Fire!

The fire started Sunday morning.

I was with some friends in Chatsworth, NJ around 9:00 AM and we watched as a number of fire vehicles went speeding by.

Three days later this is the view from Southampton, the town I live in, on my way home from work.

Here's a view a bit closer to home.

And closer still.

I was maybe two miles from home when I took this shot.

We cannot see it from our yard.

We are surrounded by too many trees.

Wait a minute ...

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

In the map below the blue dot in the upper left is our place, the purple pin in the lower right corner is the approximate location of the fire.

About twelve miles as the smoke wafts. 

Fortunately, after burning about 400 acres the fire has been contained. But it is so dry it might continue burning for a while yet. 

So as the cliche goes, we're not out of the woods yet.   

Bloom Time

As per the cliche, it seems that May is when I notice things blooming in these here parts.

And this is one of the blooms that is hard to miss. Especially when the field you are in has been severely mowed, as was the case here.

It is Turkey Beard, Xerophyllum asphodeloides, and as Boyd* notes, it is "frequent to common in low sandy pinelands". I spotted these on Lakehurst Naval Air Station.

The flowers are ephemeral. The grass like base is persistent throughout the year. Lucky for it the base is low to the ground.

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I do grassland bird surveys at the Lakehurst NAS as part of a NJ Audubon Society citizen science project. And the reason that the Turkey Beard stands out so is that the fields that I survey, as well as those of several other surveyors, was severely mowed this 'winter' (scare quotes because it sure didn't seem like there had been several months worth of growth since the end of winter).

Here are three shots showing what is supposed to be grassland habitat.

I usually have multiple Grasshopper Sparrows calling at my ten survey points. The morning I took these shots I had but one bird singing.

Very sad. And so unnecessary.

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* Howard P. Boyd, Wildflowers of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. A wonderful little book.

Clams

This is our back pond.

In the fall it attracts its fair share of leaves. And when it gets warm algae begins to bloom. And thus this past weekend I donned my muck boots and headed in. And while scooping the fruits of my labor, the aforementioned algae and leaf muck, into a wheelbarrow for disposal, I noticed a small shell.

It was a clam. A tiny clam. And then I noticed another. And another.

So I grabbed a small aquaria, as a school teacher Patty has a bunch, filled it with water, and began to pick through the muck for clams.

There were lots of tiny clams.

And they were very active, moving about the tank (you can see the center clam has its foot out) and siphoning for food.

I transferred a couple to a tank with cleaner water to take pictures. Here is a shot with the foot more obvious (as with any image, click to bigafy):

Here is an image of an empty shell, with a dime for scale.

I told you they were tiny.

Both our ponds are man made with the back pond being the more natural of the two. I understand how frogs (and tadpoles) and turtles and snakes found their way there. They hopped or crawled or slithered. But clams? While that foot works great in water I doubt it would do too well for the quarter mile or so from the nearest lake or stream.

My reference works and field guides are silent on the subject of clams. And the interwebs were little better. While I did discover that these are known as "fingernail clams" (FnCs) I learned little else. Other than some are native and some are not.

It's a puzzlement.

Update: Patty found this page on the web. I found this bit especially interesting:

The concept of a barely-half-inch wingless, aquatic critter starting out in mid-country and taking over America (and the world) is fairly astonishing, no matter how much geologic time you give it, but it turns out that FnCs “think outside the pond.” They attach to water plants as tiny juveniles, and the water plants attach to the feet of water birds, and water birds DO have wings. Sometimes the clam-ettes clamp directly onto feathers, amphibians, or mobile aquatic insects (clam and clamp both derive from Old English “clamm,” “to bond or fetter”). In addition, some species of FnC are ingested by ducks but not digested, and they may be regurgitated alive at some distance from home.

So maybe they hitched a ride on these?

What a Difference a Year Makes

Remember the mini-meadow and the problems we had with deer?

Look now.

Stuff is growing. And the deer are leaving it alone.

If you look closely at the lower left corner you'll see one of the nine Wireless Deer Fence units we have about the yard. Three guarding the mini-meadow (Patty got zapped by one while we were planting stuff the other day - ouch!). A chance encounter at the Philadelphia Flower Show led to the purchase of a set of three at the company's show booth. And it worked so well we bought two more sets (they come three to a set) for the rest of the yard. So far they are working quite nicely.

Mother Goose

Or maybe dad? Watching over the chicks.

I don't know if the chicks are from these eggs. But I do know that there are now new Canada Geese in the world.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if that is a good thing.

A Puzzle

I mentioned that our mothing light had a shield on it in a prior post. Shields limit the spread of light. Good for not blinding humans. Not so good for bringing in the greatest number of moths.

The shield on our lamp is also colorful.

I noticed these colors when we first had the light on this year, the Wednesday prior to the big moth night. A dry run to make sure the equipment was in good working order. Note that when the light is off there are no colors other than the silver of the aluminum shield.

But when I first tried to take a picture the result was this:

Curious. The colors are there. But what are those bands? They were not visible to the naked eye.

And the closer I got to the light, the more bands there were in the image.

The above images were taken with an iPhone 6 Plus. By the time I had retrieved another camera to see if I got the same results, the light had completely warmed up and was so bright the colors were completely washed out.

So on the big moth night I was ready with my Sony RX100 II camera. I chose this camera because Sony makes the camera module in the iPhone.

The results:

As with the iPhone, from a distance no bands. Although the color palette is limited to greens and blues.

But as I got closer ...

... no bands either. no matter how close I got. Hmmm, very curious.

I emailed the images to Dr. Les Cowley, he of the awesome Atmospherics Optics and OPOD sites. I had thought they might be diffraction effects. He had (no surprise!) explanations for the colors.

The colours are produced in two ways

  1.  by micro grooves on the metal shade.  The grooves act as a diffraction grating. 

  2.  interference across the anodised film if aluminium - see http://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz801.htm

Could be both.

You can see the groves on the shield, and that's what made me think diffraction for the colors. But I'd not thought of thin film interference.

As to the bands,

The bands are puzzling.   Any filament lamp powered by AC fluctuates in light intensity at twice the supply frequency.    The bands 'might' be due to the intensity fluctuations if the iPhone camera scans its sensor in a peculiar way.  The test of that would be to image a dim surface illuminated by a fluorescent lamp.

It's an iPhone issue rather than a lamp one!  What's puzzling is that they are so strong and are not produced by another camera.

So time for more experiments in iPhone photography. Stay tuned.

Giant Hummingbird

We've a giant hummingbird visiting our yard.

I think we need a bigger feeder ...