Ahead Of The Jays

Day 362: We have had at least half a dozen light frosts here in the last two weeks, so it was time for me to start taste-testing the grapes. Almost without exception, this ritual is pointless; I decide the grapes need a few more days on the vine, and the jays clean me out just before I go out to pick. This year, I seem to have gotten the jump on them, at least to some extent. While the lower bunches are still tart and hard, a few of the higher ones are sweet and tasty. The clusters of this variety are small and loosely formed and the fruits are also small, but may be used for wine as well as being very good on the table. While I wouldn't begrudge my jays a meal or two at my expense, it's nice when they allow me to share in the bounty.

Litter Pickers

Day 361: Happy National Public Lands Day! In honor of the occasion, Mount Rainier's Volunteer Program held its first "Adopt-A-Highway" litter pickup along SR 706, the gateway to the Park's most popular Nisqually entrance. One professor, nine students from the Evergreen State College and two local residents spent four and a half hours collecting seventeen bags of trash from the roadside despite occasional sprinkles.

It pleases me to say that everything went smoothly because this project was my "baby" from the seminal thought to the execution of this first patrol. Through the Volunteer Program office, I made contact with the State Dept. of Transportation to negotiate an agreement which was acceptable to both them and us. With National Public Lands Day shortly to come up on the calendar, we had to move fairly quickly to have everything in place today. Last week, I took delivery of State-supplied bags, signage and a training video, and then rounded up the remainder of our gear from various offices in the Park. Safety vests and long-armed grabbers were distributed among four "knots" of workers (three people to a knot), and in four and a half hours, the teams worked diligently to be certain each half-mile section of a two-mile length of highway was immaculately litter-free. A few hazardous items were marked for special pickup by the DoT.

Art students, the two young men (Taylor and Jude) kneeling to the left of me in the image drew the short straw and now know far more about native plants than they expected to learn during a trash pickup. That said, both entered the information in their personal journals and accompanied the descriptions with beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations of the plants pointed out to them. They also sketched owl, flicker and crow feathers in great detail. I was also thoroughly amused by the fact that they assigned a sound to each "species" of litter as it was dropped into the bag.

All in all, I couldn't have asked for a better group of Volunteers. Thanks, gang! It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

Not Lerner And Loewe

Day 360: Within seconds of receiving last month's Bird Phenology Program newsletter, I was drafting a response to the trivia question in the hopes of winning a prize. Fingers flying, I typed in "Lerner and Loewe!!!" and in the next second was shaking my head and saying, "No, no, no, no, no...you do that every time! It's Leopold and Loeb!" I backspaced my error and rewrote the correction. For once, I hadn't hit "send" prematurely, and I was still in time to be the winner. My prize arrived in yesterday's mail, a coffee cup with the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center's logo and two BPP pens. In honor of the occasion, I made oatmeal cookies.

So what was special about Lerne...excuse me, Leopold and Loeb? The trivia question was this: "What famous ornithologist was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1924?" The pair were convicted of the murder of a 14-year old boy. Nathan Leopold died while serving his sentence, but Richard Loeb was released after 33 years' imprisonment and went back into his chosen field of study, ornithology. He is known primarily for his research into the bird species of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Ethiopian Basket

Day 359: When my mother was a young girl, family friend Daisy went to be a missionary in Ethiopia. Idealistic to a fault, I have no doubt that Daisy's eyes were opened wide when she discovered the living conditions her converts had to endure, but she stuck with it for several years until she contracted malaria and had to be sent home to the US.

During the years she ministered to the impoverished and spiritually needy, she sent home a few handcrafted items, one of which was this sewing basket which in my own childhood was still brightly colored. My mother was rather casual about where she kept it, and thus the lid became badly sun-faded. The interior is still bright (perhaps not as bright as it once was), and now I keep it out of strong light, still using it as a container for sewing supplies and small projects. Although I never knew Daisy, the memories of her which my mother imparted to me always rise when I lift the lid.

Successful Carnivores

Day 358: In just a week or two, the inevitable frosts will put my carnivorous garden to sleep for the winter. Native to Oregon, these plants are cold-hardy, but go into a dormant period when the tops die back, and although they ordinarily grow in boggy areas, the soil should be allowed to dry out quite a bit during that time.

When I first purchased these three plants (two Pitcher Plants and one Sundew), they had very few heads. Apparently they've enjoyed a diet of mosquitoes, flies and other hapless insects because they have really burgeoned into a lush bowlful of exotic shapes. A month or so ago, our resident buck cropped the tops of several of them only to discover that they didn't taste as good as he had hoped. I hung a string of bells to further deter any unwanted samplings, and the plants sprang back with amazing vigor. It's nice to step out onto the back porch, knowing that my "guard-plants" are on watch for those pesky mosquitoes!

Inner Workings

Day 357: There was a project I've been postponing all summer because there was no real need to get it done, but now that we're heading into the rainy months, it was time to replace the degraded post and platform holding the pluviometer. I have a Davis Weather Monitor II station which does not connect to my computer, so every day, I record weather data by hand, having done so with a variety of stations for over forty years with only a few gaps when I needed to replace equipment. To date, the Davis has been the most reliable, although the anemometer is crudded up, and I need a longer ladder in order to get it spinning properly again.

Here you see the inner workings of the pluviometer (the inset shows the device with the collection chamber reinstalled). Rain drips through a hole in the collector until it fills one of the two identical cups at the ends of the rocker arm, triggering a sensor and dumping the water into a drain hole on either end. There is a gap beneath the base plate and the mounting board to allow the water to run off unobstructed, and each cup hold precisely 0.01" of rain. The data accumulated by the pluviometer is transmitted to the station's readout in the house, so there is no need for me to go out in the rain. Occasionally, I have to take leaves and/or fir needles out of the collection basin to allow the rainwater to run freely through the drip hole, but otherwise, there is no maintenance to be performed on this device.

Adopt-A-Highway

Day 356: We are ready to roll! Today I took delivery of the supplies provided by the Washington State Department of Transportation for their Adopt-A-Highway program. I have eleven Mount Rainier Volunteers at my disposal on National Public Lands Day next Saturday and a two-mile stretch of highway badly in need of cleanup. The weather forecast is favorable, so now all I need to do is pick up additional safety vests, gloves and long-armed grabbers from Park stores and wait for my crew to show up at 9 AM at Tahoma Woods.

My thanks goes out to everyone who helped make this project possible. Without your cooperation and assistance, it couldn't have happened. Let's hear it for those wonderful Volunteers who give their time and effort to Mount Rainier National Park!