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New Research Should Nail the Coffin Lid Shut on a Toxic Bee-killing Pesticide

2012-01-18T17:47:00.000-06:00

New research should nail the coffin lid shut on a toxic bee-killing pesticide Sierra Club, January 10, 2012 http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2012-01-10.asp

Entire food chain found to be contaminated, from soil to pollen to dead bees

Contact Laurel Hopwood, 216-371-9779 (EST)Tom Theobald 303-652-2266 (MST) Neil Carman, PhD. 512-288-5772 / cell 512-663-9594 (CST)

The Sierra Club, with over 1.3 million members and supporters, calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to immediately suspend the registration of the insecticide clothianidin, based on new scientific evidence of extensive contamination in bees and soil.

Last week (January 3, 2012) scientists at Purdue University documented major adverse impacts from clothianidin, used as a seed treatment in corn, on honey bee health. The results showed clothianidin present in foraging areas long after treated seed has been planted.

The study raises questions about the long term survival of this major pollinator.

"This research should nail the coffin lid shut on clothianidin", says Laurel Hopwood, Sierra Club's Chairwoman of the Genetic Engineering Action Team. "Despite numerous attempts by the beekeeping industry and conservation organizations to persuade the EPA to ban clothianidin, the EPA has failed to protect the food supply for the American people."

Tom Theobald, a founding member of the Boulder County Beekeeper's Association explains, "In 2010, I got hold of an EPA document revealing that the agency has been allowing the widespread use of this bee-toxic pesticide, against evidence that it's highly toxic to bees. Clothianidin has failed to meet the requirements for registration. It's continued use is in violation of the law."

Upon learning of the EPA's failures, the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, the American Beekeeping Federation and The American Honey Producer's Association urged the agency in a 12/8/2010 letter to cancel the registration of this pesticide. Yet despite the fact that clothianidin had failed a critical life cycle study which was required for registration, the agency responded in a 2/18/2011 letter stating "At this time, we are not aware of any data that reasonably demonstrates that bee colonies are subject to elevated losses due to chronic exposure to this pesticide. EPA does not intend at this time to initiate suspension or cancellation actions against the registered uses of clothianidin. If scientific information shows a particular pesticide is posing unreasonable risk to pollinators, we stand ready to take the necessary regulatory action."

Neil Carman, PhD, scientific adviser to Sierra Club, is troubled by EPA's complacency. "A huge shoe has dropped. U.S. researchers have documented major adverse impacts from clothianidin seed treatments in corn on honey bee health." Carman further explains "Because of the vital role played by honey bees in crop pollination, honey bee demise threatens the production of crops that produce one-third of American diets, including nearly 100 fruits and vegetables. The value of crops pollinated by bees exceeds $15 billion in the U.S. alone."

Hopwood exclaims, "The time is now for EPA to quit dodging the illusion of oversight and instead, cancel this bee- killing pesticide. If we travel too far down our current path, we could create conditions in our food system much like those that brought down the financial system."

................................................................

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The Iowa Native Plants Mailing List provides a forum for those interested in Iowa's natural vegetation and in general conservation issues. Another objective is to promote the Iowa Native Plant Society. This list is owned and managed by Diana Horton, and sponsored by the University of Iowa Department of Biology.

For assistance, contact Diana Horton, diana-horton@uiowa.edu

Research Shows Food Chain Was Found Contaminated.

2012-01-12T14:17:00.001-06:00

We just received this email and we wanted to share it with all of you.

New research should nail the coffin lid shut on a toxic bee-killing pesticide Sierra Club, January 10, 2012 http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2012-01-10.asp

Entire food chain found to be contaminated, from soil to pollen to dead bees

Contact Laurel Hopwood, 216-371-9779 (EST)Tom Theobald 303-652-2266 (MST) Neil Carman, PhD. 512-288-5772 / cell 512-663-9594 (CST)

The Sierra Club, with over 1.3 million members and supporters, calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to immediately suspend the registration of the insecticide clothianidin, based on new scientific evidence of extensive contamination in bees and soil.

Last week (January 3, 2012) scientists at Purdue University documented major adverse impacts from clothianidin, used as a seed treatment in corn, on honey bee health. The results showed clothianidin present in foraging areas long after treated seed has been planted.

The study raises questions about the long term survival of this major pollinator.

“This research should nail the coffin lid shut on clothianidin”, says Laurel Hopwood, Sierra Club’s Chairwoman of the Genetic Engineering Action Team. “Despite numerous attempts by the beekeeping industry and conservation organizations to persuade the EPA to ban clothianidin, the EPA has failed to protect the food supply for the American people.”

Tom Theobald, a founding member of the Boulder County Beekeeper’s Association explains, “In 2010, I got hold of an EPA document revealing that the agency has been allowing the widespread use of this bee-toxic pesticide, against evidence that it’s highly toxic to bees. Clothianidin has failed to meet the requirements for registration. It’s continued use is in violation of the law.”

Upon learning of the EPA’s failures, the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, the American Beekeeping Federation and The American Honey Producer’s Association urged the agency in a 12/8/2010 letter to cancel the registration of this pesticide. Yet despite the fact that clothianidin had failed a critical life cycle study which was required for registration, the agency responded in a 2/18/2011 letter stating “At this time, we are not aware of any data that reasonably demonstrates that bee colonies are subject to elevated losses due to chronic exposure to this pesticide. EPA does not intend at this time to initiate suspension or cancellation actions against the registered uses of clothianidin. If scientific information shows a particular pesticide is posing unreasonable risk to pollinators, we stand ready to take the necessary regulatory action.”

Neil Carman, PhD, scientific advisor to Sierra Club, is troubled by EPA’s complacency. “A huge shoe has dropped. U.S. researchers have documented major adverse impacts from clothianidin seed treatments in corn on honey bee health.” Carman further explains “Because of the vital role played by honey bees in crop pollination, honey bee demise threatens the production of crops that produce one-third of American diets, including nearly 100 fruits and vegetables. The value of crops pollinated by bees exceeds $15 billion in the U.S. alone.”

Hopwood exclaims, “The time is now for EPA to quit dodging the illusion of oversight and instead, cancel this bee- killing pesticide. If we travel too far down our current path, we could create conditions in our food system much like those that brought down the financial system.”

……………………………………………………..

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http://www.cgrer.uiowa.edu/herbarium/MailingList.htm

The Iowa Native Plants Mailing List provides a forum for those interested in Iowa’s natural vegetation and in general conservation issues. Another objective is to promote the Iowa Native Plant Society. This list is owned and managed by Diana Horton, and sponsored by the University of Iowa Department of Biology.

For assistance, contact Diana Horton, diana-horton@uiowa.edu

Corn Seed Pesticide Kills Bees

2012-01-06T14:34:00.001-06:00

We have been following the Honeybee's mysterious malady for a number of years. The official name for this phenomenon is called Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem seems to be worldwide. We received this new information just today. Ion Exchange Inc.

Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2012 Corn Seed Pesticide Kills Bees

I understand that Germany has banned their use. I wish we would do the same.
________________________________________
From: Iowa Native Plants Mailing List [IOWA-NATIVE-PLANTS@LIST.UIOWA.EDU] on behalf of Thmathews@AOL.COM [Thmathews@AOL.COM]
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 11:04 PM
To: IOWA-NATIVE-PLANTS@LIST.UIOWA.EDU
Subject: [IOWA-NATIVE-PLANTS] Fwd: Corn Seed Pesticide Kills Bees

In a message dated 1/5/2012 12:08:05 A.M. Central Standard Time, lhopwood@roadrunner.com writes:
To readers,
Sierra Club's Genetic Engineering Action Team has been following the connection between the honeybee demise and exposure to corn seeds coated with neonicotinoids.
Included here is info about the latest research.
Laurel Hopwood, Chair, Sierra Club Genetic Engineering Action Team

CATCH THE BUZZ - Corn Seed Pesticide Kills Bees
Corn Seed Treatment As Lethal As It Gets For Honey Bees All Season Long, And Long After The Season Is Gone. It Just Keeps On Killing.
by Alan Harman
(EDITED)

Frightening new research shows honey bees are being exposed to deadly neonicotinoid insecticides and several other agricultural pesticides throughout their foraging period. The research, published in the scientific journal PLoS One says extremely high levels of clothianidin and thiamethoxam were found in planter exhaust material produced during the planting of treated maize seed. The work, which could raise new questions about the long-term survival of the honey bee, was conducted by Christian H. Krupke of the Department of Entomology at Purdue University, Brian D. Eitzer of the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Krispn Given of Purdue.

"Neonicotinoids were found in the soil of each field we sampled, including unplanted fields," they report. Dandelions visited by foraging bees growing near these fields were found to contain neonicotinoids as well. "This indicates deposition of neonicotinoids on the flowers, uptake by the root system, or both. Dead bees collected near hive entrances during the spring sampling period were found to contain clothianidin as well."

"These results have implications for a wide range of large-scale annual cropping systems that utilize neonicotinoid seed treatments," the report says. The research was funded by grants from the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign and the Managed Pollinator Coordinated Agricultural Project.

Neonicotinoids are persistent. The new report says the half-lives of these compounds in aerobic soil conditions can vary widely, but are best measured in months - 148 - 1,155 days for clothianidin.

Among the largest single uses of these compounds is application to maize seed. Production of maize for food, feed and ethanol production represents the largest single use of arable land in North America, reaching a record
88,216,620 acres in 2010 and is expected to increase. All of the maize seed planted in North America except for 0.2% used in organic production is coated with neonicotinoid insecticides.

Two major compounds are used - clothianidin and thiamethoxam, with the latter metabolized to clothianidin in the insect. The application rates for these compounds range from 0.25 to 1.25 mg/kernel. These compounds are highly toxic to honey bees - a single kernel contains several orders of magnitude of active ingredient more than the published LD50 values for honey bees - defined as the amount of material that will kill 50% of exposed individuals.
In fact, the amount of clothianidin on a single maize seed at the rate of 0.5 mg/kernel contains enough active ingredient to kill more than 80,000 honey bees.

The results prompted researchers to carry out more experiments to determine how honey bees may be gaining exposure to clothianidin and other pesticides commonly applied to either maize seed or to plants later in the season. They collected samples from a variety of potential exposure routes near agricultural fields and analyzed them to determine whether pesticides were present. They sampled soils, pollen both collected by honey bees and directly from plants, dandelion flowers, and dead and healthy bees. They even checked waste products produced during the planting of treated seed. Maize seed is sewn with tractor-drawn planters that use a forced air/vacuum system and a perforated disc to pick up individual seeds and drop them into the planting furrow at the selected spacing. Maize kernels treated with neonicotinoids and other compounds such as fungicides do not flow readily and may stick to one another, causing uneven plant spacing. To overcome this, talc (a mineral composed of hydrated magnesium silicate) is added to seed boxes to reduce friction and stickiness and ensure the smooth flow of seed. Much of the talc is exhausted during planting, either down with the seed or behind the planter and into the air using an exhaust fan. Researchers sampled the waste talc after planting to determine whether this material was contaminated with pesticides abraded from treated seeds. The waste is a mixture of the talc that has been in contact with treated maize kernels and minute pieces of the seeds.

"Soil collected from areas near our test site revealed that neonicotinoid insecticide residues were present in all samples tested, with clothianidin occurring in each field sampled ... These results demonstrate that honey bees living and foraging near agricultural fields are exposed to neonicotinoids and other pesticides through multiple mechanisms throughout the spring and summer ... We show that bees living in these environments will forage for maize pollen and transport pollen containing neonicotinoids to the hive."

The results also showed clothianidin present in the surface soil of fields long after treated seed has been planted. "All soil samples we collected contained clothianidin, even in cases where no treated seed had been planted for two growing seasons," the report says.

During the spring planting period, dust that arises from this soil may land on flowers frequented by bees, or possibly on the insects themselves. Of potentially greater concern are the very high levels of neonicotinoids and fungicides found in the talc that has been exposed to treated seed. "The large areas being planted with neonicotinoid treated seeds, combined with the high persistence of these materials and the mobility of disturbed soil and talc dust, carry potential for effects over an area that may exceed the boundaries of the production fields themselves."

Later in the season, when planting is largely complete, the researchers found bees collect maize pollen that contains translocated neonicotinoids and other pesticides from seed. Translocation of neonicotinoids into pollen has previously been reported for maize grown from imidacloprid-treated seed, but the researchers say the degree to which honey bees in their study gathered maize pollen was surprising. "The finding that bee-collected pollen contained neonicotinoids is of particular concern because of the risks to newly-emerged nurse bees, which must feed upon pollen reserves in the hive immediately following emergence," they say.

"Lethal levels of insecticides in pollen are an obvious concern, but sub-lethal levels are also worthy of study as even slight behavioral effects may impact how affected bees carry out important tasks such as brood rearing, orientation and communication." Also potentially important are the three fungicides found in bee-collected pollen samples - trifloxystrobin and azoxystrobin and propiconazole. Azoxystrobin and trifloxystrobin are frequently used in maize seed treatments as protectants and all three are widely applied to maize in North America, even in the absence of disease symptoms. These findings have implications both for honey bees located near these crops year-round, but also for migratory colonies which pollinate crops such as almonds and other fruit and nut crops, the report says.

To read the study, click here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029268
To read our actions on the honeybee demise, click these five sites:
http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2009-11-10.asp
Want to eat? Save the honeybee!
http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2009-11-09a.asp
Sierra Club comments on a "neonic" insecticide
http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2008-07-30.asp
Sierra Club urges EPA to suspend nicotinyl insecticides
http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-04-07.asp
USDA, Lobbyists and Bees
http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-03-21.asp
GE and bee Colony Collapse Disorder -- science needed!

The Iowa Native Plants Mailing List provides a forum for those interested in Iowa's natural
vegetation and in general conservation issues. Another objective is to promote the Iowa
Native Plant Society. This list is owned and managed by Diana Horton, and sponsored by
the University of Iowa Department of Biology.

For assistance, contact Diana Horton, diana-horton@uiowa.edu
________________________________________
Iowa Native Plants mailing list
Iowa-Native-Plants@uiowa.edu
http://atmos.cgrer.uiowa.edu/herbarium/MailingList.htm

The Iowa Native Plants Mailing List provides a forum for those interested in Iowa's natural
vegetation and in general conservation issues. Another objective is to promote the Iowa
Native Plant Society. This list is owned and managed by Diana Horton, and sponsored by
the University of Iowa Department of Biology.

Invasive Species and How They Affect the Eco-System.

2011-11-19T09:53:00.003-06:00

In Iowa, we have witnessed the invasion of Multi-flora Rose which can completely take over open timbers and pastureland. It is so invasive that only a bulldozer can get through it. Young calves can get trapped in the dense vines covered with fishhook shaped thorns. Wild Parsnip, now widespread, has taken over road ditches and some native plantings. It can cause severe burns that leave permanent scars. Garlic Mustard is walking over and crowding out native vegetation in our timbers. It appears the only hope right now is that nature will again get things in order however this may take several thousand years to undo or redo.

Howard Bright
AKA...Earthyman ³Helping you create your own natural beauty²

Ion Exchange - A Native Seed and Plant Nursery

Earthyman Needs Help Identifying a Plant

2011-08-26T12:09:00.000-05:00

If you know what this plant is let us know. Thanks Ion Exchange

Bumblebees Are at Risk Around the World

2011-08-18T11:03:00.001-05:00

Bumblebees are in trouble all around the world. This article comes from the UK. Here is a great site to get up to speed on what you can do to help, if we all do our part one person at a time it will make a difference. http://www.bumblebeeconservation.org.uk/
Bumblebees are beautiful, hard working and incredibly important pollinators. In the last 70 years two species have become nationally extinct, and others are have declined dramatically. In short, bumblebees are in trouble...
Now imagine a different future, in which our towns and countryside are rich in colourful wildflowers and teeming with bees, other beneficial insects and a diversity of wildlife for everyone to enjoy...

Join today and help us create a colourful future

"Bumblebees are lovely little creatures - their bright stripes and gentle buzz bring colour and sound to our summer gardens. They are also very important because they pollinate our wildflowers and crops. Sadly things aren't going well and some species are threatened with extinction.

I'm really concerned by these declines and I'm pleased to support the work of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust."

Kate Humble, March 2009

To halt the recent dramatic declines, we urgently need to improve habitats. Everyone can play their part - gardeners, farmers, land managers, councils and governments can all help.
This website is packed with useful information, and includes pages to help you identify bumblebees, advice on how to garden or farm in a sensitive way, and surveys which you may like to take part in. We hope you enjoy the site.

In Midwest, Butterflies May Be Far Fewer.

2011-07-20T08:03:00.001-05:00

Rich Beauchesne/Portsmouth Herald, via Associated Press

HABITAT The use of a herbicide has taken away a home for monarchs.
By ANDREW POLLACK Published: July 11, 2011

As recently as a decade ago, farms in the Midwest were commonly marred — at least as a farmer would view it — by unruly patches of milkweed amid the neat rows of emerging corn or soybeans.

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Janet Jarman for The New York Times

WINTER HABITAT Pupils from Angangueo, a mountain town in Michoacan state in Mexico, during a celebration of migration of the monarch butterfly.

Not anymore. Fields are now planted with genetically modified corn and soybeans resistant to the herbicide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray the chemical to eradicate weeds, including milkweed.
And while that sounds like good news for the farmers, a growing number of scientists fear it is imperiling the monarch butterfly, whose spectacular migrations make it one of the most beloved of insects — “the Bambi of the insect world,” as an entomologist once put it.
Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed, and their larvae eat it. While the evidence is still preliminary and disputed, experts like Chip Taylor say the growing use of genetically modified crops is threatening the orange-and-black butterfly by depriving it of habitat.
“This milkweed has disappeared from at least 100 million acres of these row crops,” said Dr. Taylor, an insect ecologist at the University of Kansas and director of the research and conservation program Monarch Watch. “Your milkweed is virtually gone.”
The primary evidence that monarch populations are in decline comes from a new study showing a drop over the last 17 years of the area occupied by monarchs in central Mexico, where many of them spend the winter. The amount of land occupied by the monarchs is thought to be a proxy for their population size.
“This is the first time we have the data that we can analyze statistically that shows there’s a downward trend,” said Ernest H. Williams, a professor of biology at Hamilton College and an author of the study along with Dr. Taylor and others.
The paper, published online by the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity, attributes the decrease partly to the loss of milkweed from use of “Roundup Ready” crops. Other causes, it says, are the loss of milkweed to land development, illegal logging at the wintering sites in Mexico, and severe weather.
The study does not suggest the monarch will become extinct. But it questions whether the annual migration, the impetus for butterfly festivals around the United States and waves of tourism to Mexico, is sustainable.
Still, the paper does not present any data backing its contention that genetically engineered crops are reducing monarch populations. Some experts dispute that the monarch populations are declining at all, and say it is unclear whether the biotech crops are having an effect.
Andrew K. Davis, an assistant research scientist at the University of Georgia, said censuses of adult monarchs taken each fall at Cape May, N.J., and Peninsula Point, Mich., did not show any decline.
It could be that “even though the overwintering population is getting smaller and smaller, once they come northward in the spring they are able to recoup the numbers,” Dr. Davis said. His paper disputing that there has been a decline in the monarch population was published online by the same journal.
Leslie Ries, a research professor at the University of Maryland, said other butterfly counts she had examined also did not show a decline, but rather year-to-year fluctuations. Since milkweed populations are not likely to fluctuate as much, the milkweed is probably not the major determinant of butterfly populations, she said.
But two other researchers, Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota and John M. Pleasants of Iowa State, cite other evidence for a decline: the number of monarch eggs in the fields of the Midwest.
“Monarch production has decreased significantly” Dr. Pleasants said. “The reduction is caused by loss of milkweed resources available to them.”
The two scientists have submitted a paper to a scientific journal and said they did not want to discuss their data before publication.
Roundup Ready crops contain a bacterial gene that allows them to withstand Roundup or its generic equivalent, glyphosate, allowing farmers to kill the weeds without harming the crop.
Because they make weed control much easier, the crops have been widely adopted by farmers. This year, 94 percent of the soybeans and 72 percent of the corn being grown in the United States are herbicide-tolerant, according to the Department of Agriculture.
That in turn had led to an explosion in the use of glyphosate, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. About five times as much of the weed killer was used on farmland in 2007 as in 1997, a year after the Roundup Ready crops were introduced, and roughly 10 times as much as in 1993.
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“It kills everything,” said Lincoln P. Brower, an entomologist at Sweet Briar College who is also an author of the paper documenting the decline of monarch winter populations in Mexico. “It’s like absolute Armageddon for biodiversity over a huge area.”
The amount of milkweed on farms in Iowa declined 90 percent from 1999 to 2009, according to Robert G. Hartzler, an agronomist at Iowa State. His study, published last year in the journal Crop Protection, found milkweed on only 8 percent of the corn and soybean fields surveyed in 2009, down from 51 percent in 1999.
Because of weed-control efforts, even before the advent of Roundup Ready crops, any one farm is not likely to harbor that much milkweed.
But the sheer amount of farmland in the Corn Belt has meant that farms, in aggregate, have accounted for a vast majority of monarch births, according to another study published by Dr. Oberhauser and colleagues in 2001. That study estimated that in Iowa, farms produced 78 times the number of monarchs as nonagricultural sites, and in Wisconsin and Minnesota, 73 times as much.
And while monarchs come from other parts of the country as well, the Midwest is widely believed to be where most of them are hatched.
Still, even Dr. Hartzler said in his paper that it was difficult to assess what impact the decline of Iowa milkweed was having on monarch populations.
A spokesman for Monsanto, the inventor of the Roundup Ready crops and the manufacturer of Roundup, agreed, saying “knowledge is still evolving about whether and how agriculture in Iowa affects monarch population biology.” And what is true of Iowa, he said, might not apply to other regions.
This is not the first time genetically modified crops have been thought to threaten the monarch.
In 1999, researchers at Cornell reported that monarch caterpillars could be killed if they ate milkweed onto which the researchers had dusted pollen from another type of engineered crop known as BT corn. That corn has a bacterial gene allowing it to produce a toxin that kills certain pests.
But subsequent research, financed in part by the biotechnology industry, found that caterpillars were not likely to be exposed to lethal amounts of BT corn pollen under actual field conditions. That concern has died down.
Scientists say it is not surprising that suppressing weeds would have an effect on insects, and probably not just the monarch.
The National Academy of Sciences discussed this in a 2007 report on bees and other animals that pollinate crops. The report cited a British study that found fewer butterflies in fields growing genetically engineered beets and canola than in fields growing nonengineered crops.
That raises the somewhat radical notion that perhaps weeds on farms should be protected. “There’s a change in agricultural thinking, because the weed-free field was the gold standard,” said May Berenbaum, head of entomology at the University of Illinois.
Still, she and other insect experts say it is unrealistic to expect farmers to give up the herbicide-tolerant crops — so efforts should be made to preserve or grow milkweed elsewhere, perhaps on farmland set aside for conservation. Monarch Watch is encouraging gardeners to grow milkweed.
Dr. Taylor of Monarch Watch offered a modest, possibly ironic proposal for biotechnology companies. “I would implore them to develop a Roundup-resistant milkweed,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 12, 2011, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Midwest, Flutters May Be Far Fewer.

Help Stop the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) Beetle

2011-07-11T13:18:00.000-05:00

Information taken from http://www.stopthebeetle.info/what-is-eab/

What Is EAB?
The adult Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) beetle:
This invasive insect is bright, metallic green, about 1/2″ long with a flattened back. It has purple abdominal segments under its wing covers. The EAB can fit on the head of a penny, and is hard to spot in the wild.

The EAB larva: It’s the larva that does all the harm to ash trees. Larvae tunnel under the bark and disrupt the tree’s systems that transport food and water, eventually starving and killing it.

Where is the EAB?

Since it was first detected in North America, the beetle has been found in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. More states are at risk.

The Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) beetle has killed tens of millions of trees, from forests to neighborhoods. Here’s how you can help protect our trees:

    Never Move Firewood
    Burn It Where You Buy It
    Report Beetle Sightings or Signs of Infestation

How did it get here?

The EAB probably arrived inside wood packing material from Asia. Since its discovery in southeastern Michigan in 2002, the EAB has killed tens of millions of ash trees.
How does it spread?

EAB adults are strong flyers, but most of them only fly short distances (about 1/2 mile). So they don’t spread far on their own. Most new infestations are caused by people unknowingly taking infested ash to an uninfested area.
Where can the beetle hide?

Infested ash materials can include nursery stock, mulch(?), logs — and especially firewood. When people move infested firewood, they spread the beetle to our forests and neighborhoods.
What is the cost?

EAB infestations have already cost municipalities, property owners, and industries millions of dollars. If we don’t stop the beetle, the economic costs will be unimaginable and our yards, woods and neighborhoods may never be the same again.

To report seeing the EAB in Iowa contact – Rob Meinders
Rob Meinders, State Plant Health Director
USDA, APHIS, PPQ
11213 Aurora Ave.
Urbandale, IA 50322
Phone: (515) 251-4083
Fax: (515) 251-4093
robert.d.meinders@aphis.usda.gov

Butterflies on Noxious Weeds

2011-06-29T20:00:00.000-05:00

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Chris Helzer The Prairie Ecologist

As I mentioned in my last post, regal fritillaries are out in high numbers in our Platte River Prairies. We’re watching – among other things – what plant species they’re using for nectaring, and are interested to see if that use is similar to what we saw last year. Right now, the most attractive plant to fritillaries is one that might surprise you – musk thistles.
On the other hand, if you’ve spent much time watching butterflies, you’ll not be too surprised at the attractiveness of this noxious weed to butterflies and other pollinators. Native thistles are recognized as important nectar sources, but non-native thistles, especially those we’re legally obligated to eradicate, don’t always get the same positive attention. This week our technicians were out looking for both musk thistles and regal fritillaries (for different reasons) and they were finding both simultaneously! We ended up killing a lot of thistles out from under butterflies.
Here is a selection of photos from last Friday, showing fritillaries getting what they can out of these noxious weeds before we kill them off (the thistles, not the butterflies…)
To View pictures go to Ion Exchange Blog

Companion Planting - Plants to Help Control Potato Bugs

2011-06-27T11:38:00.000-05:00

Potato bugs (Colorado Potato Beetle) are a well known garden pest that target potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants and even your prized petunias! They not only thrive on the leaves of a plant, but are also known to feast on the fruit. If left unchecked, they will affect your garden’s yield and can kill young, tender plants.

Discourage Colorado Beetles By Growing Plants That Naturally Repel Them
You can get a step ahead of them by growing certain plants between potatoes to help repel them away from your garden. I’ve listed a few recommended companion plants below along with a section of tips for getting rid of them (including recipes for “Potato Bug Spray” which can be used on plants to help keep these pesky fellows at bay).
Critters other than the Colorado Potato Beetle are also commonly referred to as potato bugs, I added those at the bottom with reference links for more information on them.
How To Spot An Infestation: If you have holes and damaged leaves on the plants, check underneath leaves and look for larvae or eggs, they can be a yellow cluster of eggs or larvae with orange and black. If you spot them simply remove the infested leaf part and destroy. A good resource for pictures of the eggs, larvae and adult beetle along with more detailed information about this pest can be found here: Vegetable Pests: Colorado Potato Beetle (pdf).
Suitable Companion Plants
These plants and herbs are recommended as being suitable for deterring a potato bug population, intercrop between potatoes or in the space between rows:
1. Horseradish
2. Bush Beans: These are mutually beneficial since potatoes return the favor by repelling insects that attack the beans.
3. Catnip: Plant these in pots because it can be invasive…downside is that once the neighborhood cats figure out you’ve got the good stuff growing, you’ll be herding cats (use this plant in more remote areas rather than city or towns).
4. Cilantro
5. Coriander
6. Tansy: Also repels squash bugs.
7. Marigolds
Getting Rid of Them
• Manual pest control: Spot check plants and shake off any beetles that you see (or hand pick them off but make sure to wear gloves), dispose of immediately by crushing them.
• Did you know: Ladybugs consider the larvae of potato beetles a tasty treat, consider growing a few plants in the garden that will attract them so you have a thriving ladybug population (some ideas: Marigolds, Tansy, Fennel and Dill).
• Diatomaceous Earth: This is a non-toxic method of pest control, simply dust the leaves and surrounding soil with the powder and repeat after each rainfall.
Keep In Mind: The larvae will go underground to pupate and then emerge as adults after 10 days or so, you’ll likely need to continue removal methods until all the adults and larvae have been dealt with.
Homemade Repellent Teas or Infusions:
Here are two different recipes you can try, once they’ve cooled pour into spray bottles and use on plants (for best results spray fresh applications after each rain).
• Tansy or Marigold Infusion: Fill a pot with freshly picked tansy (or marigolds), cover with water and bring to a boil. Reduce to simmer and cook until liquid has been halved. Strain, cool and use as needed.
• Wild Mustard Tea: Steep 4 whole cloves, a handful of wild mustard leaves, a clove of garlic in 1 cup of boiling water for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and cool, then use as spray. Source: Jerry Baker’s Bug Off!: 2,193 Super Secrets for Battling Bad Bugs, Outfoxing Crafty Critters, Evicting Voracious Varmints and Much More!
Other Bugs
• Some consider potato bugs to be Pill Bugs (pillbugs), Roly Polys or Rolly Polly Bugs (because they roll up into a ball when aggravated), but these critters are more attracted to dead plant matter than they are live plants (though they will munch away on young plants too). You can try attracting them away from the garden by setting out corn cobs and then dispose of them once they gather on the cob. You can find more information about them here.
• Jerusalem Crickets: These are ugly! Known as potato bugs by some but they feed on dead plant matter and aren’t really attracted to potatoes. You can learn more about them here.

Elk in Allamakee County Could Be Gone Soon

2011-02-11T13:03:00.006-06:00

Image via WikipediaFind attached link to today's TV story. Iowa Department of Natural Resources' (IDNR) knee jerk reaction to a sustaining herd of elk (wapiti) in Allamakee County. Its so typical for this government bureaucracy. This is the same government bureaucracy that witnesses massive wetland destruction,fish kills, can't protect our watersheds & assists the federal government's ethanol subsidized/ corporate GMO heavily chemical-treated corn growing "plow up every acre", heavily soil eroding madness in this state.This agency is falsely releasing to the media that elk are not native to Iowa (Beautiful Land). When in fact elk herds were seen & recorded by all the early explores of our state. re:A Country So Full of Game, The Story of Wildlife in Iowa by Dr James Dinsmore (1994 ISU) Many of us local folks have watched this wild herd for a couple years and have always held out some hope for preserving the wildness of NE Iowa similar to when a black bear is spotted in the wooded valleys or a bobcat track or it's scream in the night. But let the Iowa DNR help propagate factory farms & their polluting unhealthy ways, so the Farm Bureau membership can ship antibiotic loaded pork to Asia. Ya lets do away with a wild elk herd! What the hell are we teaching our young folks?
Tim Mason
http://www.kwwl.com/Global/story.asp?S=14009873

Patterns of Widespread Decline in North American Bumble Bees

2011-01-13T09:31:00.004-06:00

by
Sydney A. Cameron, Jeffrey D. Lozier, James P. Strange, Jonathan B. Kochb , Nils Cordesa, Leellen F. Solter, and Terry L. Griswold

Bumble bees (Bombus) are vitally important pollinators of wild plants and agricultural crops worldwide. Fragmentary observations, however, have suggested population declines in several North American species. Despite rising concern over these observations in the United States, highlighted in a recent National Academy of Sciences report, a national assessment of the geographic scope and possible causal factors of bumble bee decline is lacking. Here, we report results of a 3-y interdisciplinary study of changing distributions, population genetic structure, and levels of pathogen infection
in bumble bee populations across the United States. We compare current and historical distributions of eight species, compiling a database of >73,000 museum records for comparison with data from intensive nationwide surveys of >16,000 specimens. We show that
the relative abundances of four species have declined by up to 96% and that their surveyed geographic ranges have contracted by 23– 87%, some within the last 20 y. We also show that declining populations have significantly higher infection levels of the microsporidian
pathogen Nosemabombi and lower genetic diversity compared with co-occurring populations of the stable (nondeclining) species. Higher pathogen prevalence and reduced genetic diversity are, thus, realistic predictors of these alarming patterns of decline in North America, although cause and effect remain uncertain.

The first author wishes me to point out that the bees have undergone reduction of genetic diversity (loss of genes because of shrinking populations), not inbreeding.

James C. Trager, Ph. D.

Biologist - Naturalist

Shaw Nature Reserve

P.O. Box 38

Gray Summit MO 63039

636-451-3512 ext. 6002

Winter and Your Garden

2010-11-21T15:41:00.004-06:00

Article from the honeybeeconservatory.org

As the trees finally shed their leaves and our thoughts turn to wintery pleasures and indoor activities, it’s easy to forget about the honey bee. After all, our busy little friends are hibernating out of sight and mind at this time of year. But before the ground freezes, and even over winter, there are still some favors we can do for these important pollinators to support them in their environment when they emerge next year.

In the early part of the growing season, flowers and their nectar are relatively scarce – this is also true in very late summer and fall. Nature provides bees with food in their environment of course, but in many areas, native plants have been reduced or eliminated as humans have encroached upon and altered natural habitats. Some introduced and hybridized plants do provide food for bees, but unfortunately, many gardeners favor double-flowered, exotic plants that are more difficult for pollinators to access. Most wild, indigenous plants have open, easy-access flowers, making them more attractive and desirable to honey bees.

So how do you choose shrubs to support bees and integrate these plants into your landscape? Learning a little bit about the plants native to your region is a good place to start, and education can take place at any time of the year. There are a number of good books and field guides written on the subject of native, North American plants.
Many of these titles are available in local libraries and universities.
Some of the best guide books include both photos and detailed information about the required growing conditions of native plants, and their hardiness ranges. William Cullina’s beautiful book, Native Trees, Shrubs and Vines
, is an excellent resource for gardeners.

In addition, many states have helpful native plant societies.
Try Googling your state name followed by the phrase “Wildflower Society”
or “Native Plant Society”. These sites will often list plants, including shrubs, native to your area. When visiting nurseries and garden centers, ask about native plants. The more we ask retailers for native plants by name and buy them, the more likely they will be to continue ordering them and keeping them on hand. All of these actions will help support the honey bee, and the environment as a whole.

Summersweet, (Clethra alnifolia 'Ruby Spice'), is a native shrub, providing easily accessed, late-season pollen for the honey bee.
ⓒ 2010 Michaela at TGE

Hawk Watchers Gather at Effigy Mounds

2010-11-21T15:29:00.003-06:00

While we have many leaf lookers stay at The Natural Gait in October, many will also go to Effigy Mounds Monument for the annual Hawk Watch Weekend.

Fall visitors to northeast Iowa aren't just there for the turning leaves. Some also take the time to stop by Effigy Mounds National Monument the first weekend in October for the annual Hawk Watch Weekend.

Situated next to the Mississippi River, Effigy Mounds is an excellent location for observing migration. This year's Hawk Watch was held October 2-3. Both days were mostly sunny with a light wind and highs in the upper 50s. Despite this beautiful weather, not many raptors were seen moving through. The total counts for the weekend were: Turkey vulture - 82, Bald eagle - 24, Northern harrier - 1, Sharp-skinned hawk - 2, Cooper's hawk - 3, Northern goshawk - 1, Broad-winged hawk - 1, Red-tailed hawk - 10, American kestrel - 1, Peregrine falcon - 1, Unknown accipiter - 1, Unknown buteo - 3, Unknown raptor - 3.

The Duluth, MN, migration count site reported most raptors were flying at higher altitudes, which could explain the unexpectedly low number on such a beautiful weekend. Many more birds could have been flying over, too high for us to spot.

Over 1,100 people came out to the Visitor Center to see the educational programs and live bird releases and appreciates a little slice of the fall migration.

Hawk Watch is coordinated by the Upper Iowa Audubon Society with help and participation from the Iowa DNR, Effigy Mounds staff, Boone Y-Camp, Laurel High School (Viroqua, WI) students, Hoo's Woods Raptor Center (Milton, WI) and many individual volunteers.

Jenni Dyar Natural Resources Aide

Harvesting Sunflower Seeds

2010-10-08T05:53:00.002-05:00

Taken from The Buzz

Today marks the autumnal equinox, the point in the year when the length of day and night are equal (the exact time this year is 11:09 p.m. ET). Starting tomorrow, the days will be getting shorter, the air brisker, the nights a little longer. Sunflowers and other garden plants that have been working hard to grow leaves and blooms now subtly switch tactics. The shorter days are a signal for them to devote most of their energy to making fruits and seeds against the time when they will eventually stop producing energy altogether and dry up.

Even though the days are shorter, there will still be blooms on many a sunflower throughout sunny September, so don’t forget to pick a day for your observation and send in your data. But while you’re at it, you may want to consider saving your Lemon Queen Sunflower seeds. If the birds and other critters don’t beat you to it, you could have a nice stash of sunflower seeds for planting or sharing next year. It’s easy. Just follow these steps:
1. Identify the earliest, biggest and best-looking sunflowers in your garden.
2. Watch and wait for the plant's seeds to ripen. When the flowers begin to drop away, you will see little green nubs all over the round head of the sunflower. In a week or so, they will begin to darken and the pollen tips will fall away easily.
3. Once the seeds are ripe, cut the sunflower head and carefully place it upside-down in a paper bag, ensuring any seeds that fall go directly into the bag.
4. Hang the bag in a cool, dry place.
5. Examine the seeds every few days. As they dry out, some the seeds will easily fall out of the flower head to the bottom of the bag.
6. When the seeds are dry (about 2 -3 weeks) remove the seeds completely from the head, separating out any leaves, stems or other debris.
7. Store in a closed container and label with the year and type of seed. If stored away from moisture, most seeds will be viable for the next few years.

Sunflower varieties readily mate. When they do that, the seeds produce plants that are intermediate between the two parent types. This means that if a bee brought in pollen from one of your neighbors Mammoth sunflowers, next years seed will not be true Lemon Queen. So, while we’d love to have everyone grow a lot of sunflowers for bee and bird food, the only way we can be sure that your plants are Lemon Queen each years is to buy them from a grower. There is such variation in the amount of nectar, pollen and flower color among the sunflowers that we need to standardize our observation plants.
Our 2011 calendar is now on sale. The theme is “Bees and Food” and can be ordered through the web site. http://www.greatsunflower.org

Global Plant Inventory Cuts 600,000 Species Records

2010-09-22T09:17:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia 20 September 2010 Last updated at 10:07 ET
Author http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11373757

Until now, there has not been a global list of all the plant species known to science

The inventory of plants known to science worldwide has been cut by more than 600,000 species names.

Many plants have been named more than once, so for the past two years, scientists have been developing an accurate record of the world's plants.

The ongoing study involves UK and US researchers, who expect the final number of recorded species appearing on the Plant List to be closer to 400,000.

The list, to help plant conservation, will be published later this year.

"Without accurate names - authoritatively determined - understanding and communication about global plant life would descend into inefficient chaos," said Stephen Hooper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew - one of the organisations involved in the project.

In partnership with the Missouri Botanical Gardens, Kew Gardens have been working on the project, which aims to provide a working list of all plants species in an effort to support plant conservation around the world.
Continue reading the main story
Related stories

* Plant experts unveil DNA barcode
* Fight to save dying plant species

It involves taking records from existing plant databases and producing a single, global inventory that removes duplications and errors - something that is not available at the moment.

The latest developments were outlined during the fourth Global Botanic Gardens Congress, which was held in Dublin in June.

The researchers involved in the Plant List are aware that is not without its own problems.

"It's been a rollercoaster of a project, and the results will be far from perfect but it will be the most comprehensive list to date," said Kew's head of science policy and co-ordination, Eimear Nic Lughadha.

"It will include almost all scientific names at species level that have been published for plants."

However, when the list is published, there will be no coverage of ferns, nor algae, which account for about 10,000 and 30,000 species respectively.

It is hoped that the working list will be accessible via the web in the coming months.

Meteor Shower Unleashes Bright Fireball

2010-08-10T10:44:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Perseid Meteor Shower Unleashes Bright Fireball
Tariq Malik
SPACE.com Managing Editor
SPACE.com tariq Malik
space.com Managing Editor
space.com Mon Aug 9, 11:33 pm ET

The Perseid meteor shower is peaking this week and announced its annual August arrival with a bright fireball over Alabama, NASA officials say.

A small 1-inch (2.5-cm) wide meteor caused the fireball when it met a fiery demise Aug. 3 while streaking through Earth's atmosphere, according to officials at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The fireball was observed by skywatching cameras operated by the space center.

"It's a very good start to this year's Perseid meteor shower, which will peak on the night of Aug. 12-13 between midnight and dawn," explained NASA spokesperson Janet Anderson in a statement from the space center.

The fireball occurred at about 9:56 p.m. local time and was low in the sky when it entered Earth's atmosphere about 70 miles (112.6 km) above the town of Paint Rock. It appeared about 9.5 degrees above the horizon. For comparison, your fist held at arm's length is equal to roughly 10 degrees of the night sky.

NASA observations found the meteor to be hurtling through the atmosphere at a phenomenal 134,000 mph (215,652 kph).

"At such a tremendous velocity, the meteor cut a path some 65 miles [104.6 km] long, finally burning up 56 miles [90 km] above Macay Lake, just northeast of the town of Warrior," Anderson wrote. "The meteor was about six times brighter than the planet Venus and would be classified as a fireball by meteor scientists."

Because of its relatively low approach in the sky and its long, shallow path, the meteor qualified as a so-called Earth-grazing meteor, NASA officials said. Earth-grazing meteors are space rocks that enter the Earth's atmosphere at a low angle, from the point of view of a given skywatcher, and appear to scoot slowly and dramatically along the horizon.

The Perseid meteor shower is an annual event that occurs in mid-August when Earth passes close to the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle.

Material left behind by the comet rams into the Earth's atmosphere during the pass at about 37 miles per second (60 km/second), creating a regular show of "shooting stars" that has become known as the Perseid meteor shower. Comet Swift-Tuttle was discovered in 1862 and most recently observed in 1992. It takes about 130 years to orbit the sun.

(This SPACE.com Perseid meteor shower viewing guide shows how to observe the event. This sky map shows where to look to see the meteor shower.)

SPACE.com skywatching columnist Joe Rao has said the 2010 Perseid meteor shower promises to be one to remember for skywatchers with clear skies. Under good conditions, skywatchers could see about one meteor per minute depending on observing conditions, he said in a recent column.

"The August Perseids are among the strongest of the readily observed annual meteor showers, and at maximum activity nominally yields 90 to 100 meteors per hour," Rao explained. "Anyone in a city or near bright suburban lights will see far fewer."

* Galleries: Perseids in 2005 and 2006
* Meteor Shower Viewer's Guide
* Top 10 Perseid Facts

* Original Story: Perseid Meteor Shower Unleashes Bright Fireball

SPACE.com offers rich and compelling content about space science, travel and exploration as well as astronomy, technology, business news and more. The site boasts a variety of popular features including our space image of the day and other space pictures,space videos, Top 10s, Trivia, podcasts and Amazing Images submitted by our users. Join our community, sign up for our free newsletters and register for our RSS Feeds today!

Mammals Breath Causes Aphids to Keel Over

2010-08-10T09:37:00.005-05:00

By Jennifer Viegas
As appeared in http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38630807/ns/technology_and_science-science/

A whiff of danger prompts insects to keel over
Response to mammals’ breath helps aphids avoid being eaten

People may feign falling over backwards after smelling bad breath, but new research shows some insects actually do keel over when they detect warm, humid mammal breath.

It turns out the dramatic instinct, which causes insects living on plants to fall to the ground, is a life-saving strategy that often prevents the bugs from being eaten by potent breath-releasing mammals as they feast on the plant.

The study, published in the latest issue of Current Biology, is the first to show that any kind of defensive behavior exists against incidental predation by herbivores.

"Tiny insects like aphids are not helpless when facing large animals that rapidly consume the plants they live on," said lead author Moshe Inbar of the University of Haifa. "They reliably detect the danger and escape on time."

For the first part of the study, Inbar and his team allowed a goat to feed on potted alfalfa plants infested with aphids. The researchers were amazed to see that 65 percent of the aphids dropped to the ground just seconds before they would have been eaten along with the plant.

"As soon as we started to work on this problem, we suspected that the aphids responded to our own breath," said Inbar, who added that he and his colleagues later wore snorkels to prevent their own breath from affecting the experiment results.

The mass dropping of bugs might have been caused by other factors, however, such as shaking of the plant by the goat while it ate or rubbed against the alfalfa, and shadows produced by the goat's presence. So the researchers invented a special leaf-picking device that shook the plant, without, of course, emitting breath. The aphids didn't keel over.

Shadows also had no effect on the aphids' dropping behavior. Even shadows created by ladybugs, an enemy of aphids, didn't inspire that kind of synchronous response.

The scientists next allowed a restrained lamb to approach aphid infested broad bean seedlings. The breath of the lamb did the trick: aphids dropped off the seedlings left and right.

"It was now obvious that herbivore breath is the key player in conveying to the aphids the message of imminent obliteration," according to the researchers.

To further investigate what qualities in mammal breath cause this bug reaction, the team constructed an artificial breath apparatus that they tested out on the aphids. Carbon dioxide and isolated volatile organic compounds in the produced breath led to no bug response.

When the airstream was warm and humid, however, aphid drop off rates shot up to 87 percent, suggesting that the aphid's sensory system on ambient humidity might be key in their breath detection abilities.

"We predict that this sort of escape behavior in response to mammalian breath may be found among other invertebrates that live on plants and face the same threat," the researchers concluded.

Other insects pay attention to our breath too.

Scientists at the University of California at Riverside, for example, recently did extensive work on how mosquitoes use carbon dioxide, emitted in human breath, to find blood meal targets.

Project leader Anandasankar Ray, an assistant professor in the university's Department of Entomology, and his team hope to foil the mosquitoes by developing repellents that he said will "block mosquitoes' ability to detect carbon dioxide in our breath, thereby dramatically reducing mosquito-human contact."

The aphid work may also pave the way for the development of non-toxic insect repellents.

Copyright © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC. The leading global real world media and entertainment company.

CRP Offers Pollinator Habitat Incentives

2010-08-04T16:50:00.004-05:00

For Immediate Release

August 2, 2010

CONSERVATION RESERVE PROGRAM OFFERS POLLINATOR HABITAT INCENTIVES

New rules passed by the USDA now offer financial incentives for the establishment of pollinator habitat through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The limited time program sign-up, which opens today to new enrollment, provides one of the largest pollinator conservation opportunities ever in the United States.

The CRP program, first established in 1985, is the largest private landowner conservation effort in the United States with up to 32 million acres eligible for enrollment through the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Program participants take highly erodible land out of crop production, and establish permanent vegetation to protect topsoil and provide wildlife cover. Contracts which run 10 to 15 years provide annual rental payments on enrolled land, and cost-share assistance for establishing vegetative cover.

New rules which go into effect today offer priority ranking for land enrollment that include pollinator-friendly wildflowers and shrubs. Under the current CRP enrollment system, landowners who want to participate are ranked against one another to prioritize enrollment that offer the most conservation benefits. To receive a higher score on the pollinator ranking criteria, participating farmers must plant at least 10% of the CRP acres in wildflower parcels (or at least one acre for CRP enrollment less than 10 acres in size).

The addition of a pollinator habitat incentive for CRP has been promoted by numerous wildlife and pollinator conservation groups in recent years, and the new ranking system now offers one of the largest potential habitat creation opportunities of its kind ever for native bees, butterflies, and managed honey bees, all of which have experienced significant decline in recent years due to habitat loss and other factors.

In developing the new CRP technical requirements, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) worked closely with Dr. Marla Spivak, a leading honey bee researcher based at the University of Minnesota, and the California-based advocacy group, Partners for Sustainable Pollination. Now, as the enrollment period for new CRP contracts begins, the NRCS is working with the non-profit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to develop wildflower seeding recommendations for states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon. Those recommendations will focus on selecting native wildflower species that are abundant pollen and nectar sources, and that are most likely to thrive in their respective regions.

Rural landowners interested in more information about CRP, including the current sign-up period which ends August 27th, should contact their local Farm Service Agency office. For location information, visit their web site at http://www.fsa.usda.gov http://www.fsa.usda.gov/> .

Iowa Insects Mailing List
IOWA-INSECTS@LIST.UIOWA.EDU
http://atmos.cgrer.uiowa.edu/herbarium/MailingList.htm
IOWA-INSECTS@LIST.UIOWA.EDU

The Iowa Insects Mailing List provides a forum for those interested in Iowa’s insects and,
more generally, invertebrates, their identification and ecology. Its purpose is to encourage
novices who are trying to expand their knowledge about the incredible world of insects.
Another objective is to support the Iowa Native Plant Society.

Wildlife Gardening

2010-07-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

Taken from http://www.wildflower.org

You can make your garden more attractive to birds, insects and small mammals in a variety of ways. Minor changes such as mowing less frequently can increase the number of non-human visitors to your yard, no matter its size.

A wildlife garden should provide for basic animal needs such as food, shelter and water. Diversity is the key to creating an optimum habitat. A diverse habitat attracts a wider variety of species, offers more choices for forage and shelter and ensures a constant food supply. Ideally, a garden should offer a mixture of meadow, woods and wet areas, but you can create hiding places and feeding areas without drastically changing your yard's character.

FOOD SOURCES
Your yard will attract different types of animals as the seasons change. Migratory species have different foraging needs than residential, non-migratory species. Larval stages of insects (such as caterpillars) often feed on completely different plants, or parts of plants, from what the adults prefer.
Watch birds and butterflies in the wild or on untended land to discover their food preferences. Select plants that maximize flowering and fruiting. Nectar-rich wildflowers are more nutritious for wildlife than showy cultivars, which often are sterile. Color attracts hummingbirds and butterflies. Hummingbirds prefer bright red and orange flowers, while butterflies seem to select yellow, purple, blue, pink, and occasionally red flowers. Members of the composite family, such as goldenrods, sunflowers and thistles are good nectar sources for butterflies, and later form seedheads that attract goldfinches and other songbirds.
Be sure to include trees and shrubs with berries to provide winter forage for birds and small mammals. Vines and grasses provide food and nesting materials. Other provisions you can offer residential or transient wildlife include pollen, fungi and sap from native plants or compost.

SHELTER SOURCES
Try to create a layered effect when planning shelter for wildlife. Wooded areas should include overlapping canopies of trees, shrubs and forbs. The edges of woods are usually rich with wildlife because the cover protects them from predators and the elements.
When designing shelter areas, shrubs may be more important than trees because they grow faster and provide nesting sites for many different species. To provide maximum cover, curb your pruning impulses! Though dense shrubbery, tangled vines and dead-standing trees may contradict your image of an orderly yard, they create ideal nesting and forage sites.
Even in a small yard, a single tree or a few vines can provide shelter for nesting wrens or blackbirds, as well as cover for snails and butterflies. Don't overlook what's underfoot - brush piles, hollow logs, and compost piles offer a host of micro-habitats for many organisms.

WATER SOURCES
A significant portion of wildlife activity centers around water. A water source such as a small pond provides a home for amphibians and aquatic insects, a bathtub for birds and drinking water for all kinds of creatures. Many insects have aquatic larval stages, so they need to be near water. Migrating wildlife need convenient water sources along their seasonal routes. On the smallest scale, even a birdbath is a valuable addition to your garden or yard.

Once you allow wildlife into your garden, you must allow nature a bit of freedom in ruling it. As Chris Baines, an innovative British landscaper, notes, the secret of a successful wildlife garden depends on understanding the way in which your various gardening activities will distort the balance. Try to minimize disturbance. Refrain from using herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides, which adversely affect the delicately balanced interactions between organisms and their environment. Allowing your garden more autonomy will leave you plenty of time to observe, enjoy and learn from your creation.

Dragonflies

2010-07-16T14:11:00.005-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

If you're lucky, dragonflies will join the birds and butterflies in your Backyard Wildlife HabitatTM site this summer. You will enjoy their presence -- especially during cookouts and other outdoor activities -- because they eat those pesky mosquitoes and flies. Dragonflies are attracted to water. Therefore, if you have a birdbath, water garden or pond, you may also have dragonflies.

Dragonflies have roamed the earth for over 300 million years. They have inspired both awe and fear in us with their fierce beauty and fascinating lifecycle. Born underwater to emerge from a life in mud and sand, a dragonfly nymph transforms into "a living flash of light," as Lord Tennyson once described them. The 2,500 different species of dragonflies come in many colors -- blue, green, purple and bronze. Their aerial acrobatics are made possible by powerful wings that generate small tornadoes of air that keep the dragonfly moving at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour.

Like many birds and some butterflies, dragonflies migrate. But unlike other migratory creatures, the phenomenon of dragonfly migration is very much shrouded in mystery. It is the combined flight patterns of millions of dragonflies that have become a mystery to modern researchers. You may have seen a group of dragonflies fly by and wondered with curiosity, "Where are they going?" As yet this remains unanswered, as do many questions. It is not even certain why dragonflies migrate. One day these mysteries may be solved. In the meantime, all we can do is watch them in awe, admire their beauty and thank them for being so helpful around the yard!

Soybean Pollination Experiment

2010-07-08T19:01:00.000-05:00

This experiment was carried out to evaluate the effect of the honeybee pollination in the production and quality of soybean seeds (Glycine max L. Merril). Seed production was higher (P=0.0001) in covered areas with honeybee colonies (50.64%) and uncovered areas (57.73%) than in covered areas without honeybee colonies. It could be concluded that honeybees were responsible for 95.5% of the pollination accomplished by insects. The pod number in covered treatment with honeybees was 61.38% higher (P=0.0002) than in the covered treatment without honeybees. The average weight of 100 seeds was larger (P=0.0001) in the area covered without honeybees, and reached 17.8 g. The medium content of crude protein in grains was 36.7% and the average oil content was 20.2%. The germination test did not show differences (P>0.05) among the seeds in different treatments. It was concluded that the honeybee pollination in the soybean increased the seeds production.

Taken from Brazilian Archives of Biology and Technology

My Little Prairie

2010-06-29T10:09:00.002-05:00

Earthyman has just written a new article titled My Little Prairie. Check it out at Native Wildflowers and Seeds.

4th Annual National Pollinator Week, June 21-27

2010-06-23T15:34:00.004-05:00

Taken from The Great Sunflower Project
www.greatsunflower.org

This week is dedicated to raising awareness of the value of those hard-working pollinators that account for every third bite of food we eat. Governors of more that 30 states have designated the last week in June as “National Pollinator Week.”
And it is being celebrated in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and around the globe as more and more people are realizing the value of pollinators as part of our food web.
“A World of Pollinators” is the theme for 2010 National Pollinator Week.

What can we do for pollinators? Start with one observation. And from there a whole new world can open up. Each observation you record and report will be part of a growing body of data that we can use to measure pollinator service around the country. But observation is only the start. We can take action, too!

Add a yard to your yard
In a recent study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, loss of habitat was identified as a major cause of the decline in the number and types of bees nationwide. By planting for pollinators, we can rebuild pollinator habitat and make a significant, positive impact on the survival rates for honey bees and other pollinators. Whether urban, suburban or rural, pollinators rely on “key species” to obtain the vital nectar, pollen, and nesting resources they need to keep thriving. These key plants are critical for survival and can be incorporated easily into your garden. If everyone added another square yard of habitat species to their gardens, just think of all the additional resources that would be available for bees to get what they need to give back what we depend on.
So if you have the room, take action! Add a pollinator yard to your yard and let us know how it goes for you.
Here’s how it works in six easy steps:
1. Select a spot in your yard that gets sun and would look great planted out with more flowering plants.
2. Measure out three feet by three feet and mark it off. You may have to remove turf, large rocks, or lawn furniture.
3. Condition the soil, by adding organic topsoil or compost and working it in.
4. Select plants that offer a variety of pollen and nectar through out as much of the year as your climate supports flowering plants. Check with your local nursery, master gardener group or botanical garden for ideas. Native plants are always a good choice.
5. Plant it out and enjoy the benefits of providing critical resources for pollinators in your garden.
6. And, make sure to take “before and after” pics of your garden- you can post them on flickr We will be awarding a jar of delicious honey from Gretchen’s hives to the lucky photo winner.

We invite you to celebrate National Pollinator Week with us. Take action and add a yard to your yard. We also suggest that you check out www.pollinator.org/TAP.htm for a list of ideas throughout the year. This new program sponsored by the Pollinator Network highlights specific actions that school groups, farmers, gardeners, and others can take to “Take Action for Pollinators.” You can purchase or download this beautifully done poster there, too. Happy National Pollinator Week!

Benefits of Planting Live Wildflower & Grass Plant Plugs

2010-06-01T07:29:00.000-05:00

The plugs in the 84 Nova trays measure 1 1/8 inch diameter by 2 7/8 inches deep and taper like a cone with a bottom drain opening. The interior ridged design of the plug directs root growth downward & avoids the wrap around growth allowed by smooth sided plugs. As the roots develop & escape through the drain opening of the plug the atmosphere will burn off the protruding root material, in effect pruning them to encourage constant development of fresh root growth. When the plugs are placed into the ground, the roots are ready to rapidly establish themselves down into the soil. It has been our experience with planting both 3” square pots & the 84 Nova plugs that the plugs will compete with & sometimes surpass the growth of the larger potted plants in the first growing season. Some species planted as plugs will flower & set seed in the first year-we had Sawtooth sunflowers that were planted in June reach nearly 8’ & flower in the same season. The size of these 84 Nova plugs makes them easy to handle in planting & transporting. Native Plant Plug

How Plants Protect Us From Disease

2010-03-22T09:17:00.004-05:00

ScienceDaily (2009-04-27) -- Everyday foods, beverages, and spices contain healthful compounds that help us fight harmful inflammation. And, in doing that, these phytochemicals—the resveratrol in red wine or the catechins in green, white and black teas, for instance—may also reduce our risk of diseases associated with chronic inflammation, including cancer and diabetes.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090419202029.htm#

Nature Deficit Disorder ... Not Here!

2010-03-09T08:09:00.002-06:00

DO YOU HAVE NATURE DEFICIT DISORDER

The natural world, as recognized over and over again can be our best teacher. The struggles and stresses that we perceive in our daily lives can get to be such a drain on us. When this happens, our lives are no longer in cadence or harmony with others and the natural world. We start to feel distressed and lost while even armed with our fine educations, years of therapy, self-awareness and physical fitness. Where do we turn? There seems to be no answer and no one to help us.

I remember when I was very young and my parents used to argue with each other, I would get very upset and walk out of the house. There was an old red oak stump in our timber. I would just sit there, staring at the ground and trees around me. It was my escape and my haven from stress and turmoil. This little wood lot that had been so mistreated and now barely remained had become my friend and companion. Having been stripped of all valuable timber long ago, then grazed, then abandoned, now recovering but extremely scarred, the landscape did not complain but only saw new opportunity for change and a new life. The stripping of its timber was not harbored in a memory bank filled with judgments of greed or bad behavior. No one was being held responsible for the condition of this little parcel. Out of what looked like total defilement and desolation came a new beginning and a new life for this old, old piece of ground.

There were Yellow Warblers, Myrtle Warblers, Scarlet Tanagers, Ruby Crown Kinglets, and Purple Finches, over 100 species of beautiful birds in this small haven along with squirrels, rabbits and copperheads. It was amazing that this land, so poor, could house and care for such a diversity of life. Underneath the shallow leaves and humus of the oaks and hickories, it was only 2" to shale rock. Erosion had not even allowed a new soil to stay in place. Now a new soil was starting to form. The oaks grew ever so slowly, but they grew. Now, down the slope, a small clearing, a little knoll occupied by Andropogon virginicus, or Broom Sedge as we called it, was dotted with Eastern Red Cedars. From here, I could lie down in the grass and look to the south and east to see a whole horizon bounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only 12 miles away, I could see Big Bald Mountain on the North Carolina line marked by the Appalachian Trail. It was a beautiful wilderness within site of this abandoned and forgotten vestige that was once a link and connection to these mighty mountains. Like a child cast out into a desert of chaos and severed from its mother, this little wood lot had become an island. My education and awareness might not have been that well established at the age of nine but my feelings were in tact and I knew this was a place where I could go and start to heal and find comfort. I didn’t have to worry about conflict here. I was accepted and I fit in with the rest. I became part of that landscape and it is still within me. I have learned from the great spirit of the natural world. Every change is an opportunity for a new beginning. Nature does not hear or respond to shame, blame, doubt, and guilt nor does she harbor regrets or grudges. She takes what she has and moves on to constantly create more beauty in the world.

I think it’s time to move on and create some beauty in our world. Won’t you join the natural world and me?

Howard Bright, Owner, Ion Exchange

Farmland Drainage

2010-02-24T13:15:00.002-06:00

This article brings our attention to some of the problems associated with farmland drainage. What are your thoughts?
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20102170339
--
Howard Bright, President
Ion Exchange, Inc.
http://www.ionxchange.com
800-291-2143
³Helping you create your own natural beauty²

A Holistic View Of Life Essential For Survival

2010-02-02T09:25:00.002-06:00

Taken from an article on The Speaking Tree

17 December 2009

There are two limits to knowledge. One set by the intellect and the
other set by experience. The comprehensive way to meditation and
penance is experience, not intellectualisation. Intellectuals might argue
against this, for the nature of the intellect is to argue. Those who practice meditation > and restraint do not use only logic and intellect as the touchstone.
Their path is paved with experience. The one who has tasted the
sweetness of experience will know there can be no other viable route.
This is an optimistic perspective. It is possible that one who prefers
going the intellect way might find this perspective pessimistic. Logic
has its own path, which can become complicated but the path of
experience is less complicated.

A head clerk told the other clerks, "During office hours you go for a
shave and that takes a long time. Do not shave during office hours."
One clerk replied, "When hair can grow during office hours, why can't
they be cut also at that time. If you find a way of stopping hair
growth during office hours, we will also not cut it during office
hours." This is the language of logic. Those who live within the
limits of the intellect and logic speak this language. There are three
limits. One is that set by the consciousness of the senses. The other
is set by the consciousness of the mind. The third is set by the
consciousness of the intellect. We have experienced the limits of all
these three. Till experience does not enter the limits of the
conscious, everything seems as above.
One who has not experienced meditation cannot enter the field of experience.

Those who have sat down for meditation for the first time say this
after 10 days - that they could never have imagined such an experience was possible.
When there was no question of imagination, how could they have imagined?

How can a man sitting on the shores of an ocean estimate its depth?
Only the one who has dived into the ocean can describe its depths.
Many spend their lives knowing just their outer self. They never get
an opportunity to go within. Are they able to see all that is within?
They do not know what lies within. Many of those who see the body get
scared on seeing its vibrations. Where have they come from? Are they
something new? They are not new. They were all within. They are
constantly working. The energy of the body is also working. But as we
concentrate we get to know of them and get scared. We are faced with a
new world. The vibrations were on even earlier but we were not aware
of them. As soon as the mind gets more stabilised, the inner self emerges clearer.

We need to engage more with the inner world. We should be less
obsessed with what others do and pay more attention to our selves.
Only then will there be opportunities for major changes in our
consciousness that will enhance our personality. If the transformation
were to continue, then there is the further possibility that we could
reach the final point. Our perspective should become more and more
gentle and the perspective of anekanta should always be with us. We
need to work towards promoting a balanced and mutually connected
individual, local and global perspective with equanimity, taking into
account every possible view. That is, giving equal consideration to all things, howsoever small or big.

Put together by Lalit Garg

Audubon Society - 110th Annual Christmas Bird Count

2009-12-18T10:17:00.003-06:00

DEB PETERSON
Bulletin Staff Writer

Billed as the "world's longest-running uninterrupted bird census" by the
National Audubon Society, the 110th annual Christmas Bird Count starts in
Baxter County at midnight tonight, conducted by "citizen scientists."

For 24 hours Friday, midnight to midnight, bird lovers plan to walk through
local bird habitats recording the number of species they see. Every year,
the data compiled by tens of thousands of observers throughout the Americas
contributes to a greater understanding of which birds are where, and when,
says Phil Hyatt of Mountain Home. That information, he says, leads to
better conservation.

roadrunner was moving north," Hyatt said. "We also documented the eurasian
collared dove in two CBCs. They simply were not known in Arkansas when I
was a boy. Neither were house finches."

Hyatt, 57, became interested in birding in 1966 during a bird walk in
Florida led by a naturalist. He helped manage the state's bird records for
Audubon Arkansas in the early 1970s and currently volunteers at Buffalo
National River with the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory. His job in the
Christmas Bird Count is to compile the data gathered in Baxter County, in
addition to observing and counting.

But you don't have to be an expert like Hyatt to take part.

Who can participate?

"We have about 12 people in Baxter County who regularly count," Hyatt said,
"but the more observers we have, the better the data."

He hopes more volunteers will get involved, either in the field or watching
their own backyard bird feeders.

Anyone who lives within the designated area can participate, Hyatt says.

"All CBC count areas are designated as circles 15 miles in diameter," Hyatt
said. "The center point is usually chosen to locate the count area in
desired and variable habitat. In our case, the Midway Post Office serves as
the center point. This allows us to include most of Mountain Home inside
the bypass, most of Cotter, all of Gassville and Lakeview, most of Bull
Shoals, the Pigeon Creek area, but not Cranfield, much of northern Baxter
County."

Hyatt says anybody interested in participating, whether by joining a group
in the field or watching their own backyard feeder, should call him at
736-1952 for instructions before the count begins.

Diane Mikrut, president of the Audubon Society of North Central Arkansas,
says she's excited about her first Christmas Bird Count.

"I love nature and I love birds," she said. "I'm looking forward to being
out there with people who can coach me on how to identify birds."

Mikrut plans to meet a group at 7:15 a.m. near Lake Norfork.

"We try to match inexperienced with experienced observers," Hyatt said.

Some groups, he says, will have two to four people. Others may have as many
as 15 or 20.

While there is no fee for feeder watching in the Christmas Bird Count,
field observers are charged $5, for which they receive a copy of the
summary journal published at the end of the international count.

What's involved in participating?

Observers in the field, whether on land or water, count the numbers of all
birds they see by species, according to Hyatt, and he compiles their
results as though seen by one person.

"Phil sets up regions in the park," said Park Interpreter Julie Lovett of
the Bull Shoals-White River State Park. "It looks like a big wagon wheel."

Her group is meeting at 9 a.m. at the trout dock in the park, just past the
pavilion.

"We'll count at the river and then go up to the wildflower garden," she
said.
Feeder watchers count birds in a different way, since the same bird is
likely to return to a feeder several times during a day, Hyatt says.

"We ask people watching feeders to count the highest number of birds of one
particular species at any given time," he said, "and keep track of the
number of hours they watch."

Hyatt says that rare species sighted during the count week also should be
reported to him.

"If we see an eagle or osprey in the count circle three days before or
after the count day," he said, "we can record it as seen during count week
but not on count day. This allows the gung-ho observers to find rare
species and still report them."

Once Hyatt receives all the local data, he compiles it and sends it to the
state Audubon organization with the number of people involved, the hours
spent observing and the weather conditions.

Weather matters.

A look at Hyatt's historical data for Baxter County shows that only three
turkey vultures were spotted in 1998. In 1999, 248 were counted.

"Turkey Vultures don't like cold, rainy weather," Hyatt said. "If the count
day happens to be rainy, you may not see any. If it is warm and sunny, you
may see 248. So we record weather conditions."

Hyatt says that while weather matters, the degree of expertise in observers
does not.

"The variations in the count are so wild that the data isn't perfect," he
said, "but you get so much data that volume compensates for the lack of
scientific accuracy."

Why does it matter?

The National Audubon Society lavishes praise on citizen scientists who take
part in the CBC. Its Web site states, "Each of the citizen scientists who
annually braves snow, wind, or rain, to take part in the Christmas Bird
Count makes an enormous contribution to conservation.

"Audubon and other organizations use data collected in this longest-running
wildlife census to assess the health of bird populations, and to help guide
conservation action."

Hyatt and Mikrut agree.

"We don't see the population change over night," Hyatt said, "so we don't
realize the change in the environment and habitat until it's too late."

He cites Baxter County's prairie history as an example. Birds that once
populated local prairies and farm fields no longer find their preferred
habitat here, where forests have taken over much of the land.

The Audubon site states that bird counts help "identify environmental
issues with implications for people as well. For example, local trends in
bird populations can indicate habitat fragmentation or signal an immediate
environmental threat, such as groundwater contamination or poisoning from
improper use of pesticides."

"Birds are one of the very first indicators of what's happening on our
planet," Mikrut said.

Hyatt says scientists are using CBC data to watch the effects of climate
change on birds. Statistics at www.audubon.org show that "177 species show
a significant shift north and this northward shift was correlated with an
increase in mean January temperatures in the contiguous 48 states of almost
5 degrees during that time."

But according to Hyatt, the best thing about the CBC is that it's fun.

"We do this for fun more than science," he said. "The science is very
useful and important, but it is also a fun day. The amount of adventure is
up to the participant — riding, walking, boating. We need more boaters who
are willing to look for loons and grebes and know what they are looking at!"

To participate in the Christmas Bird Count, call Hyatt at 736-1952. For
more information, visit www.aud ubon.org.

The Audubon Society of North Central Arkansas meets on second Mondays at 1
p.m. at Redeemer Lutheran Church. Guests are welcome. On Jan. 11, Lucinda
Reynolds will speak on "Birds, Bugs and Native Plants: Part of a Perfect
Balance (Creating a Backyard Habitat)."

"If the CBC sparks an interest in people," Mikrut said, "that would be
wonderful."

dpeterson@baxterbulletin.com

Trout Fishing in Northeast Iowa as Reported in the New York Times

2009-12-10T12:14:00.005-06:00

Hey, Earthyman here! I was just reading the article in The New York Times about trout fishing in Northeast Iowa and what a coincidence that turned out to be. My friend and I were fishing just out the backdoor of The Natural Gait on Thanksgiving Day and caught Rainbow and Brown Trout on the Yellow River here. Take a look at Terry latching onto two Rainbows View Video

Taken From The New York Times

Brad Johansen, my guide for this day of fishing in the driftless area of northeastern Iowa was discussing our fishing options between bites of biscuits and gravy at a diner. Mr. Johansen, a high school science teacher who guides on the side, said the bull had chased him over a fence the previous week.“It doesn’t matter, though,” he said while laying a $5 bill on the table to pay for his breakfast. “I caught a 31-inch trout a few days ago in the area we’re headed to this morning.” Cow pastures and cornfields are the milieu for trout angling in this hidden landscape of limestone valleys and cold-water streams. The Driftless Area occupies 24,000 square miles along the Mississippi River in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The word “driftless” refers to the lack of gravelly drift in the region from the last glaciation 12,000 years ago. The Wisconsonian glacier that plowed under much of the upper Midwest missed this pocket of more than 600 spring-fed creeks, and so the Driftless endures as 500-million-year-old karst country, where steep forested valleys descend into shadowed coulees.“Trout in the Driftless Area are as big and you can catch as many as the trout rivers out West,” said Bill Kalishek, fisheries biologist for the Iowa Natural Resources Department. Mr. Kalishek said some streams held as many as 4,000 trout per mile. “Fishing the Driftless is just different,” he said. “The streams are smaller. The setting is more intimate than those big Western rivers.”After miles of driving through croplands out of Decorah, Mr. Johansen guided his minivan down a one-lane gravel road in the Pine Creek Wildlife Management Area. We bushwhacked through willow thickets along a five-foot-wide stream, scaring up bluebirds, wood ducks and a pileated woodpecker.“These are wild trout now, so you have to be on your game,” Mr. Johansen said in a whisper. “You only get one cast. If you miss your spot or get tangled up, you’ll spook the hole.”Our party of four included two men casting spinning lures (me and Mr. Johansen), a bait fisherman using worms (Dennis Evelsizer, a friend of Mr. Johansen’s from Decorah) and a fanatic fly angler (Mike Dvorak, a friend of mine from St. Paul). A survey by the trout advocacy group Trout Unlimited found that 74 percent of Driftless Area fishermen were fly anglers, though Mr. Johansen said most of his clients use spinning gear. Casting spinners lacks the romanticism of waving a fly rod like an orchestra conductor, but there’s a skill and an art to it, as Mr. Johansen demonstrated. He padded through the oak understory to within a few feet of the stream, then flipped his spinner — sometimes overhand, sometimes underhand, sometimes sideways — with surgical precision to land with a “plip” in the water near a snag of fallen branches on the opposite bank. “My fly-fishing clients spend a lot of time untangling their equipment,” he said with a grin. On we pressed through more thickets until we reached a beaver dam with a deep pool behind it. Mr. Johansen spotted an otter sliding away. “That’s not good,” he said. “Otters eat lots of fish.”But his worries dissipated on my second cast, when an electric jolt shot up my rod, the tip bent, and in moments I was holding a 12-inch brook trout in my hands. It was a strikingly handsome fish, with a forest-green speckled back and orange fins.The region teemed with brook trout when European settlers arrived in the 19th century, logged the hillsides bare and planted croplands from which topsoil washed into valley bottoms, burying streams under 12 feet of sediment in some places. By the 1930s federal farm programs to control erosion started the comeback of the Driftless’s cold-water streams, which were stocked with brown trout, rainbow trout and more brook trout. By 1980 five trout streams in Iowa’s Driftless Area supported natural spawning, with only one stream harboring the last surviving lineage of Iowa’s native brook trout. With the 1980s and the rise of the Conservation Reserve Program that paid farmers to idle erosion-prone crop fields as grasslands, the Driftless Area’s prairie character began to re-emerge. Today 33 trout streams in Iowa’s Driftless support natural spawning. But now Driftless trout anglers worry that high corn prices because of demand for ethanol could erase those gains, as more lands are put back to agricultural use. Mr. Dvorak, the fly angler, caught and released 10 brook trout in the pool behind the beaver dam. Mr. Johansen and Mr. Evelsizer both kept foot-long brookies. On our walk back out, I cast my spinner by a log pile in a stream bend and landed a 15-inch brown trout. Mr. Johansen unceremoniously threw mine in his plastic grocery sack with the three others.
Posted by Ion Exchange at 9:31 AM 0 comments
Labels: Brown Trout, New York Times, Rainbow Trout, The Natural Gait, trout fishing
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Earthyman Harvests Big Blue Stem at Ion Exchange
As the fall draws to a close Ion Exchange our sister site is busy harvesting all the wildflower and grass seed. Enjoy Earthyman's video.

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Posted by Ion Exchange at 7:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: Earthyman, grasses, harvesting, plants, Seed, video, wildflowers
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
A Walk In The Park A Day Keeps Mental Fatigue Away
The Natural Gait provides its guests with many marked trails through timber, meadows and along the Yellow River. There is an abundance of wildlife to enjoy in any season.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2008) — If you spend the majority of your time among stores, restaurants and skyscrapers, it may be time to trade in your stilettos for some hiking boots. A new study in Psychological Science reveals that spending time in nature may be more beneficial for mental processes than being in urban environments.

Psychologists Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan designed two experiments to test how interactions with nature and urban environments would affect attention and memory processes. First, a group of volunteers completed a task designed to challenge memory and attention. The volunteers then took a
walk in either a park or in downtown Ann Arbor. After the walk, volunteers returned to the lab and were retested on the task. In the second experiment, after volunteers completed the task, instead of going out for a walk, they simply viewed either nature photographs or photographs of urban environments and then repeated the task. The results were quite interesting. In the first experiment, performance on the memory and attention task greatly improved following the walk in the park, but did not improve for volunteers who walked downtown. And it is not just being
outside that is beneficial for mental functions—the group who viewed the nature photographs performed much better on the retest than the group who looked at city scenes.

The authors suggest that urban environments provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of stimulation, which requires effort to sort out and interpret. Natural environments, by contrast, offer a more coherent (and often more aesthetic) pattern of stimulation that, far from requiring effort, are often experienced as restful. Thus being in the context of nature is effortless, permitting us to replenish our capacity to attend and thus having a restorative effect on our mental abilities.

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Posted by Ion Exchange at 3:15 PM 0 comments
Labels: mental fatigue, nature, urban environments
Monday, October 19, 2009
Nature Essential for the Brain, Scientists Report
Boston Globe - January 2,2009
by Jonah Lehrer

The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we're crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it's become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.

This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it's long been known that human attention is a scarce resource -- focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon -- Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.

Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response -- unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.

"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan," says Berman. "They needed to put a park there."

In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."

This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.

Studies have found that even a relatively paltry patch of nature can confer benefits. In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.

"We've constructed a world that's always drawing down from the same mental account," Kuo says. "And then we're surprised when [after spending time in the city] we can't focus at home."

But the density of city life doesn't just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations -- caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that's responsible for directed attention, which means that it's already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it's less able to exert self-control, which means we're more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don't really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it's surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.

"I think cities reveal how fragile some of our 'higher' mental functions actually are," Kuo says. "We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected."

Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.

Long before scientists warned about depleted prefrontal cortices, philosophers and landscape architects were warning about the effects of the undiluted city, and looking for ways to integrate nature into modern life. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to "adopt the pace of nature," while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life.

Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis," which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

"We worry a lot about the effects of urbanization on other species," Fuller says. "But we're also affected by it. That's why it's so important to invest in the spaces that provide us with some relief."

When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the Berman study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory. While people have searched high and low for ways to improve cognitive performance, from doping themselves with Red Bull to redesigning the layout of offices, it appears that few of these treatments are as effective as simply taking a walk in a natural place.

Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.

The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as "not a nature person," but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she's better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: "I'm sick of the trees/take me to the city."
PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...

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Labels: Man and Nature, natural world, nature, nature walks
Friday, October 02, 2009

For more widgets please visit www.yourminis.com
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Thursday, October 01, 2009
Keeping Horse Manes and Tails Beautiful

It’s a popular notion that the hair is a person’s crowning glory. If you spot someone in a crowd that may not be considered pretty by normal standards, a great hair cut and lustrous tresses can almost always sway a judgment. Gorgeous hair is a priceless asset, and the dozens of hair salons in every city are a testament to this.

Keeping your horse’s mane and tail beautiful is one of the most important steps in having a gorgeous horse. The difference between a beautiful mane and tail and a scraggly, thin mane and tail can make as much difference in a horse’s beauty as a person’s attractiveness.

The first step is to untangle the mess that often happens over winter. Start by untangling the hair and getting out all the dreadlocks. Don’t rush this process, as you don’t want to pull the hair out.

Work your way through the matted mane and forelock first. Start at one end of the mane and work your way slowly down the mane untangling one section at a time. Saturate sections of the hair with any over the counter detangler. Choose a large tangle, and slowly apply the product and separate the tangles with your fingers.

Start at the bottom of the tangle and work your way up to the roots. Work the product into the hair by using your fingers, and gently pull the hairs, a few strands at a time. Keep doing this until the knots and tangles get smaller and then are gone.

Repeat the same process with the tail once you have the mane and forelock untangled. You should stand to one side while detangling their tails, so you avoid being kicked by the horse. Help them maintain a calm and relaxed attitude by patting them gently, and then slowly move your hands down their necks and sides until you get to the tail.

Once their hair is free from tangles, it is now safe to brush their hair by using a stiff bristle hair brush. Never use a comb, which does nothing but pull hair out. Start brushing the bottom of the hair and then work your way up to the roots. Don’t use too much force, and make sure that you don’t stretch the hair while brushing.

Try to brush as gentle and slowly as you can. Patience is the key to leaving the most amount of mane and tail possible. It takes a long time to grow, so you don’t want to pull out what you have already grown by rushing this important step.

Beth Moore has been a leading authority on horse grooming and especially on growing long, thick manes and tails on horses for over 20 years. You can learn more about her methods and claim a free report on the benefits of owning gorgeous horses at FairyTale Horses
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Labels: Beth Moore, Horse grooming, horse manes and tails, horses, Sunburn in horses
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Fall Lineup
Here at The Natural Gait we are very fortunate to live alongside the Mississippi River Bird Migration Corridor. It is just a wonderful site to see Trumpeter Swans and Canadian Geese passing through in mass numbers and there are many more species of birds to see.

Here is an article that just appeared in http://www.enature.com

The best natural migration corridors occur in mountain ridges, river valleys, and along coastlines. Yet it's possible to see migrating animals just about anywhere. Here are some tips for enjoying the passing hordes.

Birds — Early morning often provides great looks at birds just finished with all-night flights. As the sun starts to rise, some birds that find themselves out over ocean waters or above the Great Lakes will suddenly head for the nearest land. Hundreds of birds can come pouring inland at these times, among them thrushes, warblers, vireos, and tanagers.

During daylight hours, the skies can be filled with everything from White Pelicans to Bobolinks. Expect lots of shorebirds, cormorants, terns, and gulls at the seaside and hawks, swifts, flickers, jays, swallows, and robins overhead almost everywhere.

Butterflies — Most people have heard about Monarchs and their fall migrations to the mountains of southern Mexico, but lots of other butterflies travel in autumn. Some even head north!

Watch in the same places that bird migrants concentrate for American Ladies, Question Marks, Red Admirals, and the more abundant Monarchs — all moving southward. By contrast, Cloudless Sulphurs may be headed north in fall, as their southern populations expand, and Painted Ladies and Common Buckeyes can be watched for flying north or south.

Dragonflies — Dragonfly watching is fast coming into its own on the North American nature scene. Partly that's because several excellent books have appeared to help folks tell these handsome creatures apart.

A small number of dragonfly species migrate in substantial numbers during the fall. Look for the monster Green Darner in particular and the world's most cosmopolitan dragonfly, the Wandering Glider. Others include the Black Saddlebag and the Carolina Saddlebag.

Mammals — Mammal watching is not nearly as easy as bird or insect watching. After all, the mammals first must be found, which usually involves some trekking, and they're not terribly cooperative subjects. Still, the rewards can be considerable.

Among the migratory mammals worth watching are some species of bats (Hoary, Silver-haired, and Red) that can occasionally be seen flying south during daylight hours along shorelines or even over bodies of water. Marine mammals, of course, can be observed from boats or coastal promontories. The large baleen whales occur in good numbers on their southward migrations and delight people even from a distance.

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Labels: Bird, Bird migration, Canada Goose, Mississippi River, Recreation
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Scientists Are Relocating Plants That May Be Affected by Climate Change

2009-11-19T17:22:00.004-06:00

From Mother Nature News
As warmer temperatures threaten to devastate plant species across the globe, scientists are taking the lead by relocating plants to safer grounds, according to a recent New York Times article.

Known as "assisted migration," the practice of transplanting plants to more agreeable climates is taking hold among scientists who fear that global warming will wipe out many existing plant species.

"In 50 to 100 years, because habitats or climates are so altered, we might end up trying to move species in a restoration context, in assemblages of species," said Pati Vitt, a conservation scientist and curator of the Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

In the 1990s, the botanic garden began collecting and growing pitcher's thistle - a plant whose fuzzy leaves once grew along the Great Lakes - at the garden after development, drought and weevils decimated the plant in regions where it once thrived.

Though the results of plant relocations are mixed, many more of them have been occurring since the creation of the Bureau of Land Management's Seeds of Success project, which was started in 2001 in response to a Congressional mandate to plant native seeds to restore public lands devastated by wildfire.

According to the Times, the project intends to collect seeds of the entire flora of the United States, which totals about 14,000 native plant species, excluding those species already under protection and recalcitrant species, or those that cannot survive long-term storage.

"We hope to collect 20 populations across the species' range so we can get 95 percent of the genetic diversity of the species," said Peggy Olwell, the plant conservation program manager at the bureau. "Because frankly, we don't know what it is we're going to need when we're talking restoration in light of climate change. It's going to be one big experiment."

So far, a consortium of botanic gardens and other institutions have collected groupings of 3,200 species.

But not everybody is excited about taking plants out of their native habitats and experimenting with them elsewhere.

"Even given our best science, we're not good at predicting which species will be invasive," said Jason S. McLachlan, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame who has studied postglacial population spread. "And it's going to be especially complex as climates change."

Take the American beech, for example. Though it was rarely found during the ice age, it's now so abundant in Eastern forests that it's threatening almost all the other species, said McLachlan.

As the debate continues, Seeds of Success is currently sending one collection of every species to the Millennium Seed Bank Project, at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in Britain, the National Center for Genetic Resource Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo., and the Western Regional Plant Introduction Station in Pullman, Wash.

Collecting and growing huge amounts of native seeds in the U.S. is expected to take 10 years and at least $500 million, but with the uncertainty of climate change looming ahead, many agree that it just may be a risk worth taking.

Nature Essential for the Brain, Scientists Report

2009-10-19T08:22:00.003-05:00

Boston Globe - January 2,2009
by Jonah Lehrer

The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we're crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it's become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.

This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it's long been known that human attention is a scarce resource -- focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon -- Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.

Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response -- unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.

"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan," says Berman. "They needed to put a park there."

In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."

This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.

Studies have found that even a relatively paltry patch of nature can confer benefits. In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.

"We've constructed a world that's always drawing down from the same mental account," Kuo says. "And then we're surprised when [after spending time in the city] we can't focus at home."

But the density of city life doesn't just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations -- caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that's responsible for directed attention, which means that it's already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it's less able to exert self-control, which means we're more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don't really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it's surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.

"I think cities reveal how fragile some of our 'higher' mental functions actually are," Kuo says. "We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected."

Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.

Long before scientists warned about depleted prefrontal cortices, philosophers and landscape architects were warning about the effects of the undiluted city, and looking for ways to integrate nature into modern life. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to "adopt the pace of nature," while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life.

Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis," which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

"We worry a lot about the effects of urbanization on other species," Fuller says. "But we're also affected by it. That's why it's so important to invest in the spaces that provide us with some relief."

When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the Berman study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory. While people have searched high and low for ways to improve cognitive performance, from doping themselves with Red Bull to redesigning the layout of offices, it appears that few of these treatments are as effective as simply taking a walk in a natural place.

Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.

The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as "not a nature person," but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she's better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: "I'm sick of the trees/take me to the city."

Planting Perennials in the Fall

2009-10-06T06:42:00.005-05:00

I have planted small plugs up through Thanksgiving and we are on the border of Zone 3 and 4 here in NE The root system is the most important part of the plant any time that you transplant. The fall can be deceiving and people who purchase plants this time of the year are sometimes disappointed that the tops are shaggy or sometimes non-existent. Don't get discouraged. Take time to observe the root system. Select plants that have healthy roots. If the root system is dark and slimy, it is not a good plant and might even be dead. Choose plants or plugs with turgid, proper color and are not root bound. Don't forget...plants have different colors of roots so become familiar with the colors. Also the density of the root system varies with different plants. For instance: Prairie Dropseed has a fine reddish colored root system while Cardinal flower has a very white root system that is very dense. Don't compare one species to the other. Only compare same species with each other when checking the root system. So purchase your plants now and get the jump on next year as your plants will spring forth and be way ahead of those later plantings in the spring or summer.

Howard Bright - Ion Exchange Inc.

This autumn, consider planting perennials. There is no reason to wait for spring - fall is a perfect time for planting!
Editor's note: This article was originally published September 8, 2008
Reprinted from Dave's Garden

In the spring, we are deluged with catalogs stuffed with pictures of beautifully perfect flowers and plants. "Buy me! Plant me!" they cry. The nurseries fill with plants, live and in person, all needing good homes. "Resist," I say. "The time is not yet at hand!" Planting perennials in the fall is a kinder, gentler way to plant.

Perennials planted in the spring have a tough row to hoe. They must:

* Develop an entirely new root system

* Adjust to life outside the greenhouse or nursery

* Produce a crop of flowers (or lovely foliage, or whatever it is you're expecting of them)

* Risk being planted too soon, before they have "hardened off" sufficiently

* Risk being planted too late, in some of the most taxing conditions for a plant: the heat of summer

Many of the wiser mail order companies won't even ship during the hot days of June, July and August. I recommend the more nurturing method of planting perennials in the fall. If you plant your plants at least six weeks before the first freeze is likely to occur, you'll give them a chance to conserve their foliage and flower development in favor of root growth. If the roots are there, the plant will be there.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of fall planting is a good one for knuckle-heads like me: by fall, you know approximately what the plant looks like, how tall and maybe even what color it will be.

Platycodon very busy blooming - do not disturb!

This lovely balloon flower on the right (Platycodon) usually flowers during the heat of July. Don't plant it now! It's hard enough on the poor thing that it has to flower. Don't make it suffer transplant shock as well!

This next specimen, below, may look unhealthy, but it's the same type of plant, Platycodon, at the next stage of its life cycle: setting seed and hunkering down for the winter. If you see a plant like this for sale, especially if it's marked down, by all means, buy it and plant it! Make the hole nice and deep, back fill with amended soil and consider adding fertilizer or moisture crystals if appropriate for the plant and your climate and soil. Don't forget to water thoroughly after planting.

Platycodons finished blooming. They're ready to be planted.

My husband bought around 20 balloon flowers just like the one on the left for $2 each one fall and planted them as a border to a path. I may have found Dave's Garden in my effort to discover just what, exactly, he was getting us into! But sure enough, the next July, they looked something like this:

Now it's almost a tradition. In the fall, we shop for bargain plants, and then plant them before winter. One year the snow came earlier than we expected, and the bed he was working on wasn't quite finished. So that year, he actually planted perennials in half an inch of snow! What you Southerners may not realize is that snow only means the air up high is cold, not the earth. The new bed didn't freeze for another couple of months, giving plenty of time for the heuchera, viola, columbine, geum and potentilla to get established. They were all lovely the following spring, and most of them are still fighting it out.

So procrastinators, take heart. The best time to plant many flowering perennials may be right now!

The Fall Lineup -

2009-09-29T17:50:00.003-05:00

Here in NE Iowa we are fortunate to live beside the Mississippi River migration corridor it is one of the best places to watch migrating birds. Visit us at The Natural Gait and enjoy the beautiful fall colors and all the birds along with other wildlife.

This Article appeared in eNature

The arrival of fall means different things to different people. For some, the beautiful autumn colors make it a favorite season, while for others it's the mild temperatures, the World Series, or heading back to school. But for birders and their friends who like to watch butterflies, dragonflies, and other animals, the arrival of fall means only one thing: migrations.

The best natural migration corridors occur in mountain ridges, river valleys, and along coastlines. Yet it's possible to see migrating animals just about anywhere. Here are some tips for enjoying the passing hordes.

Birds — Early morning often provides great looks at birds just finished with all-night flights. As the sun starts to rise, some birds that find themselves out over ocean waters or above the Great Lakes will suddenly head for the nearest land. Hundreds of birds can come pouring inland at these times, among them thrushes, warblers, vireos, and tanagers.

During daylight hours, the skies can be filled with everything from White Pelicans to Bobolinks. Expect lots of shorebirds, cormorants, terns, and gulls at the seaside and hawks, swifts, flickers, jays, swallows, and robins overhead almost everywhere.

Butterflies — Most people have heard about Monarchs and their fall migrations to the mountains of southern Mexico, but lots of other butterflies travel in autumn. Some even head north!

Watch in the same places that bird migrants concentrate for American Ladies, Question Marks, Red Admirals, and the more abundant Monarchs — all moving southward. By contrast, Cloudless Sulphurs may be headed north in fall, as their southern populations expand, and Painted Ladies and Common Buckeyes can be watched for flying north or south.

Dragonflies — Dragonfly watching is fast coming into its own on the North American nature scene. Partly that's because several excellent books have appeared to help folks tell these handsome creatures apart.

A small number of dragonfly species migrate in substantial numbers during the fall. Look for the monster Green Darner in particular and the world's most cosmopolitan dragonfly, the Wandering Glider. Others include the Black Saddlebag and the Carolina Saddlebag.

Mammals — Mammal watching is not nearly as easy as bird or insect watching. After all, the mammals first must be found, which usually involves some trekking, and they're not terribly cooperative subjects. Still, the rewards can be considerable.

Among the migratory mammals worth watching are some species of bats (Hoary, Silver-haired, and Red) that can occasionally be seen flying south during daylight hours along shorelines or even over bodies of water. Marine mammals, of course, can be observed from boats or coastal promontories. The large baleen whales occur in good numbers on their southward migrations and delight people even from a distance.

Conservation Project Nabs $1M Grant to Protect Land

2009-09-24T09:35:00.002-05:00

Thom Gabrukiewicz • tgabrukiew@argusleader.com • September 23, 2009

A new conservation project concentrated in Deuel, Grant and Roberts counties received a $1 million grant to help protect unbroken tracts of prairie across the Dakotas and Minnesota.
Prairies Without Borders seeks to protect sections of the Prairie Coteau region, which encompasses more than 1 million acres of native northern tallgrass. The money will go toward buying U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grassland and wetland easements, with an emphasis on getting easements on large contiguous tracts of native grassland.
The venture seeks to protect 3,106 acres within the three-county focus area.
"South Dakota has the largest concentration of tallgrass prairie, and we're working on protecting what's out there," said Pat Anderson, executive director of the Northern Prairies Land Trust. "This allows us to protect animal and plant life, too, so it can continue to grow and populate the area."
The Prairie Coteau is a 200-mile-long, 100-mile-wide swath of lake-dappled prairie that covers parts of the Dakotas and Minnesota. It is the largest remaining tallgrass prairie in the U.S.
Yet since 2002, more than 240,000 acres of eastern South Dakota native prairie have been converted into cropland.
"These easements allow the landowners to retain a working landscape, but also maintain the tallgrass prairie by preventing native and restored prairies from being plowed up," said Tom Tornow, with the Fish and Wildlife Service's Madison Wetland Management District.
While focused on the three eastern South Dakota counties, the project area stretches across 23 counties in South Dakota, nine counties in North Dakota and 50 counties in Minnesota.
"This project is unique in that it recognizes the need to protect grasslands in Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota," said Pete Bauman, area manager for The Nature Conservancy, which helped organize the project.
Other project partners include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks; and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Reach Thom Gabrukiewicz at 331-2320.

Eavesdrop on Richard Branson and Dr. Stephen Covey

2009-09-08T17:05:00.000-05:00

My friends, Alex Mandossian and Greg Habstritt, are holding an incredible series of training calls starting Wednesday. They will be featuring interviews with not just Richard Branson and Dr. Stephen Covey, but 10 other world experts and authorities!

You’ll hear directly from people like Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, who just sold for over $900 million to Amazon .. it’s obvious that there ARE people doing well even when the media is reporting gloom and doom!

In all, you’ll learn from 12 of the greatest minds in the world today. Best-selling authors, incredible business visionaries, and some of the most insightful experts are going to share their secrets with you. People like Bill Phillips (Body-for-LIFE), Janet Attwood (The Passion Test), Bill Harris (star of ‘The Secret’), Marci Shimoff (Happy For No Reason), and the list goes on!

And if you can’t make the live call each time, you’ll ALSO be able to access the replays of the calls – all at no cost!

You’ll get access to this exclusive program, both the live calls and it won’t cost you anything.

To get all the details, go to this link right now:
http://www.engagetoday2009.com/cmd.php?af=1049778

The 9 Timless Secrets to Being Happy

2009-08-31T10:53:00.005-05:00

An awesome video

Pet Tales: Attracting Fireflies, Warding Off Mosquitoes.

2009-08-10T10:30:00.003-05:00

Saturday, August 08, 2009
By Linda Wilson Fuoco, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Mosquitoes thrive when wet weather leaves pools of water where they can lay eggs.

Where have all the lightning bugs gone?

Growing up in the 1950s, I saw hundreds of them on warm summer nights. Now I see few, if any. The kids in my Bethel Park neighborhood had contests to see who could catch the most fireflies. We scooped them into jars and punched holes in the screw-on lids. We oh-so-helpfully put blades of grass in the jars to give the bugs something to eat.

The bugs always died in their jars while we slept. Some animal lovers we were.

The lightning bugs' disappearance isn't my imagination, says David Mizejewski, naturalist at the National Wildlife Federation. They've been driven away by "light pollution" and the overuse of pesticides, he says. They lose habitat when fields, woods and wetlands are destroyed to make way for houses and shopping centers.

While Pittsburghers call them lightning bugs, Mr. Mizejewski calls them fireflies, although he says they're neither bugs nor flies. They're beetles. He has tips for attracting them to your yard, and he's not even judgmental about the jars.

"The best way to enjoy fireflies it to turn off the TV, put away video games and go outside," Mr. Mizejewski said.

The federation has launched a "Be Out There" campaign "to get families across the United States to open the door and get outside." The organization hopes to see healthier kids with a lifelong appreciation of wildlife and nature.

Here's my favorite fun tip from Mr. Mizejewski: "Use a flashlight to mimic firefly flashes. When you flash, the fireflies will respond."

Everyone can attract fireflies, songbirds and other animals by creating "wildlife friendly" yards.

Don't use pesticides. Plant native wildflowers and greenery that provide shelter for fireflies. The grass in your lawn holds no attraction for wildlife, especially if you used chemicals to kill weeds and insects. For more tips, go to www.nwf.org/gardenforwildlife.

"It's OK to catch a few fireflies and keep them in a jar with holes poked in the lid for a few hours," Mr. Mizejewski says. "Just make sure to release them back into nature."

Don't bother putting grass in the jar because that's not what fireflies eat. Adults eat nectar and larvae eat slugs, worms and other soft-bodied invertebrates around streams and ponds.

If you do go outdoors, you'll have to deal with another type of bug -- mosquitoes. Mr. Mizejewski has tips for dealing with them, too.

Mosquitoes are a stretch for a topic in a pet column, but they can carry heartworms that can harm dogs and can carry rare but deadly diseases, like Eastern equine encephalitis, that kill horses.

DEET-based repellents are effective for people but Mr. Mizejewski says don't apply them to dogs or cats because DEET is not approved for pets. Chemical-free solutions include "aromatic herbal repellents," like lemon eucalyptus, which "work if applied frequently."

Here's my favorite skeeter tip:

"Mosquitoes are not strong fliers, and the breeze created by a fan is often all you need to keep a patio or deck mosquito-free so you can enjoy the outdoors."

Fans won't get to the root of the problem, however.

The most important thing is to get rid of standing water that collects in clogged gutters, flower-pot drainage dishes, children's toys and tarps that cover stacks of firewood.

Birdbaths attract birds to your yard, and some birds eat mosquitoes. But empty and refill birdbaths every few days because "it takes a minimum of a week for the metamorphosis from egg to larva to pupa to winged adult," Mr. Mizejewski says.

Another way to deal with mosquitoes is to attract their predators. In ponds and water gardens, "fish feed on mosquito larvae. Just don't release goldfish or other exotic species into natural areas. ... Add plants that attract frogs, salamanders and dragonflies," he says.

Don't put insecticides or oil on the surface of bodies of water because that will kill "beneficial insects" and mosquito predators.

And here's something I've never heard:

"Bug zappers aren't effective against mosquitoes" but they "do kill thousands of beneficial insects each night."

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09220/989411-62.stm#ixzz0NnKO9EI8

Invasion in the Badlands

2009-07-24T12:36:00.007-05:00

On vacation in the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota, I witnessed another invasion of beautiful ecosystems. Angry for several days and feeling helpless to do anything about the Yellow Sweet Clover marching over the landscape, I told my wife, Donna that I had to do something to alert people to this takeover of these beautiful landscapes. After several nights, I thought about how over the past 60 years I have been aware of invasive species and have seen the list grow and grow and grow.
What is our place on this planet? Does our labeling of plants as negative aliens and as invaders invite more negative thoughts? What good has become of our waging war on these alien species? Shouting and preaching that this just isn’t right nor nature’s way and getting all fired up and angry at one of God’s creations just didn’t seem to fit well with me anymore. I’m tired of generating negative feelings inside of me. This thought made me start to question the overall picture of man and nature and our relationship to plants, each other and our interaction with all species of our world.

Here are some of my questions that I ponder often:
· Were any species created out of negative thoughts?
· Were any plants or animals meant to remain in one area? If so, why do they do so well when introduced into different areas?
· What is the long-term succession of these so-called invasives or alien species? I mean over thousands of years?
· Can we live with these aliens and make peace or will we always wage war on them?
· Does the attack on the “invasive species” ultimately do any good?
· Are we supposed to sit back and do nothing?
· Can we make any peace with this rapidly changing world of the intermingling of species?
· Is this really a natural event and man truly is a part of nature but thinks that he isn’t because of his ability to choose and reason?
· Is it logical to think that man isn’t a part of nature or is this just another arrogant thought that puts us as the ultimate animal separated from all nature and we stand alone still fighting and compartmentalizing all species.
· Is there a kinder, more positive and cooperative way of dealing with what we perceive as invasive species?
· Does prejudice produce more prejudice?
·
If we are just holographic pieces of the “Great Spirit”, then we are included in this great magnificent process that created the universe and all within it. Are we not programmed to keep creating something different?
·
Does any one thing deserve to be eradicated or is that part of the plan?
·
Are the invasives just signals to us that we need to change our ways and they are just messengers sacrificing their lives for a cause yet unknown to us?
Some of the species that I have come into contact with and waged war over the years are:
· Japanese Honey Suckle
· Kudzu
· Multi-flora Rose
· Crown Vetch
· Yellow Sweet Clover
· Garlic Mustard
These are just a minute number of species that I have allowed to cause stress and negative energy in me. I think that now after decades of fighting, I am ready to accept that these aliens are just part of the cosmic progression to a different place on earth and the universe that is neither good nor bad.
What do you think?

Tired of struggling over this issue,
Howard Bright President Ion Exchange, Inc.
www.ionXchange.com

Munching on Garlic Mustard

2009-07-13T16:21:00.004-05:00

A New Weevil in the Works

  Garlic and mustard are common ingredients that can be found in American households. But garlic mustard? Well, that’s a different story.

Garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, is considered one of the most problematic invaders of temperate forests in North America. According to legend, it was brought here from Europe in the 1860s as a culinary herb, but unfortunately, it doesn’t taste very good. Since then, garlic mustard has spread to 34 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.

“Garlic mustard is an invasive plant that gets a lot of attention,” says ecologist Adam Davis, who has been studying the weed for years. “It’s very noticeable and hard to eradicate because of its seed bank.”

The term “seed bank” refers to seeds in the soil that are dormant but capable of germinating. Garlic mustard seeds can remain viable for more than 10 years. A single plant can produce hundreds of seeds, which scatter as far as several meters from the parent.

“You can spend a lot of time and money pulling garlic mustard up or spraying it with pesticides, but it’ll just come back the next year,” says Davis. “That’s why it’s such a problem. It’s very resilient.”

   <http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/jul09/d1496-1.htm>
Flowers of garlic mustard produce up to several thousand seeds per plant, making it difficult to control.
(D1496-1)

A member of the mustard family Brassicaceae, garlic mustard got its name because its leaves, when crushed, smell like garlic. Garlic mustard is a biennial plant, meaning it takes 2 years to complete its life cycle. During its first year, the plant is in the form of a rosette with kidney-shaped leaves that remain green throughout the winter. In its second year, the plant matures and produces small, white flowers, each with four petals in the shape of a cross. The mature plants either self-pollinate or are pollinated by insects, producing seeds that fall to the ground and enter the soil.

Garlic mustard is cold hardy and shade tolerant, enabling it to grow early in spring when most plants are not able to grow. It also secretes allelochemicals into the soil. Allelochemicals are chemical compounds a plant introduces into the growing environment to suppress growth of another plant. “It’s kind of like chemical warfare against the native plants,” says Davis.

The insects and fungi that feed on garlic mustard in its native habitat are not present in North America, increasing the weed’s seed productivity and allowing it to outcompete native plants.

   <http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/jul09/d1495-1.htm>
In Urbana, Illinois, ecologist Adam Davis records the position of garlic mustard rosettes (clusters of green leaves low to the ground) on a sheet of transparent mylar. The locations are recorded in June and October of the first year and in June the following year to estimate rosette survival rates. Once garlic mustard rosette locations are recorded, they are then converted into digital coordinates in a GIS (geographical information system) program, permitting spatial analysis of rosette survival.
(D1495-1)

A Model Solution

To better understand garlic mustard and find a suitable biocontrol, Davis—in collaboration with colleagues at Michigan State University, Cornell University, the University of Illinois, and the Centre for Agricultural Biosciences International (CABI) in Switzerland—created a computer model that simulates the weed’s life cycle.

“In part, we wanted to answer ecologists’ criticisms that biocontrol can potentially cause as many problems as it solves because of unintended consequences,” says Davis. “We were looking for a way to choose agents that are most likely to succeed while reducing their potential for harm to native plants and environments. Ideally, we want to try to release only one organism, if possible.”

Through this model, Davis was able to predict the type and severity of damage that would be needed to reduce garlic mustard’s population growth rates. Davis performed an analysis using computer code that enabled him to change one variable at a time while keeping all the others constant, allowing him to probe the life cycle for the plant’s weak point. He found that in order to make an impact, a biocontrol agent has to reduce garlic mustard’s survival in the rosette stage and its ability to reproduce in the adult stage.

Well before Davis created the life-cycle model, CABI scientists began looking for and testing potential biocontrol agents to tackle garlic mustard. They collected data on the amount of damage each insect could inflict on the garlic mustard population. From a list of more than 70 natural enemies found to be feeding on garlic mustard in Europe, four Ceutorhynchus weevils were selected as the most promising control agents.

Combining the feeding information collected by CABI scientists and the demographic information of garlic mustard in North America, Davis used the computerized life-cycle model to assess each weevil’s ability to inflict damage on the weed and inhibit its growth. One weevil, C. scrobicollis, came out on top.

High Hopes for Little Insect

The tiny C. scrobicollis has a life cycle of 1 year and produces one batch of offspring per lifetime. Itlays its eggs on garlic mustard’s leaf stems in the fall. When the eggs hatch in the spring, the larvae feed on the weed’s root crown, the area from which the rosette’s leaves grow and where nutrients are stored.

By feeding on the root crown, C. scrobicollis stops the flow of nutrients and water from the roots to the rest of the plant. It also damages the meristem, the area of the plant where new growth takes place. As a result, garlic mustard produces fewer seeds or, in areas with high weevil populations, dies prematurely in early spring without producing any seeds.

C. scrobicollis also appears to be monophagous, meaning it eats just one thing: garlic mustard. That means scientists won’t have to worry about any unintended consequences when using this insect as a biocontrol agent.

During preliminary testing, CABI scientists believed C. scrobicollis was the best candidate to control garlic mustard. Putting the weevil’s feeding data through Davis’s life-cycle model confirmed their beliefs and created a stronger case for the permit process.

“The model gave teeth to the permit application to release this weevil in the United States,” says Davis. “It provided a peek into the future as to the impact the weevil could have on the garlic mustard population here.”

C. scrobicollis is currently in quarantine at the University of Minnesota. If all goes well, this beneficial weevil may soon be roaming North America to find a nice garlic mustard meal.—By Stephanie Yao, <http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/contacts.htm#Stephanie> Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.

This research is part of Crop Protection and Quarantine, an ARS national program (#304) described on the World Wide Web at www.nps.ars.usda.gov <http://www.nps.ars.usda.gov/> .

Adam Davis <mailto:adam.davis@ars.usda.gov> is in the USDA-ARS Invasive Weed Management Research Unit <http://www.ars.usda.gov/Main/site_main.htm?modecode=36-11-25-00> , 1102 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana, IL 61801-4730; phone (217) 333-9654, fax (217) 333-5251.

"Munching on Garlic Mustard: A New Weevil in the Works" was published in the July 2009 <http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jul09/> issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

National Pollinator Week

2009-06-23T14:19:00.003-05:00

Did you know that one out of every third bite of food comes to us
thanks to pollinators? From beautiful butterflies to busy bees, it’s
clear that pollinators are essential to life on our planet.

But, declines in pollinators in North America and around the world
pose what could be a significant threat to biodiversity, global food
webs and human health.

Help pollinators in your neighborhood during National
Pollinator Week (June 22-28) by taking one or more of
these five simple actions:
1. Use Native Plants
2. Hang Hummingbird Feeders
3. Build a Bee House
4. Plant a Butterfly Garden
5. Certify Your Yard with National Wildlife Federation

The Popularity of Butterfly Gardening

2009-06-23T12:21:00.004-05:00

At Ion Exchange, Inc. we love butterflies and we have many native plants that are excellent at attracting butterflies. Check out our butterfly package HERE

By Wings On June 23, 2009 @ 5:27 am In Guest Authors No Comments

Butterfly gardening has become popular, both to magnetize the scenic travelers and to help domain species of butterflies that were dwindling due to soul encroachment into their innate habitats. Butterflies feeling sunlight! Whether you wish to works a traditional plot or a container plot, make positive that the plants are in sincere sunlight for much of the day. If you’re forecast a butterfly plot, it’s important to keep in psyche that there is no one recipe for a successful plot. Butterflies like to “pond.” Your plot desires a place of watering puncture for the butterflies to juice from. This could be done by basically rich a terra cotta pot or small plastic bucket with small rocks or pebbles about two inches from the edge. Butterfly species that are indigenous to different areas are attracted to different types of plants. To forward butterflies, you’ll poverty to know the butterfly species that are found in your blackhead, and suggest them with plants that are special food sources for adult butterflies as well as those plants that they pretty for laying their eggs and nourishing maggot. Add water to permeate the lingering liberty. Place the puddle in the midpoint of your backyard, some values that relate to all butterfly gardens. Wherever you live and anything butterflies you prospect to magnetize, you’ll attract more of them if you pursue a few unfussy basics, Butterflies dearest to eat nectar. Use some of these nectar-producing plants to attract them: milkweed, azalea, goldenrod, black-eyed susan, zinnia, aster, phlox, Japanese honeysuckle, ironweed. A few nectar-producing shrubs are butterfly plant, many fruit leaves, privet, blue and redbud. Butterflies will flock to large expanses of plants in analogous colors that flourish at the same time rather than to release plants with just a few blooms. A carpet of violets, a sea of buttercups or a thick open pasture detailed of Queen Anne’s Lace is solid to be visited by dozens of butterflies. Butterflies like bags of influence! Group clusters of the same plant together to make them easier for butterflies to see. A group of quaint plants attracts them easier than distinct flora. Butterfly gardens should to provide both sun and shade. Like all insects, butterflies are cold-blooded creatures. They boom on thaw sun, and will relax on fixed rocks or perch for long notes on the twigs of a high plant in the sunlight. At the same time, they require shade and shelter when the sun is too hot, or on cool, imprecise living. A field that gets lively sun for at least 4-6 hours per day is the best spot for a butterfly plot, but don’t forget to embrace landscaping facts that offer shade.

Mounting Evidence Shows Native Grasses Could Destroy Explosives Pollution

2009-06-16T18:08:00.001-05:00

By SCOTT CANON

The Kansas City Star

COLUMBIA Besides the obvious reason, TNT is not good for you.

But grass, it turns out, might be dynamite for the problem.

TNT contaminates hundreds of sites, from military firing ranges to old production dumps to waterways, and poses a threat to the human nervous system and to the liver and kidneys. It’s suspected to cause cancer. It can cause allergic reactions and attack the immune system, and it may lead to birth defects.

Left alone in the soil, TNT breaks down into an even more toxic substance.

If the problem is left in the dirt, maybe that’s where the solution can grow.

Three Missouri researchers have hit on an idea that could potentially scrub away the TNT danger: Simply plant the right kind of grass.

The notion started with mounting evidence that native grasses could render harmless a common weed killer.

That herbicide, atrazine, is the second most common herbicide used in the U.S. and has been a stubborn pollutant in the nation’s waterways. Mounting evidence has shown that certain native grasses, and the microbes that thrive around their roots, convert the toxic leftovers from atrazine into harmless carbon dioxide.

Robert Lerch, John Yang and Chung-Ho Lin began talking about how chemically similar atrazine is to the explosives TNT and RDX.

“If it worked for atrazine, we thought it might work for these things,” said Lin, a research professor for the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry.

Should their idea succeed, it would offer a greener, cheaper and possibly quicker way to clean up more than 530 sites across the country contaminated by the explosives.

Trinitrotoluene, or TNT, and cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, also called RDX, began creeping into U.S. soil and waterways decades ago, before the manufacturers of explosives came under stricter regulation.

The problem isn’t small. Of the 538 locations identified by the Department of Defense with RDX or TNT contamination, 20 are Superfund sites — classified by the federal government as the country’s most dangerous abandoned toxic waste sites. Congress rejected a Pentagon proposal in 2005 to exempt the military from regulations for pollution from munitions.

“It’s a serious problem, and it’s widespread,” said Andrew Wetzler of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To clear a field tainted by those explosives — typically to haul away the dirt for incineration — can run from $100,000 to $1 million an acre.

The researchers in Columbia have doped soil samples with explosives and planted two species of grass.

In essence, the explosives practically disappear.

It’s unclear whether it’s the grasses — Eastern gamagrass and switchgrass seem to work best — do the work themselves, whether it’s two forms of bacteria that thrive in soils around grass roots that do the trick, or if something happens in how they work together.

But in a closet-size room basking in fluorescent lights, a solution to explosives pollution looks to be taking root.

The scientists added RDX and TNT to cup-size soil samples and planted the grasses. In just weeks, the toxic chemicals degraded harmlessly into carbon dioxide and water.

“It’s a controlled situation to look at how these chemicals break down,” said Yang, the director of the Center of Environmental Sciences at Lincoln University.

The next step, perhaps still a year or two away, is to test the process outdoors.

The researchers are talking with the Army — the initial research has been covered by $110,000 in Defense Department grants — about trying the grasses on already contaminated sites.

Since the grasses are native and grow easily across the Midwest and the Southeast, they pose no threat of kudzu-like exotic species seen as their own environmental threat.

Initial tests show that the amount of RDX in soil is reduced by 50 percent in a matter of weeks, and TNT contamination drops by 95 percent.

So, Lerch said, a year or two after planting, a field could be cleaned of the explosives contamination.

And the cost might run less than $3,000 per acre.

“If this works, it will be great,” he said.

“It’s so simple.”

To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com

Urban Birds Tweet A Different Tune.

2009-06-08T07:55:00.004-05:00

An interesting study between urban and rural birds.

Birds in cities 'singing louder'
Scientists from Aberystwyth University have discovered that some urban birds sing at a different pitch to their rural cousins
Great tits are tweaking their tweets to be heard in noisy urban areas, but for their country cousins it is like they are speaking a different language.
Scientists at Aberystwyth University found male great tits in 20 UK towns and cities sang at a higher pitch to be heard above the man-made noise.
Rural birds were confused by urban bird song while city birds "didn't understand the lower rural pitch".
The male great tit sings to defend his territory and attract a mate.
Research student Emily Mockford visited 20 towns and cities in the UK to capture the bird song.
The singing was played back to rural male tits during the breeding season when they are at their most aggressive, but there was a "slower and weaker" response than normal from the countryside birds.
Scientists also recorded countryside great tits and found they sang at a lower pitch and, in turn, city birds found the rural droll difficult to understand, the study found.
Project leader Dr Rupert Marshall explained how the city bird song was captured.
He said: "We just stood there and pointed a microphone at them (the great tits).
"We went for medium-sized areas which were close to rural locations so that's why we avoided London.
"We played the urban bird song on a speaker to rural males during the breeding season. Usually this would provoke a strong reaction - the tits get quite worked up about it and would normally attack the speaker.
"But there was a slower and weaker response from the rural males.
"They were less aggressive and not quite sure what to make of it. It was like the city birds were speaking a different language.
"Likewise, we found city birds didn't understand the lower rural pitch."
Project scientists said the urban great tit reacted to man-made noise by raising the pitch of its songs, but in quieter rural locations a few miles away the pitch was found to be lower.
PhD student Ms Mockford said: "The next step is to find out what the females make of these different songs - will they want to mate with a guy who sings too high or too low?"

Invasive Species Field Day

2009-06-03T08:04:00.005-05:00

What are Invasive Species?
Non-native invasive plants, typically transplants from distant places, that threaten native habitats in Iowa. There are a variety of non-native invasives that have been introduced into the United States and Iowa that are significant threats to the quality of many different ecosystems (i.e. prairies, forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes).Why are they a problem? • They have a variety of survival strategies that enable them to out-compete and replace native species.• Insects and birds that rely on native species are also displaced as invasives take over.• They can alter entire ecosystems by changing soil chemistry or hydrological processes.• They cause a heavy economic toll. On a national level, invasive species are costing Americans approximately $140 billion annually in tax dollars spent on control, lost recreation, health hazards, and decreased land values.

Hawkeye Cooperative Weed Management Area Invasive Species Field Day June 11, 2009Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center 10260 Morris Hills Road Toddville, IA 52341Managed by the Linn County Conservation Board Field Day Brochure (includes map) <http://www.extension.iastate.edu/NR/rdonlyres/ABCE6DF3-724E-4752-962F-64BB1DEDF983/97257/InvasiveSpeciesBrochure_forPRINT.pdf>

Directions From I-380 northbound: go west on Blairs Ferry Road. Turn north (right) on Feather Ridge Road; From I-380 southbound: Exit west (right) on the E-34, Toddville/Robins exit, follow WHOLC signs through Toddville to Feather Ridge Road, turn south (left); go to Morris Hills Road, turn west.Proceed approx. 1.2 miles to Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center.

Agenda 8:30am –9:00am Registration 9:00am –9:10am

Welcome 9:15am –10:00am Potential Impacts of 2008 Floods on Iowa’s Natural Resources Keynote Speaker: John Pearson, Botanist/Plant Ecologist, Iowa Department of Natural
Resources

10:15am –11:10am (select session A or B)

session A - outdoors Woodland Management and the Use of Prescribed Fire in Woodlands Mark Vitosh & Ryan Schlater, Iowa Department of Natural Resources Forestry Bureau

session B - indoors Wetland Beautification & Selecting Native Plants for your Home Landscape Howard Bright, Ion Exchange, Harpers Ferry

11:25am –12:20pm (select session A or B)

session A - outdoors Identification & Management of Invasive Plants in Prairies Rob Roman, Linn County Secondary Road Department (Integrated Roadside Vegetation Management)& Chris Taliga, Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development

session B - indoors Water Infiltration & the Establishment of Backyard Rain Gardens Wayne Petersen, Iowa Department of Agriculture & Land Stewardship & Liz Maas, Transition Ecology, Iowa City

12:20pm –1:20pm Lunch & Learn provided by the Living Roadway Trust Fund at the Outdoor Learning Center1:00pm Weed Seed Free Forage & Mulch Certification Program Eileen Wuebker, Iowa Crop Improvement Association, Iowa State University

1:30pm –2:25pm (select session A or B)

session A - outdoors Identification and Management of Invasive Plants in Woodlands Dana Kellogg, Linn County Conservation Board & Dave Wehde, Johnson County Conservation Board

session B - indoors Got Goats? A conservationist’s exploration of browsing and grazing to restore natural areas Loren Lown, Polk County Conservation Board Field Day Reservations There is no charge for this program; however, lunch is provided, so please make reservations by Noon June 9th (Tuesday). Register online at http://www.linncountyparks.com/ <http://www.linncountyparks.com/> by clicking on the "Events" area or call (319) 892-6450.

Trout Fishing Tips

2009-06-01T06:59:00.000-05:00

The trout are really hitting right here on our farm in NE Iowa on the Yellow River. Some gentlemen just this week filled their limit each day while staying at the Ion Inn. We’ve just made some improvements to our little secluded campsites right on the river. Here’s an article that I found on trout fishing techniques. Come on over to The Natural Gait and give it a try.

Trout Fishing Tips, Tricks, & Techniques to Help You Catch More Trout
By Trevor Kugler
Over the past 25 years, spent trout fishing from coast to coast, I've learned some valuable tips, tricks, and techniques that have resulted in many trout being caught. In this article I will reveal some of these tips, tricks, and techniques so that you can implement them into your trout fishing repertoire. I know that you will find them every bit as valuable as I do.The first thing to keep in mind when it comes to trout fishing is that the more time that you can spend on the water, the better. Nothing will help your trout catching abilities like practicing your craft. Everyone says that patience is integral to fishing (and they're right), but practice is every bit as valuable as patience to being a successful fisherman. The bottom line is that the more time you can spend on the water, the better your angling skills will become, and the more fish you will catch.Let's start with your fishing line. When fishing for trout a great trick is to use fishing line that's as light as possible. I personally prefer four pound test monofilament, and six pound test is passable in most trout fishing situations. I like to spool my reel with Stren clear blue monofilament so that the line is visible to me, yet undetectable to the trout. The bottom line is that trout live in cool, clear water and spook easily, so the lighter your line, the more bites you will get.The next trout fishing trick is to use small fishing hooks. A great technique is to use gang hooks, which are two small hooks tied in tandem. These hooks allow you to present bait (especially worms) in a totally natural manner. This makes a HUGE difference in the number of bites that you receive. The "gang hook" trout fishing technique is deadly once mastered.If you truly want to catch more trout one of the best tips I have is to make sure that you're on the water at the most opportune times. What do I mean by this? There are certain times of the day, week, and month that trout are more active than others. You can figure out when the best times for trout fishing are by paying attention to the weather and moon, and planning your fishing trips accordingly. This is easily one of the easiest trout fishing tips to implement into your fishing repertoire. Once you know the simple rules, you can start making sure that you are on the water fishing when the trout are the most active.These trout fishing tips, tricks, and techniques will help you catch more trout as soon as they are learned and practiced, so I suggest you get out there and start putting one or all of them into action. You won't be disappointed, I promise you. Remember, the more time that you can spend on the water fishing for trout the better.Trevor Kugler is co-founder of JRWfishing.com and an avid angler. He has more than 20 years experience fishing for all types of fish, and 15 years of business and Internet experience. He currently raises his three year old daughter in the heart of trout fishing country.....Montana!Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Trevor_Kugler

Ethanol: On Beyond Corn

2009-05-30T10:10:00.002-05:00

Is there a future for farmers in the ethanol industry beyond corn? It was the agricultural community that gave birth to “gasohol” 25 years ago, and corn farmers throughout the Midwest took part in ethanol promotion activities at service stations, county fairs, and anywhere a reporter might get interested in their pitch for a new market for corn. But with the federal biofuels mandate corn-based ethanol to 15 billion gallons, is there a future economic opportunity that agriculture can harvest?

The Federal Energy Independence and Security Act implements a growing market for corn based ethanol until the 15 billion gallon limit is reached in 2012, in an effort to preserve sufficient corn quantities for other market needs. Beyond that, cellulosic ethanol is expected to grow beyond the 30 billion gallon total biofuel supply in 2022. But where do farmers fit into that overall plan?
Agricultural economist Tom Capehart of the Congressional Research Service examined Congressional policy issues involving cellulosic biofuels and says they must overcome three challenges:
1) First, cellulosic feedstocks must be available in large volumes when needed by refineries.
2) Second, the cost of converting cellulose to ethanol or other biofuels must be reduced to a level to make it competitive with gasoline and corn-starch ethanol.
3) Third, the marketing, distribution, and vehicle infrastructure must absorb the increasing volumes of renewable fuel, including cellulosic fuel mandated by the RFS.
Obviously, farmers must carve out their niche in the first challenge, if there is to be one. Capehart notes there are doubters who are “questioning whether the United States could ever produce and manage sufficient feedstocks of starches, sugars, vegetable oils, or even cellulose to permit biofuel production to meaningfully offset petroleum imports.” To many biofuel communities in the Cornbelt, “the gauntlet has been thrown down.”

Ethanol will likely be produced from a variety of cellulose sources, according to Capehart, including municipal solid waste, construction debris, and residues from the logging, lumber, and paper industries. Not much for farmers in those areas. However, other potential cellulose sources include crop residues, such as corn stalks and wheat straw, as well as perennial grasses, such as switchgrass and miscanthus. But farmers wanting to cultivate the latter will run into a challenge the CRS economist describes as, “Cellulosic feedstocks may have some environmental drawbacks. Some crops suggested for biomass are invasive species when planted in non-native environments.”

The prairie grass issue might be resolved if your ancestors could testify that they burned off switchgrass in Cornbelt states when they began the farmsteads you now operate. It was the dense, itchy stuff that pioneers fought every day as their covered wagons traveled westward. But to grow switchgrass that might be profitable, it may require several years to reach its full yield potential. Capehart quotes University of Tennessee statistics that indicate the top yield potential is two tons per acre in the first year and seven tons after the third year, which would produce up to 1,000 gallons of ethanol. An alternative is the Asian grass miscanthus, which can produce 2.5 times the amount of ethanol that corn currently produces, which is estimated at 1,100 gallons per acre. Researchers at South Dakota State and the University of Minnesota have both looked at other native prairie grass mixtures that seem promising for ethanol production, without the criticism of being “a non-native specie.”

Farmers who have baled wheat or oat straw have harvested and stored biomass for years, so there is nothing new there. Cornstalks are another issue, and Capehart suggests the need for a single machine that can harvest corn for grain and stalks for biomass in one pass through the field. And protective storage for corn stover will be a significant process and investment, which will have to borne by farmers. But imagine that an enterprising group of investors plans to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in your neighborhood and recruits you to produce the feedstock for it.
• It will produce 10-20 million gallons of ethanol per year
• It will operate 24/7 and will need 700 tons per day.
• If the plant wants corn stover, it will cost $39 to $46 per ton to transport it 30 miles.
• If the plant wants switchgrass, it will cost $57 to $63 per ton to transport it 30 miles.

CRS economist Capehart notes that harvesting corn stalks will not reduce food output, but growing grasses would displace food crops on cropland. Farmers considering such a new crop would have to calculate the multi-year commitment that would be required. The initial start-up years would have equipment investment along with a lower level of revenue for grass production. However, planting grasses will required a commitment from landowners, should such production occur on rented land, and that would mean multi-year leases.

Summary:
With US energy policy moving toward biofuels, and a limit on how much corn can be used for ethanol production, farmers will not be shut out of the market. Options are available for substantial involvement in supplying feedstocks for cellulosic ethanol producers. Those include both production of grasses, as well as harvesting of corn stalks. Farmers will have to work out marketing agreements that would compensate them for additional equipment outlays, storage and transportation costs, and early revenue losses in the case of grass production.

Source: Stu Ellis, http://www.farmgate.uiuc.edu

Create Your Own Wildlife Habitat Using Native Plants

2009-05-20T08:41:00.003-05:00

Here is an awesome video on building your own wildlife habitat using native plants by the National Wildlife Federation.
http://www.gogreentube.com/watch.php?v=NjQzMzY5
Native wildflowers and grasses are so much easier to care for than other plants, they flourish with little or no effort. There root systems go much deeper than most other plants so they are virtually drought resistant. There are many varieties to choose from. Visit Ion Exchange to look at hundreds of species of native plants.

Thoughts From The Belly

2009-05-18T15:01:00.001-05:00

Thoughts From The Belly
May 2009
By: Dan Mays – Ironbelly1@aol.com

Every year I am asked, “So what are you going to plant this year, Dan?” This question provides me with a perfect segue to launch into my personal campaign to improve the sorry state of Butterfly Gardens. I am certainly not discouraging folks from planting gardens with butterflies in mind. My hope is that I can encourage others to expand their focus to include the untapped possibilities of “what could be”. Establishing a few plants originally imported from China and watching a few monarch butterflies sipping nectar is setting a low bar indeed. In warmer climates (particularly in Great Britain), Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii) has proven to be an invasive thug. Planting something just because the horticultural mass-market industry dubbed this thing “Butterfly Bush” is not my idea of a sane approach. Following this magazine-promoted tack robs well-intentioned gardeners of an easily attainable bounty, simply for the sake of filling the marketing coffers.

It is true that this Chinese exotic draws adult butterflies to sip nectar – and that is largely the problem. The key word here is: “adult” – and only adult. What do the butterflies feed on prior to becoming adults? It certainly is not Buddleia davidii or most any other plant imported from foreign lands. While marketers harp about “clean foliage”, every gardener truly interested in Butterfly Gardens should translate this term to be “something my baby butterflies can’t or won’t eat”. Caterpillars don’t damage foliage – they are foraging.

Monarch butterflies flittering about are truly a delight to see. Instantly recognizable, they have a fascinating migratory habit. However, concentrating solely upon Monarchs is like dining exclusively on Big Mac’s for every meal. The world of butterflies and moths is a superbly rich place if only we will expand our knowledge a bit. Be careful … you might soon learn about skippers, blues, brushfoots, hairstreaks, etc.

The expanded world (egg, larva, pupa and adult) of butterflies includes general feeders and something called “obligates”. Obligates are essentially finicky eaters. In other words, if their favorite plant is not found to lay eggs on, that butterfly or moth species will not multiply. Regal Fritillary butterflies seem to have a distinct preference for Birdfoot Violet (Viola pedata). However, bear in mind that it is the immature stages that require native violets. The adult will sip nectar from a wide variety of plants. I guess this tips my hand as to the answer to the opening question: “So what are you going to plant this year, Dan?” The obvious answer is Birdfoot Violet. I have 100 of those plants on order from the Master Gardener plant sale.

My interest in butterflies was stirred to life last year when I visited the 20 acre Duke Prairie. It lays a few miles north of the Quad Cities, just southeast of Grand Mound in Clinton County. I was meeting up with a group from the Quad Cities Native Plant Society for a field trip and arrived a little early. At first glance, the place was full of interesting plants. However, the thing that seized my attention was the profusion of butterflies. They were everywhere! Curiously, most were species I rarely see. Many (and I emphasize many) were butterfly and moth species I had never seen before. The place shamed the meager butterfly garden “how-to” attempts advocated in popular magazines. Coincidentally, there was not a “required” Buddleia in sight. Why was this? Why was there so much abundance and diversity?

Upon further research and lots of questions, the obvious answer surfaced. There was food – their food. The kind of food the individual butterfly species needed for their young. I liken this phenomenon to people. If you serve jalapeño peppers, the Hispanics show up. Serve pasta and the Italians show up. Serve sauerkraut and the Germans show up. Serve a big, long buffet and everybody (even the “kids”) will show up.

There remains much to be learned in the field of insect/faunal relationships. For further study, I recommend Doug Tallamy’s book, Bringing Nature Home. It is an enlightening, enjoyable read. AND … do check out the new Iowa Butterfly Forecast website. It will help put your butterfly garden efforts on steroids!

Mother Nature Doesn't Ask For Much.

2009-05-10T09:22:00.006-05:00

Just like any other mom, she wants safe, healthy places for her young to survive and thrive.

You can lend a hand to Mother Nature this weekend by making your backyard wildlife-friendly Just provide the things that animals need most - food, water, shelter and places to raise
their families.
http://www.nwf.org/gardenforwildlife/certify.cfm?campaignid=WH09FMDX

Join over 115,000 folks who have already created havens for wildlife in their yards through National Wildlife Federation’s Certified Wildlife Habitat™ program . You’ll not only be helping Mother Nature, you’ll also receive great benefits (see right)!

Plus, when you certify your backyard , your $20 application fee allows NWF to continue its important conservation and
education work on behalf of imperiled wildlife and wild places across the country.

Please certify today!

Sincerely,

David Mizejewski
NWF Naturalist, Media Spokesperson, Author

P.S. Need one more reason to certify? Your certification also makes you eligible to purchase the “wildly” popular Certified Wildlife Habitat™ yard sign that shows your commitment to safeguarding America's wildlife. Get started now!