Weekly Photo Challenge: Changing Seasons

December 7, 2012 by scillagrace

Changing Seasons is this week’s theme, but Nature is always changing, and the parameters we use to describe a “season” are artificial. I would imagine that any nature photo would depict change in some way, so I am anticipating a lot of cool nature shots will be hitting the blogs this week. Yippee! I do have one to share, taken last February as ice was melting at Wehr Nature Center. Spring arrived very early in 2012. Climate change is noticeable here in Wisconsin, as it is in many parts of the globe. How do you live with change? Happily accepting and learning from it? Resisting and avoiding it? Oscillating on that spectrum somewhere? It’s always interesting to observe myself when change manifests. The challenge for me is to be gentle and not judgmental in that observation.

I have another picture to share, but I can’t post it except in words. Late last night, I heard the call of a Great Horned Owl outside. It was the second time in a week that I’d heard it. Steve had heard it a few days ago and called me in to his office to listen. I thought at first it was the hoot of my own breathing in my head as I grew quiet to listen. Then, unmistakably, a pattern emerged. I looked up the audio track on the internet to identify what kind of an owl it was. We went outside to look. It was coming from west of our house, but a street lamp shone in the mid distance making it impossible to see anything in the trees in that direction. Last night, I heard the sound again from the bedroom. I looked out the east window at the top of the stairs and saw a silhouette in the tallest bare tree in the neighborhood. It looked like a huge cat with pointed ears, bunching and stretching way up in the tree. The cloudy night sky reflected the city lights just enough to show an outline. The wavy old glass, dirty and screen-covered, made it even more difficult to make out, even with binoculars. But there he was, large and spirit-like, hooting in the night air. I knew this mystery could not be captured on film, so I resolved to keep it in my head and share it in story.

Wehr Have You Been?

December 2, 2012 by scillagrace

Yesterday, I returned to the Wehr Nature Center where I had volunteered as a trail guide for their school programs before I got a job as a historic interpreter. It was good to see the place again, the furry and scaly and feathered and leafy friends as well as the humans. I was helping sell snacks for their Homemade Holiday event. Families bustled about creating holiday decorations and cookies throughout the building, while a moist, gray blanket of fog settled warmly outside. When the activities were over, I grabbed my camera and headed out for a walk around the lake. Dusk crept up, and Canada geese honked loudly from surface to sky, jockeying for shelter for the night. It was as if I was looking at an old friend wearing an expression I’d not seen before. Some things had changed: new fences were in place. The duck blind at the edge of the lake had been repaired. I felt like we’d both been out of touch for a while. I sat down on a bench to renew our acquaintance.

December silhouette

Old and new

Maple Sugar!

February 21, 2012 by scillagrace

Never let me get dogmatic about anything. (That word again….one of Steve’s most over-used!) I had resisted the excitement around the Wehr Nature Center surrounding the upcoming Maple Sugar festival because I just don’t care for the taste of maple. I had a bad experience as a candihapped kid. My parents were strict about candy. We didn’t have it just lying around in big, glass jars on the kitchen counter like my best friend did. We weren’t allowed to eat our fill out of pillow cases at Halloween like my best friend did. We weren’t allowed to chew bubble gum like my best friend did. So where did I hang out? At my best friend’s house mooching as much candy as I could. And then, a miracle occurred. My parents brought home Maple Sugar Candy from a trip, or maybe it was a gift or a find at a specialty shop. Somehow, these little leaf-shaped, brown, sparkly candies were available IN OUR HOUSE, and I went berserk. I probably yanked one without permission and gobbled it up to destroy the evidence in a matter of seconds. My wise friends at the Nature Center told me this morning that the only way to consume maple sugar is in tiny, slow doses. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. My overdose at a young age left a very bad taste in my mouth about the whole maple business. I’ve avoided it for years on pancakes, French toast, spice cake frosting, bacon, you name it. Somewhere along the line, the real maple sugar and the imitation corn syrupy stuff that’s advertised as “maple syrup” got blurred together in my memory. It was all bad. Well, today, I got to go back to the source and re-learn everything I knew about the taste of maple.

Giving blood

This is a new tap in a sugar maple. The spout is called a spile. You can see a previous tap above it to the left that has healed over. Some of the kids think these look like bellybuttons. The sap drips out and gets collected in a bag. I tasted a drop of sap that I captured on the back of my hand. It was just like water with a very slight sweetness.

A stand of sugar maples is called a “sugar bush”. Tapping trees have at least an inch of sapwood under the bark. They are the more mature trees, ones about 45 inches in circumference. You can get sap from any tree, but not every sap will make a syrup that will taste good on pancakes. Pine sap can be made into turpentine. Birch sap can be made into root beer. Oak sap can be made into tannins for tanning leather. Maple sap has a sugar content of about 2.5%. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Remove even more water, and you have maple sugar. It’s very sweet, but it doesn’t make me sick in tiny amounts. You know what does make me sick? Imitation maple syrup. That’s really the stuff I loathe. We do a taste test with the kids. They get a drop from bottle A and one from bottle B to see if they can tell the difference. Bottle A leaves a trailing thread of stickiness wherever it goes. It looks like a hot glue gun. It tastes super sweet and leaves a tinny bitterness in your mouth. Yuck! It’s imitation maple flavoring, MAYBE a smidgeon of real maple syrup, and mostly corn syrup. Real maple syrup is not as harsh; it’s sweet, but with a lower viscosity.

I looked at these bright, vulnerable blue bags hanging in plain sight in the woods and asked, “Don’t you get animals coming after this sweet stuff?” Oh, yes. Weasels. Gnats. Snow fleas. Raccoons. Squirrels. They get wise to what we’re doing out here eventually. So they tell us to replace any bags that have holes, and we strain the sap before we start cooking it. I haven’t seen that part yet, the cooking. They save that for the big festival in late March.

So now I have a better understanding and appreciation of maple syrup and maple sugar. I do not hate the taste of it; I do hate imitations of it. I still prefer honey on my pancakes, though. I can’t wait to see and taste the Wehr Nature Center’s version of that, too!

Photography Ups and Downs

February 9, 2012 by scillagrace

So my son’s fabulous camera, a Nikon D-80, is showing ERR on the display. Somehow, the camera isn’t speaking to the lens. Not sure how this falling out occurred, but to restore them to their previous relationship will require some mailing back and forth and money that he doesn’t have. Bummer! Nevertheless, we went out to the Nature Center with two Panasonic Lumix cameras that I got for free from Steve’s aunt. We walked around the lake and found the frozen waterfall below the dam. And he showed me how to focus manually, which really made me happy! We are now sitting at the dining room table, laptops side by side, playing with our pictures and spooning up some re-heated chili while a chicken roasts in the oven. Here are some of my photo results from the day:

I have lots more playing around to do and more to share, but this will be enough for today. I’m spending time with my son!!! 🙂

Unbelievable, Unseasonal

January 31, 2012 by scillagrace

So, here it is, the last day of January in Wisconsin, and the temperature is….53 degrees Fahrenheit?!

Global warming is no hoax.

One of my Nature in the Parks programs for tomorrow was postponed because parents felt that the first of February would be too cold to send their darling children outside for a field trip. They re-scheduled for the 29th of February. What do you want to bet that tomorrow will be about 20 degrees warmer than the temperature by the end of the month? Of course, you never know. But don’t you think kids are resilient enough to be allowed to go outside every day of the year? They pull on their snow pants, and they’re as protected as if they were wearing bubble wrap! And they love it! They dive headlong into any accumulated snow just so that they can bounce back!

Today’s group at the Wehr Nature Center didn’t go outside because they were doing the Skylab unit under the big inflated planetarium dome. But I went out on the trails. Here are some shots: