Thoughts on the Mother's Day weekend hikes

"How did these trees start being called cedar?", she asked, referring to the ashe juniper.

I love questions.  Part of my enjoyment of the public hikes is listening to their questions.  Good questions usually beget good answers.

We had begun walking again when this woman asked the question, and I couldn't hear Nancy's response.  And I'd like to know!

***

I've studied a lot of geology, and when you know a lot about something, it's harder to decide what to say in a 1 minute summary.  I've been thinking about how I want to tell the story of limestone, since there are always many ways to tell a story.

I like that Nancy stops and talks about it at the first top of trail 3 - that she introduces it with "this is usually under our feet, but here it's exposed".  It's important, I think, for visitors to see or hear the thing we're talking about.  Otherwise, why actually be there? We could all sit around some beers and talk about it instead.

So - my limestone story begins to be explored:  Limestone is a rock that was built by life.  All of this you see is the remains of shells that tiny animals who lived in a warm, shallow sea made.  They extracted calcium carbonate suspended in the ocean water, built up their shells with that and lived their lives inside. When they were eaten, their fleshy parts were digested, but their shells were pooped out, and sank to the bottom. Billions upon trillions of these sank to the bottom, and as more and more were added, the pressure of all those on top squeezed the water out of the ones on the bottom. More and more pressure gradually turned it into a solid mass we call rock - limestone - calcium carbonate.  If you put some under a microscope, you can still see some of the shells intact. Further up trail 3, we'll see rock that was made up of bigger shells that we can see with our naked eye.

And, since a google search makes it apparent that you can't talk about limestone without referring to current climate change, here's this, which I wouldn't talk about unless someone asked:

The ocean acts as a carbon sink, meaning that it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. This causes ocean acidification: the ocean becomes more acid as it absorbs more and more CO2. The pH scale measures acidity. Its lowest measurement, 0, represents strong acids. Its highest measurement, 14, represents strong bases. A netural measurement is 7, the pH of distilled water. Seawater near the ocean’s surface should have a pH of 8.2. In the last 200 years, heightened levels of CO2 have reduced surface seawater pH by 0.1, making the water 30% more acidic. With present trends, seawater will be 150% more acidic than in pre-industrial times by 2100. Heightened acidity increases concentrations of hydrogen ions in seawater. It also ties up calcium ions [how? in what molecules?] and thus creates a scarcity of calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is required by calcifying marine organisms to build stony skeletons and hard shells. - From Nielson, Frontier Scientists 10/9/2012

Get the Smell of it

Leaves

Cucumber weed

Kidneywood

Wafer Ash aka Skunkweed

Fragrant Sumac

Blooms
Pink Mimosa blooms - get up close and personal
Honeysuckle - just get within a couple yards of it

Acreage Comparison

BL is 214 or 216 acres, depending on your source.

We've been saying that to visitors, and I've been wondering what that really means.  Sure, 216 is a big number, especially if you compare it to today's typical homestead size.  I lived on 2.5 acres and it felt like that decimal moved to the right when I had to mow it.

But just how big is 216? Do people know enough to put it in some context? I sure don't.

So, to put that in some perspective -
For a schoolkid - A football field is about 1.32 acres (including endzones)- so BL is about 163 football fields. For a local urban adult - Zilker Park is 351 acres (265 football fields).

It strikes me that both of those examples are flat.  I'm wondering if acres are measured by how the crow flies, or if it takes into account the topography of the land. [Googleing]

Ah.. acres are measured by how the crow flies.  So there's actually much more land to traverse in BL's 216, than a flat urban park's 216. (I probably could have figured that out - if I thought about why they can use lasers to simply compute the straight line distance between the laser beam and receiver, ignoring all the hills and vales in between.)

Here's some comparisons of other hilly Preserves:
For a local park adult - Wild Basin Preserve is 227 acres (172 football fields).

For a regional park adult - Balcones Canyonlands Preserve is 23,000 acres (17,424 football fields).

Ash Spring

I declare this to be the Spring of the Ash.

This lovely, small tree is popping up all over.
Here's a field of trees at the top of trail 4.

I believe they are all wafer ashes, and here's their "bloom" which the adults have right now. They're a flat, round paper-like disc the size of a quarter, and they bear more than a passing resemblance to communion wafers.

I don't know how they taste, but I hear it's also known as the hop tree, and that Germans who came to Texas, and found they couldn't grow the hops they were used to, found these to be a substitute.  I wonder if any of our local brewers have tried it, or have plans to. I'd try it!

Some of them, however, may not be communion wafers, but a variant with long, thin wafers. This one is right at the creek crossing.

I also declare this particular hike as the Day I Discovered the Hand Lens.
This little beauty had been gathering dust in my backpack for a year.
But I took it out to see if I could take a picture of star moss through it for the newsletter article -and I could!

So I took it out again to see if the knobs on the mimosa tree were buds, or spent blooms. I could tell they were buds - and discovered two tiny irridescent green flies were on the leaves as well.
This caterpillar on the mimosa I could see with my naked eye:

But when I put the hand lens to it, I noticed some leaves folded over -not up, like a venus flytrap, but over and down. And there were more yellow that the normal looking leaves. Looking even closer, I think I saw tiny creatures had folded the leaves around themselves (gads, my thumb looks huge under the lens!).

Q & A

I'm kind of insatiable with questions.  I find them far more interesting than answers.  Trouble is, you need to already know some answers in order to ask good questions.  Luckily, they feed off each other in a rolling snowball effect.  I've been stopped in my tracks by a cool answer- like a photon particle can have a wavelength several miles long.  But cool questions make me stop in my tracks and repeat the question and think about the answer and wonder why no one ever though of that question before.

I think it has to do with points of view.  Answers tell you something about a point of view that already exists.  But questions define that point of view, and can create totally new points of view.  Questions frame answers.  You can have a whole bunch of data points, but until you ask "What am I looking at?", you don't have any answers.  (Just ask Seurat.)

In my first year at BL, I've busied myself absorbing answers.  I've listened to what the Nancys, Patricia and Bill tell the hiking groups.

What's that called?


I've googled more answers on my own.
Why is it called that?
Why is the blackfoot daisy called that?  Does it have black feet (roots)?  Was there a Mr. Blackfoot?  A Chief Blackfoot?

And now, buttressed and bouyed by those answers, I'm starting to be able to ask more interesting questions.
What's the difference?
That's a yucca. That's a grass.  That's a sedge.  What makes the difference?

How does it work?
I hear at least two kinds of frogs chirping & bellowing this spring.  I imagine the chirps are from small frogs, and the bellowing from large ones.  Is that right?  And do they correspond to the big and little tadpoles I saw last spring (and expect to see soon this spring)?  (And that would explain that the big tadpoles I saw weren't small ones that had been born earlier and grown, but actually a different species, born at the same time.)

The algae growing in Dry Creek gets washed away by the rains.  This is good for Dry Creek- it brings back clear water for awhile, until the algae takes over again.  But there is no such place as "away".  It gets washed into Lake Austin.  This makes me ask - Are the small stream tributaries of a lake the major source of algae?  So the algae washed into lakes after rain thrive and are responsible for lake blooms?  Or is the algae growing in very small, shallow streams of running water a different species from that growing in lakes, which are deeper and don't flow, and so they don't thrive when they're washed into lakes?

Barking

The deer visited this morning - I heard them crashing through the underbrush.  Then two short barking sounds.  I've heard deer make one short alarm call that sounded similar, but never two in a row like this.  Then suddenly the sound was across the valley.  Ah, then: a barking bird.

But what bird barks like this?  It sounded like a dog barking far away, and muzzled.  Then I watched my owl (a great horned owl I've named Henrietta Hooter, in honor of my cat she ate) fly into her tree in my yard.  And then she barked.  And she's there barking still, as I write this.

I recognizer her voice, now.  But not this song.  Why two short barks, and not the sonorous five legato notes she usually sings?

Crowing

The crows are back.  They caused quite a rucous this morning.  The dog was barking at them.  The neighbor down the hill came out to remark on them.

My first encounter with crows was in grade school.  I was walking down the hill to the beach, and came across 5 or 6 of them feeding on road kill.  My memory is of huge, intelligent birds that didn't scare easily.  We stood and watched each other for a few moments, before they flew away.

(I had a similar encounter with vultures in high school.  I was driving my little sister and me down a hot, dusty country back road.  All the windows were down, and we were moving slowly over the uneven gravel.  We approached something on the road ahead - I couldn't tell what it was till we were upon them - 5 to 6 vultures feeding off road kill.  I had approached so slowly, they didn't move.  I came to a stop about 10 feet from them.  They just turned and looked at us.  It was stalemate for a few minutes.  It felt to me like they wouldn't fly off if I drove forward, but would rather attack us.  I told my sister to roll all the windows up fast!  But eventually, of course, I drove and they flew.  I'll never forget how intelligent they looked.)

The first thing that comes up when I google Crows in Texas is Texas Crow Patrol.  They shoot crows for free.  Apparently, crows eat crops.  So they'll come and shoot them for you.  It's legal. And oddly geometrical.

Apparently, this is the western edge of their range in Texas. Google says they are permanent residents, but in this last year, I'm pretty sure I've only heard them during their breeding season Feb - June.  Perhaps they remain here, but are silent (though the thought of silent crows makes me giggle).