Canada geese sing duet: an invitation that leads to acceptance, then courting in the rain, April 1

On Earth Day! First sighting of new Canada Goose chicks on the northeast side path! Congratulations! (April 22, 2024)

Day 3 sighting: Two Geese families and friends on the southwest side of the lake, 10 chicks in all! April 24

In this month’s blog:

Early Spring in Full Bloom in the Potomac Valley 

Climate Log: Serving Our Addiction vs. Saving Our Future

Climate Log 2: Floods in Dubai? What’s Next in Extreme Weather?

More Remarkable Virginia Trees: Survivors of Bondage and War

April 2024 Photo/Video Gallery: Birds, Bees, Blooms–and Even Cows?

Early Spring in Full Bloom in our Potomac Valley Town

You know the old saying, “April showers bring May flowers.” Here’s the updated version: “Winter showers bring April flowers.” Or March flowers, as this blog showed last month after our visit to the Tidal Basin in Washington.

This month’s Gallery will show lots of colorful views along the small lakes that provide suitable habitat in our otherwise mechanized suburban town. We are thankful for those lakes, the flowering trees, and the animals, plants, and people that care for the environment. April has become the month of fullest new blooms. Catch the blooms now before summer arrives in May, which will have its own verdant discoveries.

Don’t delay: the Cherry blossoms came in March and have now given way to the leaves, as have the blooms from the Bradford Pears and the Red Maples. Even the Redbuds, who bloomed out early this month, have turned to leaf making. Now it’s Dogwood time–Virginia’s state flower!–and Azalea time in an array of colors!  Look also closer to the ground for wildflowers and flowering bushes that manage to show their colors where the ground isn’t mowed.

 

****************************************************

Climate Log: Serving Our Addiction vs. Doing the Hard Work of Saving the Future

While fully enjoying all the beauty and genius of the plants and animals (including humans) who make Earth so wonderful a place to live, I’m saddened by the slowness of U.S. governments, corporations, and individuals to give up our addiction to fossil fuels–even as each month sets a new record for high temperatures, and as extreme weather events occur more rapidly. (See the section below on the floods in Dubai).  We seem to be more willing to pay the ever-increasing billions upon billions for flood-and-fire damage repairs than to address the actual problem.

Politicians also deliberately ignore, to satisfy the fossil fuel cartel, the causal link between worldwide spreading drought and the alarming increase of human migrations, which are stressing national borders here and in other countries. These politicians would rather blame other governments and even the victims themselves, rather than placing the blame on the fossil fuel cartels.

But addictions, including ours to fossil fuels, are really hard to break, sometimes almost impossible, especially when they give us familiar pleasures, and especially when very powerful and relentless forces (such as oil companies, plastics industries, automakers, public utilities, and a whole political party) convince us that we have to build our entire lives around that addiction. In our community, the association directors frequently remind us that ours is a “smoke-free community,” which means that tobacco (or marijuana) smoking is not allowed either inside buildings or on the grounds, including the lake and its surrounding woods. Still, we frequently find cigarette butts on the paths and in the greenery, though most residents happily adhere to the policy and love the freedom from second-hand smoke. 

But the “smoke-free community” idea, as laudable as it is, does not include the smoke that invisibly and relatively odorlessly pours from the exhaust pipes of most of the cars in the parking lots and from the exhaust chimneys on top of the buildings, all of which are gas heated and all of which feature gas stovetops and ovens. So acculturated are most of us to gas-fueled lives that we never think of emissions as smoke.  Yet, the latest annual research by the American Lung Association shows that 40% of Americans, the highest rate since the 70s, when the Clean Air Act was passed,  live in dangerously bad air, contaminated by gas-generated particulate matter, wildfire smoke, and vehicle emissions.

Despite these dangers, we really can’t imagine living differently. That’s especially true here in Virginia, where almost no houses have solar panels and renewable energy is rarely mentioned.

Oh sure, some of us, when we have money enough, peck at the edges of our addiction, like maybe buying a hybrid or even an EV, perhaps installing a heat pump and electric stove, or cutting back on plastics use and methane-belching beef. But with most elected officials dead set against incentivizing these pro-climate actions, the great majority of folks are caught in the web of the oil-gas cartels and are addicted even if they wish they weren’t.   

We’re also completely acculturated to the noise of internal combustion engines, which you will hear on many of the videos of birds and scenery in this blog, as cars and trucks pass by on the surrounding highways, and as jets fly to and from Dulles Airport. As pretty as the lake looks, the birds, squirrels, and turtles have to adjust to the noise of all the surrounding engines, if they can.  The birds often have to work hard for their calls to reach above the steady din; if they can’t, they die trying.

And for the many species that hunt for their food by sound, the “white noise” of constant vehicle traffic makes their hunting harder, if not impossible. The habitat destruction that has caused the 30% decline of bird populations in North America since 1970 includes destruction by noise, not just the incessant killing of wilderness and wetlands being turned into farms, housing tracts, mines, and commerce.

Will we ever be willing to change our ways, or will our addiction win out? When will the costs of climate catastrophes grow so great that we will say “Enough!”? 

Red-shouldered Hawk atop Tulip Tree north of the dam hears and watches the traffic roar past on the neighboring highway, Feb. 1

Mallard pair swims toward south on snowy day as a jet roars overhead, Feb. 16

********************************************

Climate Log 2: Floods in the Dubai Desert? What’s Next in Extreme Weather? 

Can you imagine the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa (3000 feet high), being without power to run the elevators and cooling system? Can you imagine a home food supply system based mainly on app-ordered deliveries totally shut down? Can you imagine some of the most traffic-clogged highways in the world suddenly inundated with water rising waist high, and cars just abandoned for days?  Can you imagine all of this happening in a desert country that has no infrastructure to deal with rain? A country where there has not been a storm like this on record? 

Well, no need to have to just imagine such a place any more. It’s real in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), right now, because of a rainstorm of from 4 to 12 inches in 12-24 hours on April 16-17.

A year or 2 years of rain there is about 4 inches. Dubai’s infrastructure has been all about how to deal with relentless heat, drought, and the need to manufacture water via desalinization in order to support a robustly technological culture with U.S.-like skyscrapers, shopping malls more upscale than in almost any other place in the world, and an international workforce of low-wage immigrants, who perform the endless construction these ambitions demand. 

During the storm, those shopping malls became waist-deep in water, with rain pouring through roofs onto the high-end merch. These roofs were never meant for anything but sun screening and keeping the cool inside. Damage estimates are in the billions throughout the small emirate.

Will events like this happen again? Probably. But how soon? Who knows? Now we live in the chemical-emissions-caused world of very erratic, often extreme weather, where communities have to be prepared for drastic variations in temperature and precipitation. In this blog in February, I reported on ways that California is preparing for erratic variations in precipitation that that state had not seen before 2022, even though there had always been much slower variations from wet to very dry over longer periods of time. California is used to having to build infrastructure to handle different extremes, and Californians know that the costs are often prohibitive, causing ongoing conflicts between competing interest groups.

But how should a nation like the UAE proceed, when an event like this storm had not happened in memory? Given Dubai’s highly sophisticated, world-class economic goals, what would appropriate preparation look like? Intractable questions like these will become much more common everywhere as climate change intensifies.

********************************************

More of Virginia’s Remarkable Trees: Living through War

Remarkable trees are not only those that are huge, stately, and symmetrically spreading. Some remarkable trees have just lived for many years, suffered damage, and yet survived through times of great disruption and tragedy. Often they have survived only with the concerned care of generous people.

One such tree is the Catalpa that grows just beside the historic main house of Chatham Plantation, across the Rappahannock River from the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Now maintained by the National Park Service, Chatham was built in 1771 as a multi-crop plantation by the Fitzhugh family, whose success came through the forced labor and dedicated industry of at least a hundred enslaved people.

By the time that the Civil War to free the slaves in the Southern states began in 1861, the then owners of Chatham abandoned the property, which was soon taken over by the Union Army of the Potomac. The Army turned it into a headquarters in late 1862 as they prepared for an attack against the Confederate Army, whose divisions were arrayed in the hills above Fredericksburg across the Rappahannock. This attack was one of the great tragic blunders of the war, as the Union troops were decimated. Chatham’s role changed once again, becoming an emergency hospital for thousands of the dying and wounded, whose cries still seem to echo there. 

Today, the gnarled and shriveled Catalpa seems a still living symbol of the horrors that occurred at Chatham, which has been restored by the Park Service as a museum of the events of over two and a half centuries. Besides the Catalpa, the Chatham grounds nurture a splendid array of magnificent old trees that honor the memory of those who were in bondage there or who gave their lives in war. 

For an excellent summary history of Chatham, I recommend this article and video from the National Park Service.

The Brompton Oak across the River in the Heights above the Town

Across the Rappahannock and far up the heights above the town of Fredericksburg lies Brompton Manor, built in 1838. When the Union troops tried their ill-fated, catastrophic attack up those heights in December 1862 against the firmly entrenched Confederate Army, Brompton Manor stood about 200 yards above the smoke and cries of battle. The headquarters of Confederate general James Longstreet during the battle, the manor house–and the massive, long-lived oak beside it, now known as the Brompton oak–were unscathed by the fighting.

But Brompton, too, became a hospital during this battle, and indeed through battles over the next two years of the War. So many of the battles from 1862 to 1865 occurred here in Northern and Central Virginia, the fighting and disease taking the lives of hundreds of thousands and disabling many thousands more. The manor house and the oak today, majestic and peaceful, with bright tulips and flowering trees all around in the April breezes, obscure the horrors of the conflict, as they do the bondage of the enslaved people who labored here.

As at Chatham Manor, perhaps only a mile from Brompton but playing a similar role during the battle, many long-lived trees have survived and still grace the grounds. Besides the historic Brompton Oak, another majestic tree that captured our attention was a 100-foot tall sycamore down the steep hill from the manor grounds and beside the Sunken Road, where some of the bitterest fighting took place. High up in the sycamore perched another combatant always ready for battle, a Red-shouldered Hawk, calmly waiting for the next action. 

***************************************

The April 2024 Photo/Video Gallery: Birds, Bees, Blooms, and Even a Cow or Two (and a Snake!)

American Robin calls from atop a Walnut tree in the east woods, April 15

American Goldfinch in morning sun calls from atop a Willow Oak on the east bank of the lake, April 16, while Blue Jay also calls and walkers comment

 

Under water and just after sunrise: 2 large Red-bellied Cooters swim to the northwest shore, April 16

 

At Lake Newport, Blue Heron and Canada Goose by the dock. Heron takes off and House Sparrows chatter in a nearby nest, April 18

 

Lake Newport: as seen from lakeside path, Red-shouldered Hawk moves up and down chimney after having captured 6-foot snake, apr. 18

 

Lake Newport: Red-winged Blackbird calls in Willow tree on sunny morning, April 14

Lake Cameron: Bumblebee flies and feeds among the pillowy White Azaleas, west side, April 20

And on to May, with more adventures in store…