Carl Kurtz's Photo Essay: Greater Yellowlegs

In preparation for the upcoming second edition of A Practical Guide to Prairie Restoration by Carl Kurtz, we're excited to be sharing Carl's beautiful photos and observations about nature!

Carl Kurtz is a professional writer, teacher, naturalist, and photographer. He and his wife and partner, Linda, live on a 172-acre family farm in central Iowa that is one of the few prairie seed sources in the Midwest.

Shorebirds come in all sizes, shapes and color styles.  The smallest are species like least sandpipers and semipalmated plovers at 6 or 7 inches in size up to the largest, godwits and curlews, varying from 18 to more than 20 inches. Plumages can be mottled with fine streaking or barring, while some species have more striking coloration.  Their bills vary from long and straight to short and stubby, some bills curving downward, some upward and most designed for probing in moist soil or in muddy shorelines. The greater yellowlegs featured here are medium in size at about 14 inches.  They are currently in mid-continent migration heading for their sub-arctic breeding grounds. 

Thanksgiving Holiday Menu 2: Desserts

What Thanksgiving meal is complete without dessert?

Election Cake from Seasons of Plenty

2 and 3/4 cups flour, sifted                          1/4 cup warm water
3/4 teaspoon salt                                          1/2 cup chopped nuts
1 teaspoon nutmeg                                      1/2 cup raisins
1 cup milk                                                   1/2 cup citron
3/4 cup sugar                                               1 egg
1 envelope yeast                                          1/2 cup shortening

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sift flour, salt, and nutmeg. In a saucepan scald the milk; then add 1/4 cup sugar and stir until dissolved. Cool to lukewarm.

In a large bowl, sprinkle dry yeast into warm water. Stir lukewarm milk mixture. Add 1.5 cups sifted flour mixture and beat with wooden spoon until smooth. Cover with towel and set in a warm place. Allow to rise - about 1 hour. Dough should be light and bubbly.

In a second bowl, crea shortening and remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Add egg, beating well.

Using your hands, mix dough with creamed shortening and sugar. Add remaining 1 and 1/4 cups flour. Knead in citron, raisins, and nuts. This must be thoroughly blended, so take your time.

Place dough in a well-greased 10-inch tube pan and cover. Set in a warm place and allow to rise about 1 hour. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes or until toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool in pan before inverting.

Combine ingredients for sugar glaze. When cake is still slightly warm, drizzle with sugar glaze.



Pumpkin Pie (Mrs. S. D. McClelland) from P.E.O. Cook Book

Peel the pumpkin, remove seeds and the stringy parts. Cut in small pieces and steam. When done beat to a cream with large spoon; press through sieve. to each quart of pumpkin, add three well-beaten eggs, a helping coffee cup sugar, one pint of new milk, one teaspoon each of ginger and nutmeg, half teaspoon allspice and tablespoon melted butter. Line pans with crust. Bake half done, remove from oven and fill with pumpkin and bake again until a light brown.





P.E.O. Cook Book(Souvenir Edition), edited by David E. Schoonover

Seasons of Plenty, by Emilie Hoppe

Thanksgiving Holiday Menu 1

Surprise your family with this delicious meal from the University of Iowa Press's cook book collection. Come back on Wednesday for our dessert ideas!

Roast Turkey (Elizabeth Hiller, Cooking School Instructor) from P.E.O. Cook Book

Select a plump, young, ten-poung turkey, dress, clean, stuff and truss. Place it on a rack in a dripping pan, rub entire surface with salt and spread with a butter paste, make by creaming together one-third cup butter an adding slowly one-fourth cup flour. This is spread over breast, wings and legs. Place in a hot oven and borne delicately, turning turkey often. Reduce heat when evenly browned, add two cups water to fat in the pan and baste every fifteen minutes until turkey is cooked.

Buttermilk Biscuits from Prairie Cooks

2 cups all-purpose flour                                  1 teaspoon soda
2 teaspoons sugar                                           2/3 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup butter or margarine

Sift flour and sugar together. Add butter and cut in as if mixing a pie crust. Stir soda into buttermilk and add all at once to flour mixture. Stir with a fork until it holds together. Turn out on floured board and knead two or three ties. Pat dough into a 1-inch-high round and cut out with a 1.5-inch biscuit cutter. Gently bunch any remaining dough to form and cut last biscuits. Place closely together on buttered baking sheet and brush tops light with buttermilk. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes or until brown. Makes 16 - 18 biscuits.

P.E.O. Cook Book(Souvenir Edition), edited by David E. Schoonover

Prairie Cooks, by Carrie Young with Felicia Young

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES

In cutting through ice, the muskrats are adept if they work from below, and they may work well at this in water. They may gnaw upward through the ice in the middle of a marsh, and then heap up the vegetation for  a new lodge around the new hole. I happened to be walking across the care ice of a marsh center when a muskrat cut through ahead of me. It pulled its wet body out, and there it sat amid ice splinters beside a hole leading down through a foot or so of ice. A muskrat may similarly gnaw from below the ice over the plunge hole of a solidly frozen, abandoned lodge and rehabilitate the lodge in a few hours.

From OF MEN AND MARSHES by Paul L. Errington

Gardening in November

Saturday, November 18

...Dan turned the soil and I pulled out the dried corn stalks and the dead cosmos, marigold, okra, and sunflower plants. The accumulated stuff of an entire season's growth, fruition, and decay so quickly cast away. A mess of rotten straw, dried-up cucumber vines, sodden leaves, and soggy squash plants gradually turned under, gradually exposing the rich dark soil itself, chiseled by the spade, moistened by the snow, glinting suddenly in the noonday sun. Just the dark soil and the white row covers.

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

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES

With the first freeze-up, mallards typically appear by thousands. They cover the remnants of open water or sit on the ice. If the ice melts again in a day or two, the waterfowl population may not be so much different from before except for the departure of the coots and the mild-weather ducks and for the great proportions of mallards. More of the ducks have brighter plumage in late fall: the green heads of the mallard drakes stand out and so do the white throats and brown necks of the pintail drakes. The drakes of what are locally known as the "northern spoonbills" do not look like the same species as the brownish shovelers of early fall.

Mallards may be in no hurry to leave as long as they have access to cornfields and a safe place to sit between feedings. They may still be on the larger lakes by early winter.

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES by Paul L. Errington

Michael Lannoo Interview Part 3

Your new book has convinced me that conservation biologists trained at Lakeside Lab—and biological research stations like it—might just be able to solve today’s huge array of environmental problems. Tell us more before we forget about this summer’s extreme heat and drought.

Our current societal emphasis on the spending habits of 15-year-old girls at shopping malls means that we are culturally ill equipped to understand the things that are really important to us. Further, we retain little memory of critical events such as environmental disasters, especially when we were not directly affected or inconvenienced. At some point in the future, for civilization to continue, we will have to place our emphases on things necessary to propagate civilization. And both our resources and our models for operation will come from ecosystems. Right now, nobody understands ecosystems better than people working at field stations. These rubber-boot biologists collectively know everything that we now know about ecosystem functions and services. Lose these guys (of both sexes) and you’re left with folks trying to understand life by sitting in front of a computer screen. And life is still too complicated, and probably always will be, for us to adequately model it in any sort of reasonably predictable way. Concerning this past summer’s weather, people sitting in front of their computers and looking at their models say, “Wow, we never thought this would happen!” while field biologists are out in it looking. Getting sunburned, sweating their rear-ends off, measuring everything they can, observing effects firsthand. In science, these facts should always take precedence, and by and large it’s folks at field stations who are collecting them.

Circling back to the younger Michael Lannoo who discovered his future at Lakeside in 1977, what advice would you give to a similar nineteen-year-old taking a course there for the first time?

Become a sponge; look, listen, and absorb. Know that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Also know that the first rule of life is living. Have a good time—but not so good that your fun gets in the way of learning—and know that human memory functions best when experiences are tied to deep emotions. Lakeside has always been a place where you can discover who you are and what you’re about, if you’re open to it. Right now our society sets us up to be clueless, and to be absolutely serious about our cluelessness. So much better to know yourself, and with this knowledge learn not to take yourself so seriously. During that first summer at Lakeside you’ll become knowledgeable, you’ll become competent, and if you want, you’ll begin to understand who and what you are.

Michael Lannoo, author of The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature