What's It?

This blog is the first of a new feature I plan on running every so often. I call it my “What’s It?” feature.

Readers who think they know the identity of the item or items shown in the accompanying photo may email me at tomgseymour@gmail.com or, if they wish, reply directly to the blogsite. The first person with the correct identification will get mentioned in my blog.

Good luck and have fun.

Tom

Tick Horror Show

Tick Horror Show

The following is the letter my friend Dan Ladd of Belfast recently sent me. I offer it here in its entirety, since not only is it full of information that everyone who goes outdoors ought to read, Dan is an excellent and entertaining writer. So here is a guest appearance from Dan Ladd:

“Here is a creepy story I should have sent on Halloween.
Walter Guinon and I hiked the southern section of the Georges Highland Path Saturday Oct 27. It was a fairly long section of 6.7 miles, but mostly flat along the Oyster River and through the Oyster River Bog. It does climb two hills, one near the beginning of the trail after Baker Woods just outside of Thomaston and one near the end of the hike which stops at Route 90 in Warren.

The Georges Highland path has 40 miles of hiking trails from Thomaston to Montville. They are not contiguous trails and are made up of  lands from about 50 private land owners who offered public access to their land. The Oyster River Bog has over 1200 acres held in conservation easements and was founded in 1977.

We packed a lunch, water, maps, socks, and a walking stick. We wore blaze orange because it was the first day of deer hunting season. We got a decent start at 10:30 and even carried matches and flashlights just in case we couldn’t finish before the 5:30 sunset. I felt that we were well prepared as we even spent a few hours scouting the trail at both ends and the parking situation.

 After a couple of hours on the trail we were packing our outer shirts and hiking in tee shirts as the temperature climbed to a very pleasant October day. We crossed a power line that was cut though the landscape straight as an arrow. It afforded us a clear view of the distant mountains and an opportunity to argue as to whether it was Dodge Mt or not and if it was northwest or north northwest. I had a compass in my pack but it mattered little and was more fun to debate than settle the point.

We hiked down through a beautiful oak grove and noted the lack of acorns and heard a pileated woodpecker. We talked about how far we had to go to reach Keene Brook which we would hike along for half a mile and once we crossed the brook we would be more than half way through the hike. We planned to eat our lunch as soon as we crossed the stream.

Shortly after we started along the stream bank we encountered thigh high grass. I looked at my legs and saw little dots moving up my pants. Walter was hiking in front of me and I saw his faded jeans speckled with climbing black dots. I didn’t need my glasses to tell that we were covered with ticks. We stopped and picked the ticks off our pants but we had miles to hike through this terrain and were nearly at the half way mark.

Fifteen minutes later we stopped and picked another dozen ticks off our clothes including our shirts. Walter said that we were fighting a losing battle. I could see the ticks land on my pants as the grass rubbed on my jeans when I walked through it. It was easy to flick them off but if they were not dislodged the first flick they were much harder to pick off as they dug in and held on.

We stopped on some high ground a little later and stripped our packs and shirts off. We did a thorough delousing but soon we were hiking in the tall grass once more. We stopped again and found ticks on our skin and one that had burrowed into Walters side. I could not dig it out with my fingers but Walter had a Swiss army knife which has tweezers in it. We crossed the foot bridge and didn’t stop for lunch as land was low. For the next half mile, we just pushed onward. We hiked into a timber cutting operation and the area was free of grass.

We stopped and picked ticks off and ate our lunch. Two hunters came down a woods road on an all-terrain vehicle with rifles slung on their shoulders. I was glad we were wearing blaze orange vests. They came over and asked if we had seen any moose or moose sign. We told them we had seen tracks. We also told them about the tick infestation but I don’t think they grasped the magnitude of it as they headed toward the bog. Ironically they were from Jay, Maine and had to come to hunt on the coast as that was their moose lottery hunting area. Walter said that they most likely passed more moose on the trip down than they would see here.

The tick situation improved as we hiked toward Spit rock which would be five and a half miles into our trip. The trail was flatter and was bisected with many woods roads which were cut for the logging operation. We were still finding a few ticks on our pants but not like hiking on the edge of the bog or stream. My ankle had been bothering me as we hiked near the bank of the stream which was uneven but after the lunch break and a good self-massage I could pick up the pace.

We were deep into a discourse on the merits of early voting when we came upon spit rock. From here forward it would be downhill to the Oyster River and then slightly uphill to Walter’s truck parked on Route 90. We crossed a dry stream bed with a foot bridge and wondered if it could be the Oyster River. But shortly we crossed the Oyster River and it had a nice water flow and a new log bridge with a plank seat which we utilized. We reached Walter’s truck at 4:30 after walking though Johnson’s boat storage yard and commenting on some of the sail boat designs. Walter suggested we check for ticks. We found that he had two and I had none.

Walter drove us back to the starting point where my truck was parked and on the way my right triceps started itching. Once we arrived I could see in the truck mirror I had a tick digging into my arm. Walter scraped it off and I got my magnifying glass from my truck and we took a good look at the tick.

This was a deer tick (Ixodes Scapularis) the black leg tick, the only type according to the medical authorities that spreads Lyme’s disease. The other common tick is the brown dog tick which (according to medical authorizes) carries Lyme’s but does not transmit it. I have seen deer tick which look like brown dog ticks and visa versa. The only way I can tell the difference is with a magnifying glass and checking the size of the mouth parts. The deer tick has much longer mouth part than the dog tick and after a few comparisons it is easy to see the difference.

In addition to Lyme’s (spirochete bacteria) New Englanders better be on the watch for Anaplasmosis, a white blood cell parasite transmitted by ticks and Babesiosis, a red blood cell parasite known as Nantucket fever. There is also evidence that the lone star tick bite can cause an allergy to a sugar protein found in meats. This allergy can cause a sever reaction to beef, pork, chicken, and lamb. A hike in the grass can make you a vegetarian.
The next time I hike I will carry a can of bug spray with DEET, even in December. Walter found one more tick on him after he got home, well embedded. I inspected my clothing and pack when I returned and washed it all in hot water and dried it on high heat. One can only wonder what other change the warmer weather will bring to New England. I never worried about ticks until the late 1980s.  It was the same time the turkeys were introduced in Maine. I wonder if there is a connection between the two?”

Hurricane Sandy

Like a little child all prepped for a blizzard, I hunkered down Monday, prepared in every way for Hurricane Sandy. But despite some 15-mile-an-hour gusts of wind, nothing much happened until after sunset.

Then the wind picked up and gusts hit perhaps 30 m.p.h., not enough to cause concern. By bedtime, it blew in earnest, but still not yet enough to create alarm. And like the little child waiting for that big snowstorm that would cause school cancellation the next day, I harbored something akin to hopeful anticipation for hurricane winds and torrential rains.

Don’t get me wrong…I was hoping and praying that the worst of Sandy would bypass Mid-Coast Maine and my prayers were answered. But still, that feeling of unfilled expectation lingered. Just admitting this helps to get a certain feeling of guilt off my chest. And now I think I have a slight inkling of the thing that possesses extreme athletes to risk life and limb, that pushes race car drivers to the fullest measure and that causes people to do any number of otherwise irrational and probably stupid things.

Looking danger in the face and coming out the other side unscathed does something for the psyche. It probably even provokes beneficial chemical changes in our bodies. So when we go to bed thinking that the biggest storm in 200 years is about to swoop down upon us only to wake up to complete serenity, something in our innermost beings looks out at the world and says, simply, “humph.” 

At noontime Tuesday, the day after “Frankenstorm,” the sun broke through the overcast and shone upon my little cabin in Waldo, Maine. Dragonflies swooped about, darting here and there, picking some unidentified insects from the air. The rain from the previous night, what there was of it, had obviously benefited my Swiss chard, since it stood thick and green.

Meanwhile, I must now pour out all that water I had stored up in a dozen different containers. And the oil lamps will go back into storage, as will candles and lanterns.

Am I pleased and grateful that we were spared the big hit? Absolutely. But somewhere deep down, that little child begrudges having to get up and go to school.

A Scarcity Of Beech Nuts

This past season was a busy one for me and unfortunately, my travels precluded my making regular posts to this blog. But things have slowed down to a more manageable pace.

So here we are in late October and temperatures remain on the mild side. In fact, we here in Waldo, Maine, saw only two frosts so far this season. And wouldn’t you know it, these were severe freezes and although few in number, sufficed to kill most of my garden vegetables.

The hardy survivors, parsnips and Swiss chard, can stand up to most anything nature throws at them. Parsnips, I leave in the ground until spring. The prolonged freezing makes them much sweeter. Besides that, it’s reassuring to know that as soon as the ground thaws in my garden, I’ll have some delicious fresh vegetables.

The chard I just keep using, although eating chard every day does lead to me becoming rather tired of it. But it’s green and it’s fresh, two big points in its favor.

One of the things that took my time this past summer and fall involved taking photos of Maine’s nuts and berries for a new book I just completed. At the beginning of this project, it never occurred to me just how difficult it can be to find nuts and berries at just the right stage of ripeness for photographing. I soon learned that I had undertaken a daunting task.

For instance, since we have so few wild nut trees available, beech nuts were one of the biggies in my book. But despite me searching Knox, Waldo, Penobscot and Somerset Counties, I could not find one beechnut. My salvation came when on hands and knees on my own woodlot, I found an intact beech nut from last year, one that the squirrels and chipmunks had somehow missed.

Juneberries, or serviceberries, were another tough subject. What few I found had some kind of blight and were wrinkled like little prunes. I shot photos of the best of the best, but it was difficult to get a keeper shot.

And barberries, those thorny, often invasive shrubs with the little red, oblong berries that dangle from the branches, proved evasive. I finally recalled seeing some on the (wouldn’t you know it) opposite end of Sears Island. It took three trips to this location to finally find the berries in their red-ripe stage. It seems that barberries don’t ripen until quite late in the year.

By the way, the berries are useful in jellies. Wear gloves if you go to gather some, though, since the thorns are quite sharp.

But finally my picture-taking came to an end and I sent my photos in, along with the completed manuscript. The book probably won’t come out until some time next year at the earliest. I find that these bigger publishing houses have something like a governmental bureaucracy. They have the copy editor, the proofreader, the project editor, the assistant editor and the associate editor and every one has a shot at messing with a new manuscript. It’s tough dealing with these people, since most of them know little, if anything, about the topic at hand. In fact, I had to wrestle with someone who kept changing correct grammar to bad grammar. Even worse, one bright light changed botanical names from what I had, the correct usage, to outdated and otherwise wrong usage. Frustrating beyond belief, it was. 

Far better, it seems to me, to deal with a smaller publisher and work hand-in-hand with that person. That’s just a suggestion to any would-be book authors out there. Of course the topic has much to do with the difficulty of dealing with publishers. Guidebooks are terribly structured and the editors are professional nit-pickers. Books on other subjects are far easier to deal with. In fact, the biggest names in publishing are the easiest of all to work with, or so I'm told. The trouble there is getting them to go with your project in the first place.

But enough of my trials and tribulations with the publishing world. I’ll soon be posting blogs on what I hope will be an array of interesting topics. Until then, happy fall.

                                          Summer Nights

It’s that time of year when sultry, humid nights bring out a host of animal and insect species. Of these, Luna moths number among my very favorite critters.

These huge, pale-green moths with the “tails” have become increasingly scarce, mostly due, I’m told, to pesticides. So when a Luna moth does show up, it’s a very big deal…at last for me.

My friend Suzie Gowie has kindly sent me a photo of a Luna moth that visited she and her husband Art’s place in Bangor. That is the photo you see posted here. Thanks, Suzie.

Next, I mentioned this to someone recently and I don’t think they believed me. On these hot summer nights, you can actually hear corn grow. Remember, the stalks have striations and these help the thing vibrate as it literally shoots from the ground. Just put your ear next to a cornstalk on a good, warm night and listen for a gentle, squeaking sound. I’m somewhat hearing impaired and I can hear it, so I’m sure most everyone else can as well.

It’s time now for a bunch of wild plants and prominent among these are common cattails. Go now and collect the green spikes atop the plants. To test for ripeness, try and crumble the spike with a thumbnail. If it is too hard and resists, it isn’t quite ripe. But when you can easily make a dent and crumble it, it is at a peak of ripeness.

Pick as many of these as you want and boil them for perhaps 10 minutes. Season with butter, salt and pepper and eat like corn-on-the-cob. Delicious.

Meanwhile, back to nighttime doings, rural people hear the constant trilling of gray treefrogs. These lend a pleasant background accompaniment to the croaking of aquatic frogs and the distant howling of coyotes.

So enjoy these summer nights. This season won’t last long, so embrace it while it lasts. 

                                                    Wild Strawberries

A singular incident occurred today, which I will share with you. I am working nonstop on my new book, Nuts And Berries Of New England and realized that while I had already written my chapter on wild strawberries, I didn’t have any fresh photos to accompany the text.

I had been keeping track of some strawberries in front of my house, but they were slow in ripening. Today, I thought surely they must be dead ripe, fresh and juicy, so I wound my way through the brush to where they grew and found them gone. Some critter had pre-empted me.

So drawing upon memory, I went down the road where I live, searching places where strawberries previously grew. But the open areas had grown in, as they will, making it too dense and shady for strawberries. I gave up and headed home and on the way, saw my neighbor and his fiancé walking down the road, taking a stroll, or so I thought.

As it turned out, the pair was heading to a fine patch of ripe strawberries. Who would have thought that at the same time I was out searching for berries to photograph, my neighbor was headed to a large patch of ripe berries, just waiting to be picked and, of course, photographed. This is, I believe, called “the law of synchronicity.”

This place was just a short distance past where I gave up my search and turned around. So the two hopped in my car and we drove to the designated area and sure enough, it was red with berries.

My neighbor and partner began picking and I began shooting photos. Anyone who has ever attempted to photograph wild strawberries will immediately know the trials and tribulations involved in the process. Focus on one berry and all the others go out of focus. Try and focus on a wider view and the overall photo becomes less sharp. Besides that, grass, weeds and leaves all vie for center focus, making it a poke-and-hope procedure at best.

Anyway, I shot lots and lots of photos and of them, perhaps three were “keepers.” But that’s not bad, all things considered.

I find it odd, that I make a living writing about nature and wild foods and at the moment, am so busy writing about it that I haven’t time to devote to gathering the wild produce. Or at least, I haven’t as much time as I would wish. But better busy than not, I suppose.

Anyway, lots of plants are coming online right now. I see buds on daylilies swelling, about right to pick and cook as per green beans. Lots of seaside plants are up and ready, too. These include sea blite, orache, goosetongue and sea rocket.

So if you can, I do hope you can make time to get out and harvest some of the wonderful wild fruits and vegetables that grow so abundantly here in the great old State of Maine. 

Wild Plants And Wooly Bears

The Amazing Transit of Venus

This past week of continual rain, cold and clouds surely dampened my spirits. Several outdoor events went forward despite the rain, but the weather put a damper on both.

Additionally, mosquitoes, enlivened by the cool, damp and gloom, have made it difficult to spend time foraging for potherbs. Consequently, I was and am consigned to foraging for lettuce, chard and turnip tops in my greenhouse…thank goodness for that.

Amidst all of this, I looked forward to the Venus transit on Tuesday afternoon. This would be the last time Venus passes between earth and sun for over 100 years, essentially making it an once-in-a-lifetime event for most of us.

So when Tuesday rolled around and with it, rain and leaden skies, I only naturally assumed that we here in Maine would be cheated out of this one-time opportunity to witness a spectacular astronomical event.

But with perhaps one hour to go, a patch of blue showed up in the western sky. I had an appointment to meet a fellow amateur astronomer in Brooks. We planned to each bring a telescope and set them up on the bridge in town. This place offered a wide-open view to the west.

Rain returned after the little bit of blue sky, that teaser, had me thinking that just maybe things would turn out okay. But again, the rain stopped and the blue sky returned. So I loaded the scope in my car and headed for Brooks, not really expecting to see the transit.

My friend was already there and had his scope set up. I wasted no time in erecting mine and at that point, the sky to the east, south and north was dark and cloudy, but the sun shone brightly to the west. At about three minutes before the appointed time for the transit to begin, several rainbows appeared to the east and some people standing nearby ooh’d and aaah’d at the sight. But my friend and I had our gaze riveted on the eyepieces of our respective telescopes, waiting for the transit to begin.

The time came and went and nothing happened. Perhaps my watch was set too fast. Or maybe it was all a sham. All manner of thoughts flashed through my mind. And suddenly, a tiny dimple appeared on the bottom edge of the sun. This was the leading edge of the disc of Venus.

I hollered out, “I see it. It’s beginning.” My friend confirmed the sighting. We both kept our gaze upon the scene, watching, as the disk grew larger and progressed further into the larger disc of our sun. Then in a wink it was fully inside. But for a brief moment, I saw what looked like a black link between Venus and the Outside edge of the sun’s disc. Was this the famed “black drop” I had read about? I don’t know, but I am certain that I saw it, whatever “it” was.

At this point, some passers-by had stopped and we invited them to look through our scopes. Each person had a different reaction, but my favorite was from a young lady who simply exclaimed, “Wow.”

And so it went. People stopped and we beckoned them to come and look at this once-in-a-lifetime scene being enacted before our very eyes.

And then the sun grew low in the sky and trees intervened. So we called it quits and packed our scopes and headed home, awed by what we had witnessed and completely satisfied.

Later, the sky darkened once again and rain threatened. It was the same this morning. Our open area of sky where the transit occurred, was it just an accident? Or were millions of people’s prayers answered and the clouds kept away so that we could witness a stupendous, heavenly event?

I’ll leave that to the readers to decide.