The Urban Pantheist

As we approach the first tolls in New York, my dad holds up his EZ pass transponder.

Most of these Brooklyn Nature post pics are going to from Prospect Park, a nearly 600 acre Olmsted landscape, of which I explored a few hundred square feet. Alexis and I first looked at very early on Sunday morning, before the wreckage of Saturday night festivities had been cleared away. Here's the base of a planter, delightfully overgrown with moss and weeds.

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The second two days of the Rodent Control Academy were held in the building I'm leaning in front of, a City Government Administrative building of some kind way way down on the southwest tip of Manhattan. It was cold and foggy in the mornings (even as the temp got up to the 80s in Boston) but when it burned off there was quite a view. Here's the balance of my NYC pics, including a couple that I took while doing Rodent Control fieldwork:
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Here I am on a short break from the 3 day workshop: "New York City Rodent Control Academy" put on by the NYC Department of Health.

( More from the Big City )

Reishi Ganoderma lucidum


Identifying mushrooms is difficult, perhaps I've mentioned that before. Many species look similar to one another, and many field markings are variable. In G. lucidum what appears to be a bracket fungus, growing directly from a tree here, can have a long stalk. It can be relatively more red, or banded like a candy corn, or more white. It can be broad and fan-like, or narrow and branched like antlers. All of this would be mere curiosity for naturalists if this mushroom wasn't among the most important medicinal fungi in traditional Asian medicine.

The shape and perhaps the color, as well as other attributes are thought to enhance one property or another. Fortunately scientists are starting to look into it, and are finding anti-tumor and other protective qualities. Whether the shape of the mushroom influences its ability to cure disease is not known, but it is known that the shape is influenced by the conditions of the mushroom's growth. Longer reishi mushrooms and stalked fan-like brackets tend to be produced in warmer areas. In Boston we tend to see stalkless brackets on trees and misshapen blobs growing from hidden roots. One of these latter mushrooms was treated with great suspicion in New York City recently. Hacked from its spot where it was growing on subterranean Callery pear roots, it grew back; well, of course it did--removing the fruiting body does practically nothing to the fungus that produced it.

Reishi (I'm using the Japanese name because it is short and easy to say) can be a beautiful and durable mushroom. If you don't grind it up for tea you can dry it and keep it as an ornament. It readily grows in cultivation and you can buy kits to do so. (You can also buy capsuled reishi supplements and even reishi-infused chocolates.) In North America, a close relative G. tsugae grows from conifers. DNA research seems to indicate that the two North American species are closer related to one another than they are to the G. lucidum that grows in Asia. The above specimens are growing from a larger burl on a honey locust tree that has appeared in this journal (here) before. I posted a very different photo of mushrooms from this species complex here.

This past weekend audacian and her husband took Alexis and I to The Fields sculpture park at the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY. This piece was made of polished stainless steel, perforated with bullet holes.


( More cool art in The Field! )

Just heard a snippet of a Robert Krulwich piece on NPR that made me dash to the computer to check out the full story.

One of the guaranteed species on an Urban Nature Walk is the honey locust. It's a widely planted, pollution tolerant tree, with tiny leaflets that blow away in the fall requiring little clean-up. Most of the honey locusts found in cities are cultivated varieties that have done away with their two most interesting features. First, their huge seed pods, and second, their array of large sharp thorns:



I'd been walking around with the misapprehension that this tree was native to the hills south and west of here, but apparently that applies only to black locust.  Honey locust is considered native, and for the purposes of Krulwich's piece, was known to be growing on Manhattan Island 13,000 years ago.  Also on Manhattan at that time, were elephants, specifically mastodons.  Now for the honey locust tree to evolve these big, sharp, and expensive (from a biological point of view--that's a lot of energy to devote to a decoration) thorns, there had to be some animal that the tree wanted to deter.  I always assumed that the thorns were there to slow down raccoons and bears from climbing the tree to eat the seed pods before they were ready.  Krulwich proposes that the thorns, which come out of the bark of the trunk as well as the branches, evolved to keep some herbivore from stripping the bark.  He points out that the acacia tree of Africa, which famously still has elephants, bears similar thorns.  He also mentions that until someone studies mastodon droppings or coprolites and finds honey locust parts therein, there is no proof that mastodons ate from the honey locust.

Pretty cool.  Of course my contrary side would quickly like to mention that there are other bark-eating animals in Northeastern North America that haven't gone extinct.  Moose and white-tailed deer come to mind, not to mention the cottontails.  But it's so fun to picture mastodons in New York and New England that I'll play along for a while.

The happy thing meme has been helpful. It's a good exercise to think about what made you happy in a given day. Sometimes it's something obvious, usually not; often when I think of it, it makes me happy all over again. I haven't been keeping track of how many days I'm doing it or how many I'm supposed to do. I think I'll just keep on doing it until entropy takes over, like every other running project I've done in this journal.

For my happy thing for Friday, I'm going to have to go with the easy rapport I have with my coworker Courtney. I think the people you work with accounts for workplace happiness far more than the actual work you do, at least for me. ( Possible complaining hidden behind Lj cut )

For Saturday, my happy thing will have to be audacian's wedding. It was wonderful to be at a celebration of love. Alexis was the official photographer, I was her unofficial assistant. Mainly that meant staying out of the way most of the time, helping when possible (find which two batteries still have any charge left) and trying not to make a total ass of myself. ( Self criticism verges on complaint )

I'm looking forward to today's happy thing! It might be the party for Jim at Alex's house in Cambridge, or it could be the wise decision to stay home and not try to drive in a snowstorm three days in a row. I'll let you know.

If they did this in Boston the police would open fire. Or is that only if there are l.e.d.s?