Like pokemon go only for nerds

I have been waiting for this my entire life. No, really, my whole entire life. (Yeah, college, yeah, science, but I wanted to live in Greater Rednecklandia and to play horse. The combo of "live in Greater Rednecklandia" and "$$$ for playin' horse" ruled out academia. I'm a landlord, which pays the bills.)

One of my goals is a week by week catalog of flowering plants (and yes, that is a huge damn list, and I mean huge, because a lot of stuff flowers and not just the herbaceous stuff people think of as "flowers") with pictures, location notes, first bloom each year, yadda yadda yadda. Ideally, this could be made into an interactive calendar for my enjoyment although really by making the calendar I would already know all the... look, I just like categorizing stuff. I like lists.

Most of my observations will be on a fairly quotidian timbered-several-times chunk of ridge-n-valley Appalachia located just outside of Breezewood PA. We have a lake (about 40 acres surface area, big enough for fishes and turtles and obviously a nice selection of odonates, but it is an impoundment and not a natural feature), several pretty-reliable creeks, and a good-sized chunk of east-facing mountainside. All told, it's on the close order of five hundred acres, the borders of which are heavily plastered with no trespassing signs. (We don't like strangers on our land. If you have some science reason for needing or wanting to be here, send me a message or something first. Don't just show up and wander around, that's rude and also illegal. We prosecute.) Our property borders are the Buchanan State Forest (marked with white blazes of paint), the old PA Turnpike (between the Sideling Hill and Ray's Hill tunnels, has a falling-down fence to mark the border), and the top (it has a crappy dirt road along it and that's the property line, more or less) of Ray's Hill.

The lake has a 2.2 square mile watershed (which I know because we need that information for the Dam's Emergency Action Plan) the vast bulk of which is wooded. Water's pretty clear (I have a Secchi disk and should start tracking that just for shits and giggles), mostly unvegetated, and, according to Penn State "low nutrient". The lake was built in 1968/69 and is probably twenty feet deep at the most though I haven't measured it. It's basically a glorified pond.

I have lived here my entire life with the exception of college and I'm reasonably familiar with the property. This makes it easy to find known things but, as I discovered when I inexplicably got interested in odonates one summer, there's a hell of a lot going on out there that you don't see until you look for it. Like, I knew we had "dragonflies" but we have a lot of them. They all fly differently. They hang out in different places. Some like streams that are calm. Some like brisk streams with rocky riffles. Some like big open water. Some like to perch a lot. Some are nearly impossible to net (Common Green Darner of whom I still do not have a picture, I am looking directly at you with narrowed eyes). Like, each species has its own personality and behavior and preferences and seasons. Once you get to know them, it's a lot easier to find them. If I'd had to guess how many odonates we had prior to The Odonate Enthusiasm, I would have guessed like six kinds. Not even close. There are at least twenty in regular presence about the place. You don't know until you look and you don't know how to SEE until you do some looking and then get better at looking by way of having done it a while.

Posted on February 18, 2018 12:52 PM by whichchick