Like in Ben Hur? My brother and I used that call all the time as kids! Sounds like fun (and beautiful).
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We’ve got Japanese knotweed. When horticulturists from OSU asked colleagues in Japan how to control it, the response was, “Control??” Here it chokes out everything; there it’s just another plant in the system. It even destroys some swimming holes because it grows right out into sandbars, and when the rainy season brings more sand downstream its dead stems catch heaps, so sandbars that have been about the same size and shape for fifty years suddenly start growing, and the first part to reach a riverbank anchors the whole mess to the bank and proceeds to fill all but the main channel.
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There’s a type of maple that grows here that naturally has an even bottom to its canopy. There’s one that Knox and I walked past today that is monstrous; the trunk is easily four feet thick while the canopy is about 45’ wide and 75’ long – it’s elongated due to the winds at its location.
On an interim term project to California, I happened to be driving the wee-hours shift when we were crossing (IIRC) Arizona. Two of the guys were city types who’d never seen the night sky in its raw beauty, so I pulled over and woke the two in the back up. The only time I’ve seen anything like the awe on those two guys’ faces was in high school when we had three members of another symphonic band staying at the house and my mom decided to take them to the beach. None of them had ever seen the ocean before; the largest body of water they knew was about two miles across which meant the other side was visible.
I got spoiled in university astronomy class: I managed to get on the list to be able to take the active mount along with one of the 4" reflectors. It’s amazing what you can get pictures of when you can focus on one star and let the machine track it!
BTW, I was out one night not long ago while Knox nosed around the yard to sniff out if any critters had been in his turf, and was checking off items in the sky – Jupiter, Arcturus, Venus . . . then I spotted a red pinpoint, thought a moment, and said out loud, “Hi, Mars!” Then I laughed at myself and said, “Knox, we’re in Ukraine!”
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Curious, do you have deer at your location or other largish herbivores? The even, horizontal edge of such trees is often caused by the “grazing line” of herbivores…how high they can reach to munch on the veg.
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We do (you might have seen. ; - ).
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I talk to birders out where I do conservation work and they affirm what I’d guessed: as the invasive species take over more territory, the number of bird species is dropping.
It’s not just birds, either; there are fewer wildlife of all kinds except coyotes and maybe the elk.
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Seems to go that way. Less native plants means less hosted insects which means less food for frogs, lizards and birds which means less snakes and with less birds come less native fruits seeds being carried off and dispersed by them. It means less birds carrying eggs from aquatic animals accidentally from watering hole to watering hole. As less native seeds are dispersed by birds there is less native plants popping back as good meaning higher chances of invasives replacing them because of consumerism. So deers tend to over browse on saplings meaning less trees to grow big to relate the fallen ones. It’s just chaos.
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On a canoe trip down the Willamette River once we swore the mosquitoes were flying in formation. And on one island campground they were so thick it was possible to hear a background hum!
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I saw a fraternity group at Lake Shasta once build “Beerhenge” out of cases of beer – probably the shortest-lived version.
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Sounds like the English Ivy, Japanese Stiltgrass, Kudzu, privet, Japanese Honeysuckle, etc., etc. around here. I really wish there were better options than manually pulling all of it up or using an herbicide for those.
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The best I’ve seen is “Milky Way is visible, but you can’t see any obvious naked-eye structure to it.” I still don’t understand the point in leaving lots of lights on overnight most places.
I suppose that’s where we got it; I can remember yelling it at church camp during (highly unauthorized) boat ‘wars’ out on the lake as a junior high kid.
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Oh, this stuff makes English Ivy look incompetent. Idiots try to kill it by chopping it down, unaware that even a major portion of a leaf, if it lands in a damp place, can root and start a new plant. As for herbicides, to use RoundUp you have to mix it with an oil that will penetrate the leaf cells and spray it at least every month from the time it turns green in the spring – and do that for three or four years. There’s an herbicide that can kill it if it’s sprayed while flowering, which is all of about eight days a year, but it’s highly restricted to government use only here.
It’s effectively impossible to pull manually; to manually remove it requires digging at least four feet deep and then sifting the dirt to make sure there are no little bits of root left.
I keep intending to take a container of rock salt up the river to a spot I love but where there’s one of these things sprouting to see if salt will do it in.
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I used to be immune to all that stuff; I think I was in sixth grade when some guys at summer camp dragged me from the showers and threw me in a patch of stinging nettles; I just got back up and finished my shower. Once at a family reunion, paying “skins” in football, I got knocked into a patch of poison oak; then there was the bike ride where I hit some loose gravel and wiped out into a patch of poison ivy – no reaction to any of them.
Then I lived in urban St. Louis for a year, and all the chemicals in the air screwed up my system.
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I once camped on a frozen lake. Another time a blizzard hit when we were setting up camp.
I actually miss those severe midwest winters.
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With little wild cress growing along with!
Wild cress can be irritating to pull when the seed pods ripen: the seeds are spring-loaded and when a ripe pod is bumped it can fire seeds over a meter. That’s just annoying, but if one gets you in the eye it can hurt.
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My older brother used to hike that one.
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They sure do. Found out this summer why rocket is called rocket, as it does the same.
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We had a tiny patch for years by the main porch, till one summer I conspired with siblings and cousins to rebuild the porch and there was a lot of walking in the flower bed. I was worried the bulbs might get damaged, but what happened was that the next spring instead of a small cluster there were two dozen coming up, and the year after that doubled.
Apparently they’d been dropping seeds that were just waiting for disturbed soil/bark dust.
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