#548 Mountain Lake Biological Station

In 2009, I made my first trip to the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station, a residential research and teaching field station on a mountaintop in southwestern Virginia.

I quickly learned the study of snakes is central to the station's mission when a researcher examining the contents of a garter snake’s stomach (termed “barfing the snake”) became so excited upon finding a poisonous newt inside that the station director was alerted immediately via two-way radio.  

It's hard to overstate the level of excitement this generated. A crowd gathered and everyone was really, really excited.  I got excited about how lucky I was to see this apparently rare and thus exciting occurrence.

But I’m a lucky guy.  I've been lucky enough to visit MLBS along with my colleague Chris Gist every year since 2009 to help with geospatial training for summer researchers who work on many topics in biology.

Seems fitting that for our 5^th annual visit we focused once again on snakes.   This time we organized teams of students to map the location of over 200 “snake boards”, stiff black plastic rectangles scattered around the station grounds.  Snakes love to hide beneath the warm snake boards. 

Herpetologists regularly check under every board, collecting the snakes, weighing, measuring, examining, and recording every detail.  Combining many years of these data with locations in geospatial software will give researchers new tools for analysis.  And that gets me excited.

A highlight for me on this most recent visit was the station director asking if I remembered that red letter day when they found the newt inside the garter snake.  Apparently the researcher still talks about how happy she is that I asked for a demonstration of her snake work which led her to check a nearby snake board at a time she would not normally visit and find for only the second time ever at Mountain Lake Biological Station, a garter snake with a newt inside. Now that's exciting.

Yours in asking the right question at the right time,
Kelly

#534 George Washington Defaced It, Thomas Jefferson Bought It, We Visited It

• George Washington defaced it (some say) by carving "GW" into the rock during his 1750 surveying visit.  
• Thomas Jefferson bought it from the King of England for a few dollars, built a private home there, and tagged it "the most sublime of nature's works".  
• The National Register of Historic Places listed it as a National Historic Landmark.
• Herman Melville used it to as a literary device to describe Moby Dick. 

It's Virginia's Natural Bridge.  So we stopped by to see what all this fuss is about.

Virginia's natural beauty, lush and green, engulfs the place.  But the incredible coming together of nature's forces to create this oddment is the real story.  Tectonic plates, continental collisions, limestone's incremental yielding to the unstoppable forces of water, and poof, a natural miracle happened before we were watching.

Seated on benches facing the bridge, we heard a well-delivered scholarly description of the natural and human history of this dramatic place.  Later we engaged costumed interpreters at the Monocan village in the bridge's shadow and got a sense of the depth of their knowledge of Native American life.  These educational interludes (our highlights) were pleasant surprises given the for-profit nature of this place.

Yes, there's a gift shop. Virginia's Natural bridge - "it's easy to get to and hard to forget".

Yours in admiring Mr. Jefferson's real estate acumen,
Kelly

#505 Happy Earth Week

John Muir in the New World is a new 90-minute documentary film that premieres on Monday, the 18th,on PBS' American Masters series.

We were lucky enough to have a sneak preview of this film on board the MV Explorer with Peter Evans, a lifelong learner and one of the film's executive producers.  He provided some background on how the project came together and led a discussion after the showing.

This new documentary focuses on Muir's contributions to the US environmental movement, but late in life Muir fulfilled his dream of traveling to the Amazon and to Africa.   As we sailed up the River Amazon, I enjoyed John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa.

Yours in bookending our trip with Muir,
Kelly

#426 Floating the Rivanna

Think about your dream job.  What would it be?

Hmmm...something that would make people say "You get PAID to do that?"

I recently met Allan Thomson. He has a dream job like that. He takes people on canoe trips to raise awareness for a healthy Chesapeake Bay watershed. Cool. He invited me to join him and a group from the University of Virginia for a day on the Rivanna River as part of Earth Week festivities. Even cooler.

So here's Allan steering our canoe.

A few international students in our group had never been on a float trip. With guidance from Allan and his colleague Pat, they did just fine. And they introduced us all to the concept of delicious boxed cake for shore lunch.

After lunch we hiked through woods to find the massive cut-stone remains of a long abandoned river lock.

Too soon our six-mile float was done and we were all smiling for the camera.

So Allan did his dream job well and we all left feeling a little more aware of our local ties to the Chesapeake Bay.

Yours in supporting dream jobs at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation or anywhere,
Kelly

#385 Grand Canyon of Indiana?

My author friend Mike Habeck tells me about a dramatic human-induced landscape change threatening to create the new Grand Canyon of Indiana. Let's have a look from the air.

The town of Buckskin is in the red oval. The Grand Canyon is inside the moving red polygon.

Yours in keeping an eye on Indiana canyons,
Kelly

#350 Stop the catalog madness!

Is your mailbox crammed with catalogs like this?

It's that time of year. The holidays are right around the corner and every company wants to sell you the perfect gift. One solution: Use Catalog Choice to help put a stop to the madness. It is a free service that allows you to remove your name from numerous catalog mailing lists at once.

In my first week, I've unsubscribed from 8 catalogs. According to Catalog Choice, "more and more companies [are] honoring consumer’s requests to no longer receive a catalog in the mail." I feel better already. Think of the advantages! Fewer trees are cut. Less fossil fuel is used in production. And you can make fewer trips to the recycling center!

Yours in blatant non-paper-based promotion of Catalog Choice,
Mary

#280 Happy Earth Day!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle all day long and every day!

Yours in appreciating the earth on our walking commute,
Mary

#225 Think globally, recycle locally

BEWARE: What follows is a blatant advertisement for Freecycle.

Need moving boxes? You could always impose on a good friend to bring you carloads full of paper boxes from the office. (Thank you, o' kind one.) Or you could check Freecycle.

Need to get rid of all those moving boxes after you’ve got them unpacked? Simple. Post them to Freecycle. Next thing you know, you’re getting offers from people who are eager to come take them away. No trips to the cardboard recycling place for you!

When you want to find a new home for something, just send an e-mail offering it to members of your local Freecycle group. When you're looking to acquire something for yourself, just respond to a member's offer, and you might get it.

We've used freecycle about 10 times through the years and have had terrific experiences. It's a good thing.

Freecycle is changing the world one gift at a time.

Yours in freecycling,
Mary