The forest tent caterpillar we found along the roadside seemed at first glance to be stretching for the sky.

Up for June

June 2, 2012

As Oscar Hammerstein wrote in the classic tune from Carousel, June is bustin' out all over. Our own schedule is bustin' at the seams, as we try to keep track of all the birds and bugs and blooms, and continue to set up a building's worth of colorful and creative new installations at The Naturalist's Notebook in time for our June 25 season opening, and as I immerse myself in SI's extensive London Olympic preparations. It seems hard to believe, but within 30 days we will be making the flip turn into the second half of the year (as Michael Phelps might put it).

Since one of our interactive displays at the Notebook this summer will involve a highly inventive chicken, maybe I should describe the rapidly passing year this way: We've almost half-filled the 2012 egg carton with completed months. With that in mind, here are a full dozen welcome-to-June notes:

1) This is a great time to see caterpillars. Many have already metamorphosed into butterflies here in Maine; we're seeing swallowtails in particular. The roadside forest tent caterpillar we saw is destined to become a somewhat destructive (and, to my eye, less beautiful) moth, but Pamelia and I still enjoyed watching it cling to (and gnaw on?) a blade of grass. A bit of sixth-month creepy-crawly trivia: Caterpillars have six tiny eyes (able to sense light but not recognize shapes) on each side of their head.

2) In Case You've Never Heard June Is Bustin' Out All Over (click below) I'm hardly a Broadway expert, but if you need a boost to your day this certainly is an upbeat number. Oscar Hammerstein, by the way, also collaborated on the musicals Wildflower, Green Grow the Lilacs, The New Moon and Very Warm For May. America's favorite naturalist-librettist?

What are these birds? They were among the types shown during a bird-I.D. panel discussion at the Acadia Birding Festival on Thursday. O.K., we’ll tell you. They’re storm petrels.

3) The Acadia Birding Festival As I write this, groups of avian-watchers are on trails and boats in and around Mount Desert Island enjoying one of the year's best events here in Maine. I hope to be with them tomorrow.

4) How to Watch a Hawk Like a Hawk. Right now Cornell's world-renowned ornithology lab has a camera trained on a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks. They're perched on a light pole above athletic fields at the university's campus, in Ithaca, New York. Click on this short behind-the-scenes video below to see the hawks and hear how the lab set up the camera.

5) A Storm Discovery Flash. Crack! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!

Flash. Crack! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!

Pamelia and I learned during a nighttime thunderstorm this week that our resident wild turkeys, perched in the trees around our house, don't like lightning. At all.

6) New York Bathers

During a whirlwind visit to New York for SI work and a wedding, Pamelia and I walked through Central Park, where softball players were sliding in the dirt and birds galore were bathing in it. All were having fun.

7) Mummified Dogs I'm eager to receive our copies of Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death, by Bernd Heinrich, the great naturalist and scientist whose artwork and writings we're highlighting this summer. (He's tentatively set for Notebook-organized events—some held at the Notebook, some elsewhere in the area—on August 20 and 21.) The book has just come off the presses, and I've interviewed Bernd about it and many other topics in a lengthy Q-and-A we'll be posting on the blog soon.

It's interesting to look at how we humans handle death, not just of fellow homo sapiens but of other animals. Mythology has long been a driving force. In millennia past, bodies of several species were mummified in the belief that this would create harmony between a departed spirit and its corporeal host. Archaeologists in Egypt have found millions of mummified dogs and jackals. Sad to say, most of these animals were apparently killed as pups and mummified as part of a ritual tribute to Anubis, the Egyptians' jackal-headed god of the dead. We live in a strange world.

A few days ago Notebook contributor visited the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, and sent back a photo of mummified dogs on display as part of an Egyptian exhibition. "They're beautifully painted and carefully protected by the elaborate folds of fabric you see on human mummies from the Fayum period," she reports. It's hard to make out the painting, but here is the picture:

8) Six for the Sixth Month • Insects have six legs. • Beehive chambers have six sides. • So do cubes. • Six is the atomic number (number of protons or electrons) of carbon, an element found in all forms of life. • Snow crystals have six corners. • Any person on Earth is supposedly six degrees of separation (through friends who have friends who have friends) from any other person on Earth.

9) Maine's Changing Climate Pamelia and I went to another Science Cafe talk sponsored by the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and heard from Kirk Allen Maasch of the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute. I hope to write more about this talk soon, but among other highlights was Kirk's explanation of how and why climate change has become more noticeable in our state in the last three decades. Maine happens to be the northernmost range for many species and the southernmost range for others, so what happens here will affect—and is already affecting—numerous plants and animals. Maine is projected to become not just warmer but also wetter in the years ahead, with more rain and less snow.

Maine’s climate has been warming, though the average year-round temperature along the coast, where we live, is still just 44.3 degrees. The global average is about 58 degrees.

10) Our First Roadside Iris of the Year

11) Inspiration and Tragedy You may have read about the death of Marina Keegan in a car accident this past week shortly after her graduation from Yale. Near the end of her college career, Keegan, a gifted writer and fresh voice who was to have begun work this month as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker magazine, wrote a essay about being part of a college community. It's a lovely piece of writing about the bonds and camaraderie that make shared experiences so important to us as a species. It's called "The Opposite of Loneliness." Click here to read it: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/may/27/keegan-opposite-loneliness/?cross-campus

12) ANSWER TO THE LAST PUZZLER As some of you correctly responded, the bird in that Maine photo was a blue-headed vireo. Don't know if you saw the comment, but a trio of blog readers invented names for some fictional blue birds they'd like to see: an ultramarine flycatcher, a cobalt sapsucker and a Prussian-faced booby. Any other suggestions?

Here's a short video of a blue-headed vireo nesting in Massachusetts:

TODAY'S PUZZLER:

What kind of nestlings are shown in the photo above, which was taken this week in Maine?

a) herring gulls
b) juncos
c) blue jays

My first job was to crush the Total flakes into fine pieces.

How to Extract Iron From Breakfast Cereal With a Magnet

May 28, 2012

I've been reading a book called How to Fossilize Your Hamster. It's written by Mick O'Hare of New Scientist magazine and, yes, it will be available at The Naturalist's Notebook when we open for the season next month.

I don't have a hamster, nor would I want to fossilize my pet, but O'Hare's delightful book is filled with other strange experiments and fascinating insights. I now understand why some types of cheese melt lusciously under the broiler and other types sit there in a lump. I've learned how to measure the speed of light using a chocolate bar, a ruler and a microwave oven. (Warning: possible future Notebook blog.)

I was startled to discover that I could remove visible pieces of iron from a bowl of cereal using water and a magnet. The steps are shown below. O'Hare suggests doing the experiment with a high-iron cereal, so I chose Total.

I started by crushing about two-thirds of a cup of the cereal with a mortar and pestle.

Grinding away…guess I could have saved myself work if I had opened the cereal bag from the bottom, where all the dust settles.

Total? Totally pulverized. Ready for the next step.

I mixed the crushed Total with hot (not quite boiling) water in a Ziploc bag. The book doesn’t say how much water to add, so I just guessed and made it somewhat watery. Maybe half a cup? Following O’Hare’s instructions, I let the mixture settle for … — I mixed the crushed Total with hot (not quite boiling) water in a Ziploc bag. The book doesn’t say how much water to add, so I just guessed and made it somewhat watery. Maybe half a cup? Following O’Hare’s instructions, I let the mixture settle for about 20 minutes.

I wasn't sure if the experiment would work. The two-inch magnet I'd bought at Home Depot seemed fairly strong, but I was worried that my mixture was too soupy. Per O'Hare's instructions, I tilted the Ziploc bag to allow the cereal to gather on one side and then moved the magnet beneath the soggy Total particles. Iron, being the heaviest element in cereal flakes, would supposedly sink to the bottom, just as iron and nickel descended to the core of the Earth when the planet was forming 4.6 billion years ago.

O'Hare reveals an interesting fact about the iron in your cereal—a fact that also explains why this experiment is possible. He says that cereal companies don't fortify their products with iron ions (a form of iron that would combine with the other cereal ingredients more thoroughly and be easier for humans to digest) because that would make the cereal spoil faster. Instead, the companies use the regular metal form of iron, much of which goes through your system undigested...and some of which can be extracted from the cereal with a magnet.

Anyhow, after some magnet-waving, I initially saw nothing. Then my kitchen lab associates lifted the Ziploc bag toward an overhead light for better viewing. Voila! There it was—a small clot of iron threads, right near the magnet.

You can see the dark clump of iron just above the magnet.

One more look, with the gray iron strands again clearly visible.

So perhaps you should stay away from the iron-fortified cereal the next time you're going to be passing through an airport metal detector. And after this, I probably will have to show you the speed-of-light-with-a-chocolate-bar trick. That, and how to use Alka Seltzer to make a 1970s lava lamp.

Thank You... ...very much to all of you who sent comments or emails with condolences and memories about Wooster. I sure miss her lying asleep by my chair as I write this.

Stray Dog Completes Race Across China I posted this on the Notebook's Facebook page, but I know a lot of you aren't on Facebook. If you like dogs, it's worth a click:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-18218878

Look to the Sky

The newly arrived edition of the Mount Desert Island-based Sorrento Scientific Society newsletter, called Guillemot, has some helpful stargazing tips. All winter and spring we got used to seeing Venus as the brightest light in the early evening sky, but on June 5 (between 6:04 p.m. and 8:15 p.m., to be exact, at least in this part of coastal Maine) our neighboring planet will pass between the Earth and the Sun, an event that won't happen again until the year 2117. You'll be able to watch this transit as you would a solar eclipse—very carefully, by projecting the image through a pinhole in a cardboard box or using some other such device. (You'll have to look really closely, because Venus is only 3 percent as wide as the Sun.) For the rest of the summer and fall you'll be able see Venus before sunrise, back in its alternate role as the Morning Star.

Meanwhile, you can look into the southwestern sky after sunset and see another planet, Saturn, filling the evening void left by Venus. Guillemot calls Saturn "the only bright object [now] out there" in that part of the sky at that hour.

Answer to the Last Puzzler The tiny egg shown in our last blog came from the official state bird of Maine—a black capped chickadee. (Thanks to Notebook contributor LJ for the photograph and the identification!) The extra-credit answer: The whiptail lizard is the state reptile of New Mexico.

Today's Puzzler
What type of bird is shown in the picture below, settled in its nest? The photo was taken this weekend in Maine:
a) a blue-headed vireo
b) a cerulean warbler
c) an indigo bunting

Here's the beautiful barred owl that Sarah photographed.

The Barred Owl and the Tree Lobster

March 14, 2012

The other day on Mount Desert Island here in Maine, Dave Marks and others working at Morris Yachts saw a barred owl. Here is Dave's account:

"It was about 11 a.m. on a nice sunny day at a boat storage building in Tremont. The owl flew off the ground as we walked by and went to a tree branch 15 feet away and three feet off the ground. It turned and look at us for quite a while. It then flew back to the ground about six feet away from us, pecked once and scratched the ground twice with its back to us then flew back to the same spot. It wasn’t concerned with us at all. In fact I talked to it quite a bit and it seemed only bothered by the chance we may have caused it to lose a possible lunch. I went to work in the building and came out an hour later and it was in a different tree overlooking a grassy area in the woods. I yelled and it turned its head around then went back to its business. I’m kind of a bird nut and I’ve never heard one in the area let alone seen one and I’m at those buildings quite a bit. The pictures were actually taken by Sarah Brandon; she paints names and hails on boats for us."

If you haven't heard one, the barred owl's call often sounds like the words "Who cooks for you?" The owl, however, appears to prefer its mice and squirrels raw.

Other Avian News

The Naturalist's Notebook has become a sponsor of the 14th annual Acadia Birding Festival. The event, which includes lectures, walks and a pelagic seabird boat trip, will be held on Mount Desert Island from May 31 to June 3. During past festivals, participants have seen more than 180 bird species, from ospreys to swamp sparrows to scarlet tanagers to all sorts of warblers. (Roger Tory Peterson once called Mount Desert Island "the warbler capital of the world.")

Put the festival on your calendar if you'll be in Maine then. As event organizer Michael Good of Down East Nature Tours says, "I had my first yellow-rumped warbler on the 8th of March so the birds and spring are coming!"

Adventures With The Tree Lobster

Robert Krulwich of National Public Radio recently reported on a rare creature that was found living on Ball's Pyramid, an 1,844-foot jag of rock poking out of the Tasman Sea, off Australia.

It was discovered (or, as we will learn, re-discovered) by a pair of rock-climbing scientists. They saw fresh, large insect droppings under a lone melaleuca (myrtle family) bush that was sticking improbably from a sheer cliff 225 feet above the shark-infested waters. But the climbers saw no insects. Only when one of the scientists and a local ranger scaled the cliff again, at night, by flashlight—yes, field biology can be a daredevil sport—did they find that same bush and the ground below it covered with hard-shelled critters almost five inches long.

The creatures were Lord Howe stick insects, the heaviest flightless stick insects in the world. They are known as tree lobsters for their size and lobster-ish exoskeletons. Once prolific on nearby Lord Howe Island, they were thought to have gone extinct after a ship ran aground on Lord Howe in 1918 and brought in black rats, which ate every Lord Howe stick insect they could find. From 1920 until 2001, when the Australian scientists rock-climbed on Ball's Pyramid (following up on 40-year-old rumors that other climbers had found insect carcasses there), no one saw a single Lord Howe stick insect.

As far as researchers can tell, the insects now live in the wild only on and under that one bush on that one spire of rock in the middle of the ocean. But the Melbourne Zoo has started breeding them in hopes of reintroducing them to Lord Howe Island. As Krulwich notes, this will require a major rat-eradication effort as well as a public-relations campaign to make the human inhabitants of Lord Howe Island more comfortable with an influx of fist-sized, hard-shell creepy-crawlies. The video above of a Lord Howe stick insect struggling to hatch (you may find yourself saying, "Come on! You can make it!") is part of the campaign to reposition the insects as courageous and lovable.

Ball's Pyramid, where the climbers found the stick insects.

One of the lessons of the Lord Howe stick insect is that some animals survive only in the most specialized of habitats. Another is that scientists often display an inspiring level of dedication in pursuit of knowledge. A third is that invasive species, especially on islands, can quickly wipe out other animals. But the lesson that, if you will, sticks with me is how strange we humans are in our relationship with other animals. We kill 'em off, bring 'em back, try to make them 'em sound so cuddly that Disney would turn them into cartoon characters. We're probably fortunate that our survival doesn't depend on whether another species thinks we're cute enough to keep alive.

Jumpin' Jupiter and Venus!

Have you looked up lately? Right now you have the chance to see at least two sights that you won't see this clearly for years to come.

The two bright objects fairly high in the western sky, quite close to each other, in the four hours after sunset are Jupiter and Venus. Venus is the higher and brighter one. On the night of March 15 the two planets will be just 3 degrees apart. This moment of visual proximity is called the Venus-Jupiter Conjunction.

Mind you, Venus and Jupiter aren't actually close to each other—they're just temporarily lined up from our perspective—and they're certainly a long way from us. At different points in our orbits Venus gets as close to the Earth as 26 million miles and as far away as 160 million miles; Jupiter's distance from us ranges from 391 million to 599 million miles. (Flying the latter distance at the speed of a commercial jet would take you a mere 137 years.)

When you go outside to look at Venus and Jupiter in the west, take time to look east as well. The red light you see will be Mars. It won't be this bright in our sky again until April 2014. You can see it from dusk to dawn.

The Turkeys Are Getting Frisky

I posted this quick video on youtube yesterday after watching male wild turkeys strutting and displaying their tails in our driveway:

Daylight Savings Idea

Einstein discovered that as we near the speed of light, time slows down. Anyone who has ever toiled in an office knows that the same thing happens during work hours on Mondays. So here's my idea. Instead of moving our clocks an hour ahead in the middle of a Saturday night to start Daylight Savings Time—a cruel mandate that costs us not just one hour of precious sleep, but one hour of precious sleep during the weekend—let's move the clocks ahead at 4 p.m. on a Monday, thus chopping an unwanted hour off the most hated work day, raising national morale, and giving us all a reason to think of Albert Einstein. We can brand the event as Relativity Monday.

Answers to the Last Puzzlers

1) One of the distinguishing traits of mammals is that they—and no other animals—have a middle ear containing three bones. That configuration has helped scientists trace mammals' evolution. For a fascinating account of how bones, fossils, DNA and other evidence have revealed the course of change and adaptation in animals (including us), read Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. That mind-opening book, which among other honors won the Best Book award from the National Academy of Sciences and the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, should be required frontier-of-knowledge reading for anyone who wants to understand how biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, anatomists and other experts have pieced together, with physical evidence, the connections between humans and all other life forms on Earth. The book also offers a fun look at how both detailed planning and extraordinarily good luck are sometimes required to find tiny, hundred-million-year-old bones buried in the surface of our vast planet.

2) The branches in the photo are turning red because spring sunlight is causing the plant to produce anthocyanin, an antioxidant that also gives grapes and berries their color.

Today's Puzzlers

1)Geologists use several criteria to distinguish minerals from rocks. Which of these is NOT true?

a) Minerals are made of substances that were never alive.
b) Minerals are never found above ground.
c) Minerals have the same chemical makeup wherever they are found.
d) The atoms of minerals are arranged in a regular pattern and form crystals.

2) Why is a barred owl called a barred owl?

a) Because it was barred from churchyards in medieval times as a symbol of death
b) Because of the bars of light and dark across its feathers
c) Because it often roosted outside a famous prison in Shropshire, England
d) Because its wise look suggested a lawyer, or barrister; it was originally a "barristered" owl

(Thanks to Notebook friends and correspondents Kathy Weathers, Regina Ryan and Leanne Nickon for their blog contributions.) —Craig Neff, The Naturalist's Notebook

Crazy Sneakers and Changing Seasons

September 2, 2011

A group of us was sitting on the Notebook deck,

halfway through the season's final session of Earth News, our kid-reporter workshop. I couldn't wait any longer. "Bring out the surprise," I told fellow Notebook team member Eli.

He went inside and returned with a box that was, suspiciously enough, about the size of a shoe box. Despite this clue, half of those in the group, including Pamelia, had no idea what was inside it. After a game of 20 questions (no one guessed correctly), Eli opened the box and pulled out...the world's first pair of Naturalist's Notebook sneakers. They had been designed by Eli and fellow Notebook team members Haley and Julie as a gift for Pamelia.

No, they're not for sale. We do hope to create a number of new and unique items in the months and years ahead, but shoes probably won't be on the list. However, I will keep you posted on any comments the official Notebook sneakers receive when Pamelia wears them in public.

Is That Fall I See?

Pamelia took in the view toward Seal Harbor and the Atlantic as we climbed the Beachcroft Trail up Huguenot Head on Mount Desert Island.

Hurricane Irene blew a lot of tourists out of the Bar Harbor area. Mount Desert Island has been quiet all week. Not as many children and families have been stopping in at The Naturalist's Notebook, though more retirees and couples have. Just as the leaves change at summer's end, so do the demographics of visitors to the Maine coast.

I always tell people that the best time to come to this area is in September and October. We've had a string of perfect 70-degree days leading up to Labor Day, and more are ahead. Pamelia and I have finally gotten a chance to do some hiking. We went up the Beachcroft Trail, a mountainside route filled with switchbacks and made almost entirely of granite steps. We've done some early-morning exploring in this week's super-low tides, treading carefully to avoid stepping on sea stars and urchins.

We've also begun focusing on Notebook plans for 2012, when I'll be in New York and London for a number of weeks working on the Olympics for Sports Illustrated. We hope to get e-commerce up and running, work with even more young collaborators and create a range of new exhibits. Right now College of the Atlantic student and budding filmmaker Julie Olbrantz is working on some short videos about the Notebook for our website. And we will finally finish our brochure before the end of the year.

We welcome all your ideas for promoting and improving The Naturalist's Notebook. Just spreading the word, in person and online, helps us immensely. We hope to see many of you over the next six weeks, even—perhaps I should say especially—after the detour signs start directing all through traffic around the center of Seal Harbor on Sept 19.

Periwinkle snails were stacked up everywhere, including atop clam shells, when we wandered through the low tide zone.

Honey Tournament Semifinals Update

In a match interrupted by Hurricane Irene, Italian Sunflower defeated Maryland Bamboo (actually Japanese knotweed) 32-20 to advance to the Sweet 16 final. The sunflower will face the winner of the much-anticipated match between defending champion Maine Wild Raspberry and newcomer Oregon Wild Red Huckleberry, which has crushed all of its opponents in the tournament so far.

About the Garlic Sauce...

Several of you responded like serious foodies to my mention that our Moldovan-born house guest had cooked us polenta with fish, feta and a delicious garlic sauce. You asked for the garlic sauce recipe, so here you go (it's very simple): Take several roughly cut-up cloves of garlic and a pinch of coarse salt. Smash them together with a mortar and pestle (or some equivalent smooshing device). Stir in enough water to give the mixture the consistency of a watery relish. Voila. You have a potent, delicious condiment.

Maine safari? A visiting four-year-old created this museum-worthy diorama this week on an outdoor table. Both hippos and rhinos are herbivores who sustain their multi-ton bodies by eating grass (hippos) or grass, buds, leaves and fruit (rhinos).

Coming Soon: The Big Year

Any of you who have read the very funny birding book The Big Year, by Mark Obmascik, will be delighted to know that the Hollywood film based upon it will be released on Oct. 14. Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black will star in the movie. I'll post a trailer as soon as one is available.

Blog to Blog

Speaking of avian matters, VIA magazine has started posting some blogs I wrote for its website last fall while covering the Pacific Flyway bird migration. The first one is available by clicking on this link: http://roadjournals.viamagazine.com/2011/09/02/pacific-flyway-embracing-sights-unseen-and-unplanned-for/

If you would like to read my VIA story about our 3,000-mile trip along the Pacific Flyway, click on this link: http://www.viamagazine.com/attractions/adventures-pacific-flyway

Some of the migrating waterfowl we saw at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge last fall.

The latest work to spring from the fertile imagination of Rocco Alberico—as well as new, one-of-a-kind endangered species gold jewelry pieces from fellow New York artist Anne Woodman—will debut at the Notebook this Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. Come on … — The latest work to spring from the fertile imagination of Rocco Alberico—as well as new, one-of-a-kind endangered species gold jewelry pieces from fellow New York artist Anne Woodman—will debut at the Notebook this Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. Come on over!

Look What Landed

June 29, 2011

New York artist Rocco Alberico has built an international following for his unique multi-media constructions, with shows in New York, Berlin, Valencia, Miami, Los Angeles and other cities. A graduate of the prestigious Cooper Union, he was a top graphic designer in the magazine world (and the award-winning art director of Sports Illustrated For Kids, where I worked with him) before deciding a decade ago to focus on his own fine art.

Rocco will be unveiling two dazzling, humorous, inventive pieces at The Naturalist's Notebook on Thursday, June 30, from 4 to 8 p.m. He'll be there with his equally talented wife, playwright Wendy Yondorf, as part of an extravaganza we're calling Volcano Night. The event will highlight not only Rocco and his pieces but also wonderful New York jewelry maker Anne Woodman, who was hugely popular at the Notebook last year and is back to show new work, including one-of-a-kind endangered-species designs. Oh, yes, and at 7 p.m. we are going to set off a small volcano outside the Notebook. It'll be the only volcano in Maine this year. We hope.

Take Me to Your Leader (Part One), which is on display in our Seal Harbor Observatory room.

This is the second year in a row that the Notebook has been fortunate enough to display some of Rocco’s pieces. We interviewed him about the two works he's showing this summer, playfully entitled Leave it to Beaver and Take Me to Your Leader (Part One). The former is a 66-inch-tall, water-tower-shaped piece with two dioramas, two 3-D viewers, fish wearing dentures, a sinister motorized hay bale on a railroad track, the Big Dipper and oh so much more. Take Me to Your Leader (Part One) is a wall-hung, outer-space-inspired construction containing dioramas and a praxinoscope, a 19th-century animation device.

Q: When did you start making these unique, architectural multi-media constructions?
Rocco: In art school. The first ones were simple and quite small—and similar in shape to the very tiny Cape Cod house I grew up in on Long Island. As a kid I had developed a love of dioramas. I had a slot-car race track in the basement of our house, and I spent hours landscaping in miniature. I could never afford the expensive plastic trees and hand-painted figures, so I made due with twigs and lichen. I was obsessed with making everything look real.

Here's Rocco outside the Notebook last year with his homemade 3-D camera, which never fails to attract crowds when he's hiking with it in Acadia National Park.

Q: Describe your creative process for making a piece. And what inspired Leave It to Beaver?Rocco: My creative process is not very linear. In fact, it’s rather erratic and chaotic. Inspiration for a particular piece can come from anywhere—personal experience, something I might read or see on TV, nature, travel, etc.

I may start out with an idea for a 3-D image or diorama and built a piece around that. For example, when I began working on Leave It to Beaver the only thing I knew was that I wanted to build a water tower out of popsicle sticks based on the shape of the wooden water tanks I see on rooftops of buildings in New York City. (I love their conical roofs and spherical bottoms.) I also knew that I wanted to include some kind of track that would run around the circumference of the structure with some kind of sinister vehicle riding around in circles.

The sinister motorized hay bale, comin' around the bend.

I built the basic construction first but wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to put inside it. I had a 3-D image that I thought might be appropriate (the Big Dipper with a gloved hand pointing to a birch tree) and I knew the general theme had something to do with water. I also knew I wanted to include a strong reference to beavers. I’m constantly taking pictures of beaver lodges and dams, and they’re my favorite animals. I got the idea for the beaver lodge/fortress diorama while kayaking on Island Pond in Harriman State Park in New York’s Hudson Valley.

I love nature and the outdoors but somehow feel it’s out to get me. It seems to be a general theme that has emerged in my work.

Q: Where do you work?
Rocco: In a small room in the back of our apartment in Manhattan. It’s crammed with art supplies, tools, my computer and tons of stuff I’ve collected over the years. I do a lot of my wood cutting and sanding in a small bathroom outfitted with an exhaust fan. I’m slowly taking over the rest of the apartment.

Q. Does Wendy, who is tremendously creative herself, serve as a muse or sounding board?
Rocco: She is a great sounding board for me. I’ll usually show her finished elements of a piece to get her reaction. If she doesn’t get it, I almost always take her suggestions. For example, when I finished the lethal motorized haystack that runs around Leave It to Beaver, it initially had two sharpened spikes in front. She really liked the vehicle but asked why there were two pencils sticking out of it. I tried to explain the “pencils” were spikes but she just not buying it. A few days later I changed the spikes to the rake-like configuration you see now.

Rocco's love of fishing (but failure to catch many) may have inspired him to give these guys dentures.

Q: What’s the story behind Take Me to Your Leader (Part One)? Rocco: As a kid in the ‘60s I was always fascinated by the prospect of life on other planets. I was an avid follower of NASA and the space program and was transfixed when Neil Armstrong took that first step on the Moon. At about this time I ordered a copy of Flying Saucers: Serious Business, by Frank Edwards and became absolutely convinced that we were being visited by beings from another world. I read everything I could get my hands on regarding UFOs and even built a UFO detector that I saw in a magazine. I fantasized about being abducted by aliens and learning their secrets.

When I was in college I read a book called From Outer Space by a UFO contactee by the name of Howard Menger. He claimed to be in contact with a group of benevolent space brothers from a distant planet and said he would often accompany them on their forays throughout the solar system. At one point he said he was taken to the Moon and presented with a hydroponically grown Moon potato. The story was an obvious hoax and I thought it might be fun to create my own UFO hoax, which I did for a book project in a photography class.

The idea/theme of alien visitation has stayed with me, although now I’m a total skeptic. I’m now interested in the mythology and the religious undertones of the things like the UFO phenomena. My UFO is shaped like a funnel and is based on the base of a municipal water tower in Long Island, where I grew up. I liked the shape because it’s very similar to the space capsules used in the Mercury space program. For the animation in the praxinoscope, I built a small model and photographed it against a background photo in different positions so as to give the impression of the funnel-shaped object flying around in a circle. This is the first piece in a series that I’ve been working on.

Q: Any idea yet what your next piece might be?
Rocco: I’m not sure yet but I do have an idea for a tall building with “arms.” That’s very anthropomorphic and I’d also like to do something around the theme of volcanism. I’ll still keep working on my other series as well.

Sneak Preview:
Anne Woodman deserves (and will get) her own blog post, but here's just a sample of her work—one of her new endangered species pieces. Come to the Notebook for much more:

Book Spotlight:
Here's Eli Mellen with a lot at another of the 1,000-plus natural history titles we have at the Notebook: Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, by Scott Weidensaul

Rachel Carson opened the public's eyes to the richness, fragility and interconnectedness of the oceans as a singular ecosystem. In much the same way Saul Weidensaul's book Living on the Wind serves to illustrate the highly interconnected nature of the entire Earth's tenuous and miraculous ecosystems. He does this through the lens of bird migration from one hemisphere to another. By following the course of these migrations Weidensaul shows that ecosystems and bioregions that are often viewed as independent of one another can also be seen as highly connected nodes of a much larger ecosystem. They are linked by the birds' migratory pathways. And that is the deeper value of Weidensaul's superb book: In looking at birds, it offers a new way of looking at the planet. –Eli Mellen

Answer to the Last Puzzler:
What is the chemical symbol for tin?

a) Au
b) Tn
c) Sn
d) Espn

Answer:
c). The Sn comes from the Latin word for tin, stannum.

Today's Puzzler:
Anne Woodman's jewelry is made of gold. Which element is heavier, gold or lead?

Jessica Richieri designed and built this to win several awards at the prestigious Intel science fair (photograph by Rodrigo Pena for the Press-Enterprise).

Science Winners, Butterfly Chasing and Chickens In a Vending Machine

May 18, 2011

As a follow-up to my recent post on the Maine State Science Fair, I have to note the astonishing project done by 17-year-old Jessica Richeri of Corona, Calif., to win a total of five awards and $20,000 in scholarship money at last week's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles. Her project was entitled, "Autonomous Robotic Vehicle: Saving Lives, Preventing Accidents, One at a Time." To quote the website of the California newspaper the Press-Enterprise, Jessica "built an autonomous robotic vehicle with the capacity to detect and avoid obstacles while moving in traffic through an urban environment. The vehicle also is equipped with GPS navigation."

And get this: Though her project won four special awards, it finished only third in the electrical engineering category. That speaks awfully well of the future of science at the highest end (in contrast to the poor state of science knowledge among students overall). Jessica was up against 1,500 other science students from 65 countries. I'm guessing a future Nobel Prize winner is among them. Here's a link to the Press-Enterprise story. http://www.pe.com/localnews/corona/stories/PE_News_Local_D_science17.38d2a88.html

Monitoring a Monarch

A Naturalist's Notebook friend mentioned in an e-mail this week that she had monitored monarch butterflies and learned how to tag them. I was curious how that tagging was done without injuring such delicate creatures. The video above shows a conservation group in Cape May, N.J., monitoring and tagging monarchs with press-on number tags. The butterflies were on their way to Mexico for the winter—a journey of a mere 2,000 miles.

Have you seen any monarchs yet where you live?

Adder's Tongue or Trout Lily?

Our woods is blanketed with these wildflowers, which have three names: trout lily (because of the speckled pattern on the leaves), adder's tongue (because of the shape of the flower) and dogtooth violet (because someone who saw it must have loved do… — Our woods is blanketed with these wildflowers, which have three names: trout lily (because of the speckled pattern on the leaves), adder's tongue (because of the shape of the flower) and dogtooth violet (because someone who saw it must have loved dogs; the plant isn't even a type of violet).

Pretty sure I saw a magnolia warbler in the trees behind The Naturalist's Notebook. The spring warbler migration has reached Mount Desert Island, which is always a great place for birdwatching. The Acadia Birding Festival is coming up June 2 to 5.

What Came First, the Chicken or the Egg Machine?
Factory farming crowds animals into tiny pens and sun-deprived cages. To raise awareness of the conditions in which poultry is raised, an animal-rights group in Germany created this fake egg-vending machine containing live chickens. The machine, located in the center of Frankfurt, didn't dispense eggs; it gave out informational coins that explained how to buy eggs that come from chickens that are either free-range or otherwise humanely raised.

3-D Ants
Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences have embarked on a project to shoot 3-D, up-close images of all 12,000 of the world's known ant species. Click on the link below to see a BBC slide show that is both fascinating and a little creepy. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12880498

This barber's-eye view of a Costa Rican leaf-cutter ant shows the sort of detail visible in the California Academy of Sciences photo series..

Invasion of the Japanese Knotweed
Last night Pamelia and I sat in on the first-ever session of a multi-organizational group that includes Acadia National Park and the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and is focusing on the invasive-plant threat to Acadia and Mount Desert Island. I'll tell you more about that whole subject in a future post, but in the meantime, if it's a subject you'd like to know more about, just send us an e-mail.

Answers to the Last Puzzlers:
1) Which of these statements is NOT true:
a): The word magnet comes from the Greek town Magnesia, near which magnetic ore was first found.
b) The name lima beans comes from Lima, Peru, where they have been cultivated for 8,000 years.
c) The color magenta was named for the 1859 Battle of Magenta, which was fought in what is now Magenta, Italy.
d) The name maple comes from the Latin term for sweet tear drops.
Answer: d). Pinning down the origin of maple is a little tricky, but it may have come from a Germanic word roughly translated as "nourishing mother tree." On the other hand, I did find out with amazing statistical certainty from a baby-name website—I'm not making this up—that Maple is used as a name for boys 5.363 times more often than it is as for girls.

2) Why is a type of owl called a saw-whet?
a) Because it likes to nest in trees freshly felled by the saws of loggers
b) Because the skieu! call it makes when alarmed sounds like a saw being sharpened
c) Because it was raining heavily when a naturalist first discovered the species in 1683; he literally saw the bird when he was wet
Answer: b).

Today's Puzzlers:
1) You have a four-minute hourglass and a seven-minute hourglass. You need to time something that lasts exactly nine minutes. How can you use your hourglasses to do that?

2) Unscramble these to find words related to nature:
a) bralewr
b) erncat
c) sloduc
d) toro

Birthdays:
Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel-winning British chemist who discovered the structure of insulin, cholesterol and vitamin B-12, would have turned 101 this week. Born in Egypt to an archaeologist/scholar, she developed a love of science as a child. She eventually made breakthroughs in X-ray crystallography, which provides a 3-D look at how atoms are assembled in a crystal. By the way, until the early 1900s people didn't know that vitamins existed. For more than 99 percent of human history people had no concept of nutrition, and essentially looked at all food as having the same nutritional value.

Ronald Ross, the Nobel-winning British bacteriologist who discovered that malaria is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito, would have been 154 on Friday. Ross, who had contracted malaria while researching the disease in India, had recovered and was working in West Africa when he found the malaria parasite in the Anopheles mosquito. That was a crucial step in determining how to control the disease, which even today kills a million people a year and is responsible for one of every five childhood deaths in Africa.

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