Panamanian Frog Hotel

A story in the Washington Post that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking: the tale of the golden frogs of El Valle de Anton in Panama. With a deadly fungus tearing through Central American amphibian populations, the golden frog has been sequestered in a run-down backpacker's hotel at the edge of the mountains with hopes that it can wait out the naturally-occuring chytrid fungus. The Hotel Campestre has become a sort of postmodern Noah's Ark and currently has 40 species of endangered frogs and toads shacking up in it. "The volunteers found glass frogs with skin so translucent that their organs are always on full display," explains the Post. "They picked up frogs that look like rocks and eat freshwater crabs, aggressive tree frogs and shy, nocturnal toads."

The hotel's guests are happily mating, and scientists are monitoring their reproduction, waiting for the day when it is considered safe to release them back in to the wild. But Good Samaritan impulses aside, interesting questions arise.

"There's this moral dilemma," one Panamanian biologist said. "Is this evolution? Should we let it run its course? If we do this for frogs, then do we do it some other time for the snakes?"

Also, scientists wonder if "the frogs they are saving in Panama might be the last of their kind? And might those frogs -- those jumping, squirmy delights -- never see the outside world again?"

Should humans play the role of Noah by taking wildlife out of their native habitats and shielding them from the blind course of natural selection? Is our planet becoming so unhospitable to animals, birds and fish that we will eventually have to create virtual habitat in order for them to survive?

Read the rest of the story here.

North Cascadian Larch Magic

"It was another October gold rush in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, with foliage prospectors at altitudes of 6,000 feet and beyond gazing at their chosen grail: the alpine larch, a slender tree whose velvety needles turn an incandescent yellow-gold come fall." So writes Linda Baker in today's New York Times' Travel section. Great tribute to the amazing larch tree of the North Cascades high country; read it here.

North Cascades
Larch
Fall Color

R.I.P. Hugo, Jellyroll & Raven

Several Pacific Northwest newspapers reported last week on the disapperance and presumed death of three orca whales from the San Juan Islands pods: Hugo, Jellyroll and Raven have vanished from their usual haunts and hunting grounds. This is a distinct departure from the good news of last spring, when several new orca whalets were discovered, and a terrible turn for the precarious local population. In general, they've been seen as slightly rebounding in numbers, but the mysterious recent disapearances reinforces the reality that Puget Sound's orcas are being pummeled by multiple threats all at once.

What happened to these particular three swimmers? Was it the built-up levels of PCBs biomagnified and stored in their blubber, bestowing upon them the dubious distinction of "most polluted marine mammals in the world"? Or did they starve to death from a lack of salmon, another species not doing so hot in our troubled waters?

"When salmon are plentiful, the whales tend to travel close together," the Seattle P-I reported on Wednesday, "but this year's sightings revealed the whales as spread out, indicating they were foraging and food supplies are short."

The Seattle P-I just published a commendable series on the state of the Puget Sound, written by their crack team of environmental investigators, Robert McClure and Lisa Stiffler. You can read their entire series "Broken Promises" here. Part of the series is a dramatization of the life of one particular Puget Sound orca named "Granny" written by M.L. Lyke. "She has lived long, seen much, some of it best forgotten: Bullets, bombs, nets, babies born dead. She understands the world of orcas. It's always about survival, always about community." You can follow Granny's story here.

Read more about the lost orcas here or here.

Incidentally, while researching the web for orca information, I came across this fascinating movie on YouTube--check it out.



orcas
puget sound
endangered species

Last sunset of the summer

Here's the view from Bellingham Bay, in the far northwestern corner of Washington State, on the Fall Equinox....

"Messenger"

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird--
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

--Mary Oliver, from "Thirst"; Beacon Press, 2006.

Mary Oliver

Interview with Barry Lopez

The Georgia Review's current issue features an interview I conducted with Oregon writer Barry Lopez, author of the outstanding "Arctic Dreams," "Of Wolves & Men" and several collections of short stories. You can read it on the web here.


Barry Lopez

Lurker of the Deep

Ever heard of an oarfish? Me neither, but one washed up on a beach in Oregon. Apparently they are giaant fish tha tlive in the deep dark depths off the coast of the Pacific. "It looks like a cross between an eel, a tarpon and I don't know what else with that big bug eye," explained Keith Chandler, general manager of the Seaside Aquarium, who identified the mysterious visitor last week. They are extremely rare and rarely seen. Consequently, science doesn't know much about them. But they do have a place in native myth, where they are known as "king-of-the-salmon. As the Oreognian explains, "The name king-of-the-salmon comes from a Native American legend in which the fish leads salmon on their migratory travels."

View the Oregonian article here.


oarfish
pacific ocean

Who the hell....

....are Brent and Jan LeBaron?!?! And why are so many people looking for them?

I get dozens of visits a day from people all over the world -- Canada, Spain, Australia, Japan -- who are Googling "Brent and Jan LeBaron." I randomly posted their excellent photos of Mt. St. Helens a few months back (a friend emailed them to me, but I don't know anything about who they are) and they have been far and away the most visited posts on Ish River Itinerate. So, my curiosity is piqued. If you are a Brent and Jan LeBaron Googler, leave a comment that will help me to decode this worldwide phenomenon!

Brent and Jan LeBaron

Tim McNulty's North Cascadian poems, reviewed

Through High Still Air: A Season at Sourdough Mountain
By Tim McNulty
Pleasure Boat Studio, 2005, $9
www.pbstudio.com

"The dry summer of 2003 saw wildfires sweep through the forests of the mountain West," writes Tim McNulty in the introduction to his latest chapbook of poems, Through High Still Air. "By August, a number of lightning-strike fires were smoldering in the deep mountain wilderness of Washington's North Cascades National Park. Four of them fell within sight of Sourdough Mountain Lookout."

McNulty explains how, after the park service decided to reactivate the historic lookout, he "jumped at the opportunity." It was a serendipitous decision: the summer of 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of poet Gary Snyder's tenure at Sourdough, a moment in time immortalized in Snyder's book Riprap, Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels and John Suiter's Poets on the Peaks. Having one of the Pacific Northwest's finest contemporary nature poets atop Sourdough during this auspicious season was bound to inspire something special. Through High Still Air is McNulty's record of his mountaintop residency, and is appropriately dedicated to Snyder, "poet and lookout, fifty years down the trail."

In the too-brief 24 pages that follow, McNulty gives readers a chronicle of weather ("high winds up the Skagit/ pile dark-bottomed clouds/ against peaks and snowfields" and "taste of raincloud moving past,/ streams and rivers/ beginning again"), buddhistic meditations, a litany of the fire lookout's daily duties, field notes and observations on the behavior of wildfire ("I've never seen the utter transformation that is wildfire…this is raw presence, wild and unencumbered”). In McNulty's plainspoken summoning of North Cascadian elements -- heather and hemlock, Skagit gneiss and shadow, mountain ash and mist -- details accumulate until the effect is like an invocation, a heartfelt prayer to this particular corner of the planet.

Wildlife too regularly appears in these pages, including a three-point buck, a Swainson's hawk ("fierce, streamlined missile with wildly rippling feathers"), a short-tailed weasel, grasshoppers, a Townsend's warbler ("a gift from Costa Rican forests"), and spiraling sharp-shinned hawks ("poised, compact and gracefully alert"). McNulty observant poems even take notice of the animals that *aren't* there, like the "delicate tracks of/ small deer,/ nimble handprints of raccoons" or the footprints of black bears on the bottom of a tarn in his exquisite journal entry entitled "August 24, 'Three Bear Tarn'."

Poet Howard Nemerov once explained that "A poem is an act of attentiveness." Mary Oliver furthered this theory by confessing "This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness." McNulty shared both of these quotes with me during an Institute poetry workshop in 2002, and Through High Still Air is testament to his abiding belief in the power of focused attention, intricate details and deep respect for the natural world.

Reviewed by Christian Martin. Photo by Todd Burley.

Tim McNulty teaches "Wild Poetics" -- a field course exploring the connections between nature, wilderness and poetic expression – June 23-25 at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, fittingly at the base of Sourdough Mountain. Information and registration at www.ncascades.org or 360-856-5700 x209.


[Tim McNulty]
[North Cascades]
[Fire Lookouts]

TROJAN DOWN

A friend of mine was in Kalama, WA last weekend for the implosion of the Trojan cooling tower. She gave me this report: "We were directly across the river from the tower. They shot off an initial round just to scare the birds out before the real action began, then a quick series of huge blasts and the thing dropped to the ground. The entire event could not have lasted more than five seconds. A moment later, as the dust was still settling, a sea lion popped its head out of the Columbia and looked around to see what all the fuss was about." She also took these awesome photos...





There are quite a few more photos, like the one below, here and the Seattle Times and The Columbian both have stories covering the big blow-up.




trojan

Lost and Found Fotos: Mount St. Helens II

“Here is something not many of us get to see, unless you live near there - Mt. St. Helens at sunrise.

Mt. St.. Helens continues to spew ash, while it is forming a lava dome in the crater and still having minor tremors. Here in this sunrise shot, she appears to be blowing smoke rings (and anything so benign is welcomed, given recent history).

What forms the "smoke rings" is the air flowing over the mountain getting pushed up higher as it goes up and over the top. The moisture content and initial temperature are just right so that the moisture condenses from a vapor to small particles at the higher altitude. When the moving air moves past the peak and comes down again, the particles evaporate back to an invisible vapor.

The two "pancakes" describe that there are two layers of air for which this is happening, thus making this awesome picture possible.”

Photo and text by Brent and Jan LeBaron (I got it forwarded this stuff forwarded to me via email, and don't know the LeBarons personally...)

mt st helens

Lost & Found Fotos: Mount St. Helens

(Picture by Brent and Jan LeBaron)