The Bradford Pear in Autumn

Last spring I wrote a lengthy post in defense of the Bradford Pear tree. These ornamentals are criticized by some naturalists as nonnative and invasive. I won't revisited the arguments I made in that post except to say that I continue to find the trees interesting and worthy of further study.

Bradford Pears were once encouraged because of their lovely autumn foliage. A lengthy and hard freeze this November somewhat damaged the colors, but the fallen leaves still made a very pretty carpet.

As an aspiring naturalist, I treasure my two Bradford Pears because of their contribution to the local habitat. Of all the trees on our heavily-wooded four acres, these two are the only ones regularly drilled by Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers. In past years we have had a wintering pair, but this year we seem reduced to a solitary male.

In addition to being a winter feeding station for Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers, Bradford Pears are also a source of berries for Cedar Waxwings. Last weekend so many of them flocked to the trees that our Pontiac Vibe was fully coated in bird poop! Despite that, they are lovely birds--but I wish one of those with the red-banded wingtips had posed long enough for a snapshot!

Those who dislike Bradford Pear trees may be distressed to see the pictures of the Cedar Waxwings feeding on the berries. Those birds will very likely spread the seeds far and wide--perhaps to germinate and produce Callery Pear saplings . . . . I'm certain that I cannot fully allay their concern, but here is what I know: Not far from our cabin there is a large, grassy field of perhaps five open acres. It is bush-hogged occasionally, but it has not been mown in recent years. A variety of saplings are now springing up amid the grass--Redcedar, Honeylocust, Winged Elm, Gum Bumelia, and more. If Callery Pears were an invasive threat in this area, they should be springing up in that field. I have not found any. Bradford Pears are supposedly sterile, but I've never tested that. To do so this spring, I've planted ten seeds from my trees; I'll be interested to see if they germinate. Perhaps the invasive thickets that some have reported are more the result of spreading from rhizomes than from seeds.

Bradford Pear trees don't reveal all their delights until the spring when they are among the first trees to blossom. Birds, bees, moths, butterflies, spiders, caterpillars, wasps, and treefrogs benefit from them. I look forward to documenting that annual event. But just before the leaves began to change colors this fall I made one more close inspection of the underside of the leaves. Unless I am mistaken, this last photo shows the remnants of two butterfly eggs. This year I hope to identify which species of butterflies and moths use the tree as a host plant.

Update: 4/29/2016 This spring, as always, the Bradford Pears in my yard were filled with lovely blossoms. And as is usually also the case, these blossoms satiate the hunger of the early spring pollinators for nectar. On one sunny, still afternoon the sound of those happy insects was the loudest noise in nature as I stepped out my back door.

In the picture above I show a couple of caterpillar egg cases. The caterpillars that feed on these trees are the native Choristoneura rosaceana (oblique banded leaf roller), which eventually turn into an attractive (though fairly ordinary) little moths. Of course, both the caterpillars and the moths are nourishing food for many species of birds. 

More of a Naturalist's Hallowen

These Halloween snapshots speak for themselves:

Sumac

Pokeweed berries with Cucumber Beetle

Jack O'Lantern Mushrooms

Dewy spider

Halloween Assassin

When I ambled out to the shed a few minutes ago, I was delighted to see the Halloween colors on these two Assassin Bugs.

Assassin Bugs are well-named since the curving appendage of their snout can be used to ambush a passing insect, stab it, and suck out its juices. These two are properly known as Reduviidae Pselliopus barberi. Larger specimens are apparently capable of delivering a painful sting if particularly annoyed by the paparazzi.

Hiking the Ozark Trail -- North Fork Section, mile 23

Yesterday Sue and I made a quick afternoon drive up into Missouri to hike part of the Ozark Trail along the North Fork of the White River. Here is a link to a nice map of miles 15 to 26.

We parked at the campground in Hammond Camp and hiked the lovely 1/4 mile over to Blue Spring. That first section of the hike has rocky Dolostone outcroppings, great views of the river, and lots of riverside wildflowers.

The spring itself create a beautiful blue pool, maybe 30 feet across. At least 7 million gallons of icy water bubble up from it each day. At some point in the past huge flat chunks of rock were carefully positioned around it to create a sturdy walking ledge and steps leading to an overlook above the river. This spot is worth exploring for at least a half hour . . . if not a full afternoon.

On the far side of the overlook above the spring, there is an almost imperceptible path that winds its way steeply uphill. This horse path / foot path eventually connects to the Ozark Trail, but first you will climb about 300 feet in a bit over a third of a mile. This is the most difficult part of the hike but it is not dangerous.

At the top of the hill this path intersects with the Ozark Trail, which is flat, level, and spacious in this particular section. The trail evidently follows an old road along the top of McGarr Ridge, but the woods have taken over so your hike will be shady and comfortable. The forest is mostly deciduous with lots of colorful maples and hickories at this time of year.

After about a half mile you will notice the trail gradually descending. The descent steepens a little and cuts through some sandy, deeply rutted areas of the flood zone before butting up against the North Fork River just at one of its most lovely bluffs. This is a good place to take a swim, eat a snack, and enjoy the view of the river before heading back to your car.

This is a short hike--not more than three or four miles in all--but every section of 

it is varied and interesting.

Lion's Mane Mushroom.

Reviewing the Amazon Fire HD 6--Almost the Perfect Tablet

My Fire hd 6 arrived Tuesday afternoon so I have just begun to test it. I've always loved small computers--netbooks, Kindles, and Android tablets--so this device seems almost designed specially for me.

First off, the tablet arrived in perfect condition, beautifully packaged. It was a joy to unbox and a cinch to set up. I plugged it into an outlet and watched as it automatically booted up for the first time. No problem. Neither was there any problem connecting to my existing Amazon account and gmail account. The system update took a while to download and install. And it took even longer to get the battery charged up fully (in part because I decided to use the tablet while it was charging.

The tablet itself is a solid, well-made slab. It feels like something that is not fragile and that will last. It's comfortable to hold in one hand with squared edges that don't jab into one's fingers the way the edges of my thinner Asus Memo Pad 10 tend to do. It is not a featherweight, weighting exactly the advertised 10.1 ounces (the same weight as the venerable Kindle 2 it will largely replace).

I purchased it primarily as an ereader and have tested that function. I rarely read in direct sunlight but often read in bed so the backlit screen is perfect for me. The text is very sharp and the entire Kindle reading experience is a joy. Text to speech in public domain books uses a pleasant female robo-voice. I'm quite happy with it. I haven't yet tried Audible books or audio books from my public library, but I'm quite certain they will work (after I fiddle around to install the Overdrive app). The single speaker is loud enough for most purposes.

The Silk browser is fast and smooth. I'm using it to write this review and am very pleased with the implementation of the swipe keyboard for writing. Word prediction is fairly accurate. Web pages come up as quickly as they would on any of my laptop machines--maybe even a little more quickly.

Amazon Prime videos load and play smoothly. The six-inch screen is big enough for pleasant viewing, given that I wanted a light device I could easily slip in a my pocket.

I took a few test photos with the camera. It works, but it is only two megapixels. Still, I have found my two megapixel cell phone camera capable of taking surprisingly good macro photographs of wildflowers and insects. My initial results with this tablet's camera were a bit disappointing. But I have hopes of figuring out how to take better shots and will report back tomorrow.

To be continued . . .

UPDATE

1. THE CAMERA. The camera itself does not offer many features, but it does have the basics. Since there is no flash, you need to make sure you have good light. In addition to the standard mode, you can switch to HDR mode for those occasions when when the background is either too dark or too bright. If you use the HDR mode, be sure to hold the camera very steady as it takes several shots sequentially. In addition there is a burst mode which you access simply by holding your finger on the shutter button.

While the camera is about as simple as a Kodak Brownie, you can do a lot to improve your shots with the photo editor. I won't discuss the many features; suffice it to say that you can easily crop and adjust your images. Nicest of all is the fact that Amazon offers to store for free all the photos you take with your Fire HD 6.

I like to take macro photos of wildflowers and insects. Surprisingly this camera performs quite well, as do most cell phone cameras. The trick is to place an inexpensive jeweler's loupe over the lens and hold the camera at the right focal distance--about two to three inches from the subject. What makes the tablet better than the typical cell phone is the six-inch screen. This screen image is much bigger than a cell phone's and thus gives you a better chance of achieving prefect focus. The screen is a bit dim in bright sunlight, but it is adequate. My close ups of wildflowers and insects are good enough for identification purposes even if they are not quite as sharp as the ones I take with my $350 digital camera. Note that the first two sample photos have been cropped; the third is full size.

Nature lovers may wish to know that the first photo is of Wild Blue Sage, the second is of Pokeweed, (note the two very tiny ants), and the third is of Small Morning Glory.

Now there is no doubt that the Olympus TG 3 is a far superior camera, but just for fun I thought I would compare it to our previous quality camera, a Sony Cybershot DSC-S730. That camera sports a 7.2 megapixel chip and a close-focus mode. Here are two pictures of a daddy long legs. The first is taken with the Fire HD6 and the second with the Sony. See what you think.

The tablet is also handy for casual photography. While using the camera app, you can push the power button to put the tablet to sleep. Pushing it again immediately awakens the tablet and a single swipe to unlock the screen brings your camera right up again, ready to use. Here are two shots I just took that illustrate the colors and range of focus.

The mushroom was very big--maybe six inches across, as was the sycamore leaf.

2. DOCUMENT CREATION AND EDITING. To create and edit documents, go to the docs tab at the top of the device and use WPS Office. You can save the file on the device and also share it with your Google Drive account. This pre-installed app is all you need for basic writing. The swipe feature here is also well implemented. The auto save feature helps to protect you from those maddening deletions of entire drafts. (If your keyboard becomes unresponsive, you need to wait a few seconds for auto save to complete its work.)

3. FILE MANAGEMENT (AND SIDE LOADING APPS).You can use ES File Explorer (from the Amazon App Store) to handle most file manager tasks and to access Google Drive and Dropbox files . . . but I don't recommend using it to edit files. Several times I lost entire drafts of documents while trying to use this app for writing. But the app does do a lot of neat stuff. It even includes a basic browser that is worth giving a try. There's one thing it can't do, however, and that is manage your apps. In fact, I have not yet found anything in Amazon's app store that does that. So here's the solution, borrow somebody's android phone or tablet. If it doesn't have the X-plore File Manager installed, download and install it from the Google Play Store. X-plore usually shows two panels side-by-side, and the last two items are App Manager and Show. (If you don't see App Manager, click on Show and tick the option to display App Manager.) Using App Manager, you can transfer any free apk files onto a USB drive. Now you will need a USB to micro-USB OTG (on the go) dongle to connect the drive to your Fire HD 6. Once connected you can install those apps. Note: they may not all work! And there is some risk you could create a problem that requires you to "factory reset" your tablet. I do know, however, that X-plore worked flawlessly for me in transferring X-plore, Fbreader, Fbreader tts+, and the Ted text editor to my Fire HD 6.

4. DOWNLOADING PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOKS AND AUDIO BOOKS. Download and install the Android Overdrive app (from the Overdrive website) to listen to audio books from your public library. Click on it in ES File Explorer to install it. (This is another way of side-loading an app.) The app did not initially show up in my apps, but I could find it and use it by searching my apps. Once I used it, it remained in my carousel, and now it is even visible in my apps. Because this tablet can fit in a roomy pocket, it is a very satisfactory audio book player.

5. THE SINGLE SPEAKER. I like the speaker. It produces a good volume of sound so that headphones aren't essential (though they do provide excellent stereo sound.)

This little tablet plays YouTube, Amazon Prime, and streaming public radio. It is an audio book player and an ebook reader. It is even surprisingly useful for writing documents and composing email. All in all, the Fire HD 6 is a great entertainment device . . . and a good deal more.

6. TO KEEP THE SILK BROWSER RUNNING SPEEDILY, I recommend that you go into Settings and clear the browser's cache regularly--perhaps even at the end of every browsing session. Past experience with my Asus netbook convinces me that devices with solid state drives can more quickly download information over a WiFi connection than call it up from the cache on the drive.

It does seem to me that the Silk browser is a work in progress. Its best feature is the "Reading View," but that only works reliably with a relatively small percentage of web sites. And in the regular browser view, text can be a bit small on the six-inch screen for my tired, old eyes. As a result I have side-loaded Opera and am currently using it for most browsing. With Opera you can go into Settings and tick a box for "text wrap." On most web sites that allows you to resize the text however you wish. 

Blues by the Beach--More Macro Photography with the Samsung S390G

Sue and I have recently upgraded our main "adventure/nature" camera to an Olympus TG 3--a camera that resists squashing, drowning, dropping, and freezing. It also takes superb macro photographs at distances of less than 1/2 inch. That said, my cheap cell phone stays with me more of the time and is a lot less finicky. To take macro photos, I just attach my freebe loupe with two rubber bands and try to guess at the right distance to hold the camera (about three inches). Sometimes the cell phone photos are well worth having.

This first photo is of a group of Eastern Tailed Blues. The image is not in perfect focus, but it is good enough so that one can see the distinctive black spots, the orange rectangles, and the tails.

My guess is that this next picture is of a female efferia pogonias robber fly. My knowledgeable friend Norman Lavers describes the insect in these words: "The female E. pogonias is also dark with a yellow mystax. Both sexes are excessively hairy, perhaps another defense against late season weather."

http://normanlavers.net/apocleinae.php

I have no idea what kind of spider I have captured in the next photo--perhaps a mangora spiculata. It was really very tiny and I was amazed to get such a clear shot of it. The camera saw much more than my eye could do.

Next we have what could be a neoscona domiciliorum. Whatever its true name may be, this is the spider that is most common in our woods during the late summer and fall. These webs cross all the trails and are frequently seen even well up in the treetops. This particular spider was very large--an impressive specimen silhouetted against the sky.

I cannot identify the green and yellow caterpillar in the following photo. It was crawling on the gravel path to the lake. I couldn't begin to guess at its host food so I just set it up on a Carolina Buckthorn branch, hoping for the best. Good luck little fellow.

The flower photographed below is probably Angular Ground Cherry (Physalis angulata). When green, the fruits are poisonous, but the ripened berries are sometimes used in jams and pies by particularly courageous (or foolish) cooks. Its cousin, Physalis virginiana, can also be eaten when ripe and is reputed to have medicinal benefits.

Sue and I have been baffled by this flower. It strongly resembles Calamint, but the crushed leaves have no mint smell and the flowers seem bigger and showier, with some dark inner dappling that I don't find in my other pictures of Calamint.

This is Frostweed or White Crownbeard (Verbesina virginica). While the flowering phase of this plant is very pretty, the most spectacular part of its life cycle actually occurs when it is dying or dead. On chilly winter mornings one can sometimes find convolutated and twisted exudations of ice crystals oozing from its stem. It looks very like ribbon candy. . . . Soldier beetles seem to be very common and industrious polinators in this area during the late summer.

Climate Change Headlines

For some reason I enjoy reading the headlines about climate change. Here, without comment, is a sampling of the news headlines that have popped up on my Google News feed:

Climate change makes salamanders shrink, scientists say
In Ranchers Vs. Weeds, Climate Change Gives Weeds An Edge
Feds spent $700000 on a climate change musical
What Famous Old Paintings Can Tell Us About Climate Change
Tragedy in Washington state: Why climate change will make mudslides more common
Climate change will make UK weather too wet and too dry, says Met Office
Climate change: While we fiddle, the world burns ... and floods and parches
Climate Change Art: That Sinking Feeling
Teachers swap climate change scare stories for fun and games
Debunking Myths: Oregonians ARE Worried about Climate Change
Boriskin: Blame Bush for ‘climate change'
Obama: Denying Climate Change Is Like Saying the Moon Is “Made of Cheese”
Three Ways Climate Change Is Going to Ruin Your Beer
8 Summer Miseries Made Worse by Global Warming, From Poison Ivy to Allergies
Climate Change Could Alter the Human Male-Female Ratio
What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?
Mountain Goats Are Shrinking—A Lot—Because of Global Warming
Inventing Climate-Change Literature
Climate Change Is Real. Too Bad Accurate Climate Models Aren't.
Climate Change Threatens to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park
Texas And Oklahoma, Hotbeds Of Climate Change Denialism, Wracked By Another Year Of Warming-Worsened Droughts JANUARY 14, 2013
Texas, Oklahoma Drought ‘All But Over’ May 21st, 2015
Is global warming increasing the risk of shark attacks? Higher temperatures blamed for record number in North Carolina
What climate change will do to your loaf of bread
The White House Wants Your Doctor To Teach You About Global Warming
Delayed flight? Blame global warming
Mosquitoes, Ticks and Poison Ivy Thriving with Climate Change
2015 and 2016 set to break global heat records (London September 14, 2015)
Obama Seeks Psychological Help with Climate Change
New Study Claims Global Warming Is Producing Massive Swarms Of Killer Mosquitos
CLIMATE CHANGE COULD SHRINK YOUR GRANDKID’S INCOME SAYS NEW SCIENTIFIC PAPER
Gains Of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater Than Losses: NASA Study
Global Warming May Affect Birth Rates: People Less Likely To Have Sex In Hotter Temperatures
Why Can't We Find Aliens? Climate Change Killed Them
Recent improvement and projected worsening of weather in the United States. Nature, 2016; 532 (7599): 357 DOI: 10.1038/nature17441
CO2 is making Earth greener; too bad about the rising seas
Life on Earth-like planets could be impeded by global warming, scientists say
Trees Can Limit Climate Change—Unless It Kills Them First
John Kerry warns your refrigerator is as dangerous as ISIS
Polar bears are totally screwed
Polar bears in Svalbard in good condition – so far

AND IN GOOD NEWS . . .
Climate change could make Middle East 'uninhabitable'


______________________________

Note: I haven't tried to screen these headlines in any way--except to select ones that somehow struck my fancy. If you'd like to actually read one of these articles, just enclose the entire headline in quotation marks and plug it into Google Search. That will take you to my source.

JAWS!

Life in the Ozarks can't really compete with the Spielberg movie, or can it?

I guess the answer demands on how closely one is able to observe nature and how fully one uses one's imagination. And imagination was really what caused the horror in Jaws, anyway.

So here we go.

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The Giant Stag Beetle

My first ferocious insect is actually only frightful to see.

Lucanus elaphus, the Giant Stag Beetle, is a huge insect almost three inches long with pincers of about an inch. Fortunately those pincers are mostly for show. Only the male has such large ones, and he uses them only to impress the ladies and to wrestle with the guys. He hasn't actually got the strength to give much of a pinch with them.

The adult beetle lives for about a month, defending a rotten stump from other males and mating when possible. (The male in the two photos above is posing on one of my deck posts, which I hope he is not correct in believing to be rotten wood.) The female lays eggs in the stump and they hatch in due time into the larval form. For the next few years the larvae munch away, growing and molting toward their brief lives in the sun.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The Ant Lion

Unlike the Giant Stag Beetle, the inconspicuous Ant Lion is a ferocious predator . . . but only in its larval stage. As an adult, it is a pretty little thing (much like a damselfly) and it feeds only on pollen and nectar (except for a few species that also eat small bugs).

The Ant Lion larva is tiny (less than 1/2 inch) and I've never actually seen one, though their sand traps are common and unmistakable. I have a whole colony of these sand traps just outside my garage door, so today I decided to use Sue's new TG-3 camera to take a close-up photo of the very bottom of such a trap, where the Ant Lion lies concealed and waiting for an unfortunate ant to slip over the edge.

If you look very closely and use a bit of imagination, you can just make out the front-half of the sand-covered beastie. It helps, however, to know what you should be seeing so here is a link to a photo from the of the larva:

Nothing helps the imagination more than a bit of video. National Geographic has a nice YouTube piece about the Ant Lion doing its job: Antlion Death Trap. Apparently, there is a price to pay for being so cruelly predatory: Ant Lions are the most constipated of insects, so much so that they have no anuses!

And that scares even me.

The Gordian Worm

The Gordian Worm youtube video

The Gordian Worm is a very long, very slender insect parasite that gets its common name because it is sometimes found tangled up in what almost seems to be a living gordian knot. It is also known as a Horsehair Worm because of the typically ill-informed folklore that "the long, thin hairs of a horse's mane or tail [can fall] into the water trough as a horse [drinks] and later [come] to life."

The scientific name for this animal is Nematomorphora. In its larval stage it is a parasite of grasshoppers and crickets. What happens is that the eggs hatch into tiny larvae which are then encysted on submerged grass or other plants. When these are eaten by grasshoppers or crickets, the Nematomorphora larvae grow inside the host until they eventually break free into the adult worms. Exactly how these worms grow as long as they obviously do is not explained in my source material.

Interestingly there are occasional instances of Gordian worms infecting humans--though these seem to occur only in the Far East and are apparently instances of pseudoparasitism. I.e., a person accidentally or intentionally eats an infected grasshopper or cricket. This introduces the worm into the human, but the worm is incapable of thriving in its new host.

For a truly fascinating introduction to horsehair worms and similar parasites, watch this YouTube video: Horse Hair Worms: http://youtu.be/so8ScD6m1MI
Sources:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2012.html
http://www.nematophora.net

The Water Bottle Money Can't Buy`

Cyclists need water. Moreover they often need to drink water while pedaling down the highway at over 20 mph. Yet the design of the usual sports bottle requires one to tilt one's head up sharply, risk taking one's eyes off the road, and both squeeze and suck on the bottle to get a few precious sips of H2O. It's sad. And dangerous.

Enter "The Water Bottle Money Can't Buy." To make this bottle, you need a section of 1/4-inch silicon or poly tubing that is about an inch longer than your water bottle is deep. Drill a 1/4-inch hole through the lid of the bottle and another 1/8-inch hole a little distance away. Now slide the tubing into the bottle and you have a hydration system that is much easier and safer to use.

You can drill your 1/4-inch hole right through the nozzle of a regular sports bottle for a professional-looking bottle. Or you can do what I have done and recycle a 20-ounce Gatorade bottle. Either one is a big improvement on an ordinary sports bottle.

Cell Phone Macro Photography

When I am out and about in nature, I prefer to carry light-weight, minimal equipment. Typically, I'll have a water bottle, a pair of 8x25 close-focus binoculars, and my cell phone (an inexpensive Samsung s390g). The camera on the cell phone takes two megapixel snapshots. When the light is good and I am able to hold the phone steady, these snapshots are adequate.

To photograph insects and wildflowers, however, additional magnification is essential. It turns out that with the aid of an inexpensive loupe such magnification is relatively easy to achieve. Here is a pair of pictures of my cell phone set up for macro photography:

As you can see, the loupe is attached with a rubber band to the phone so that the lens of the loupe is centered over the lens of the cell phone's camera. The only trick to taking fairly decent macro photographs is to hold the phone at the right distance from the object being photopraphed. With this loupe that distance is about three or four inches.

Here is a photo that provides a sense of the degree of clarity and magnification that I can achieve. (I usually set the camera's timer to two seconds so that I can get the distance just right and hold the phone steady enough to eliminate motion blur.)

Click to see full-scale photo

Clearly the loupe does create some distorting curvature along the edges, but the clarity seems fairly good.

Here is a link to a portfolio of pictures of wildflowers on our property that I have taken with cell phone macro photography:

Click to go to Picasa folder

The flower in the center of the first photo is almost unbelievbably small, as is the beetle perched atop the flower!

Those Blasted Bradford Pears

The speaker in our master naturalist class was irate. Her tone was sharp with her voice rising in anger.

"Those blasted Bradford Pears! If I had a chain saw, I'd fire it up and cut down every one in the entire state."

She passed around for our inspection a black thorny branch she had taken from one of the offending trees and described the dense thickets she had seen in her area. She viewed these pear trees as thorny monstrosities that shaded out and choked out all plant life below them; trees that nurtured no beneficial insects and whose non-nutritious fruit could be eaten by birds whose droppings would spread the evil spawn for miles around.

Honeylocust

My fellow Nits (naturalists in training) oohed and aahed over the prickly branch, but when it got to me, I was unimpressed. My reaction was in part moderated because we have on our property (and treasure!) a honeylocust tree that is the most dangerously thorny thing I have ever seen. The callery pear trees reviled by our speaker have smooth trunks and relatively thornless branches, but the honeylocust is better armed than a porcupine. The thorns on its trunk and branches form 3-dimensional clusters so that no matter how they fall to the ground some thorns will be facing up. Unlike the callery pear, the honeylocust frequently sheds dead branches and clusters of well-concealed thorns. Thus, walking beneath a honeylocust tree (or even parking a car beneath one) is a bit like wandering into a minefield. I have shoved honeylocust thorns right through the soles of my tennis shoes on many occasions. I once incautiously knelt down to observe a pretty wildflower and drove a honeylocust thorn right into my shinbone--a memory that can still bring tears to my eyes. That puncture wound swelled up like a golf ball, and even after healing remained a palpable knot beneath the skin for several years. I love a good honeylocust tree for its incredible ferocity; it is a savage tiger of a tree. By comparison, the callery pear is a sweet little kitten. And the Bradford pear (a special cultivar) is even more tame, being entirely thornless and usually infertile.

Indeed I quite like Bradford pear trees. One reason for this is that I have long experience with them. I planted two tiny Bradford pear saplings by my pond more than twenty years ago (long before assertions about their invasive nature began to be promulgated). Those two saplings have grown into handsome trees. Each spring they are the first trees to burst into bloom and each fall their colors are the most beautiful and the most long-lasting. The authorities certainly do label the trees as nonnative and invasive, but religion relies on reference to authority. Science relies on observation and experimentation. In the remainder of this article I will consider the charges against the tree and share my observations.

1. Bradford pears are nonnative. This is true. But all pear trees in America are nonnative, having been brought by European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries.

2. The Bradford pear is a cultivar of the thorny callery pear. This is true, too. But it is important to note that Bradford pears have been bred to be thornless and infertile and that most fruit pears are grafted onto callery pear rootstock. Fruit pears are much more susceptible to fire blight than Bradford pears, and when the graft dies, the rootstock usually flourishes and grows up into a callery pear. Thus, one should not assume that the thorny pears one sees are the result of unintended propagation from ornamental Bradford pears. Fruit pears are the more likely culprits.

3. Birds will eat the fruit of Bradford pear trees and can therefore spread the seeds through their droppings for miles. This is true, but so what? That birds are nourished by the fruits of the Bradford pear is a very good thing. Their droppings contain these seeds as is the case with any other fruit that nourishes birds. Normally those seeds are infertile, but it is said that cross pollination of different callery cultivars can produce fertile seeds. Later in the year I will try to test this hypothesis with the seeds from my own trees.

4. Bradford pear trees are invasive. This is certainly untrue of the Bradford pear cultivar, but it is possible that fertile callery pear trees can form dense invasive thickets. There is testimony to support that. But a plant that is invasive in one region is often not invasive in another. Since pear trees bloom and leaf out so early in the spring (and retain colorful leaves so late in the fall), this something that one can easily test by observation. I have been driving all over Baxter County, Arkansas, this spring and I have been on the lookout for problem areas. Nowhere have I seen invasive thickets of Bradford or callery pear trees. There is an abandoned amusement park that has an abundance of wild pear trees, but it is not so dense as to be a thicket, nor is it a monoculture. I hypothesize that the thin, rocky soils of the Ozarks are not so hospitable to these trees as richer soils.

5. These nonnative species do not support insects and birds. This is completely false. Because they are the first trees to blossom in the spring, our Bradford pear trees absolutely hum with the buzzing of honeybees and pollinators of all kinds. At dusk the moths flutter in clouds seeking the nectar. We own four acres of land, nearly all of which is left in a natural state. We have wild plums, wild peaches, redbuds, hackberries, sugarberries, wild cherries, dogwoods and more. But these two Bradford pear trees seem especially prized because of their role as the heralds of spring. Here is an early Bradford pear leaf that has been thoroughly munched by a caterpillar. Here is a caterpillar in action . . . and again a much magnified caterpillar . . . and on my thumb to give a sense of its tiny size. Here is a spider making its home on a pear leaf. Here is a Crane fly in close proximity with what seem to be two spiders! Here is a spider that has spun its web on a pear leaf and captured three insects. In the winter rare yellow-bellied sapsuckers sometimes stay nearby specifically so that they can take advantage of these two Bradford pear trees. They drill dense patterns of holes in the trunks and then return frequently throughout the day to dine on the insects attracted by the sap. No other trees on our property are used by the sapsuckers in this way.

Because I now have good friends who disapprove of Bradford pear trees, I would not plant them again. But I do cherish the ones that I have and I hope that thoughtful naturalists will reconsider the contributions of these ornamental trees to the environment (at least in areas where they are not invasive). . . . Oh, and as to the white flowering trees in the photo at the top of this blog . . . those are American Dogwoods, native trees that propagate profusely as a result of seeds in bird poop, trees that leaf out early and shade out their competitors, trees that frequently dominate the understory in this part of the Ozarks. Delightfully so!

T-DUMB

I was recently sorting through some of my old teaching files and came across this little jeux d'esprit that I created as a way of mocking the pretentions of academic writing. I am posting it on my blog page for whatever amusement it may give to other suffering English majors and scholars.

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Tabular Development of Useless Mediocre Bombast

DUMB makes it possible for even the most mediocre student or professor to write critical nonsense that sounds quite convincingly intellectual. In some quarters it is felt that the DUMB system is routinely used by those who publish in scholarly journals.

To write DUMB prose you simply string together random four-digit numbers and then read off the DUMBly generated sentence from Tables A, B, C, and D below. For example, 2743 corresponds to the sentence: "On the other hand, any contingent generic element necessitates both anthropological and metaphoric considerations of the individualistic or idiosyncratic symbols." More sophisticated prose stylists can combine the elements in the order BACD, DBCA, or DABC. Some additional punctuation may be required in these advanced configurations.

Table A
1. In particular,
2. On the other hand,
3. However,
4. Similarly,
5. As a resulting implication,
6. In this regard,
7. Based on ethnocentric values,
8. For example,
9. Thus,
0. In respect to specific desiderata,

Table B
1. a large portion of expressive verbal communication
2. a semiotic system of literary artifacts
3. the characterization of archetypal patterns
4. the conception of metatheoretical critical constructs
5. the deconstructing of seminal verbal acts
6. the insight informed by depth psychology
7. any contingent generic element
8. the individuation of structuralist reservations
9. the independent fictive principle
0. a primary interrelationship between various theories and methods of interpretation

Table C
1. must utilize and be specifically interwoven with
2. augments the imaginative aura and minimizes the linguistic deconstruction of
3. underscores the premises that underlie
4. necessitates both anthropological and metamorphic considerations of
5. requires dual foci for scrutinizing
6. is neither mimical to nor inconsistent with
7. embodies interesting methodologies for
8. recognizes the recurrent thematic concerns and formal devices that significantly link
9. exemplifies the psychodynamics of
0. adds ritualistic overtones empathetic to

Table D
1. the dystopian vision.
2. the apprehension of reality.
3. the individualistic or idiosyncratic symbols.
4. the philosophic concern about post-modern discoveries.
5. the prevailing orthodoxy.
6. the evolution of iconographic interests in discrete literary periods.
7. the philosophy of humanistic culture.
8. the cosmos/self relationship.
9. any unique verbal or literary evidence.
0. the striving of humanity for self-actualization.

Based on Honeywell's Buzz-Phrase Generator for Writing Simplified Integrated Modular Prose (SIMP). I first found SIMP in Scientific American, but I no longer have the reference details. Here is a link to another blogger who discusses this buzz-word generator:

http://www.copywriting-on-demand.com/buzzword-generator.htm