Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween - ceramic pumpkins and my cross-stitch
ornaments.

One of my favorite things to do is to read holiday themed stories around Christmas-time, but I don't usually think to read Halloween stories at this time of the year. However, I couldn't resist re-reading one of my all time favorites, Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party featuring Hercule Piorot and Ariadne Oliver.  A murder is committed at a children's party where the victim, one of the girls at the party, is drowned in the bobbing for apples bucket. I never was a fan of bobbing for apples and now I have a really good excuse not to like it.

Isn't romantic?

My wedding cake topper (Llardo),
my grandparents wedding photo,
and Galt Niederhoffer's novel
 

 The Romantics by Galt Niederhoffer, takes the reader off to the Maine coast for the August wedding of Lila and Tom. The happy couple were college sweethearts. Well they became sweethearts only after Tom stopped dating Laura, Lila's roommate. Laura is to be maid-of-honor at the wedding having stayed friends with Lila and Tom. We are then introduced to the rest of their gang of friends who have convened for the wedding. This clique of friends formed when they were all at Yale. Fellow students called the clique The Romantics as a result of their intermingling relationships.



My grandmother as a
flower girl.

To be honest, I really didn't care much for this bunch of people and Niederhoffer makes them out to be very pretentious and superficial. They certainly don't take friendship or marriage very seriously. Overall those of them that made it to the altar are very unhappy and even Tom and Lila don't seem to be well suited for each other. Marriage is depicted as a social status and a rite of passage more than the sacrament that it is meant to be. No one seems to be working hard at their relationships. And those of us who are married know that it is no picnic and requires lots of patience, endurance, compromise, desire, and love.
The story line takes place over a 24-hour time period including the arrival of the wedding party, the rehearsal dinner, the morning of the wedding, and the big moment. I won't spoil the ending. Let's just say I was a little bit surprised by it, and it lived up to the title.

The depiction of the rehearsal dinner got me to remembering my own. I will admit I was nervous, a bride wants everything to go well. When we arrived, the church was cold (married in early November in New England) and my dad was obviously worried about getting the place nice and warm in the morning in plenty of time before the guests arrived. Speaking of arrival, my in-laws were late and I was getting a little panicked and peeved. Once everyone showed up the rehearsal itself went fine. Off to dinner we went.

Now by the time we arrived at the restaurant my stomach was a little queasy. I chalked it up to being hungry as we were running behind and it had been some time since lunch. A little dinner roll and some salad should help I thought. Next thing I know I need to head to the ladies room. It was awful, before I knew it I'm vomiting and feeling miserable and every female guest knows it. I'm embarrassed because they must think it's my nerves and I know it isn't. There is something seriously wrong with me. I don't remember much more of the dinner except that I said good night to my future husband and drove home. Shortly after midnight I stopped vomiting and I knew it was over.

I managed to get a couple hours of sleep. I showered, ate a piece of toast and went to have my hair done. I came home, had another piece of toast, did my makeup and was dressed in time for the photographer's arrival. The wedding went off without a hitch. The reception was fantastic. Stopped in at home for the after party, and made our farewells to the family and took a limo to the airport hotel to spend the night before an early flight to our honeymoon cruise. Now here's the funny part, in the middle of the night I wake up all alone in bed, my new spouse is puking up his guts in the bathroom. "Okay it wasn't your nerves," he says. Of course it wasn't.  It was a fast moving stomach bug and I made sure everyone knew that fact when we got back home. I can happily say that 23 years later it's still a fun story to tell.

Nature Wars IV - last post on this topic

I promise, this is the last post on this topic. It's amazing what a reader can get from one book. Chapter Ten of Jim Sterba's Nature Wars is all about Roadkill. He begins by introducing the reader to Brewster Bartlett whose nickname is Dr. Splat because as a high school teacher looking for a way to use the fledgling Internet and e-mail system to help communicate the findings of a research project, he decided to have his students keep track of the roadkill on the roads around town. Ghoulish you might think but as a high school teacher myself I can appreciate that students especially some of the young guys would think this was a cool project.

I myself heard Bartlett speak at the New Hampshire Environmental Educators spring conference a couple of years ago. As an educator I am amazed to discover how little my students know about the world around them. Very often they are surprised when I tell them about plant life and the food that they eat. "EWWWW, fruit is the ripened ovary of the flower?" "I'm allergic to plant sperm (aka pollen)?"  I get a sense of gratification when they look through the microscope and see the beauty of cells that make up a leaf. Author, Richard Louv, in his book The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, makes an argument for reconnecting our children with the natural world. They spend way too much time indoors. The shame of it is, children don't get to play and explore outdoors often. After school care, living in areas that may not be deemed safe, over scheduled lives, and time spent in front of the TV or computer screen keep kids from experiencing nature.

Much of Sterba's book focused on how disconnected we all have become from Nature. We want to protect it and yet we still carry out behaviors that places the environment at risk mostly through our overwhelming consumption of resources. In the Epilogue, he points out that here in America we have an abundance of natural resources many of which we take for granted. From our abundance we wear blinders that prevent us from realizing how much we spend on repairs to damaged cars (deer and other animal strikes), replacing landscaping or crop damage, the cost of cleaning up playing fields and golf courses (geese feces), and the damage from flooding caused by beaver dams. If we were to find ourselves unable to pay for these repairs we certainly would have to change our world view. In fact I try to remind my students that when we talk about environmentalism we must realize we speak from our own cultural experiences and that for other people around the world their concept of nature is much different from our own. We've saved our own forests here in the US but if we purchase products that result in the damage or deforestation of someone else's land then shame on us. It may be time for us all to take a good look at our role in the ecosystem because we are not separate from it, we are part of the biotic factors that make it up and our possessions and lifestyles create many of the harmful abiotic factors that we all have to live with.

Nature Wars III - I'm Guilty Too!

My empty bird feeder

I am really captivated by Jim Sterba's Nature Wars, as you can tell since this is the third post I've generated based on this one book. I never thought that feeding the birds wasn't really the best thing to so, even after we were visited by a bear (one of the other animals discussed in the book) you would have thought I might have changed my behavior.

Many of us love to hang up a feeder and watch the various species that come to feed at or under the feeder. I've had chickadees, nuthatches, finches, titmice, cardinals, woodpeckers, mourning doves, and the list goes on. I've also had both red and gray squirrels. Sterba's right when he writes that these creatures can find plenty to eat on their own. In fact the many perennials that are planted in my garden provide plenty of seeds for the birds, and the fact that I leave the seed heads on long after the blooms have faded helps them to find a delicious meal.

Now granted the seed does attract other animals, as well as, the birds. I mentioned squirrels, which are really something when it comes to getting at the birdseed. I've had squirrels eat through the plastic tubes of feeders to get a meal. This summer one of them got into the garage where we stored the seed in a plastic covered container. The squirrel chewed through the cover to get at the seed. We placed the container in a garbage can with a cover on top and the darn thing chewed through that as well!

At one time I used to purchase those feed filled suet squares which were very popular with the birds in the winter. Well, they are popular with bears in the early spring. I never saw the bear but I found the damage that he or she left behind. The shepherd's crook from which the suet feeder hung was bent over (and couldn't be straightened) and the feeder itself gone. My neighbors informed me that they saw the bear in action. That put an immediate halt to feeding the birds. I read up about bear behavior and learned that they will remember where they have found food in the past and will revisit those sites. I also read about hibernation times and figured I'd put out food only during those times.

Sterba points out that feeders become a feeding site for predators of small birds. I've noticed a few cats over the years come stalking through my yard but never really thought that they might be after easy pickings from the feeder. I just hoped they'd take care of my chipmunk population. But it's the hawks who have really benefited from the smorgasbord that I''ve created. I've witnessed the hawk come swooping in for the kill. Sometimes the big bird is successful and other times I've seen a small bird take cover in a bush where the hawk could not fit.

I guess what finally got me was Sterba's statistics - 50 million Americans spending close to $3.5 billion (yes that's right billion) on bird food. On food that these birds don't need because they can fend perfectly well for themselves. Here I am donating food items and money to the local food pantry and feeding the birds. I've decided that's got to stop. I'll let nature take care of her own, and I'll use the money that I save to help support those of my own species who are struggling to feed themselves.

Nature Wars II - Oh Deer!

Deer damage - a defoliated
hosta plant in my yard

Jim Sterba in his book Nature Wars challenges the reader to think about how one relates to nature now that nature has returned. The eastern deciduous forest has rebounded and with it many species which were once threatened, the white tail deer among them. Those darn pesky deer are now so numerous that they cause huge costs to the insurance industry due to car strikes. They do quite a bit of damage to landscaped yards (mine included) and crops. But without man taking part of the ecosystem as the top predator we no longer work to keep the population in check.

My father grew up during World War II when people planted Victory Gardens for their sustenance. My grandparents bought a piece of land which at one time seemed to be in the middle of no where but today is smack dab in the middle of sprawl as Sterba calls it. But back then going to the market wasn't as easy as it is today. My grandmother preserved the vegetables that they raised along with meat from the chickens they kept, while the eggs were sold. It would be years before they'd give up that hard work as groceries became easier to obtain.

Dad learned to hunt and fish as a kid going out with his father, grandfather, or uncles to bag deer, duck, frogs, and trout. He continued his hunting and fishing into his adulthood. He taught my sister and I how to fish taking us out when he could. He even got himself a lobstering license and some pots. I remember bobbing about in a small boat near the breakwater while my father stood up in the boat and hauled his pots up from the ocean floor. It was just business as usual.

I saw Bambi as a kid and was traumatized by his mother's loss but I saw it for what it was. Hunting is one thing and the murder of a parent is another, and I think many people get the two confused. Man has always been a part of keeping other animal populations in check. Not until the mid-20th century did we take on large animal farming and decided that we would eat only chicken, beef, and pork. No wonder there are plenty of geese, turkeys, and deer available fore us to eat today and which we don't. We think of them as nuisances, our grandparents would have seen dinner. For me it was natural that people hunted, my father hunted, we had a deer head on the family room wall. Sterba's book challenges us to realize that more and more we are separated from nature and we really need to reflect on how that changes the way nature is viewed and managed. And yes we do need to take a role in managing the ecosystem for our benefit and for the health of the other organisms in it.

Nature Wars I

Striped Maple tree bark
Harvard Forest

Striped Maple tree leaves
Harvard Forest

I picked up Jim Sterba's Nature Wars: The incredible story of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds, at the library recently and have been reading through it. As with many books there are things written within them that  you are very familiar with. For example, Sterba visited the Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA to learn about how the deciduous forest of North America regrew. If you go there for a visit you can view the dioramas, which really are beautiful works of art, that were created in the 1930s to depict the history of the forest from pre-settlement (1700) through 1930. Here in New England we have no concept of what it must have been like to see the land cleared of trees akin to what the mid-western states are like in topography. It makes sense when you stop to think of  all the stone walls that run through the woods. They didn't get there by themselves. Those stones were moved by the early settlers attempting to clear our glacial soil of rocks in order to plant their crops.

Once farms were abandoned in the 1800s with farmers moving to the newly opened west, or to work in the newly built mills in the every growing cities, or even to take jobs in the ever expanding whaling trade, the land was left to revert to its previous state. In ecological terms this is referred to as secondary succession (primary involves the destruction and replacement of the soil).

I too visited the Harvard Forest for a professional development workshop to learn about forest succession and how to teach this very topic to my students. It was here that I saw for the first time a striped maple as pictured above. Although their distribution covers New England I was unfamiliar with this variety of maple tree as we do not have any around my area. I love learning something new every day whether it be from a personal experience or a book.

Christie, Marsh, and Thallium

Researching murder by
poison.

As a follow up to yesterday's post about Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, I did a little research into the poison used - Thallium. Turns out that element 81 on the periodic table of elements is one of the deadliest. According to Deborah Blum in The Poisoner's Handbook, thallium is colorless, tasteless, odorless and very soluble in a variety of liquids. Would you care for some thallium laced hot chocolate? Arsenic always had to be added to something bitter tasting to help hide the flavor.

In the 1930s, thallium could be found in many pesticides including rat poisons that were easily purchased on the open market. Turns out thallium is also an effective depilatory and was used in cosmetic preparations that would help that discerning lady remove the unwanted hair on her arms or upper lip. Unfortunately, some consumers lost more hair then they bargained for when scalps were made bald, vision was lost, or mobility was impaired. For investigators of criminal activity the classic symptom of hair loss was a key clue.

Ngaio Marsh used thallium poisoning in her novel Final Curtain. (Spoiler Alert) A preparation of thallium was used to treat a group of young children with ringworm, a common occurrence in the day before too many children were sicken or died from the treatment. The murder help him/herself to the medicine to do in the victims of this mystery.

Christie (Spoiler Alert) has the poisoner in The Pale Horse lacing personal care products or packaged foods with thallium. Here too the amateur detective, Mark Easterbrook, figures out what's going on when Ariadne Oliver points out that many of the victims have had their hair fall out. Easterbrook remembers reading about a poisoning case in the States, and finally puts two and two together. In both stories once the source of the poison is figured out the capture of the culprit isn't too far off.

As a high school teacher (I don't watch much TV but I hear this guy from Breaking Bad is giving us a bad reputation), I'm a bit of a science geek and have to admit that all three titles pictured above come from my book shelves. It's amazing what you can learn from a book. Who needs to do a Google search when you have access to great resources. Okay call me old fashioned.