After months of semi-hibernation, Alvin popped out yesterday to look around.

The Chipmunk Who Thought He Was a Groundhog

March 1, 2011

When winter began our chipmunk family went underground. Even in warmer months our 'munks go subterranean; the tunnel system they've built beneath our lawn rivals that of the New York subways (but with seed stockpiles instead of newspaper-and-lottery-ticket kiosks). In very cold weather they really hunker down. Chipmunks curl up in the den, lower their body temperature from about 99 degrees Fahrenheit to about 43 degrees, and fall into a state of torpor.

And then, on a warmer day like yesterday, they make like Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog. Around 8 a.m. our Alvin (the head 'munk) poked his head up through the snow like a periscope—initially just enough for us to see one of his eyeballs. About half an hour later he emerged fully and raced toward a thicket of rugosa roses, a corridor that would eventually lead to our bird feeders.

He did not see his shadow. If he were a groundhog, that would suggest that the end of winter is near. I suspect the appearance of the chipmunk is a more reliable predictor of that.

Redpoll Madness
The chipmunks have at least 40 new rivals for the birdseed supply: a flock of common redpolls that swarmed in about a week ago. Redpolls are tiny, far northern finches that chatter happily, or at least make us happy with their nonstop chatter. They have bright red crowns and the males have red-stained breasts. Though I haven't detected these in my observations, redpolls have throat pouches in which they store seeds to eat later, much the way you might sneak shrimp from a restaurant buffet into your purse, backpack or oversized dinner napkin to gorge on back home. Uh, not that I would do that or anything.

This female is part of a huge flock of common redpolls that showed up in late February to enjoy coastal Maine life outside our house.

Turning the Calendar Page
March is the only month that is also a command. That's fitting, given that its name comes from Mars, the Roman god of war and the root of the word martial, meaning military or soldierly. Mars— the No. 2-ranked Roman god, behind Jupiter—also oversaw agriculture, and was supposed to ward off weather that would be bad for crops. This time of year was the start of the planting season, which is why Mars was celebrated with festivals about now and why March was named for him.

A Refresher Course: Is this Moon Waxing or Waning?

We went through this several weeks ago, but repetition bolsters learning. Remember, when the moon is growing smaller, the curved side is on the left, as in the letter C. Moon getting smaller? C ya, moon! So the moon in the photo above is waning.

Worth a Read

My bedside companion of late has been a highly entertaining and astute book called A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. It's written by John Allen Paulos, who's a math professor at Temple, an essayist, an ABCnews.com columnist and a smart, funny observer of the world. He's written a number of terrific books, but in this one he dissects news coverage to look at how numbers are used, misused and distressingly omitted. In one section, he points out how often newspapers cite statistics that are almost comically precise even though they're based on uncertain data. He throws in this kicker:

"The joke about the museum guard who told visitors that the dinosaur on exhibit was 90,000,006 years old is a good illustration. Upon questioning, the guard explained that he was told the dinosaur was 90,000,000 million years old when he was hired, six years before."

Great Photography Link
Thanks to Notebook friend Betsy Loredo for pointing out the winners of The Nature Conservancy's latest photography contest. Click on this link to see them all: http://my.nature.org/photography/2010-photo-contest.html?autologin=true

This remarkable shot of an egret by Graham F. Owen of Burbank, Calif., was one of the Nature Conservancy winners.

Answers to Last Puzzlers:
1) The bird in the photograph is a secretary bird. There is disagreement over whether that name comes from the quill-pen-like feathers at the back of its head, or an Arabic word for hunter-bird that was translated into French as secretaire. The scientific name for this African bird of prey is Sagittarius serpentarius because it bears a vague resemblance (mostly in stature) to Sagittarius the centaur/archer and because it hunts snakes.
2) Absolute zero is minus-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.
3) Henry Chadwick chose the K symbol to represent a strikeout in baseball because it's the last letter in the wordstruck.

Today's Puzzler:
How many coastal states are there in the U.S.?

A Gymnast and Painter
Frank Bare died a few days ago at age 82. I never met him, but he was a star college gymnast at Illinois and the founding president of what is now the U.S. governing body for his sport, USA Gymnastics. He laid the groundwork that enabled American gymnasts such as Mary Lou Retton, Carly Patterson and Nastia Liukin to become Olympic champions. He did this despite suffering from Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a condition that leads to progressively more debilitating muscle weakness. The disease did not stop him from pursuing his other passion: painting. One of his works is below.

This Frank Bare painting, called The Cello Player, is part of the Muscular Dystrophy Association art collection in Tucson, Ariz.

Birthdays:
Joel Roberts Poinsett, the South Carolina-born botanist and (holy Mars!) onetime Secretary of War (under Martin van Buren), would have been 232 years old tomorrow. You probably have guessed this already, but he is the man for whom the poinsettia plant is named. An inveterate plant collector, he brought the first specimen of Euphorbia pulcherrima into the U.S. from Mexico. It was initially dubbed the painted leaf or the Mexican fire plant because of its vibrant red leaves—or, more properly, red brachts, a specialized type of leaf, different from a foliage leaf, that in the case of the poinsettia serves to attract pollinators. Poinsett himself was no mere pretty plant. He also co-founded the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts, which eventually morphed into the Smithsonian Institution.

Frederic Chopin, the Polish pianist and composer, would have turned 211 today. As a keyboard meddler who is more chopsticks (pronounce that shope-sticks) than Chopin, I'm unqualified to do justice to either his keyboard virtuosity or the magnitude (magn-étude?) of his important contributions to music. But his romance with the Bohemian female writer George Sand suggests a man not satisfied to play it safe, and his early death—at 39, probably of tuberculosis, though possibly from cystic fibrosis, a condition not then known to medicine—reminds us how much someone can accomplish in a short time if he fully engages life.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, the Massachusetts-born writer, illustrator and extraordinary-species creator better known as Dr. Seuss, would have turned 107 today. Or, given that he was born on Feb. 29 and thus had an actual birthday only every four years, perhaps he would have been (aptly enough) much younger than that—by my math, three-quarters of the way between ages 26 and 27. One of my favorite childhood books was Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. It may not have been his greatest work, but it instilled in me a love of turtles and perhaps even a sense of social justice, from seeing the greedy, self-aggrandizing Yertle get his comeuppance—or rather, his go-down-ance, right into the mud.

What's your favorite Dr. Seuss book?

The sculpin looked considerably better when we put him in the freezer a few years ago.

The Creature in the Fridge

February 26, 2011

What is the strangest item—living or dead—that you've ever found in your refrigerator?

Until the other day I might have said one of the technicolor mold stalagmites I have grown over the years by tossing leftovers in the fridge and forgetting about them.

But not anymore. While digging through the freezer in search of peas, Pamelia instead came upon a Saran Wrapped, freeze-dried, four-inch-long grubby sculpin. We originally found the specimen (already dead) at low tide here in Maine on a bitter cold winter afternoon several years ago. We knew little about the sculpin as a species, but decided to preserve our discovery because it reminded us of a story Pamelia's late mother, Pam, had told us.

In recounting her decades on Union River Bay in Trenton, Maine, Pam said that she used to catch a type of fish called a sculpin—actually a shorthorn sculpin, much larger than a grubby (as long as two or three feet) but similar in appearance. That is, big-headed, huge-eyed, monstrously spiny, amply finned, and, in Pam's word, "ugly!" The shorthorn sculpins were abundant, she said, but in the last couple of decades they seemed to have vanished from the bay. Pamelia and I figured we would never actually see this almost mythical creature, and we would talk about it as an example of the declining sea life in Maine's bays.

Then we found our specimen—a toy version of the fish Pam had described. A bit of research revealed that of the 16,764 known species of fish in the seas (to use the figure released in 2010 by the Census of Marine Life, which has been counting for a decade), the grubby sculpin stands out mostly because no commercial use for it has ever been found. It is a bottom feeder and is said to be the only fish that can be seen in Maine tidal pools in winter.

That heartiness is rather endearing to the two of us. As I look out at almost a foot of fresh snow on this 12-degree morning, with plenty of winter still ahead, I can't dispose of Mr. Grubby. And so he's back in the freezer, re-Saran Wrapped and carefully set atop a bag of organic green beans.

The Pelican and the Strip Club

Rachel, the Notebook's Nova Scotia correspondent, has alerted us to a major development in the story of Ralph the pelican. Ralph, if you missed it, is a juvenile brown pelican from the southern U.S. who was found at Ralph's strip club in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, last September after being blown far off course by Hurricane Earl. ("Like I'm going to believe that!" hoots Mrs. Ralph the pelican.) Efforts to have him flown to a wildlife sanctuary in the U.S. were blocked by international red tape, so now he's going to be driven by a Nova Scotian who holds various world distance-driving records. Here's the full story on Ralph's upcoming road trip to North Carolina: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2011/02/24/ns-ralph-pelican-going-home.html

Last Puzzler Answer:
Which of those five birds were real, and which one was made up? The fake one was the devil-capped flycatcher. The violaceous trogon, white-whiskered puffbird, gang-gang cockatoo and black-faced antthrush are all real birds, though we don't see any of them in Maine.

The violaceous trogon lives mostly in the Amazon region and often nests in wasp, ant or termite nests.

Today's Puzzlers:

1. What type of bird is shown above?
a) a colonial poppycock
b) a secretary bird
c) a post courier
d) a frocked willy
e) a knickered ambler

2. Because it's so cold here in Maine today, let me ask: What is absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature?
a) minus-273.15 degrees Fahrenheit
b) minus-1,012.36 degrees Fahrenheit
c) minus-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit

3. Given that the spring training baseball season is starting (Grapefruit League games in Florida, Cactus League games in Arizona), let's pay tribute to Henry Chadwick, the British-born sports writer and statistician who, among other contributions to baseball, came up with the symbols and system used for keeping track of a game on a scorecard. Chadwick was from an interesting family. His half-brother, Edwin, was a health reformer who was in charge of improving the living conditions of England's poor during the Industrial Revolution. As a strong proponent of miasma theory, which wrongly held that all diseases were spread by foul air, he tried to get rid of anything that smelled bad in England's slums. The father of the two Chadwicks, James, once taught John Dalton, the English chemist who scientifically developed the theory that materials are made of atoms and also discovered color blindness, a condition not found in major league baseball until the arrival of Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers owner who signed Jackie Robinson. All of which leads to this unrelated question: Why did Henry Chadwick choose the letter K as the symbol for a strikeout in baseball scorekeeping?
a) To honor his father's friend Lord Kelvin, who discovered the existence of absolute zero
b) Because it's the final letter in the word struck
c) Because it was his middle initial, and he knew that if he had ever played baseball he would have struck out regularly

Fans keeping track of a pitcher's strikeouts; a backwards K means that the third strike was called by the umpire, not swung at and missed by the batter.

Birthdays:
Charles Best, the Maine-born scientist who as a medical student co-discovered insulin, would have been 112 years old tomorrow. Talk about Best of luck: He was chosen to work on the insulin project ahead of another student because he won a coin flip by project leader Dr. Frederick Banting.

Victor Hugo, the French poet, playwright and novelist, would have turned 109 today. Though better known for writing works such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, he also was a gifted artist. He did more than 4,000 drawings and, in the estimation of painter Eugene Delacroix, might well have become a towering figure in art had he pursued that as his career. Oddly enough, Hugo also popularized squid. After he wrote the novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), which included tales of dangerous ocean creatures, Parisians became obsessed with squid, donning squid hats, eating squid dishes and holding squid parties.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet who was born in Portland back when Maine was part of Massachusetts, would have been 204 tomorrow. Here is an excerpt from his poem Birds of Passage:

And above, in the light
Of the star-lit night,
Swift birds of passage wing their flight
Through the dewy atmosphere.
I hear the beat
Of their pinions fleet,
As from the land of snow and sleet
They seek a southern lea.

Susan Helms, the North Carolina-born astronaut who in 2001 (with fellow astronaut Jim Voss) set the record for the longest space walk (8 hours, 53 minutes), turns 53 today. If you want to learn some space jargon, remember that a space walk is more precisely called an EVA, for extra-vehicular activity.

Linus Pauling, the brilliant Oregon-born chemist and peace activist, would have been 110 tomorrow. Along with Marie Curie, he is one of the two people ever to have won Nobel prizes in different fields—in his case chemistry (1954) and peace (1962).

And one more happy birthday today, to a grandmother of The Naturalist's Notebook—my mom.

Evolution in Bar Harbor

February 23, 2011

About 2.5 million people visited Acadia National Park last year (up a quarter of a million from 2009), and many of them stayed in Bar Harbor. With that in mind, I'm posting a photo to show you how different Bar Harbor's waterfront looks as of today. The long-standing Quarterdeck Restaurant at the foot of Main Street has been demolished—along with neighboring buildings on West Street—to make way for a large new hotel. When the project is done the town will have a very different look down by the pier.

If only it were so easy to create new habitat for other animals.

As the Natural History Museum's display makes clear, Alaska brown bears such as these are utterly gigantic—much bigger than grizzlies, though (good news if you run into one) their claws are shorter and their temperament less aggressive.

Bearing Up in New York City

February 21, 2011

You never know what you’ll see and hear when you visit the American Museum of Natural History.
I spent a few hours there last Saturday afternoon while in New York for Sports Illustrated work. I enjoyed seeing, in the Hall of Birds, 372 avian species (stuffed) in dioramas—exotic types such as a glossy drongo from Congo, a purple-crowned fairy from Panama, a Southern screamer from Argentina and a Mongolian finch from the Gobi desert. I also observed many varieties of museum visitor—from the harried female carriage-pusher to younger, wilder specimens like the raucous redheaded paw-it-all . Here are a few random scenes and comments that reminded me why the museum is one of my favorite places:

“Come on! Let’s go see the heavy elements!” —Declaration from an exuberantly stressed father to a deeply unmotivated three-year-old whose pants he is struggling to pull up in the men’s room.

Teenage girl No. 1, pointing to a genetics display: “Look—DNA tells us all about humans.” Teenage girl No. 2, scrunching her face: “Whaa-AHHT?”

Mother to three-year-old daughter passing a wetlands diorama: “A beaver—oooh! That’s scary!” Girl screams. Mother drags daughter away.

Twenty-ish blinged-up woman passing the same beaver display a moment later with her boyfriend: “They eat whaat—wood! That’s CRAZY!”

Agitated, middle-aged, very New York woman addressing her husband while looking at a gallery of bird photographs: “You complain when I touch up a photo? See this? [She points to the edge of a wing in a photo of an Arctic tern.] IT’S TOUCHED UP!”

Burly father puts his teenage son in a chokehold from behind and asks the boy if he remembers how to get out of it. Boy doesn’t. Father tells him to reach back and grab father’s pant leg and pull. Father and son separate. Father looks up at primate display. Points: “See? DNA. Chimpanzee 99 percent the same as humans.”

Smiling mother to smiling six-year-old daughter while heading for the revolving-door exit at closing time: “It’s been a good day, hasn’t it.”

Yes.

Part of a superb photo exhibit called On Feathered Wings, this extraordinary photo of a barn swallow feeding a fly to a fledgling was shot by David G. Hemmings in Canada.

Part of the same Natural History Museum show, this shot by Richard Ettlinger of a double-breasted cormorant was taken in Florida, apparently at lunchtime.

Today’s Puzzler:
Which of these is NOT a real bird:
a) violaceous trogon
b) white-whiskered puffbird
c) devil-capped flycatcher
d) gang-gang cockatoo
e) black-faced antthrush

How Oysters Could Save New York (Or At Least Part of It)

The talk on this video is by architect Kate Orff, a pioneer in a field she calls "oyster-tecture." Watch it and you'll learn a lot about oysters and, perhaps, the future of New York City:

Birthdays:
Robert Baden-Powell, the British Army officer who founded the Scouting movement in 1907, would have been 154 years old tomorrow. As a schoolboy he would sneak out to the woods to stalk game and hide from teachers, and his interest in military training and the outdoors eventually led him to launch Scouts. He is less famous for being a prolific, ambidextrous artist who, while working in military intelligence, disguised himself as a butterfly collector and incorporated secret military plans into his butterfly drawings. Politically naïve but staunchly anti-Communist, he became an admirer of fascists such as Mussolini and, in a memorable assessment, described Hitler’s Mein Kampf as “a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc.”

How can we at The Naturalist's Notebook not point out that Samuel Pepys, the British naval administrator who jotted down the minutiae of his life in a notebook every day for 10 years—the famous Diary of Samuel Pepys—would have turned 378 this week. Without Pepys' diary, which he wrote in a form of shorthand that could not initially be deciphered when the diary was first discovered in the 1800s (he also wrote sensitive portions in a code that combined Spanish, French and Italian), we would not know today what daily life was like in the 1600s. Pepys also gave an important historical accounts of the Great Plague of London (1665-66), which killed 100,000 residents of his city, and the Great Fire of London, which gutted the city just as the plague was ending. A few years later, Pepys had to stop keeping a diary because his eyesight had gotten so bad—possibly from writing by candlelight for so many nights.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Maine-born poet, playwright and feminist who saw parallels in the cycles of nature and love, would have been 119 tomorrow. Preferring to be called Vincent and named (since we have a New York City theme going) for St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where her uncle's life had been saved, Millay was red-haired, beautiful, vivacious and gifted. Here is Pity Me Not, one of the sonnets (a sad one, mind you) in which she combined love and nature:

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.

This love I have known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn

And for today's final twist, here's to James Watson and Francis Crick, who 58 years ago today discovered the spiral structure of DNA, the genetic instruction manual in the cells of all living things. And yes, the father in the Museum of Natural History who put the chokehold on his son was correct: Genetic research has proven in the last several years that our DNA is approximately 99% identical to that of chimpanzees and bonobos. We're all well connected.

Watson (left), Crick and the double helix of DNA.

Clearly not chicken, these self-brining wild turkeys went wading into the frigid Maine water at low tide.

Ahoy! Sea Turkeys

February 19, 2011

I've often mentioned the flock of wild turkeys wintering at our house. The number has shrunk from two dozen to just eight (not sure where the others went), but those survivors are both hearty and seaworthy. This week Pamelia looked out and saw them roaming and pecking in the low tide. Perhaps they were gobbling up sand, pebbles and crushed shells—good grit for grinding grub in their gizzards.

All Ears

A bit farther south, in Montville, New Jersey, an owl has been keeping Sarah Markwood awake some nights with its hoots. Her dad, Scott, reports that when he was out chopping ice in the driveway at dusk the other day, he saw the silhouette of something large perched in a tree. He says it was size of a huge raccoon, with two ears sticking up. Then he realized that it was an owl—"much larger than I imagined an owl could be," he says. From his description (about two feet tall), it may have been a great horned owl, an aggressive hunter and, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the only animal that regularly eats skunks. A (literally) smaller possibility is the long-eared owl, which stands only about 15 inches tall but has a resounding voice that might keep someone awake: Its call can be heard three-quarters of a mile away. Scott says his daughter, a budding naturalist, put the sighting in context: "Sarah reminded me that the original name for the area (English name, taken from the local Indians' name for the area) was Owl Kill. And the town crest still has the owl on it."

A great horned owl, hunting for a skunk?

Veggies Vs. Fruit (Cont.)

As promised, after the last post about the scientific differences between fruits and vegetables, my botanist friend weighed in—and confirmed (whew) that legumes are indeed fruit. So green beans do qualify. He added this note:

"During one of my programs as an interpretive ranger at [a national park], I would have everyone sit down beside a carriage road, and we would discuss fruits vs. vegetables (with appropriate props). One of the items I brought along on the walk was a can of Veg-all, which really should be called 'Veg-half' because four of the eight main ingredients are fruits. I recall that at least one of them was a legume. Another misnomer on store shelves is V-8. It’s pretty close to being correct because the only non-V is the tomato. But, in the interest of accuracy, the ad should say, 'I could have had an F-1/V-7.'"

A thank-you to my longtime friend and colleague Roger Jackson for flagging this tale of a cat burglar in California that had stolen 600 items from neighbors' homes—and turned out to be an actual cat: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110216/od_afp/uscrimeanimaloffbeat_20110216210804

Answer to the Last Puzzler:

What has two big arms and three smaller arms and be seen only at night? The Milky Way galaxy. The arms are the arms of its spiral shape.

The Milky Way, our galaxy, is made up at least 200 billion stars. The universe contains at least 200 billion galaxies. Do you think there's maybe a slight chance that there's some other form of life out there?

Today's Puzzlers:

A memory builder: Study these animal names for 30 seconds, then look away and try to write them down in the same order. Porcupine Mink Squirrel Badger Porcupine Deer Badger

A tongue twister: Say "Good grit for grinding grub in their gizzards" three times, fast.

Birthdays

Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who made the revolutionary discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun (instead of the other way around), would have turned 538 years old today. Amazingly, he had so many talents and occupations (including mathematician, diplomat, jurist, translator, military leader and economist) that astronomy was essentially just one of his hobbies.

Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the term "nurture versus nature," created the first weather map, and invented the silent dog whistle, would have been 189 this week. A former child prodigy, he was prolific in his ideas and research, coming up with the concept of statistical correlation, exploring and mapping southwest Africa, and pioneering the study of inherited intelligence, meteorology and even fingerprints. He did not coin the phrase "can of worms," but in coming up with the term eugenics and believing that selective breeding could raise the intellectual level of humans (apparently without considering the full consequences of that idea), he opened one of the largest such cans in history.

Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who in 1800 invented the battery (and was the namesake of the volt), would have been 266 yesterday. His historical significance was recognized a few years ago by Toyota, which produced a prototype hybrid sports car that could go from zero to 60 mph in four seconds and was called (what else?) the Alessandro Volta.

You'd have needed a lot of lira to buy a Toyota Volta.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian-born, Cree Indian folk singer who grew up in Maine, turns 70 tomorrow. Her environmentally-themed songs include No No Keshagesh, about the despoiling of the planet through greed; keshagesh is a Cree word for a puppy that tries to eat everything.

And finally, Jackie Gleason, the comedian and early proponent of space travel ("To the moon, Alice!"), would have been 95 tomorrow.

Music, Moscow and the Mailbag

February 15, 2011

Need a quick infusion of joy? Click on the video and watch the creative genes at work in this young conductor, courtesy of Notebook contributors Andy and Adele from North Carolina.

The Naturalist's Notebook (e-)mailbag has had some other interesting comments and contributions lately, from places as far away as Japan. Let's take a look at a few:

Watt You Might Have Missed:

After we noted Thomas Edison's birthday a few days ago, Pamelia's brother, Scott, who works in energy conservation for a utility company, sent in this comment with more about the Wizard of Menlo Park: "Thomas Edision was indeed founder of the first electric utility, Pearl Street Station, in NYC. So, quite an accomplishment, more so because people did not have any immediate need to purchase electricity?! After all, there were no electric appliances around most homes. So he sold light bulbs, not electricity. Yes, back then, the electricity was free! Imagine the convenience of turning a switch when you came home instead of lighting an oil lamp or candle. Those of you who do the house work, will cringe to learn, the second big (and I mean “big”) electric appliance was the vacuum cleaner! The first ones had to be pulled around on horse drawn carts! The third, another one we all love, the electric iron!"

Here is one of those horse-drawn vacuum cleaners, on exhibit at Don Aslett's Cleaning Museum in Pocatello, Idaho. The vacuum was parked on he street; it cleaned buildings with vacuum hoses.

Speaking of Horses...

In an e-mail to a Notebook correspondent, I mentioned that I was curious how roads were cleared of snow in the days before the invention of the truck and the snowplow. He dug into his deep well of expertise and provided this explanation: "As I 'recall,' many of the roads, at least in the 1800s, were rolled. The wooden roller was pulled by a horse (of course, of course) or probably a team of them, and the only shoveling of snow, except around a horse and barn, was onto the road where it passed through a covered bridge. Pulling a sleigh over a dry, wooden surface would have been tough sledding, so to speak."

Why a Tomato Is a Fruit

I jokingly told a botanist friend that, to clear up my confusion over the differences between fruits, seeds and nuts, I would love to take a Fruits and Seeds 101 course he might teach. I told him I would be the one arriving at class dressed as a either a fruit or a nut. His reply: "Sorry, a nut is a type of fruit. With the notable exception of strawberries—where did I read about that?—the seeds of flowering plants are enclosed in fruits. That’s why a tomato is a fruit, but so are walnuts and acorns. We have this image that a fruit is soft, brightly colored, and more or less juicy, and seeds are hard, and drab, and dry. The latter is generally true, but the fruits of many plants (e.g., grasses) are not particularly appealing to the palate until they have been processed in some way. This fall I took an acorn class from [a botanist friend], and last week I had acorn-flour-based pancakes at his house."

It's a fruit if it contains seeds. That means that not just tomatoes, but also cucumbers, squash and green beans are, in scientific terms, fruit. Unless there's a Legume Corollary I don't know about that applies to the beans. My botanist friend will advise.

Dogs of Moscow

Russian rush hour: One of the Moscow canines riding the tube between the suburbs and the city center.

Our correspondent in Russia sent along a story about how dogs in that country's capital have learned to ride the subway from the suburbs into the center of the city, where the food scraps and mooching are better. Researchers are studying this behavior, which seems to have started after the Soviet Union collapsed. Not sure how the dogs raise the nearly $1-a-ride fare.

The Olympics, a Year Later

A sports colleague sent me a link to a story about the status of the environmentally-designed Vancouver Olympic Village, which I toured a few days before the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics while covering the Games for Sports Illustrated. As some of you have may already read (I linked the story on Facebook), only a small fraction of the apartments that housed athletes and coaches during the Games have been sold as part of a condo conversion. The recession and a wariness about the village's gritty, industrial neighborhood are largely to blame. Apparently in environmentally progressive real estate—as in other forms of real estate, and baseball pitching—the old dictum still applies: location, location, location. (For a look back at my tour of the Vancouver Olympic village, click on: http://naturalistsnote.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/olympics-green-legacy/. For the happy news about SI's Olympic preview issue winning a magazine award last week, check out: http://www.foliomag.com/2011/sports-illustrated.)

The athletes' village (with eco-designed green roof) is now an under-occupied condo complex.

Wishful Thinking Dept.
When Pamelia and I were in frigid Seal Harbor a few days ago doing some work at The Naturalist's Notebook, we couldn't help smiling at the fun-and-sun spirit implicit below:

SI's swimsuit issue may be out, but not even polar-bear club members were using Seal Harbor's snowed-in beach facilities.

Last Puzzler Answer
What natural North American landmark is always moving backwards? Niagara Falls, whose rim wears down by two-and-a-half feet each year because of water erosion.

Today's Puzzler Here's a real challenging one: What has two big legs and three small legs and can only be seen at night?

Birthdays

Galileo Galilei, the world-changing Italian astronomer, physicist and mathematician, would have been 447 years old today. He has been called the father of modern science, the father of astronomy and the father of modern physics (and he was in fact the father of three children), but some of his ideas weren't welcome during his lifetime. His strong support for Copernicus's theory that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the solar system—a theory condemned by the Catholic Church as "false and contrary to Scripture"—led to his arrest and conviction as part of the Inquisition. He died under house arrest, still deemed a heretic, but has since been honored with everything from stamps to coins to street names to a prominent mention in Queen's song Bohemian Rhapsody.

Margaret Knight, the York, Maine-born inventor who's known as both the female Thomas Edison and the Queen of Paper Bags, would have been 173 years old yesterday. In 1871 she patented a revolutionary machine that folded and glued paper into the flat-bottomed bags (paper, not plastic) that are still used today in grocery and department stores. (That feat earned her a place in the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame in Appleton, Wisc.) Even as a child she was inventing and building items, such as sleds and kites for her brothers. Her more than two dozen patents included the window frame and sash and a machine for cutting shoe soles.

Fritz Zwicky, the Swiss astronomer from Caltech who in 1935 (with a colleague) coined the term supernova, would have been 113 yesterday. Supernovae are exploding stars that generate phenomenal heat and light and create, in their interstellar blast furnace, many of the elements from which the universe is composed.

If we're highlighting the three-year-old conductor above, we might as well mention that Henry E. Steinway, the German-born founder of the world's most famous piano-making company, would have been 214 years old today. My favorite Steinway story involves my mother's father, Oscar Laitinen, who died shortly before I was born. As a young man he saved up all his money and—even though he was a starving artist who didn't even know how to play the piano—bought a Steinway baby grand. He fit it into his small apartment and learned to play it. So did my mother, Jean Neff, who wasn't half bad. She went on to study piano at Juilliard.

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