On the Fly: An Interview with Connie Mutel

Check out this link to the UNESCO City of Literature featuring Connie Mutel, author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa and A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/cityofliteratureusa

Habitat of the Month

Pacific Coastline

Black Oystercatcher

Where land and sea meet, expect to find interesting habitats. Cliffs carved by the force of waves beating against rocks make perfect homes for birds that eat fish and shellfish.

Black oystercatchers are large shorebirds that live along rocky coastlines. They have all-black bodies, yellow eyes, light pink legs, and long orange bills. When you walk on a beach, you can hear them noisily peeping as they look for food along the water's edge. Sometimes their call sounds like a whistle.

Oystercatchers make nests called scrapes in shallow dents along the rocky beach. The parent birds line the nest with small shells and pebbles. When the eggs hatch, both parents care for the chicks until they can fly. Most black oystercatchers live all year round where they nest.

When oil from big ships and garbage spills into the ocean, the black oystercatcher's home is in danger. Keeping the ocean and beach clean is most important to the birds that live along the coast.

Where Do Birds Live? by Claudia McGehee

This Week in Iowa Nature

Migrating painted lady butterflies swarm across fields and roads; they can overwinter in sunny, warm places.

The Iowa Nature Calendar, by Jean Prior and James Sandrock

Gardening in November

Wednesday, November 1

Now for the first times in five months, the poles are down and the fruit is completely harvested -- twelve dozen Enchantments and four dozen Big Beef slicers sitting on the back porch, to be ripened on shelves in the basement. And now as I look out my window in the late afternoon, all I can see in that once abundant spot is the pile of dead pepper plants and tomato plants waiting to be bagged up for the refuse, and a ghostly white row cover along the front of the bed, protecting the radishes and green onions. But I can still remember how it looked in high summer -- tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants pendant on all the vines and bushes.

Carl H. Klaus, My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season

Tree of the Week

Ohio Buckeye, Aesculus glabra Willd

DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: Leaves once-pinnately compound, opposite; leaflets 5 to 7 in number (usually 5), 3 to 6 inches long, elliptic to slightly oblong, gradually tapered to both the apex and the base; margins finely toothed. WInter twigs stout, red-brown to gray, glabrous; leaf scars rather large, half-rounded to shield-shaped, bundle scars 3 or in 3 groups. Buds ovoid, light brown, with 5 or 6 pairs of dry brown scales, the terminal 1/2 to 2/3 inch long. Flowers yellow-green, perfect or imperfect, irregular, in panicles, appearing after the leaves in spring. Fruit a nutlike capsule 1 to 2 inches in diameter with 1 or 2 seeds; capsule wall thick and leathery with deciduous prickles; seeds large, dark shiny brown, with a single large, pale spot (hilum). Bark ashy gray, separating into scaly plates divided by shallow furrows.

SIMILAR TREES: Common horsechestnut, our only other tree with palmately compound leaves, has white flowers and obovate, coarsely toothed leaflets abruptly tapered to the apex. Several shrubby species of Aesculus are planted. In winter, horsechestnut has dark, sticky buds.

IOWA DISTRIBUTION: Native south of a line extending from Mills County northeast to Boone County east to Clinton County. Planted throughout the state and sometimes escaping.

Forest and Shade Trees of Iowa (Third Edition), by Peter J. van der Linden and Donald R. Farrar

Scarth Exhibit

If you’re in the Baraboo area tomorrow, come check out Linda & Robert Scarth’s DEEP NATURE: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM IOWA (as well as some of their other work), which will be on display at the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Art Discovery Day. Hope to see you there!

October Gardening Tip

As the frost kills plants, remove them. Annuals should be dug up or pulled out by their roots. Perennials, except for roses, should be cut off an inch or two above the groud. Put undiseased plant material in a compost pile, chopping up large pieces. If plant material is diseased, put it on a special, seperate pile to prevent disease from spreading.

-- Veronica Lorson Fowler, Gardening in Iowa and Surrounding Areas