What beautiful weather we are having this fall. Funny how all of our seasonal weather patterns are now so scrutinized in terms of that hotbutton “Global Warming.” The averages of the weather are just that, a way of explaining what things are normally like based on averaging all the data we have on hand. It may be warm now, and that may or may not have to do with anything other than it is just an above average year. Last winter we had a lot of snow but I’ll bet if we averaged snowfall out over a 25 year period it would not change that overall average amount of snowfull much (the important comparision being leaving our heavy snowfall year in and then out of the dataset). Anyway that was not what I was wanting to write about. The earth is getting warmer, based on the science and all the credible evidence I have seen but that is besides the main point.
I have been enjoying being out and about these past few weekends and even getting back and forth to work during the week. I doubt this nice run of above average temps will not last all through the winter so I will take whatever I can in this regard. While I have never been someone that “minds” the weather so much, just that as I get older things do seem to go easier if it the weather is pleasant. Trying to shovel a foot of snow, and having my bad back ache for days aftwards, makes things like snow not as carefree an event as it used to be in the past. And I did used to not mind all that digging out at all.
I am sure my son will enjoy the snow once he gets old enough to get around well in it. Then of course he will love having time off from school when he gets a snow day. That is surely a common experience for anyone who has grown up in areas where the winters include snow. Remembering those days when you had a day off from school and could go play in the snow instead! Of course it occassionaly happens that work gets “cancelled” for the same reason but it just was not the same as missing school. For me, it just leaves me with a day to catch up with later. What I like even better these days than a snow day out of work is a snowy day in work when most everyone else stays home. Those are days I can really plow through things at the office!
Alright, enough rambling opinionated dribble from me.
Tagged as:
rambling
A November walk.
We got out of the house around 10 and headed over to Lincoln to explore Adams Woods, a Lincoln Land Conservation property. It is about 100 acres in size and borders Walden Pond. The first challenge was finding a trailhead access point and a place where we could park the car. Talking to a guy raking leaves I find out it was just behind the sign that says “No Parking.” Once that was all behind us, and we got the boy in his carrier and on our back, we were on our way.
Walden Pond in the background
It was a beautiful fall day and the property, and the trails, were just great. The center of Adams Woods is fairly flat and level but around the edges there are some ups and downs around various water related features. To the south, and along what is roughly the boundary, is a trail that runs along what is called Heywood’s Brook. It ends at a meadow, which in turn looks out over Fairhaven Bay. To the northwest are Andromeda Ponds. These are a series of bog ponds that Thoreau visited and wrote about in his journal. This was not a far walk for Thoreau as the ponds and this property border the southwestern edge of Walden Pond.
There were a number of horses out and about on the trails, and even more runners, but all of our encounters with others were pleasant. The various water bodies and the related topography associated with them were really great. The New England woods in autumn are interesting enough but with all the leaves off the trees you could really see into some nice brooks, wetlands, and the bogs.
Some of the reading I did about Adams Woods in the “Guide to Conservation Land in Lincoln” says that things look much different here in the past. The small meadow stretched along the whole length of Heywood’s Brook, for instance. It is also sure that this being Massachusetts that the forest throughout here has been reworked in many ways. This includes Thoreau and a friend starting a forest fire when they were cooking some fish.
Tagged as:
forest,
Lincoln,
New England,
walking
There are few animals that provide us with stronger reactions than seeing a snake. A few are not worried at such a site but as E.O. Wilson writes in his book Biophilia it seems that we have a long evolved innate alarm response to these organisms.
An eastern diamondback rattlesnake
Of all the snakes that we could run into vipers can be pretty worrisome. Many have a form of venom that can cause severe pain, other problems such as the breakdown of tissues, and in some cases (and only from some snakes) death. They also look pretty fierce with eyes that have a pupil that is a vertical eliptical – in other words it is slit shaped. The vipers include snakes with cool names like the puff ader, the rock viper, the eastern hornsman adder and the black-spotted palm viper. Folks in the US are familiar with this group as the cottonmouth, copperhead and rattlesnakes are all from the large family of snakes, the Viperidae, that includes all the vipers.
All vipers have long hinged fangs. These can penetrate deep into our skin and are also designed as venom delivery devices, with the poison being injected as the fangs are sinking into whatever is being bitten. When retracted the fangs fold back into the roof of the mouth into an membranous sheath that is designed to keep them out of the way and safe from being damaged.
We think we have some fierce looking poisonous snakes in North America but there are a lot of interesting vipers found in other parts of the world. Here is one from the middle east. This snake lives in the desert and most, but not all, have horns on their head.
Hornless
The picture above is the hornless form of Cerastes gasperetti. Below is the horned form.
Horned!
Pictures shared under creative commons license. Please refer back to the original source, as given in the following, to see the original copyright and if you need to provide proper attribution for any of these images that you may wish to reuse elsewhere. Eastern Diamondback by poplinre. The last two are courtesy of: Stümpel N, Joger U (2009) Recent advances in phylogeny and taxonomy of Near and Middle Eastern Vipers – an update. In: Neubert E, Amr Z, Taiti S, Gümüs B (Eds) Animal Biodiversity in the Middle East. Proceedings of the first Middle Eastern Biodiversity Congress, Aqaba, Jordan, 20–23 October 2008. ZooKeys 31: 179–191
Tagged as:
herps,
snakes
