Happy World Turtle Day!

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Thanks to my friend over at Serenity Spell—a wonderful nature blog with gorgeous photos and wildlife information—I was reminded this morning that it’s World Turtle Day today.

First started by American Tortoise Rescue, Turtle Day was started to raise awareness on turtle ecology and conservation.

To celebrate Turtle Day, here’s a watercolor of a gopher tortoise I did a while ago for The Conservation Fund. It was part of a large interpretive sign project in Southern Florida. The Conservation Fund was designing a development with ecologically sensitive aspects, including setting aside 180 acres for gopher tortoise habitat.

DDahnGTortoise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I learned a lot about these fascinating creatures while working on the project, and I was thrilled to catch a glimpse of one on a site visit.

Just by doing what comes naturally—digging burrows—gopher tortoises provide habitat for nearly 80 other species! Their burrowing activity also improves the soil, recycles nutrients and disperses seeds.

Gopher tortoises are one of the oldest living animals on earth—their ancestors date from 55 million years ago. Their natural lifespan can be as long as 50 or 60 years.

Unfortunately, gopher tortoise habitat is rapidly decreasing due to development and agriculture. Many of them die each year as roadkill.

Here’s a thumbnail of one of the interpretive signs I did for the project.

DDahnSign4

 

 

Learn more:

Read an article about World Turtle Day on the Huffington Post.

Learn about gopher tortoises.

 

Delicate Strength

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This week I received my first blog post request.

“I’d like a poem,” she said.

“And more butterflies. But, not ones that are dying…something more fanciful.”

DDahnButterfly1

A scratchboard illustration I did of a fanciful butterfly

 

I had been thinking of writing about the frog fungus that is killing all the frogs, and then when the tornado hit Oklahoma, I couldn’t think of much else. Life is so delicate. So fragile.

But there is strength in delicate things, too. What is more delicate than a butterfly? Yet butterflies live amazing lives – sometimes migrating thousands of miles, and flying as high as jet airplanes. They’ve been surviving for millions of years.

Lives may be fragile and delicate but life-force is strong.

DDahnButterfly2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here’s the rest of my butterfly illustration…

I did this illustration of butterflies and flowers on scratchboard (a chalk-covered board covered with ink and scraped with a sharp tool)

I did this illustration of butterflies and flowers on scratchboard (a chalk-covered board covered with ink and scraped with a sharp tool)

 

And, as requested, here is a poem.

Because I always do what my mother asks.

 

WordsworthPoemCover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WordsworthPoem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WordsworthPoem2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Blame Beans

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There might be a few good reasons for genetically modified food crops—increased nutrition or drought tolerance perhaps—but Monsanto’s Round Up Ready corn and soybeans were “invented” for one purpose.

You can spray the heck out of them.

Roundup Ready plants won’t die from heavy herbicide use—that’s their claim to fame. (Plus they encourage increased use of Monsanto’s other big product, the herbicide Roundup itself). But all other leafy life in Roundup’s way will shrivel and die, including one of agriculture’s most despised plants, milkweed.

But what Big Ag hates, butterflies love. Milkweed is the one and only plant that monarch butterflies use as a “host” plant. Without it, they cannot survive as a species.

This is a section of a larger watercolor illustration/poster I did for the State of Minnesota. The intent of the poster was to encourage prairie habitat preservation. Milkweed is the pink plant. Also shown: an adult monarch butterfly, and a monarch caterpillar.

 

Milkweed is a native grassland plant that used to thrive along with thousands of other grassland plants and animals in prairie regions of North America. Even before the introduction of Roundup Ready seeds, tallgrass prairie habitats had already been reduced to less than one percent of their extent prior to European settlement and agriculture.

See the full poster at the Prairie Passage page.

 

Since most prairie land was converted to agriculture, milkweed grew only in remnant prairies, preserves, private gardens, or in between row crops—which actually added up to quite a bit of habitat, when you consider millions of acres of corn, beans, and other crops.

Not anymore, though, thanks in large part to Roundup Ready. Loss of milkweed habitat in row crops is thought to be the reason—along with extreme weather—that Monarch populations plunged dramatically this year.

Monarch butterflies are a marvel and a mystery. Their unique migrating behavior is still not fully understood. They migrate thousands of miles on a round trip between the U.S. and their wintering grounds in a forest in Mexico. But, how do they find their way? No single individual makes the entire round trip…there are never any older adults to show the young ones the way, as with other species. Are monarchs born with some kind of “map” of the route already in their brains?

Two days ago, Monsanto won a huge victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. They were suing a farmer for illegally using their patented Roundup Ready soybean seeds. The farmer claimed the beans had (more or less) sprouted of their own accord, and were exempt from the patent, but the Court ruled against him and he ended up with an $84,000 fine. Justice Kagan rejected what she called a “blame-the-bean” defense.

She’s probably right about that. We can’t blame beans for sprouting, or farmers for wanting to save time and money by using new products at their disposal, or Big Chem for making Big Chemicals, or Big Ag, or even Big Politics.

If monarchs go extinct, it will be a tragedy. But, it will be our own fault. You, me, and most everyone else living in North America. We live the richest lives in human history. We vote with our ballots, and we vote with our dollars. We’re running the show.

Each migrating monarch makes individual butterfly-decisions that guide the whole species on one of the most amazing, most unlikely migrations of any lifeform. And they have a brain the size of a…well really, really small.

What can we do? Can we find better ways to live individually that added together will collectively guide our species to a more sustainable future?

What do you think?

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So, what to do?

If you live in monarch range, plant milkweed!

Buy organic!

Vote green!

Go outside, enjoy nature, butterflies, birds…everything.

Learn More:

High Country News article about Monsanto

New York Times article about Monsanto

New York Times article about monarchs

Yale 360 post about Monsanto and monarchs

Monarch Watch – an organization dedicated to studying, tracking, and preserving monarchs

Serenity Spell -a nature blog with wildlife news and gorgeous photos

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Summer Vacation

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(This week, something a little different: a road-trip post. Originally posted on Facebook last summer).

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Oh, no…

 

“That can’t be it,” he said as we drove past the creepy place for the third time.

“The ad said ‘charming, rustic cabin in an old-growth forest.’ We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We looked at each other—obviously we were both thinking the same thing. It had been a long hot drive down to Mt. Hood from the Methow Valley, and all we wanted was to get out of the car and relax with a cold beer. We’d found the cabin on VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner). They’d never let us down before. How bad could it be?
“It’s probably cute on the inside,” I said.

 
As he went to find the key, I thought wistfully back to the previous week we’d spent in the Methow Valley. We had rented a sunny cabin at the edge of a wilderness, owned by a couple of middle-age hippie artists with a flair for hand-made details. It was 160 acres of meadow and forest, shared only by thousands of birds in the daytime and a hundred billion stars at night. Nature, peace, beauty, and solitude at its best.

In the distance is the cabin we had just spent the previous week. A glorious spot.

 

Black Pine Lake in the Cascades…we’d had a nice picnic here one day.

 
Maybe we should have stayed there for the second week, too.
“Got the key!” he said, creaking back across the sagging porch. At one time, this place was probably a cool little forest cabin, but it obviously hadn’t been maintained in decades. At the end of the deck sat an old hot-tub perched on rotting timbers. The cover looked like it was growing some kind of lichen.
“Let’s unload the car and then we can have our beers in the hot tub,” he deadpanned.
I laughed. Hot tub, indeed.
I’d sooner bathe in a vat of snakes.
 
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The Next Morning

 

“You slept in your clothes last night,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said as I rolled up the outfit and sealed it into a zip-lock bag. I shook out my shawl that I had used as a pillow-cover and inspected it for signs of blood. I had spent much of the night fending off some winged-creature flapping around my head. Probably a moth…a very big moth, I told myself. But I checked for bite marks—just to make sure.
This dilapidated cabin wasn’t the roughest place I’ve ever stayed. I’ve done my share of tramping around the world—first, second, and third. I love rustic. I love the wilderness. I grew up spending summers in our own primitive family cabin way out in the wilds. I don’t mind nature-dirt at all.
But this place was just icky…dark, moldy, and with creepy black hairy stuff poking through gaps in the walls and hanging down from the ceiling. My imagination started to run wild—something along the lines of giant mutant cabin-eating fungus.
I shuddered, thinking about spending the next week here.
He frowned. “We’re getting out of here.” He grabbed his ipad and flipped it open.
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Gotta Go Now

 

We chuckled as we drove away. The stinky little place was falling down…literally rotting to pieces, but it had WIFI. In less than 20 minutes, we had booked a new place—a cabin on the Sandy River, close to trailheads and all the glory that is Mt. Hood.
Ah, that’s America.
Killing time before we could check in, we headed up to Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood, a historic lodge from the WPA era of the 1930s. Every detail of the place, from the paintings on the walls, to the stonework and hand-forged iron hinges seemed to have been made by some lucky artist, funded by Uncle Sam. The good old days when art and crafts were valued.
 

Mt. Hood in the Cascades of Northern Oregon

 

It was crawling with tourists…but the good kind, the kind that seem happy and excited about life. Actually, it seemed a bit unreal, like someone from Central Casting had just flown in and assembled a cross-section of humanity designed to fit the scene. There were people of every age, style, race and cultural background, and everyone seemed in a good mood. Harmony was in the air.
We rode the chairlift to the top – to what feels like the top of the world – behind a woman who was celebrating her 104th birthday. One of her relatives told me she had climbed the mountain in her youth, and wanted one more trip up the mountain. Later, I looked her up on the internet, and found an article about her with photos from her mountain-climbing days.

It was her 104th birthday! I wonder if she’ll go to Mt. Hood again this year.

 
As we rode back down, we passed a wedding party on their way up— the bride and groom riding the chairlift still in their wedding clothes.
It gave me a nice feeling to be up there at 7000 feet, on a warm day with blue sky and fresh mountain air and a view that went on forever—behind us on the chairlift a young couple just starting their lives, ahead of us an old woman, celebrating one more birthday in the place she loved most, with the people she loved most.
We were right in the middle. Right where we should be.
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This One Will Do Fine

 

I held my breath as we opened the front door to the new cabin. It was only a few miles from the previous nightmare, and I wasn’t sure what we would find. As it turned out, it was new, and clean, and on a private woodsy chunk of land right on the river. No rot. No vermin. No disturbing issues with mold. And, amazingly, it cost about the same.

 
The rest of the vacation was a blast. We hiked old-growth around Mt. Hood and on the way home spent some time in the fabulous city of Portland.
 

Beautiful little pond south of Mt. Hood.

 

Old growth near the Sandy River

 

Portland’s Rose Garden

I’m looking forward to this year’s trip. We’re going back to the Methow Valley, and we’ll do some hiking in the North Cascades. 

This is us.

 
 

Forest Sketch

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On one of my forest walks, I came upon an elderly gentleman who was standing by the trail, gazing up at a gnarly bigleaf maple. It was one of those Seattle-summer days when the sun comes out unexpectedly, and after weeks of dismal gray, the world was in full-color once again. The whole forest was glowing.

As I passed, the man tipped his hat to me in a polite, old-fashioned way that seemed out-of-place in West Seattle. He must be from a foreign country. Or at least, a foreign time.

“You know what I wish?” he asked, smiling. “I wish I was an artist. I wish I could paint this!” He swept his hand across the lovely scene.

I stood with him for a moment admiring the lumpy, twisted old maple. The sunlight was filtering through the leafy canopy, falling in streaks against the brilliant moss-covered trunk. I imagined painting the tree, how I would drag brushloads of sap green over raw umber to capture the colors and play of light.

I was just about to share my art-thoughts with him when I noticed his eyes had teared up a little. “I want to remember this tree,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, but by the time I get home, I’ll have forgotten. It’ll all be lost…like it never existed. If I was an artist, I could paint this and take it home with me. I’d have it forever.”

I realized we weren’t really talking about art at all, but about how it feels when things we love slip away. Was he afraid his beautiful world was disappearing…being erased into blankness?

He was still standing with the old maple when I continued on my walk. I hope he remembers his tree.

I wish I had painted it for him.

 

An acrylic sketch I did of a maple in Schmitz Park. It didn’t have a mossy trunk, but it was beautiful anyway.

 

 

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