Greensleeves

“I was taught that nature was interesting.”
– Jennifer Anderson-Cruz

A fascinating Quad-City wildlife opportunity will be available Friday night (May 22) at Daven-port’s Nahant Marsh.

Jennifer Anderson-Cruz invites you to join her at the marsh where she will count frogs and toads based on listening to their calls. She’s been doing this every other week from late April through mid-July for TEN YEARS as part of an ongoing study on how frogs and toads are affected by pollut-ants.

Anderson-Cruz, a Davenport native, began her study as an undergraduate student at the former Marycrest University in Davenport. She now lives near Des Moines where she is a biologist for the Natural Resources Conservatinon Service, but she comes back for the counts (and to see her fam-ily).

Meet her at about 9 p.m. in the marsh parking lot, 4220 Wapello Ave., and expect to stay until about midnight. (The only caveat is that the survey will be called off if winds are more than 15 mph, or if it is raining heavily, or if there is lightning.)

Anderson-Cruz will begin the evening with a presentation on her research and will help you identify six different frog and toad calls.

Brian Ritter, facilitator at Nahant, says he’s been hearing chorus frogs since February, so if con-ditions are good, you should be assured of hearing something.

Wear long pants, covered shoes/hiking boots and, most importantly, bring a flashlight.

If you’d like more information, contact Sheri at skcolman@aol.com or (309) 786-8504 or Brian Ritter at (563) 323-5196.

My husband and I participated in this frog count last year and it was one of the highlights of the summer.

It is quite – I don’t know, spooky – to be walking around Nahant at night, following the railroad tracks (in the dark, of course) to wetlands away from the main site.  It was a fun thing to share.

Background

When Anderson-Cruz began her work 11 years ago, Nahant was still heavily polluted with lead shot and other substances left after years of shooting over the water by a sportsmen’s club. In 1999, the marsh was cleaned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund site, and the purpose of her master’s thesis was to compare the numbers of frogs and toads before and after the clean-up.

Her hypothesis was that the numbers would improve and that, in fact, is what happened.

For more on her work and on Jennifer herself,  go to this site for a story I wrote last year.

One of the things she told me was that, as a child, she was “taught that nature was interesting.”

What inspiring words.

“Gnats are out in droves and attracted to bare skin, such as my bald head,” Rock Island naturalist Bob Motz says.

 
“I phoned (a local lawn and garden center), but they had nothing to help. I’m wondering if you know of anything that can keep them out of a picnic/patio area or repel them from skin of people like me who otherwise love being outdoors.”

 
So gnats are back; co-workers hearing me talk about this subject agree that the little bugs “are everywhere.”

 
We had lots of questions about gnats last summer, too, with  Quad-City Times Master Columnist Bill Wundram and myself taking on the subject.

 
Among the home remedies suggested to Bill:

* Absorbine Jr., a liniment intended for arthritis aches and pains. Perhaps it’s the scent, which is derived from a combination of natural menthol, absinthium oil and wormwood oil.

 
* A variation on that of half-Absorbine Jr., half-mouthwash (such as Listerine)

 
* A dab of household ammonia behind each ear

 
* A scented dryer sheet (such as Bounce) placed in your pocket, making sure a portion sticks out.

 
* Avon’s Skin So Soft bug guard

 
* Vicks VapoRub

 
* Vanilla Cologne, sold by the Watkins Co. This is not the vanilla used in baking but rather a different kind of product. My neighbor uses it while fishing and mowing the lawn. He buys it from a local distributor, but it also may be purchased here online, he says.

 
In the calls and e-mails we fielded last summer, there emerged a “holy grail” of gnat repellant, a product called McNess Formula 1046, which was made years ago  — but no longer – by a manufacturer in Freeport, Ill.

 
Readers who happened to have a bottle of this antiseptic/disinfectant guarded it with their life.

 
Although the product is no longer made in Freeport, its active ingredient (PCMX, parachlorometaxylenol), is used in other products, including Dettol Liquid First Aid Antiseptic, which is made by Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare in Great Britain.

 
Aaron Osborne of Davenport ordered a small bottle over the Internet and has been using it with success.

 
“I am not sure if it is the PCMX that repels the gnats or the combination of the ingredients,” Osborne told me last year. “I do know that for $6-$7, after shipping, the small bottle will probably last several years and is well worth the effort.”

 
To find a product like this, type “dettol” in your computer’s search engine.

 
Good luck!

A couple of years ago I received a news release about an observance for “Migratory Bird Day.”

And I thought, really? What is that? Why do we celebrate that?

I’ve learned a few things since then.

I’ve come to realize that migrating birds are a wondrous sight – jewels in the treetops — and an important piece of the Earth’s biodiversity that needs to be celebrated and drawn attention to, lest we think it’s not important.

The observance was created in the early 1990s by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) to encourage programs to teach people about birds.

One such program in the Quad-City region will be tomorrow (Saturday, May 16) at the Ingersoll Wetlands Learning Center, Thomson, Ill.

The free event begins at 7:30 a.m. with a guided bird walk, followed by beginning bird identifica-tion at 9 a.m. There will be a trumpeter swan restoration at 10:45 a.m. and a presentation “What in the World is Geocaching?” at noon.

For more information, call (815) 273-2732.

We in the Quad-City region are really lucky when it comes to migratory birds because the Mis-sissippi River is a major transcontinental flyway. We get to see more neat birds – colorful birds! — here than most other places in the country, if we just know to look.

Bird experts tell us that neotropical migrant birds (those that fly to the Caribbean islands, and Central and South America and back) have sustained significant population declines in recent decades.

The overwhelming issue is habitat loss, fragmentation and reduced quality of breeding habitat.

Even if the birds don’t nest here, our woodlands provide critical resting and refueling sites along the way. This is includes the Mississippi River bluffs, which also are prized home sites by well-heeled humans and subject to encroachment.

 The Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation is a nonprofit group that is working to preserve the bluffs, as well as other wild areas in the state. For more information on this and how you can help, go to this web site.

P.S. If you want to go to the event at Ingersoll: Take Illinois 84 to three or four miles north of Thomson. Look for the corner with New Miller potato farm, a McDonald’s sign and a brown sign for Ingersoll. Turn left (toward the river) and follow the road.

I was driving east on West Central Park Avenue about by Assumption High School in Davenport when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some kind of brown shape, like a deer or a big brown dog, headed right for our car.

I flinched and nearly steered the car into the right-hand lane to avoid this perceived threat when – as quickly as it appeared – it vanished.

“Did you see that?” I said to my husband.

“No, what?”

“There was this brown thing – a deer or a dog or something. Didn’t you see it?”

He said he’d seen a flash of something but nothing more.

My heart was pounding and hands were shaking because, really, whatever it was had been headed straight at our car.

But now it was gone.

As I continued driving, I slowed for the stoplight at Harrison Street. A van pulled up next to us, with the driver motioning for us to roll down our window.

My husband did so, and said, “Was that a deer?”

“Yes,” the man in the van said. “And it jumped right over your car.”

Oh my gosh. The wonders of nature.

Last fall I visited the Loess Hills in northwestern Iowa near Sioux City, and took these pictures on the Broken Kettle Grasslands of The Nature Conservancy.

Shortly after my visit, the Conservancy re-introduced bison to the prairie.

The bison aren’t just for looks.

There is science indicating that the way bison graze creates a healthier and more diverse prairie.

And now – following a tough winter — the herd has produced its first four calves, causing a lot of rejoicing among the Conservancy staff.

“This is the first time that a bison has been born on native prairie in Iowa in more than a century and a half, within a herd established exclusively for conservation,” according to the group’s news release.

That’s something to applaud. For a picture of the first calf, go to this site.

The bison originated from the Wind Cave National Park herd in South Dakota. They are consid-ered historically and genetically valuable because they have shown no evidence of cattle genes as determined by current DNA testing techniques.

I hadn’t realized that scientists make a distinction, but it turns out that almost all bison herds, except those in Wind Cave and Yellowstone national parks, contain evidence of cattle genes.

What are the Loess Hills?

Broken Kettle is in the northern portion of the Loess Hills, which rise 200 feet above the Missouri River Valley, snaking in a narrow band of wrinkled bluffs that cover some 650,000 acres along Iowa’s western border.

The Broken Kettle preserve covers 3,000 acres, containing the largest remaining prairie in Iowa.

“Loess” is a kind of soil consisting of tiny windblown silt particles. The Loess Hills were literally blown into existence as the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated. Loess covers most of the Midwest, which is why our land is so rich for farming. But the deposits in the Loess Hills are far deeper than in other places.

Why care about grass?

Some people don’t find a lot of beauty in grasslands. Forests and wetlands tend to generate more enthusiasm. 

But grasslands of all kinds once covered 40 percent of the Earth’s land masses, and today they are the least protected, most threatened terrestrial habitat on Earth, according to the Conservancy.

And when a habitat is threatened, so are the various forms of life – birds, insects, reptiles etc. – that make their homes there.

For more on The Nature Conservancy, go to this site.

I remember when the annual cleanups of Nahant Marsh, the wetlands in southwest Davenport, first began several years ago.

We’d write stories about how much was accomplished but then in less than a year, there’d be an-other cleanup scheduled.

And I wondered, isn’t that place cleaned up yet?

I posed that question once to Kathy Wine, executive director of River Action Inc., Davenport, which was spearheading the cleanups then. She just smiled.

Just as cleaning your house isn’t once and for all, neither is cleaning a marsh.

In fact, it’s much less so. It’s an ongoing mission and there are occasionally new challenges that one doesn’t anticipate, such as debris brought in by flooding or new invasive species.

I am happy to report that much was accomplished – again – at the most recent cleanup on Satur-day (May 2, 2009).

Here is a report filed by Arnie Christian, of Friends of Nahant Marsh:

“We had an estimated 60 people doing all sorts of work on a beautiful day,” he says.
Folks cleaning up Wapello Avenue to Iowa 22 and Wapello Avenue to Concord Street and the In-terstate 280 overpass recovered:

 * 15 tires

* 3 TVs

* A school desk

* A baby chair

* A pallet

* Old clothes

* Paint cans

* And enough cans, bottles (plastic and glass) and Styrofoam containers to fill 20 plus big trash bags donated by Farm and Fleet

In addition:

* Volunteers pulled GARLIC MUSTARD along the trail.

* About 20 people removed invasive cottonwoods and willows from the front prairie.
(Cotton-woods and willows can be fine trees, but not when you’re trying to maintain a prairie ecosystem).

* About six people dragged branches and cut-up trunks of trees blown down west of the bird blind and put mulch on the butterfly garden.

“It was a rewarding day for the environment and great to see about 20 pelicans in view all day,” Arnie continues.

“Hy-Vee of Rockingham Road generously donated six dozen doughnuts that provided some start-up energy for all volunteers and the Dr. Pepper-Sprite Bottling Co. across from Nahant donated five cases of water.”

Volunteers came from the Optimists, Defiant/SADD groups, Boy Scouts from the St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, Davenport, the RSVP organization and Sierra Club.

More opportunities

In case you missed the cleanup day and would like to help, members of Friends of Nahant Marsh meet for workdays just about every Saturday morning; the next ones will be May 16, 23 and 30.

And if you’d like to listen to frog calls and other mysterious night sounds at the marsh, join re-searcher Jennifer Anderson for an interesting evening on May 22.

For more on Nahant, visit this Web site.
Also:

The Wapsi River Environmental Education Center, 31555 52nd Ave., Dixon, Iowa, has a spring work day planned too. Volunteers of all skill levels are needed to clean up habitat and work on erosion control improvements. Chili will be served for lunch.

For more information, call (536) 328-3286. For more on the center, visit this Web site.

I returned to Schuetzen Park in Davenport on Saturday and Sunday to pull garlic mustard, the invasive plant that is taking over woodlands. I didn’t have to look hard. Much of it was in bloom, ready to produce billions of seeds.

It is discouraging to see how much there is (and how much I left behind), but I kept telling myself that each plant I pulled was one less that would go to seed.

More hands are needed, though. Many more.

I received a recent email from Scott Killip, branch manager of Seneca Environmental Services, Inc., and a Boy Scout dad who said he is going to try to rally Scouts to the cause.

“I spend a whole lot of time outdoors and understand the depth and seriousness of this invasion,” he said. “This plant can (and has in many areas) dominate and choke out the forest floor and has a very strong possibility of causing extinction to several sensitive floral species.

“While I have pulled lots of these plants myself, it needs the efforts of an army to really get any real control over this stuff. (Eradication is probably impossible at this point.)

“A formidable force would be the Boy Scouts,” Killip said.

“While many groups spend lots of time picking up trash to make things look nice it is not often that you can truly save the environment by staving off potential extinction.”

 Killip raises some very good points. We must keep working on this.

As a P.S. to my personal endeavor, here was an eye-opener: As I worked in my Bettendorf yard on Sunday I noticed, blooming just as happily as you please next to our front porch step, a garlic mus-tard plant!

I pulled it and put it in the trash. But its presence in my very suburban yard shows how this stuff can spread. I’m not sure how the seed got there, but it could have been carried on the bottom of someone’s shoe who was walking in an infested area, and who then cleaned the mud off on the step.

That is why it’s recommended that you remove your shoes after being in any natural area and clean them off (putting the dirt in a bag in the trash) before going to another natural area. That’s because you never know what you might be carrying on the bottoms of your shoes.

Deer don’t clean their feet, but deer also don’t get in a car and drive hundreds of miles to poten-tially spread seeds.

Saturday was the day I had been waiting for – the day to be part of an organized garlic mustard pull.

Garlic mustard, as you’ll recall, is the invasive plant that is choking our native wood-lands, turning forest floors into deserts of nothing but garlic mustard. It’s awful, and it’s everywhere.

I was excited to be part of the effort organized by Partners in Horticulture because there is strength in numbers and because of the possibility of actually making a dent in the problem.

My husband and I decided to help out at Schuetzen Park in Davenport.

I’ll say one thing : There’s nary a level spot in the whole place. That made the work hard on my feet and knees.

And there was no end of garlic mustard to be had. At first it wasn’t too bad – just a good amount that I could pull and stuff into my bag.

But toward noon, I happened upon a hillside that was a virtual carpet of garlic mustard. Pulling it was like pulling the blades of grass from a lawn.

As Beth Carvey Stewart of the Black Hawk State Historic Site in Rock Island says, “You don’t want to look up when you’re pulling garlic mustard. Just look in front of you.”

Her point is that if you look at the big picture, you can get pretty discouraged. (Which is true of many things having to do with the environment, I’ve found.)

I felt good about each plant I pulled. Each plant in my bag would be one less burst of seeds for the future.

I enjoyed my surroundings, listening to the birds singing and the chorus of frogs trilling in the newly installed deer pond. I also took joy in the occasional wildflower, mostly May apples, growing amidst the garlic mustard.

I wish there had been a bigger turnout. All told, there were about 10 people at Schuetzen.

If you’re interested, there still are several weeks to pull before the plants go to seed. I plan to return next weekend. (I have to give my joints a little time to recover.)

If you’d like to help, call Brian Ritter at (563) 323-5196. He can set you up with collection bags and direct you where you’re needed most.

Henbit has produced a riot of purple color this year along Davenport's East River Drive.

If you travel along Davenport’s East River Drive, you may have noticed the south-facing hillside of Lindsay Park, all covered with beautiful purple flowers.

What are they?

I stopped yesterday for a closer look, and at first blush, the plants looked a bit like creeping Char-lie. But other characteristics definitely indicated something different.

I took a few stalks to Duane Gissel, Iowa State University/Scott County Extension horticulturist, and he instantly identified them as henbit — a weed if you will.

So no, this is not something the park department planted. This is a plant that spreads through seeds.

Google “henbit” and you’ll find a wealth of information and all kinds of pictures.

Henbit is described as a winter annual with square stems and pink-purple flowers, reaching 16 inches in height. It is primarily a weed of turfgrass, landscapes and small grains and is found throughout the United States but most common in the eastern states.

Its leaves are opposite (definitely different than creeping Charlie), reaching 5 inches in length, circular to heart-shaped, with hairs on the upper leaf surfaces and along the veins of the lower surface. Leaf margins have rounded teeth.

But why all of a sudden?

I’ve been commuting past Lindsay Park for more than 20 years, and I’ve never noticed this be-fore.

Gissel says the sudden profusion may be because conditions were just right for seed germination and survival last fall, and so now this spring – voila – flowers!

If you’ve got this plant in your yard and want to get rid of it, there’s an ISU article that gives ad-vice. You’ll find it at this site.

 On the other hand, you could just enjoy the flowers.

I read so much about what’s going wrong with our planet that sometimes I lose sight of celebrat-ing that which is good and wonderful.

I shouldn’t have to be reminded that the annual miracle of spring is happening RIGHT OUTSIDE THE WINDOW and that I should pause to observe and appreciate.

Grass is turning green. Trees are bursting into bloom. All kinds of perennial plants are poking their hopeful spears up through the soil having somehow survived sub-zero temperatures during the winter. How do they DO that?

Today let’s just rejoice and give thanks for the beauty that is all around us.