Some lessons from nature

Staff

Published Saturday, November 22, 2008

My neighbor Crandall stops by.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“Everything is copacetic. My brother Cletus quit smoking. Whenever he feels like having a cigarette, he stands outside in the freezing cold. He and Still Bill make quite a pair. Cletus is so cheap he won’t even buy a rain gauge. When somebody tells Cletus how much rain he had, Cletus says, ‘That’s about what I had.’ He’s so miserly that he only changes the windshield wiper on the driver’s side. And Still Bill—if he is ever going to stop, he would have to speed up a little. It’s hard to believe he set a high jump record in high school.”

“He lifted mediocrity to new heights,” I say.

“Boy, that mercy degree you got from Generous High School is really paying off. Still Bill’s record didn’t count. The Minnesota State High School League said it wasn’t legal. What Still Bill had done was to have grabbed himself by the seat of the pants and threw himself over the bar.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that,” I proclaim.

“If you went to a mind reader, you’d only have to pay half price. You are like good candy in a bad tooth. I hope you are not calling me a liar. I’m better than George Washington. George said he couldn’t tell a lie. I can, but I choose not to.”

Notes from a Minnesota morning

I went for a morning walk. It’s a delightful way to give a beginning to a day. Hope has feet. A chill spilled out of the new day. I walked by a favorite tree. There was a crow there. He was going nowhere. I saw the clouds on the horizon. They were imagined mountains. The weather began to spit out rain that wanted to be snow. It didn’t disturb my walk a bit. I have found that the best advice I can give a person is to carry your weather with you.

Nature lessons

Frank Chapman, who created the Christmas Bird Count, wrote of goldfinches, “Their flight is expressive of their joyous nature and as they bound through the air they hum a gay ‘per-chic-o-ree.’ Their love song is delivered with an ecstasy and abandon which carries them off their feet, and they circle over the fields sowing the air with music.”

A black-capped chickadee weighs less than one half-ounce. That’s about the same as two quarters.

In the Middle Ages, many people believed that butterflies were disguised fairies bent on stealing dairy products such as butter, milk and cream.

Rodent teeth never stop growing. The enamel on the front of a tooth is harder than on the back. When a rodent chews on something hard, the back of the tooth wears down faster than the front, sharpening the tooth.

I’ve been reading

These words in a condensed form are from Michael Pollan’s, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “An American supermarket is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn. Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. A chicken nugget piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, the corn oil in which it gets fried. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink is to have some corn with your corn.

“Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup — after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candles, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and the shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. Yes, it’s even in the Twinkies, too. There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. You’ll find plenty of corn in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself — the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built — is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.”

Q and A

“Are there any plants that I can grow near walnut trees?” The juglone in walnuts is toxic to many plants, but there are a good number that will coexist with walnut trees. Those include: Astilbes, begonias, bee balm, coral bells, crocus, daffodils, daylilies, geraniums, hostas, Japanese maples, snowdrops, spirea, tulips, and zinnias—to name a few.

“Why does a snake shed its skin?” A snake molts because its skin cannot grow fast enough to keep up with its body.

“How does a flock of birds manage to do synchronized turns?” A researcher at the University of Washington studied slow-motion films of flocks and determined that a change in the flock’s direction could originate with any single bird located anywhere in the flock. It might be in response a predator’s threat or another factor. The nearest birds to that single bird of change react to that action at a speed of 15 thousandths of a second.

Thanks for stopping by

“Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light.” —  Jennie Jerome Churchill

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will  be too late.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

DO GOOD.

Al Batt of Hartland is a member of the Albert Lea Audubon Society. E-mail him at SnoEowl@aol.com.

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