The Urban Pantheist

The oak skeletons of Franklin Park silhouetted against the 3:00 setting sun.

( More snapshotty stuff that shows the Zoo Library )

If you find a metallic or pearly red-to-pinkish disc adhered to the underside of a stone, you may wonder what it is. Or you may dismiss it--there's lots of stuff under stones, who cares, right? Oh someone cares, trust me.

Round bulges in the surface of the disc reveal its purpose. This is an egg-protecting device, silken and flush against the rock, difficult to remove or penetrate. It is made by a small spider that lives in such places--a spider with a body that somewhat resembles an ant, enough so to be lumped in with "ant-mimic ground spiders." The egg-case belongs to a spider known as "Phrurotimpus".

There are seventeen species in the genus Phrurotimpus in North America. According to some sources the name means "guardian of stones." My Composition of Scientific Words book verified "Phruro" to mean guard, but I was unable to find any etymology for "-timpus."

Many thanks as always to Charley Eiseman, whose book Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates has been an amazing revelation to me.

Our shelves were too heavy for the wall, so we took them down and moved the brackets so that they were in line with the studs. About a minute after I took this picture the cordless slipped on a stubborn screw and put a phillip's head puncture wound in the tip of my left index finger. It's mostly healed now, but boy was there a lot of blood! Alexis said, "I guess it's not really your house until you bleed on it."

"First thing every morning, Harry and I would climb the fence into the zebra paddock and collect the velvety, dew-drenched crop of mushrooms that had sprouted there in the night. These Harry would cook in butter in a little saucepan, and we would devour them for our elevenses. They made a delicious meal, but the hazards involved in mushroom collecting with a couple of murderous zebra stallions in the paddock with you were extreme to say the least. We worked close together, with a pitchfork handy, and when one was bending down to pick mushrooms the other was watching the zebras. One morning there was a particularly fine crop and we had filled half a bucket and were congratulating ourselves upon the enormous feed we should be able to have at eleven o'clock. I was just bending down to pick up an exceptionally succulent mushroom when Harry shouted, 'Watch out, boy! The bastard's coming!'

I looked up and the zebra stallion was thundering toward me, his ears back, his lip pulled back over his yellow teeth. Leaving the bucket, I followed Harry's example and ran like a hare. We scrambled over the fence, panting and laughing. The zebra scudded to a halt by the bucket and glared at us, snorting indignantly. Then, to our extreme annoyance, he swiveled round and with immense accuracy kicked the bucket in a great swooping parabola through the air, scattering white mushrooms like a comet's tail. It took us half an hour to collect the mushrooms again."

From A Bevy of Beasts, by Gerald Durrell, 1973.

Alexis and I went to a reading last week, conducted by the author of the book THAT IS ALL. It is the third in a series of complete world knowledge made up by HODGMAN, known better to me as "Judge John Hodgman" or @hodgman. He explained that the problem of coming up with complete world world knowledge, is that the world keeps adding more information to know, therefore, if the world were to end sometime such as December 21 2012, as the Mayans may have predicted, the complete world knowledge would then be truly complete.

It was a very entertaining and reasonably-priced evening of entertainment. And we took some pictures. Some of these are by me and some are by Alexis when she took my camera away from me to make it take better pictures.
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Thanks, everyone, for the congratulations and well-wishes. I'm making my 2011 blog project directly related to the house and the land it is on, so be prepared to be well sick of that half acre in a few months.

But I want to tell you about a field guide I picked up the other day. Actually, I picked it up in the summer and put it right back down. "Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast," sounds pretty perfect for me. But I was adamant about not getting new books, as I'm trying to whittle things down, not build them up. I already have a few decent weed and wildflower guides, and the great Sibley tree guide.

So I was back in that store a month later (the Audubon shop, attached to Drumlin Farm, where I was teaching a mushroom class) and it was still there. I picked it up again and opened it at random. It opened to pp.152-153, New England hawkweed Hieracium sabaudum. Instantly I recognized it as a very common plant that I've had a lot of trouble identifying, as seen here.


I took this picture in September of 2006, when I was in the thick of the 365 project, and desperate to identify this ubiquitous plant. The experts on my friends list agreed it was probably Canada hawkweed H. canadense. That didn't feel right to me, and I didn't end up using it in the project.

The first paragraph in the listing in the field guide reads "Even experts have trouble distinguishing this highly variable European species, H. lachenalii, and a native North American species H. canadense. Seeing this problem solved so elegantly (reading the rest of the description of H. sabaudum, especially the habitat requirements, made it plain that it was the species I was trying to identify) on the first page I opened to, clinched my decision to buy the book.

I honestly haven't had much chance to use it since I bought it, as most of our wild plants are on the wane, with only some tansy and some asters persisting. But I have flipped through it and have found it quite readable and straightforward. I've tested it a few times by looking for specific plants and I haven't stumped it yet. Some of the plants I've looked for have been included as a sidebar to another species (Pennsylvania smartweed appears on the page that describes pale smartweed--another common weed that has flummoxed me for years).

The Preface explains that the book was inspired by a trip the author made to Spectacle Island (a Boston Harbor island consisting of a capped landfill that is now a park, where we had an urban nature walk back in July 2006) so I knew he was local. The book covers Detroit eastward, south to Washington D.C. Still I was stunned to see this photograph:


This is literally across from my front door, as in: if I am standing on my front step looking straight ahead, that's what I see. You see the reddish stone stuff in the upper right of the photo? That's the arched footbridge over the Muddy that I've taken 5000 photos of, especially during the Muddy River project. Kind of freaky. Also embarrassing, as I have eaten berries from that bush, but was unsure of the species (Rubus can be a tricky genus). I have flipped through the book to see if there are any other places I recognize, but so far I haven't.


Alexis took this picture standing among the swamp dewberries, looking back at our front door.

So I guess what I'm saying is, any field guide to urban plants of the northeast that uses a picture of berry bushes from in front of my house is okay with me.



Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, A Field Guide. Peter Del Tredici. Cornell University Press 2010. The price on the cover is 29.95, but it seems to be pretty reliably about 20 bucks online. Well worth it.

Well, it can't hurt to put it in my wish list, right?

It's been a while since I've seen the image of a product and felt a visceral desire to own it. Someone just posted a link mentioning The Sibley Guide to Trees and I felt that desire grab my chest.



The Sibley Guide to Birds upended the status quo in bird guides by simply being better than anything else out there. It meticulously depicted all the North American bird species, the plumage of both sexes and that of juveniles, as well as regional and unusual variations. It included how postures and temperature can change the silhouette of a bird, and detailed the anatomical terms of different plumage areas. There was a huge one for both coasts and field-sized east and west coast editions.

The fact that it was also a labor of love of one self-taught birder crossing the country for a decade in a van full of paint and canvases made me feel great to buy it. I met David Sibley at the Audubon Shop in Lincoln, and found that he was humble and personable, and living in Concord, practically a neighbor.

I have an ugly void in my field guides where a great tree guide belongs. I have an ancient golden guide, which has sufficed, and a guide to urban trees which helps fill out the commonly planted exotics. The fact that Sibley has now applied his "formidable skills of identification and illustration to the trees of North America" is the best news I've read in a long time.

I am loathe to add more possessions to my life, but I am willing to trade. If you have an extra copy of this book, I will gladly exchange a huge amount of used CDs--in excess of double the value of the book--for it. I know it's a long shot, and that I'll probably just buy myself a copy at the Audubon Shop when I go to Drumlin Farm September 27th to teach a mushroom class. But if you want a huge amount of used CDs, this would be a great opportunity for you.

I hope he's working on a shrubs and herbaceous perennials book!

My old friend Kelly Link has a new collection of "weirdly wonderful" short stories for young adults called Pretty Monsters, and she's reading from it at the Harvard Book Store tomorrow evening at 7.  If you don't know her work, but are a fan of Neil Gaiman, magic realism, or "the grotesque and the ethereal," you should definitely check it out.