1. Gardening for wildlife: butterfly and moth caterpillar needs - Thursday 5 March
2. See 100 different kinds of birds at Heron's Head Park - Saturday 7 March
3. Plants: oxalis and ehrharta grass vs miner's lettuce
4. March 13 - International Day of Action for Rivers
5. Botany training--in Grand Canyon
6. For Farley/Phil Frank fans: exhibition in Bolinas
7. Feedback
8. A dangerous state: The Californication of the Democratic Party
9. Naturalist notes: rare butterfly/great horned owl/Comet Lulin/how dictators solve water shortages
10. Raw foodies: beware
11. Death of a heroic woman, Alison Des Forges--and a lesson for us all
1. California Native Plant Society meeting - free and open to the public
MARCH 5, THURSDAY
Butterfly and Moth Caterpillars Feeding on California Native Plants
7:30 pm, Speaker: Dr. Jerry Powell
Plant Identification Workshop - 6 to 7:15 pm, Leader: Kirra Swenerton
San Francisco County Fair Bldg
9th Av & Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park
Our speaker is Dr. Jerry Powell, Emeritus Professor of Entomology and Entomologist in the Agricultural Experiment Station, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Division of Insect Biology, University of California, Berkeley, as he shares his knowledge and experience concerning our native lepidoptera. After giving us a brief overview of his life’s work, he will share his knowledge and his amazing photographs to emphasize the diversity of caterpillar feeding types and to show representative images of the adults (which do not feed on plants except to take nectar). Jerry tells us he first became interested in moths and butterflies at age 13 when he was “sentenced” to a summer course for junior naturalists at the San Diego Natural History Museum. By summer’s end he was an incurable lepidopterist. He began to specialize on the so-called microlepidoptera in his senior year at UC Berkeley, “probably because nobody else in the west was so gullible.” He is best known by non-entomologists for the popular California Insects (UC Press 1979). Dr. Powell received his B.S. (1955) and Ph.D. (1961) from UC Berkeley. He has spent his long career at the University and he currently holds the titles of Professor of the Graduate School and Director Emeritus of the Essig Museum of Entomology.
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2. Heron's Head Park
Public tours, 10 a.m.–noon at Jennings Street and Cargo Way, 2 blocks south of Pier 96.
Sponsored by San Francisco Nature Education
The final tour will be held on Saturday, March 7th of 2009.
This field trip is a first time opportunity for the public to observe the 100 birds that visit the exciting wetland known as Heron’s Head Park. Come and experience the wonder of observing and learning about waterfowl, shorebirds, and wading birds that call Heron’s Head Park home in the winter. San Francisco Nature Education has trained six Lowell H.S. students to serve as interns and lead birding tours of this wetlands known as Heron’s Head Park in Hunter’s Point. For more information, www.sfnature.org or 415-387-9160
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3. Wild plants: One goodie--and two baddies
Two invasive plants are becoming increasingly noticed along the California coast, ehrharta and yellow oxalis. They are the bane of wildland managers, but they are now beginning to frustrate home gardeners, who find them difficult to manage.
Yellow oxalis (a few people still use an old name, Bermuda buttercup), Oxalis pes-caprae, is arguably the most difficult weed the gods have devised for the California coast. It is active only in the rainy season, and goes dormant shortly after the rains cease, dying down to the bulb, which is several inches underground. The bulb produces a prodigious number of offsets and and it also sends out deep lateral runners, by means of which it colonizes new ground rapidly. This reproductive mechanism is highly successful, and it doesn't need to produce seed. (None of the plants in California reproduce sexually!) Traditional weeding methods are of little use, as removing the top-growth causes it to send up another shoot. If you persist, you can exhaust the bulb, but most people become exhausted before the bulb does. If you are unable to devote the time to removing by hand, spraying herbicide (Roundup will do it) is usually effective at killing the bulb. However, if you accidentally spray nearby desirable plants they will be killed also.
Baddie #2 is ehrharta, Ehrharta erecta, a perennial grass. It spreads by seed--and does it spread! It forms a stout and deep root system. It can start out in low-light conditions--sometimes in light so dim that you would have trouble reading. It slowly gathers its strength and sends out a flowering culm with tiny florets. These often poke out, porcupine-like, from shrubbery, such as groundcover junipers or clipped hedges.
Oxalis and ehrharta, once they claim territory, never yield it to any other plant. They are only irksome to the home gardener, but their effects on the California coastal ecosystems is devastating, a problem that we are going to be sorry we neglected.
The goodie
The plentiful appearance of miner's lettuce may be deceiving. It formerly grew in every little niche it could find: vacant lots, under shrubs, wherever there was a patch of exposed soil. Now it is being displaced by the aggressive yellow oxalis and ehrharta. It is only a matter of time--alas, a very short time--before the delightful miner's lettuce will be a thing of the past in San Francisco and much of the coast. I would encourage people to plant it in their garden. Likely it will persist on its own if the conditions are half-way favorable--and you keep out oxalis and ehrharta. It reseeds itself abundantly, especially if there is cool shade and not a lot of competition from taller plants. It is a cheerful plant--and edible.
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4.
Demand Water for Life, Not for Death
The 12th Annual International Day of Action for Rivers
Every year thousands of people around the world take action to celebrate and protect rivers.
Here in Berkeley, we're holding an International Rivers Film Festival: Lights! Camera! Action! on March 13.
Visit our website to see other exciting events planned for this year.
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5. Combine the Grand Canyon, botany, and learning:
http://www.gcvolunteers.org/trainings_botanists.html Budding Botanists
Colorado Stratification
Layer by layer
History revealed--
Hungry river writes exposé!
Ernest A. Peterson
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6. For Phil Frank fans
The Bolinas Museum is hosting a special exhibit featuring the rarely-seen assemblage boxes by Phil Frank from March 7th to April 26th, 2009, from 3:00 to 5:00 on the afternoon of Saturday the 7th an opening will be held in the main gallery. To learn more about the exhibit details, read the press release and view a PDF of the show catalogue please visit our News page link: www.farleycomicstrip.com/news.html
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7. Feedback
Antonio Piccagli:
If I am not mistaken, the reason that some vegetables are sweeter has to do with resisting the cold. In order to resist freezing, as temperatures drop, vegetables store more of their energy in sugar form. The sugar helps them stay structurally sound by lowering the freezing point of the water in them. I can't explain why some plants are better at this process than others. Perhaps slow growth is another piece of the sweetness puzzle, but I am not totally convinced.
I neglected to paste this (ahem, delicious) item last newsletter, so, in order to give it context, I am re-pasting part of it: I think the taste change has to do with the weather. Carrots don't love hot temperatures and if the carrot is developing more slowly, as it would in times of less sun and heat , it would have more time to accumulate sugars. Perhaps this is why winter greens, like kale, are also better in the winter?
You may be right about the sweetness and flavor being better in the slow-growing winter season. However, do you know that this is the correct explanation? In the case of fruits, the sweetness is strongly correlated with heat and the amount of energy collected from the sun. Think peaches and melons, which are best in July and August. With a root crop, is it just the opposite? Is there science on this?
Mei Ling Hui:
Hi Jake, It took me a couple tries to find the right combo of words in my favorite search engine to find this - but yes! There is scientific evidence to support carrots tasting better in cooler temps! Though I was dead wrong about my sugar guess.
Apparently, though the carrots actually have more sugar when grown in hotter temperatures, they also have more terpenes, and terpenes mask sweet flavors with a bitter, green, or earthy taste. Wikipedia reports that the word "terpene" derives from the word "turpentine" because turpentine is made from resin, of which terpenes are a major component.
Here's a link to the abstract where I got his information:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/97517461/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
I don't think this is more specific to root veggies though, I think it would relate more closely to those that prefer cooler growing temperatures. I did a little more searching, for info about taste and growing temperatures for kale, but didn't come up with any scientific studies. (They must be out there! Ensuring best quality of product is itself a huge business!) Though I did find a few mentions here and there of how minerals in the soil are more readily available for absorption by plants in different soil temperatures, which may also affect taste.
Thanks for the interesting distraction!
TANKLESS WATER HEATERS
Allan Ridley:
We keep a bucket in bathroom to collect the cold water in the supply line before the hot arrives to shower & sink. There is usually enough in the bucket to flush the toilet. The kitchen sink line water is used to water house plants.
Maggie Robbins:
Hi Jake, On long pipe runs for hot water... one thing about those big water tanks is we put them in basements because they eventually burst or leak. And they're very heavy and large and so we put them out of the way. "Tankless" hot water heaters can be installed in a much smaller space and are not going to dump 60 gallons on the floor if they do leak. They can be put into a cupboard near the kitchen and bath, vented outside. Some can even be installed mounted on the wall outside the house, so you could put it adjacent to the kitchen and bath. Of course if you're simply replacing your dead conventional big-tank hot water heater then you may not want to re-plumb your house now, but in some cases it could be pretty easy.
I put tankless in quotes above because the one I had did have a small tank. The tank was quite small, maybe 5 gallons. Water in that tank was heated and circulated for the heater (hot water radiators) and a spiral tube ran through the tank that was then used to heat the domestic hot water for the shower, etc. Because this small tank was always hot, it provided "endless" hot domestic hot water because that spiral tube turned cold water into hot water in the seconds it took to go through the tank.
In my flat in London, as was common there, the hot water tank (whether large or of these new almost-tankless types) were installed in the kitchen. They were easy to access so you could switch them off when you went on vacation. Whatever heat they do give off goes to heating the kitchen rather than the basement or the outdoors. In a cool climate like SF, that works just fine. Maybe not so fine in Bakersfield, I suppose.
Robert Nelson:
Dear Jake: A recent client of mine put a tankless water heater in not so much to save water or energy, but to free up the space that a
tank type water heater occupies. As detailed in the parenthetical note to your mention (not the first time in Nature News...) of tankless water heaters, water can be wasted while running the cold water out of the line. Some clever engineer invented a system to allow "instant hot water" by recirculating the cold back into the system until the hot arrives. I don't know how well the system works or how reliable it is at this point, but some information can be found here:
http://www.taco-hvac.com/uploads/FileLibrary/100-49.pdf
Jane Martin:
Hi Jake RE: tankless water heaters – if you have a long supply line you’ll end up wasting as much if not more water waiting for hot. I suggest you look at shortening the plumbing run by locating the tankless closer to the faucet. I have installed these at my building (and am an architect for what that’s worth) so let me know if you want a consultation. Also, for multi-unit buildings or anywhere hot water, especially small amounts (eg. hand washing) is in high (frequent) demand, a tankless may not make much sense. Some say that tankless wastes water – because it’s “endless” hot, whereas with a tank when the water starts to go cool people elect to discontinue use.
I would be interested in a consultation, Jane, although there's one big obstacle: I couldn't bear for you to see my basement. Oh, the humiliation! It's been manana, manana, for years, but it never seems to come. Instead, I just get busier and busier, and the basement gets more dysfunctional.
John Anderson:
Jake, Thanks for the sections on plastics and the Pacific gyre. I’ve wondered when reading about this: when I was a child reading children’s science book (e.g. “All Aout the Oceans”) they talked about the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic, and what a special part of the ocean it is (or was), because the currents tend to concentrate floating objects there. So it seems to me those gyres must have (or had) some specialized roles in the ocean’s ecology. I wonder if there are studies on that, or if it is too late to find out. Thanks again for the newsletter.
Lest it be outdone in the attacking-animal category, Boulder, Colo., can report that a "bitter bovine" attacked a Boulder biker. NewWest.net said a cow "charged a woman" on a trail and knocked her down. "The cow had left the scene by the time rangers arrived, but hikers coming down the trail were warning others about the rogue bovine."
(Mad-cow disease?)
I wonder why they didn’t make the headline “Bitter bovine bullies Boulder biker”?
John: Newspapers pay people to think up clever headlines--eg, one of my friends, who worked for the SF Examiner in the 1950s, wrote the headline "Mutiny on the high C's" in regard to one of Maria Callas's tangles with the law. So, should I recommend you for a job with High Country News?
Frank Noto:
RE: Drawing of legislative districts--I am a continued fan of your newsletter, Jake, so please take no offense when I point out occasional discrepancies. FYI, voters last year took away the drawing of legislative districts in CA from the State Legislature. That means that districts are much more likely to be competitive, and districts are far less likely to be one-party districts. Gerrymandering is out the door.
But be careful what you wish for: More competititive districts are generally a good thing for big business and other wealthy special interests. Democratic legislators who normally would vote their constituencies (and generally vote for the environment) will need to lean more toward business interests who may oppose environmental actions that appear to cost them money. In the longer-term, it may also increase the likelihood of anti-environment Republicans winning control of one or both legislative houses (again, partially for the same reason, more campaign money from business), not to mention Congress. We won't know what impact it will have in the next election after re-districting (2012) until we understand the political (and economic) climate then, but in the short term it will start hurting environmental causes in California soon, though probably only slightly.
Take offense? Certainly not, Frank--I love it when people give different points of view, particularly when they're provocative or give one pause, as yours has done.
For starters, I was thinking that Prop 11 was defeated, but maybe you're right. It seems the election night returns see-sawed for awhile, and I thought it had been defeated. As to the dangers you point out, again, you may be right, and I do need to think about that some more, although I am not totally convinced. I am well aware of money's ability to mold opinion: eg, this note in the newsletter item you're reacting to:
The worst of these was a postponement of regulations to clean up exhaust from diesel construction equipment, which causes serious air pollution and health problems. Bizarrely, the two Republican leaders who pushed for this rollback represent the Central Valley, which has some of the worst air quality and diesel pollution in the state. The budget also exempted eight planned highway infrastructure projects from environmental review.
You'd think that this would command voter attention, but those two Republicans will be reelected easily.
I don't know if your scenarios will happen that way or not, but they may, and I will take your advice to heart.
Louise Lacey:
Thank you for this, Jake: www.savestrawberrycanyon.org
And I always read what you have to say about population. The subject is even more important to me (my boook LUNACEPTION) than my native plants.
And I'm sure I don't need to tell you that without arresting population growth, there won't be many native plants or animals anywhere on earth.
Mary Keitelman:
Re the aspartame item-- there is plenty of corroboration elsewhere, but, I did get this feedback on the rense website:
Rense - one of the most notorious Nazi sites on the internet. Congratulations on become a total dupe.
http://rensewatch.blogspot.com/
Marci Scileppi:
Chinatown is being invaded by CCSF. What do the inhabitants of Chinatown think of that?
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8. A dangerous state
...The Californication of the Democratic Party carries all sorts of risks. The most obvious is that California has the most dysfunctional politics in the country. The Golden State has one of the highest unemployment rates in America, at 9.3%, thanks to its high taxes, its unions, its anti-business climate and its gigantic housing bubble. Some 100,000 people have fled the state each year since the early 2000s. More would follow if they could sell their houses. A second risk is party disunity. The rise of the Californians has already produced bloodshed: Mrs Pelosi beat Martin Frost, a Texan moderate, for the leadership (Martin Frost? Pelosi beat Steny Hoyer for the leadership. JS), and Mr Waxman dethroned John Dingell, from Michigan, for the chairmanship of the energy committee. Sherrod Brown, a senator for Ohio, and Debbie Stabenow, a senator for Michigan, have both worried aloud about overzealous environmental legislation and the coastal bias against manufacturing.
The biggest risk is overreach. Many Californian liberals are as far to the left on cultural issues as the southern Republicans were to the right. Many of them also draw their support from two groups that have limited appeal to the rest of the country, particularly to the “bitter” voters that Mr Obama had such trouble wooing in November; the fabulously rich and public-sector activists. All this suggests that one of Mr Obama’s most delicate tasks, if he wants to prevent his party from being captured by the “left coast” in the same way that the Republicans were captured by the South, will be to contain the Californian barons. Excerpt from Lexington in The Economist
"America is built on a tilt and everything loose rolls toward California." Mark Twain
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9.
Naturalist notes
Locally rare butterfly
In early February local naturalists and Nature in the City members, Matt Zlatunich and Liam O'Brien, sent a letter to Dr. John Burns from the Smithsonian Institution, regarding an unusual discovery at the Presidio. The butterfly in question was of the genus Erynnis.
Matt wrote, "Although the host plants of both E. tristis and E. funeralis are present at the site, any Erynnis is extremely rare in San Francisco county, and we believe this lone individual to be a vagrant. Opinions of local lepidopterists have varied, and none have been conclusive."
Dr. John Burns replied with a positive identification: "Matt, this is without question an example of Erynnis funeralis (and, if it's of any interest, it's a male).... Your photographs are good and the skipper itself is in good condition. I think that E. funeralis is probably more mobile than other species of Erynnis."
Great horned owl
I was walking Mt Sutro's Historic Trail when I heard a great horned owl hooting at me. I looked up, and there it was peering down at me from its nest in the top of a giant eucalyptus. Every time it hooted it got a response from somewhere nearby, presumably its mate. I returned after a couple hours working and it repeated its performance. I speculated that it was nesting, and that my presence was disturbing to it and it was scolding me, or that it was communicating a fact to its mate. Anyone know?
Watching The Skies For Comet Lulin (copied from NPR's website):
NPR's All Things Considered, February 23, 2009 · Comet Lulin, a two-tailed green-colored comet, can be seen in the eastern sky all week, but is closest to the Earth Monday night.
"After it gets dark, look for two bright stars near the horizon: one is the planet Saturn, the other is Regulus, the star, and for the next few nights, Lulin will be somewhere between them," says Kelly Beatty, senior contributing editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. Beatty says there's a good chance of spotting the comet with binoculars pointed in that general area.
(NPR didn't make it clear what Monday it was talking about, but I assume it was Monday the 23rd. If so, the comet may be dimming beyond binocular capability. Damn clouds.)
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Forest planned to change climate
The Turkmenistan president, Saparmurat Niyazov, has ordered a forest to be planted to change his desert nation's climate - the latest of the autocratic leader's elaborate projects, which include an artificial lake and an ice palace. From Guardian Weekly March 06 2008
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10. Most of your food should be cooked
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Pennisi_99.html (Wrangham)
YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
Click here
In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
Dr Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
...Dr Wrangham is relying on a compelling chain of logic. And in doing so he may have cast light not only on what made humanity, but on one of the threats it faces today.
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11.
Obituary: Alison Des Forges
Alison Des Forges, a witness to genocide, died on February 12th, aged 66
Two plane crashes bookmarked Alison Des Forges's life. The first was nearly 15 years ago, when a luxury jet carrying two African presidents was shot down by missiles over Rwanda. The second was last week, when a cramped commuter plane crashed in icy weather near Buffalo, New York, killing 50 people. The first crash served as the pretext for the swiftest genocide in history. The second silenced its most dogged witness, a tiny American lady with silver hair.
On April 6th 1997, Mrs Des Forges was at home in Buffalo. The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated at 8.30 pm that day, which was lunchtime in Buffalo. Twenty minutes later, a friend telephoned Mrs Des Forges from Kigali, the Rwandan capital. "This is it. We're finished," said Monique Mujawamariya, a fellow human-rights monitor.
Mrs Des Forges call her every half-hour, late into the night. She heard her describe steadily more alarming scenes--militiamen going from house to house, pulling people out and killing them. Eventually, they came to Ms Mujawamariya's door. Mrs Des Forges told her to pass the telephone to the killers. She would pretend to be from the White House, she said, and warn them off. "No, that won't work," said Ms Mujawamariya. Then she added: "Please take care of my children. I don't want you to hear this." And she hung up.
...She made calls, sent faxes and frantically gathered information. By April 17th she was convinced that a full-blown genocide was under way. She was one of the first outsiders to say so. But everyone who mattered ignored her. Africa specialists at the State Department wept with her when she described what was going on, but who listens to Africa specialists? The top bureaucrats at the UN were concerned mostly with evacuating foreigners. President Bill Clinton was anxious to avoid another Somalia (where, the previous year, 18 American soldiers had been killed during a humanitarian mission). Mrs Des Forges could not even persuade the Pentagon to jam the radio broadcasts that co-ordinated the slaughter. It would have cost too much.
...She then wrote the definitive account: nearly 8000 pages of scrupulously footnoted horror. Future historians will depend on it. Her testimony helped put several of the perpetrators behind bars. And she made it impossible to argue, as many did at the time, that the genocide was a spontaneous explosion of ancient tribal hatred. She read the plans. She saw the receipts for half a million machetes...She took extraordinary risks, rushing to the scenes of massacres and questioning killers when their blades were barely dry. She left out none of the ghastly details: the wives forced to bury their husbands before being raped; the baby thrown alive into a latrine.
...What drove her? One story is revealing. In Burundi, Rwanda's neighbour, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in 1993. The Western media barely noticed. Hutu officers in Rwanda concluded that they could do the same thing, and no one would give a damn. Mrs Des Forges wanted to document such atrocities so meticulously, and publicise them so persistently, that people would have to give a damn. Her book was called, after a killer's cry, "Leave None to Tell the Story". She knew that story-telling matters.
Excerpted from The Economist 21 February 2009
Guardian Weekly adds (excerpts):
...Even as she was alerting the world, she was desperately trying to help Rwandan friends. After she had failed to persuade Bill Clinton to intervene, the president's national security adviser, Tony Lake, told her to "make more noise". She understood he meant that the constituency of people who cared about Rwanda was so small it had little influence in Washington. Painstaking research led her to conclude that governments and the UN "all knew of the preparations for massive slaughter and failed to take the steps needed to prevent it".
...Last year, they banned her from Rwanda. "Her work on the abuses being committed by the Rwandan government today made her something of a sknk at a global garden party," said...the associate director of Human Rights Watch.
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