uniform, green-all-year-round lawns and eco-awareness don’t mix. They aren’t supposed to.

And since my front lawn is that compost-awkward size — too small for two yards of compost, two big for one — and since I decided during a rare burst of fiscal prudence to err on the side of too little compost when I ordered it on Saturday — I have now a 1/2 composted lawn.

I’m toying with what would be wiser. Leave the other half uncomposted as a test to see if the effort is really worth it?

Or shell out for another load to spread next weekend . . .

We’ll see.

In the meantime, one of the things compost won’t really help of course is weed control (yeah I know, theorectically if your grass is happy it will compete better — but compost nourishes weeds too now, doesn’t it). As I’ve mentioned in another post, I’ve been applying corn gluten in the spring; it inhibits seed germination and so over time will cut down on weeds. Some weeds — if they’re annuals or short-lived perennials. Any perennial that lives on like grass, otoh, will be unaffected by corn gluten — and speaking of the English, one of the weeds I have the most problem with, Glechoma hederacea, is a non-native plant brought over here by someone on that side of the pond.

I suspect the English. Wikipedia mentions an English herbalist, John Gerard, who said a brew of it cures tinnitus, and that

Glechoma was also widely used by the Saxons in brewing beer as flavoring, clarification, and preservative, before the introduction of hops for these purposes; thus the brewing-related names, Alehoof, Tunhoof, and Gill-over-the-ground.

Some descriptions say it smells minty but that’s only one aspect of its odor. Excuse me, “odour.” Its smell is unlike anything else — strong, bitter, mediciny.

It’s happy in sun and shade, doesn’t mind being cut low, is happy to grow right over top your grass if you cut it high. It loves to take over the edges of things — the edge of a garden, the edge of the driveway, the edge of a new patch of lawn you’ve reseeded for some reason.

The good news. Wikipedia and this article both say you can get rid of it by using Borax, which is relatively non-toxic.

I may give that a try . . .

On the other hand, I have tinnitus . . . hmmm . . .

Technorati Tags: organic lawn care

My daughter & nephew found this cicada on my parents’ pool deck this morning. It was sluggish from the cold so I was able to hold it for quite awhile to photograph it, until it got warm enough from the sun to fly off.

I’ve been fascinated by cicadas since I was a kid. Those wings — aren’t those amazing wings? And the huge sound they make — you can’t help but know they’re all around — yet you hardly ever see them, they hide so far up in the trees.

(Although you can easily find the husks of the nymphs. Here’s a pic of a husk my daughter found a few weeks ago — not a great pic because I took it tonight, so the flash is going off.)

As I started this post, I thought maybe I could figure out what species of cicada I’d photographed today, but no luck — it doesn’t look much like the photos I found of various species online. It also turns out there are a loooot of different kinds of cicadas — 100 species in North America alone, 2500 worldwide. About all I can figure is that it’s probably a dog day or annual cicada, not a periodic cicada.

I thought this was interesting, too:

Cicadas are unique in sound-producing insects in that they have a musical drum in their abdomen. The organs that produce sound are ‘tymbales’ ~ paired membranes that are ribbed and located at the abdominal base. Contracting the internal tymbal muscles yield a pulse of sound as the tymbals buckle inwards. As these muscles relax, the tymbals return to their original position. The interior of the male abdomen is substantially hollow to amplify the resonance of the sound. The song intensity of the louder cicadas acts as an effective bird repellent. Males of many species tend to gather which creates a greater sound intensity and engenders protection from avian predators.

In addition to the mating song, many species also have a distinct distress call, usually a somewhat broken and erratic sound emitted when an individual is seized.

One summer –it must have been in the 70s — while we were visiting my paternal grandparents in Germantown, New York, I happened to be out in the yard when I heard a racket in the air — a cicada killer wasp had attacked a cicada; they were grappling midair like two monsters in a Godzilla movie, the cicada buzzing noisily — the sound was recognizable as a cicada buzz but at the same time it didn’t sound at all like when they call from the trees. “Broken and erratic” for sure.

I guessed what was going on — I’d probably read about cicada wasps in Ranger Rick or someplace.

It’s one of the pleasures of summer vacation for a kid though, isn’t it? To spend all that time hanging around “not doing anything,” and as a consequence catching things like that — like a cicada wasp seizing a cicada. It’s not even that such things are so uncommon, either, just that you have to be in the proverbial right place/right time.

Anyway. A few more weeks of cicadas singing yet, before the summer’s done. Happy dog days. Good night.

Technorati Tags: cicada

My friend from England was here for a visit (the reason I haven’t been blogging much!) and we spent a couple of hours last weekend at Mendon Ponds Park, a 2500-acre county park south of Rochester.

We were looking for Nature, since he doesn’t get much of that in London, and found some. Here’s a pic.

Isn’t he gorgeous?

Probably a “he” since the females usually have more blue on their hindwings, according to my butterfly field guide, Butterflies of North America by Jim Brock and Kenn Kaufman.

What’s really interesting, though, is that if you went by the top of the wings (along with the range) you’d assume this is an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus). But if you look at the underside of his wings . . .

. . . it’s not so clear cut.

You see, there’s a Canadian Tiger Swallowtail too (Papilio canadensis), and it has a range that happens to overlap the northern part of New York State.

The two species of butterflies are very similar, but on the Canadian, the yellow marginal band underneath the forewing is continuous. Like this.

On an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, that band would be broken — it would look like a series of dots.

But even that’s not the answer. My butterfly was big. Canadian Swallowtails are usually quite a bit smaller than Easterns. And the black stripe on the underside of the butterfly’s hindwing, closest to his body, would be a lot thicker if he were a Canadian.

As it turns out, the guide says differentiating between the two species “can be difficult along the lengthy, narrow strip where their ranges meet . . .” and to make it even more interesting, “some individuals appear intermediate.”

I’d say this is one of those individuals, wouldn’t you?

We saw several other species of butterfly while we were there — it’s a fantastic spot for butterfly watching, since there’s a terrific mix of wetlands and woodlands — but I wasn’t able to get nice photographs of the others.

This was the best shot I got of this little guy, which is too bad, because the focus isn’t clear enough and I can’t ID him. I’m guessing it’s some kind of Skipper, but the closest in the guide is a Chisos Banded-Skipper, and they’re described as “rare, found in our area only in oak woodlands of Big Bend National Park, Texas.”

Maybe I’ll try to go back and get another pic. There were two or three of them around. It’s a small butterfly but the banding on the wings was pretty striking.

This isn’t a butterfly, but a Yellow-collared Scape Moth, Cisseps fulvicollis. He’s hit some hard times, judging by how raggedy the back edges of his wings are. These are really common moths around here — you see them all the time on flowers during the day. For some reason I find them just a touch creepy. They look like they’re up to something.

The park has other critters besides Lepidoptera. There are about a billion chipmunks.

And of course, the requisite Canadian Geese. I liked this shot, only I wish the camera had captured a bit more detail on the head and neck of the goose in the foreground. The shots where I did get more detail, the goose wasn’t posing quite as nicely. Didn’t she know she was supposed to copy the arc of the log in the water? :-)

Technorati Tags: Mendon Ponds Park, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Canadian Tiger Swallowtail, Yellow-collared Scape Moth, Canadian Geese

Thank you Instapundit for finding this article about “colony collapse disorder.”

I’d come up with a lot of the same information in dribs and drabs, and mixed it with a large dose of skepticism about overwrought news reports. For example, there’s this PDF of a powerpoint slide about “fall dwindle disease” (the old name for colony collapse disorder). It mentions that the phenom struck a beekeeper in the 1930s. (Turns out it’s been around even longer than that.)

So it’s nice to have it all presented in one place, in a friendly & calm piece written by an entomologist who, among other things, advises that “it’s never a good idea to trust what the media are telling you.”

Hah.

Here’s his sum-up:

[T]he leading hypothesis in many researcher’s minds is that colonies are dying primarily because of stress. Stress means something different to a honey bee colony than to a human, but the basic idea isn’t all that alien: If a colony is infected with a fungus, or has mites, or has pesticides in its honey, or is overheated, or is undernourished, or is losing workers due to spraying, or any other such thing, then the colony is experiencing stress. Stress in turn can cause behavioral changes that exacerbate the problem and lead to worse ones like immune system failure.

What’s interesting is that out on the bee keeping fringes, people are discovering ways to keep their hives healthier. I blogged one other time about Kirk Webster, who has bred bees resistent to Varroa mites, one significant cause of stress to European honey bees.

Here’s another beekeeper who controls mites by using hives with smaller cells. I thought this was cool, as well:

The other change I’ve done in my beekeeping, is to capture feral swarms and start raising queens from these. These are darker bees that seem more acclimatized to my location and have been surviving on their own with no chemicals at all.

Yeah, let nature sort it out!

Technorati Tags: colony collapse disorder, honeybees,

Technorati Tags: Rochester, New York, spring