There was a small beaver dam only about a half mile into the walk, but unfortunately the beavers weren’t around.

The ruins were perhaps the most interesting part of the park. This was once the New Manchester Manufacturing Company, a textile mill built in 1849, and primarily produced a type of coarse fabric called Osnaburg. In 1861, the Confederacy contracted New Manchester to produce materials for their soldiers’ uniforms. On July 2, 1864, Union forces under Sherman’s command captured New Machester (the company town and the mill), arrested its employees and burned it to the ground. The 70 or so employees were forced to take an “Oath of Allegiance” to the government, and were dumped off across the Ohio River, and told not to return south until the war was over or face imprisonment, showing just how sweet a guy Sherman really was.

All that’s left of New Manchester now is these ruins and the millrace that led to the water wheel. The ruins are gated off (except on tours), so this is as close as I could get.

The way plants grow down is somehow different than up north. I’m used to mainly pine forests, the towering conifers spaced out among blankets of dead needles and sporadic fern. It’s never too crowded in the mountain forests of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Georgia, at least in the areas I’ve been, is a little more populated.

There are entire swaths of sidewalk in my neighborhood that have been consumed by brush, broken by tree roots and barricaded by twisted vines. Midtown Atlanta is hardly neglected by the city, but the plant life down here just seems more aggressive, and forces you to look beyond the pavement and man made structures to the veritable tangle of vegetation between blocks, behind homes. It’s easy to imagine that you can actually see the slow takeover, witness nature’s reclamation.

It always brings my mind back to precolonial America, the idea that the entire Eastern US was covered in deciduous forest, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. It’s the same feeling I get from that primeval, aboriginal fantasy that plays out in our minds when we think of alien landscapes towering ferns and sauropods. What would it have been like to walk in those ancient, untouched Appalachian forests? To hear wolves at night and know that you were most definitely alone in the wilderness, with the exception of the native tribes? Frightening, perhaps, but none the less, an exciting concept.

Americans thought of wilderness in interesting ways back then. The Puritans equated their flight to America from England with Christ’s journey into the desert wilderness or the exile of the Jews. So it was considered an appropriate setting for a test of spiritual hardiness. When more and more settlers came to the country and started establishing communities, the wilderness was perceived as working against them, they worked to conquer it.

The American wilderness broke against the successive waves of development to the extent that we had to sanction areas to preserve so that they could never been exploited. Still those boundaries are tested, especially in the past eight or so years, and it seems like nothing is safe from our influence, directly or indirectly.

But there are those moments, that exist maybe only in my mind, where I see nature pushing back, breaking concrete and barring passage, and we just let it, and I get a great sense of peace from that.

The Farm Bill is an omnibus bill passed every few years, setting a policy toolkit for agriculture in the US. It has massive implications for industry, food, foreign policy and, for our purposes, conservation and the environment.

Here are a few things that stuck out for me:

The new Farm Bill includes the Endangered Species Recovery Act, which will provide tax deductions for private landowners that volunteer to conserve habitat on their lands for threatened and endangered species.

An excellent idea considering many of the trouble areas are on private lands, and NGOs can be a bit intrusive. The guilt trips haven’t really worked.

The Wetlands Reserve Program will be reduced by about 25% to just 185,000 acres per year.

Not good. We have already eliminated well over half of the 215 million acres of wetland in the continental US, with some states nearly destroying all of the major wetlands within their lines.

And this bit is just far out of control:

High commodity prices and federal subsidies for corn ethanol production have created intense pressure to plow under remaining native grasslands. Conversion of these lands to corn production not only destroys important imperiled habitats that are home to numerous declining species of birds and other wildlife, it also releases large quantities of carbon stored in grassland soils. A strong Sodsaver provision would have helped counteract these pressures by eliminating federal support and insurance payments on newly broken out land. Sodsaver provisions were included in both the House and Senate bills, as well as the Administration’s farm bill proposal only to be taken out during Conference committee. Now producers in the prairie pothole region will be incentivized to break out their lands for fear their Governors will opt into this program. At least parts of the permanent disaster relief program will likely exacerbate the problem by guaranteeing producer income on even the most marginal of newly broken lands. Taken together with the bill’s significant retrenchment of the Conservation Reserve Program, the net effect will be to add to rather than ameliorate the pressure to plow under fragile native grasslands–destroying habitat while contributing to climate change by releasing carbon stored in the soils.

Climate change is also contributing to the invasion of brush into the native grasslands of more arid climes in this country. I’m reviewing a paper on the subject and should have something up about it today.

I spent most of my life in close proximity to bogs and marshlands, so the reduction of wetland protection bothers me a great deal. They are beautiful, unique environments where it takes a sharp eye to pick out some of the most brilliant curiosities you won’t find anywhere else. I had the fortune of seeing firsthand different kinds of wetlands. The eastern shore of Maryland is home to salty, coastal wetlands where stalk legged herons pick through the muck for food. On the other side of the state, in the mountains of Garrett County, there are bogs that stretch miles, weigh stations of sorts, purifying waters that flow clean off the rocky heights of waterfalls downstream. In the fall, the sphagnum turns deep red, matching the autumn treetops and blueberry bushes that surround the thick, low lying mats of moss, soaked in the muddy bog. Sarracenia purpurea grows on little hummocks, small white flowers poke through the sphagnum and in a couple of months, when everything is covered by layers of snow and ice, the skunk cabbage will still be visible, producing enough heat through its own respiration to melt the winter around it.

I don’t think I have ever stepped into an environment so alien, so unique as a bog or marshland, and I hope to track down some local wetlands in Georgia. Perhaps this time I’ll have some pictures to go along with the descriptions.

I finally got around to blogging about this study published in PLoS One a few weeks ago, regarding geophagy in tropical species of bats. The study provides a nice overview of the literature and some of the potential reasons why they (and we) do it.

We all eat dirt, in a sense, through mineral supplements or through the minerals and inorganic nutrients contained in our food, but there is a long history of the consumption of clay by human beings, and some tribes in sub-Saharan Africa continue to visit these “clay licks”. Pregnant women in particular will frequent these licks. Scientists believe that the clay is soothing to morning sickness as well as a good source of calcium for the skeleton of the developing child.

So the fact that animals of all kinds eat dirt is well established, but it’s hard to pin down exactly why in specific situations. There are two main hypotheses that attempt to explain why, both of which were considered by the researchers involved in this study: Mineral licks provide specific nutrients to an inadequate diet and/or they provide a buffer against plant secondary metabolites (PSMs), compounds that serve an ecological function to the plant beyond sex and energy production. In this case, PSMs protect plants from ingestion by poisoning the consumer. (To truly cover how interesting PSMs are would consume another blog post at least, which I have scrawled in my notebook.)

In this particular study, the researchers captured two species of bats each with different feeding habits: Artibeus obscurus is an obligate frugivore while Carollia perspicillata is a generalist species, feeding on fruit, pollen and insects. Insects provide little nutrients compared to fruit, so the researchers expected to see a greater frequency of generalist visitors than strict frugivores. However, most of the bats captured at mineral licks in the tropics are frugivores and many of these are pregnant, lactating females.

So if a diet of fruit is generally more nutritious than a diet of insects, why are there more fruit-eating bats captured at the licks? Probably PSM, especially if you consider this: pregnant female frugivores are eating for themselves and their offspring, which means a greater intake of fruit and PSM within the fruit, leading to a greater need for the toxin buffer provided by mineral licks. In this case it seems that mineral licks are more frequently used for detoxification than nutrients.

It’s important to note that not all mineral or clay licks are the same obviously, so this isn’t a solution to the dueling hypotheses (which probably explain the behavior as a pair instead of separately), but it does provide a bit of insight as to how specific cases will differ depending on the chemical composition of the lick and the needs of the organism.

Photo: Artibeus sp.

I think someone could start a series of blog posts/videos called “Stupid Things People Say at Zoos”. You could literally spend one day at any zoo and have enough material for months of blogging. I swear that guy you hear in the background shadowed us all day.

I’ve got some more videos I’ve been meaning to upload, including one of the red panda in the Atlanta Zoo, and another of a polar bear from the Pittsburgh Zoo.

Panola Mountain or Sweetwater Creek?

I want to do some hiking/photography.