Earth Explorations

When I started this #SummerOfClimateAction challenge in which I attempt to follow the calls to action as made by How to Save a Planet, I thought I would listen to a few podcasts, email a congressional representative or two, maybe finally commit to composting. You know, stuff like that. Week One: Spark Tank started off with a bang. The topic was electricity storage on the electrical grid and as it happens, my city utility also sent out a communication that related to storage on the electrical grid but left out any mention of climate change (See Climate Change Is Still Worse ). So, yes, I did end up emailing truth to power, calling upon them to "acknowledge the impact of climate change and communicate its relevance in regards to city matters." I'll just say that sending an email through a contact-me box to a representative in far off Washington DC is one thing and emailing your local officials who recognize you in the grocery store is entirely different. Another outcome, I

 My city is a municipal utility, which means the city owns the electric utility that provides the electricity to the community. An insert in our recent electric bill caught my attention. Apparently, there is a possibility of controlled energy outages which means under energy emergency conditions we would have to take assigned turns using electricity until demand goes down.  The city's explanation of contributing factors to the need for controlled outages was a deep sigh moment.  For someone who isn't familiar with our national electricity grid (no shame, it's generously described as arcane) this reads as if renewable energy and closure of coal-fueled energy generation were the definitive reasons for the controlled power outages. This is an oversimplification. The more technically precise reason for the controlled power outages is the lack of energy storage capacity on the grid. In other words, we have to store electricity made by renewables when they are producing for times

  Well, that was fast. I no sooner announce that I am going to do 8 weeks of climate action per How to Save a Planet  (or How 2 Planet as I call it) then I find out that Tuesdays are action days. This week's action: learn more about energy storage and create a climate venn diagram to find the place where what brings you joy, what you're good at, and what needs doing intersect. My venn diagram is above. Since my job is in informal education and I am literally paid to do outreach about watersheds and soil health, this is a no-brainer. My climate action is to make the climate connection  to these topics explicit and then teach my little heart out. There is a long standing tension about whether education is action. And in my opinion it is when you are trying to effect systemic change, not because education automatically leads to behavior change or voting in a certain way but because it creates a social norm that people must agree with or resist. This is why the backlash to "CR

  The Supreme Court was off the hook last two weeks of June. I'm sure your social media feeds were filled with memes too. Oddly enough, my social media did not have much about West Virginia vs EPA, the SCOTUS ruling which said that the EPA did not have the authority from Congress to regulate cap and trade or generation switching (i.e. requiring power plants to switch to non-fossil fuels). This despite the fact that both the majority opinion and the dissent acknowledge that climate change presents a well known danger 1 . The answer, of course, is to elect a different Congress that would grant the EPA such authority. Right now and for the foreseeable future, I'm a single issue voter. Climate change is an intersectional issue meaning that other issues like voting rights and women's rights also walk over to climate so I'm more nuanced than it first appears but yeah, I'm here for the climate. If you want me to support something, it needs to move the needle, even if indi

I'm attempting the Runners World Summer Run Streak, running a mile a day between Memorial Day and 4th of July. So far, so good. On yesterday's run I encountered this fine critter, so of course I stopped to take a picture for iNaturalist. Like my reading, I want my running to be enjoyable and that means I stop and photograph the turtle.  

I have dubbed this summer the Summer of Read More, Run More.  For Read More, my read more goal is to read 5 books by Labor Day. I know for some people that's a Tuesday, but I've been slacking on my reading of late. Reading 5 books is an appropriate level of challenge, I will stretch without overreaching. I want  Read More to be a growing experience, but a fun growing experience and not one where I am grinding through books with a clenched jaw and set brow. If the book I read is particularly enjoyable, I will share it here via what I post on Goodreads . I'm off to a good Read More start: my first entry is below. My Run More goal is to run at least a mile a day from Memorial Day to Independence Day. I'm giving myself permission to skip the days I'm in the Badlands for a class. I know from prior experience that the best laid running plans can be disrupted with proximity to bison. Any days I have to skip, I'll make up by extending the deadline so I complete 35 day

I got to spend some time on the Standing Butte bison ranch the other day. The ranch mangers don't treat their land or bison with pesticides because the pesticides take out the beneficial bugs along with the not-so-beneficial. This means the ranch has a healthy population of dung beetles (genus Canthon ). I find dung beetle butts as cute as bee butts. Also, that plant in the bottom center is scarlet globemallow, the first wildflower I learned to ID.

 More fun with dip netting this evening. The first two photos are of the same mayfly, the dorsal (back) and ventral views. Note the abdominal gills. The third photo is of a damselfly which looks like a mayfly but does not have gills. Ironically, mayflies and damselflies look similar as nymphs but nothing alike in the adult stage while it's just the opposite for dragonflies and damselflies, different as nymphs but similar as adults. Nature is funny that way.

Sunsets are hard to improve upon. Photos of sunsets, however, can be made more interesting by including a foreground detail.  Open the whole post for the sunset-with-foreground vs sunset-only view.  

I took my macro kit* to a local pond to see what I could see.  I saw a Bladder Snail attach itself to a Damselfly, for one thing. The Damselfly was not happy about it. You can ID a Bladder Snail (also called Pouch Snails or Lunged Snails) by the orientation of its opening when you look at the snail with the pointy top of the whorl up. If you draw a line from the top point down through the middle of the snail, the opening will be on the left or right of the line. When the opening is on the left, it's a Bladder Snail (family Physidae). I returned the snail and the damselfly to the water after photographing. I think I managed to loosen the snail from the damselfly in doing so. I am learning phone macrophotography as part of a crowdsourced science project I'm piloting with a group of fine folks. The goal is to document the aquatic critters of South Dakota's lakes and streams using iNaturalist as the data platform. It's TBD if enough quality photos, i.e. photos that are good

  My mother encouraging me in my earliest nature adventures. Happy Mother's Day, Mom! Thanks for all the love and support over the years.

I was working on a project and making absolutely no progress, just stuck in a thinking loop. I needed a break. Since the project was related to soil health, I grabbed my macrophotography kit and popped outside for a little bit of exploration. There is something quite therapeutic poking around in the dirt.  The rolley poley is a Common Woodlouse, according to iNaturalist, introduced to the US through anthropogenic means. The little critter below is in the Class Sylphans and is referred to as a soil centipede though it is not, in fact, a centipede or millipede. I need to add a plastic spoon to my macro kit so I can scoop up little critters like this. They are quick and once gone, they seem to dematerialize as I could not find it again, even in the petri dish poking around with the stick. Macro photography with my phone is a relatively new hobby for me. So far, my kit consists of my Android Galaxy S8 phone, a Xenvo clip lens, Rite in the Rain index cards for scale (each little square is 6

  The week after the City Nature Challenge is for identification of organisms and data crunching. I am, unexpectedly and probably none too healthily, drawn into data point of the most observed species. Last year it was the mallard. This year Common Dandelion, previous top spot winner, is ahead of Mallard but not by much. As of this writing, Dandelion is out front by only 94 observations. Considering that Dandelion has 4338 and Mallard has 4244 as of this writing, I don't feel Dandelion's place is a shoo in. I check the results several times a day, as if I were awaiting election returns. You can follow the action yourself at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022?tab=species. 

Yes! We did it! The goal was 250 observations and we made 250 observations! It helped that there were some serious hard core iNatters who carried most of the load.  There yet may be a few more observations trickle in. Anything uploaded this week counts towards our project's tally. We actually did not reach 250 till this morning, the morning after. When I went to bed last night we were at something like 234, close but still too far for me to do anything about it. When I woke up, we were at 247. Oh, hell no, we are NOT falling three short, I thought. I went back through my photos, found three photos I hadn't uploaded (because how many white-crowned sparrow observations do we need even taken at different times?) and boom, we were at 250. So what about next year? Next year, the goal will be to add more observers. We had 5 this year. Can we double it for next?  

  Headed out early Saw a White Face Ibis

Rain, rain. I cannot say go away as it is so desperately needed in our drought gripped land. But this is not a propitious start to the #CityNatureChallenge.

 I took this photo at the beginning of April. The clouds, the setting sun and the road all felt like a visual representation of where I am in life.  I'm changing up this blog a bit. It will be more of a microblog for the near future, more Instagrammy with notes of Twitter and less Medium and Substack. So why not use Instagram and Twitter?  Why not not?