Archives for March 2015

Nature’s Year in Time

March 28, 2015 by Denise Brake 3 Comments

Today marks a milestone for North Star Nature–a year has passed since my first blog post! How do we measure the passing of a year? I think it depends on our stage in life and the structure of our days. We all have calendars that systematically number off the days and months of sunrises and sunsets, full moons and new moons, holidays and birthdays. I feel the passage of time when I turn my calendar to the next month, to the next beautiful picture from Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and to the next 30 days of opportunities. A year in the life of a young child can stretch out ‘forever’–perhaps because they live in the moment better than the rest of us or because they always have something to look forward to. Soon time is organized around a school year–for students and their parents–the next grade, school supplies, holidays, tests, homework, and back to Summer vacation! Then it starts all over again until, next thing you know, you are taking those school kids to college. Many people mark a year by living for the fifty-two weekends. Others by the busy blur of daily activities and places to be. Some pass time by staring out a window, listening to the clock tick, eating meals, and wondering when the family is going to visit.

This is also my 100th post! What is it about 100? Young school kids celebrate the 100th day of school with learning opportunities and fun. 100 pennies make a dollar. I’m still thrilled when I hold a $100 bill in my hand! ‘100 years ago today’ teaches us history lessons. And celebrating 100 years of age practically makes a person famous!

What both of these milestones do is give us a reason to look back on what was and to look forward to what will be. The blue-sky, snowy picture of our old oak tree started North Star Nature’s year–before I knew how to remove the date from the picture, before I learned how to put more than one picture in my post, and before I realized how much I would enjoy this nature blogging process! The Old Beauty is another year older!

My year was measured by blogging time, from last April’s frozen sap, drilled by the yellow-bellied sapsucker….

to drilling and tapping sugar maples earlier this month at St. John’s Arboretum in order to make sweet maple syrup.

Flowers show the progress of time from early May pasque flowers…

Pasque flowers on SD prairie hill by LAn

to late September monkshood and all the incredible blooms in between.

Time marked by seeds…

growing into buds…

producing flowers…

Lupine flower

and developing fruit…that contains the seed….

A year of blogging gave me the opportunity to photograph the remarkable eagle pair and their eaglets,

a huge flock of overwintering trumpeter swans,

and the grandly feathered wild turkeys that trooped through our yard.

I felt privileged to photograph this curious young fox,

a pair of spotted fawns,

and this hungry, flighty red squirrel.

How long does it take Mother Nature to fill a lake with lilypads?

Or to decay a fallen tree back to soil?

How long does it take for these shells to be formed by the soft-bodied creatures who inhabit them?

What’s the lifespan of a wasp?

What if your entire adult life, like a butterfly, lasted only two weeks?

Or a month or two of summer weather, as for the dragonfly?

How long has the Mississippi River flowed through the land known as Minnesota?

How long do Maple trees live?

How much time would it take to walk around Mille Lacs lake?

We rarely think about the rhythm and constancy of the moon rises and sunsets.

Every day for our whole life long, we are witnesses to miracles. Do you see them?

Nature also structures time by the seasons. We experience renewal and freshness in Spring.

Summer gives us long days of light, lush vegetation, a palette of flowers, and growth.

Fall shows us decline, brightness then brownness, harvest, and bounty.

And Winter teaches us to lift up our arms to the good things in life, to hunker down and persevere, and to explore our inner life as the outer life lays dormant and white.

It has been my intent to share Nature’s Beauty and Wisdom with you. My love and awe for Nature has grown in this past year, as I hope it has for you. I invite you to send me feedback in the comments section below or by email to northstarnature@gmail.com I would love to hear what you like about my blog, if you have any constructive suggestions, or if my pictures or words made a difference in your life somehow. It has been a wonderful year for me as I have shared over 900 photos and 100 posts with you, and I’m looking forward to experiencing and sharing Nature’s Beauty in the year to come! Don’t forget to like North Star Nature on Facebook and follow NSN on Twitter! Thanks for reading about and sharing our beautiful natural world!

Spring Anticipation

March 22, 2015 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

The sun rose to reveal an unusual sight for a Central Minnesota Spring Equinox–no snow! Two years previous, I was standing knee-deep in the white stuff on the first day of Spring, so we’re already way ahead in the waiting-for-the-real-spring-to-get-here game. That being said, I was hard-pressed to find many other signs of the vernal season.

I did locate a few patches of green grass by the spruce stumps, due mostly to the very early November snow we had that covered the yard with a thick blanket before the grass went dormant.

Those stumps remind me of the loss of five huge, old pines and spruces that succumbed to the harshness of the drought year, but I rejoiced when I saw a tiny replacement growing beside another towering pine. It must have been there last year, but in its tininess and surrounded by other green things, I never noticed it. So I’m counting the hardy little green tree as a first sign of Spring.

Locust seedpods and white pine cones littered the yard, looking like fall but indicating Spring with their shedding–getting rid of the old to make way for the new.

One shock of color in the brown woods was a clump of raspberry stems–vibrant and alive-looking in reddish purple, defended from the greedy rabbits by the battalions of thorns.

One green Bergenia leaf lay in the brown rubble of oak leaves and spent perennial stems. It whets my appetite for the spring ritual of uncovering the perennial beds to find the buds starting to grow from seemingly nothing. It makes one respect the power of the unseen.

And finally, I found a maple and a birch tree with swollen flower and leaf buds holding forth the promise of Spring.

Spring usually arrives for us in a cloak of white. Even without the snow, we cannot boast of the usual harbingers of Spring like the Texas Bluebonnets or the Missouri Daffodils–as much as we would like to! What we do have are tiny indications that we are bidding Winter good-bye as we anticipate the warm, colorful Spring to come.

Anticipation is one of those words that we hold a fair amount of power over how it is perceived. It can be hopeful expectation or dreadful apprehension. And while the future event certainly influences our feelings, I like to think that we can control our impression of it. Is it an optimist/pessimist thing? How do we anticipate the dawning of a new day? How do we navigate the sorrow and reluctance of letting go of the old in order to embrace the new? How do we color our world when the landscape around us is gray and brown? How do we appreciate the tiny things and respect the power of the unseen? Even with snow in the forecast, I’m looking forward to a beautiful Spring!

Healing Wounds

March 17, 2015 by Denise Brake 3 Comments

Inside every cell in our bodies is an amazing, complex system of DNA repair that maintains the integrity of our genes. Our cellular DNA is subject to attack by reactive oxygen radicals produced by normal cellular processes (why we want to have antioxidants in our diets) and by environmental agents including chemical toxins and radiation. There are 130 known human DNA repair genes whose proteins identify the damage, excise or cut out the damaged area, replicate a new strand using the information in the ‘good’ strand, then bind it all together again. This process is happening in every cell in our bodies every day of our lives! On a somewhat larger scale, we also have an intricate system of wound healing that includes vasoconstriction and blood clotting if bleeding occurs and an influx of inflammatory cells to cleanse the wound, clean up debris of damaged tissue, and promote the growth of new blood vessels, endothelial cells, muscle tissue, and collagen. Immune cells, growth factors, cytokines, and many others are all activated when an injury or wound occurs.

Plants also have DNA and wound repair systems. As infrequently as we think about our own wound repair, we think even less of the trees and other plants around us. A number of trees in our yard and woods have been damaged by various things. Trauma on the trunk of this young birch was probably from sun scald. It occurs on the south or southwest side of the tree in the winter when the bark freezes following warming of the trunk by the sun. But this is not a recent injury–notice how the new tissue is rolling in and over the dead wood of the wound.

Another late winter wound is frost crack when the water in the phloem and xylem expand and contract at different rates. This creates a sudden, long vertical injury accompanied by a loud shot sound.

A common wound in young trees is when a person mows or weed eats too closely to the tree, damaging the bark. Considerable trauma occurs when tree stakes are not removed after a reasonable time. This maple tree was staked with a chain to prevent it from leaning. By the time we bought our place, the tree was growing around the chain. The healing process continues since we removed the restriction.

Another injury of neglect is when something is tied around a tree and not removed. This pine tree had a clothesline tied around it, causing a wound around the whole tree.

One of the previous owners of our place–many years ago–used the oak trees on the wooded hillside as fence posts for his barbed wire fence and didn’t remove the wire from the trees. More than half a dozen oaks have barbed wire sticking out through the bark. Many have scars where the barbed wire is, but it is amazing how much healing has occurred, how the tree has integrated the wire into itself and has kept on growing.

Routine care and maintenance of trees also causes injury. Whenever we prune a branch from a tree, we create a wound.

Immediately, the cellular repair mechanisms get to work to begin the process of sealing the wound with callus layers.

Mother Nature and her harsh winters and changing conditions can cause damage to trees. Neglect and abuse by clueless caretakers can create and perpetuate wounds. Even the intentional, respectful care by a tree lover can create an injury. It takes years for a tree to heal a wound, leaving it vulnerable to disease and insect damage, but from the DNA level up, the tree is always working to repair itself. The birch tree exemplifies the healing and growth process: how wounds are healed, how the old is sloughed away, and how the pristine cells create the new and improved tree.

We are all wounded. Life can be traumatic–Mother Nature can assault us with floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes that take away our homes and our feelings of safety. Ignorant people can wound us with words, actions, inactions, and physical harm. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time can impart lasting impairment. Institutions, cultural hierarchies, biases, and dogmatic thinking can leave a trail of trauma in their wake with no accountability. Loss of a loved one by death or abandonment wrenches the heart and leaves a permanent scar. Even unintentional damage happens in the most intentionally loving families–a move to a new place, a career change, or a divorce.

The good news is we are built to heal! Our physiology–beginning with our DNA–has complex systems in place to get rid of the bad and restore homeostasis or balance. Our smart body is programmed to maintain its integrity. Grief is the bitter balm that begins the healing process of our minds and spirits. It assesses the damage, stops the bleeding, cleans up the debris of the trauma, and rallies the troops to begin the rebuilding. Healing our wounds takes time, often years, and includes constant alterations or remodeling of our cells or our thoughts. Eventually we integrate the pain and the loss into our daily self. We carry it around with us. We are not ashamed of our scar. We are restored, but to a new level–one that is burnished by fire and polished with Love–and we keep on growing.

Welcome to the Sugar Shack

March 11, 2015 by Denise Brake 1 Comment

With a greeting of “Welcome to the Sugar Shack,” an azure blue sky with an eagle circling overhead, people in brightly colored hats, boots, and fleeces, and acres and acres of woods, I knew we were in for a great afternoon!

The monks of Saint John’s Abbey have been making maple syrup for over sixty years. After 2500 acres of land were designated a natural arboretum, the first Saint John’s Maple Syrup Festival was held in 2001. But before you can have syrup, you have to collect the sap! We joined a hundred other volunteers of all ages for ‘tapping day’ on Sunday. After a prayer and a song to bless the workers on their way, we headed to the woods. The ‘sugarbush’ is the stand of sugar maple trees used to collect sap for the maple syrup process.

In our group of ten, including four eager children, we learned how to tap a tree. We drilled a two-inch deep hole at hip height, making sure not to drill within four inches of an old tap hole.

A metal ‘spile’ was tapped into the hole with a hammer.

We hung a bucket on the spile, put a lid on it, and the tree does the rest!

During winter dormancy, the starch made by photosynthesis the previous year is stored in the roots and trunk of the tree. When temperatures rise above freezing during the day and fall below freezing during the night, it creates a change in pressure that forces the sap to move up the tree. The sap is approximately 98% water and 2% sucrose and supplies nutrients for the tree’s new buds.

Other maple tree species (box elder) and other trees (birch) can be tapped for sap, but the sugar maple is the most productive using 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The average maple tree will produce 9 to 13 gallons of sap each season.

We tapped trees for two hours in ‘The Hollow,’ one of eleven areas of trees in the sugarbush.

Then we headed back to the Sugar Shack for cookies and hot chocolate!

Inside the Sugar Shack is a massive wood-burning evaporator that is used to boil the sap down to syrup.

The shed beside the Sugar Shack is filled to the top with stacks and stacks of wood. It takes one cord of wood to make twenty gallons of syrup.

Two Maple Syrup Festivals, one at the end of the month and one in April, will be the culmination of many hours of hard work for the monks and their helpers–wood cutting and hauling, gathering supplies for tapping, checking buckets and hauling sap back to the Sugar Shack, and the evaporation process. The real prize at the end of all that hard work will be the gallons of sweet maple syrup!

Isn’t it wonderful to have the blessing of a prayer, a song, or an eagle flying overhead as we venture out to work? It’s important to know the history and hard work that goes into making simple, delicious food for our tables and to appreciate all the things in our lives that are provided by Nature. May we all know the sweetness and flavor of a life well-lived!

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

March 8, 2015 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

You know how things can be going along rather smoothly with blue skies and sunshine, then all of a sudden, you find yourself between a rock and a hard place?

Quarry Park, with all its bedrock and spoils piles, exhibited a portfolio of examples of living creation dealing with an unyielding environment. But back to the smooth sailing for a moment….This aspen grove looks idyllic at the marshy end of one of the quarries, but not far below the snow and thin layer of soil is a deep layer of rock. The aspens grow in large clonal colonies derived from a single seedling. The extensive root system allows them to survive forest fires and thrive when growing over and between granite.

What is the story of this bent-over oak tree? How could such a large tree be bent at a ninety degree angle? Squirrel tracks in the snow showed how it was now used as a highway to the next tree.

It wasn’t until I was home and looking through photos that I noticed the huge iron staple below the wounded tree. Since it was adjacent to the quarry, perhaps the quarriers somehow used the tree and iron staple to hoist the blocks of rocks from the hole.

Two interesting saplings along the trail demonstrated that it wasn’t just rocks or iron that could put a tree in a hard place. This young, flexible tree was used for a deer rub. Bucks of all ages will rub the velvet off their antlers in late summer; then during the fall rutting season, the more mature bucks rub to attract does and warn away other bucks. The rub is a visual warning as well as an olfactory one, as the buck rubs the scent gland on his forehead against the exposed wood.

I didn’t look closely enough to tell if this buckthorn sapling was being strangled by its own or another’s branch, though the reddish twig suggests it is from another.

The last quarry on our hike was the only one with ice falls. Spring water flowed and froze on either side of the large plateau of granite where, miraculously, a sizable cedar tree was growing!

The snow-capped ice draped over the granite, and tiny trees pushed their way through the crevices of the rock face.

A green patch of moss with a head of white snow and a beard of ice nestled itself on a granite ledge.

The twigs of a tree were captured by the ice fall while its roots were wedged between rocks. Another tree caught between a rock and a hard place.

All of us will find ourselves in a very difficult situation at some time in our lives. It may be a physical challenge or a moral dilemma that offers two equally difficult or seemingly unacceptable choices. Sometimes we get ourselves into a tight spot when a person or situation looks like one thing but below the surface is really something else. Other circumstances or people can tear away at our defenses for their own purposes or wrap themselves around us so tightly that we can’t grow and be our best. At those times, we need to ask ourselves, “What’s my story? How did I get myself into this condition? And more importantly, how do I get myself out?” We need to connect to our colony of family and friends, the ones who sustain us through tough times with roots reaching with love and encouragement. It is possible to stand tall and prosper in spite of hardship, and like the ice that holds the twigs hostage, this too shall pass.

Gleanings from February 2015

March 3, 2015 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

When I started the gleanings posts last June, it was because I had an abundance of photos that didn’t fit into any particular post but still highlighted Nature’s treasures. In the short, cold, wintry month of February, I have slim pickings for gleanings photos!

February began with hardly any snow, and while we’ve had a few inches here and there, it has been the least snowy February in quite a while.

The upside to that is we could get out to do some winter hiking. It was great fun to see the eagles’ return to their nests and the almost daily sightings of them perched over the Sauk River near the bridge in town. Yesterday’s eagle update: it looks like both females are brooding their eggs! Ninety-eight percent of the time one parent, mostly the female, remains on the nest for the thirty-five days of incubation.

Purple finches usually come to the feeders in a group, like college kids flocking to the commons at suppertime. Unlike some of the other birds, they don’t seem to mind who dines with them.

An early February snow clung to the tree branches as the afternoon sun shone through the snow clouds and trees–a cathedral of color and light.

One brave parishioner was out before the snow stopped, wallowing in the glory of Winter.

A full moon was setting in the western sky one morning as I rose from my warm, flannel-covered bed. Good morning, Moon!

Clouds and color paint a nightly work of art as the sun says good-bye to another day. Good night, Sun!

Snow and cold and lack of subjects caused slim pickings for my February photos. It seems like February and the end of winter can get on a person’s last nerve–slim pickings of patience. It’s good to finally see the first day of Spring on the calendar as we turn to March. But oftentimes, there is a shortage of other things in our lives. Some literally have slim pickings of food before their paycheck comes again. Others have a shortage of good will for those around them. Some don’t have much love or friendship to brighten their days. What is lacking is our lives? And how can we help bring abundance to others? Let’s all wallow in the constancy of each day’s sun, the hope of new Spring life, and the glory and beauty of Nature.

Archives for March 2015

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