Oh Deer

Out in our neck of the woods we’ve been increasingly faced with incursions of deer, the last few years. Their numbers and audacity seem to have grown immensely. A century ago they were held in check by big predators like wolves, coyotes, and wildcats; but humans drove them out, so the deer now ramble quite freely. A few decades ago numerous hunters roamed these woods with rifles and played the primary role of deer population-control predator. But each year these woods see fewer hunters and more deer. The automobile may soon become the sole predator.

Deer love to eat the things that people grow: luscious vegetables, fruit trees, ornamentals. These fancy plants are far tastier than tough forest vegetation. Deer may be cute, but they can be pests.

We have been quite lucky not to have been too bothered by deer in recent years—even though many of our neighbors have been. We’ve always had good-sized dogs as members of the family. They’ve roamed the immediate area, spread their scent, and enjoyed a good deer chase.

But that luck has recently been changing. Maybe it’s the increased deer population, maybe it’s the current dog getting older and more sedentary, maybe it’s all the luscious apple saplings I’ve planted. We’ve repeatedly been invaded by deer, with the buggers nibbling off the tender tips of the saplings. Their pruning technique is not to my liking. After some research and a few false starts, I’ve come up with a repellant that does a pretty good job—a noxious blend of raw egg, milk, vegetable oil, liquid soap, and cayenne powder. The sour milk and rotten egg turn my stomach, but I believe that the hot pepper bothers them most. The vegetable garden has yet to be invaded, but how much longer?

There is a worse problem than the deer nibbling our plants, however: Lyme disease. This scary malady is caused by an adaptive little germ—the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb)—that is carried by the deer tick. The tick sequentially attaches itself to field mice, humans, and deer, in that order. We—in the middle—suffer from the disease; the animals don’t. The germ must accomplish that triple-host journey, riding in the gut of the tick and pulling off the unlikely stunt of getting transferred to its current mammalian host and then back to subsequent generations of the tick. Unfortunately, Bb is very successful in meeting the challenge.

The germ’s incredibly complex journey once was rare, but is progressively more common. Humans and deer cross paths more frequently, as people have moved farther out into the exurbs. Lyme disease is nasty. But it’s certain that we’re likely to see more of it in the near future, as we rub shoulders with an escalating deer population. I think I’d rather deal with apple sapling nibbles.

Black Swallowtail Larva

Beyond the Big Balloon

The Big Bang theory is a story that carries a lot of weight in the scientific community. It was first proposed a half-century ago—first as a mocking comment, but then became accepted—and has gained general concurrence ever since. It helps explain many observations that astronomers have made and fits the mathematical models. The theory pulls a lot of loose astronomical threads together into a very satisfying weaving. And yet…

While the Big Bang story accounts for a lot, it also presents us with a few conundrums for which science as yet has no explanations. It also plays games with our brain by tossing it seemingly illogical situations to deal with. For example: How is it that all the matter contained in the universe could have once been wedged into a space the size of a pinhead—or even a pinpoint? That just doesn’t seem possible. Yes, the mathematics elegantly describe that “in the beginning” this vast universe occupied virtually no space at all, but wrapping your mind around the math can cause a big headache.

Another conundrum: What happened “before” the Big Bang? Was there a “before?” The mathematical model of the universe simply places its origins at about 13.7 billion years ago—it doesn’t care about any “before.” But my mind keeps asking that unanswerable query. Maybe the question makes no sense. Maybe an answer will come some day.

Then there’s the riddle of what may lie outside the universe, if indeed there is an “outside.” One mental model of our universe is to imagine that it’s a Big Balloon that’s been blowing itself up for nearly 14 billion years. The balloon contains the “known” or “visible” universe—by definition, “the totality of all the things that exist.” Earth and all we can see are somewhere inside this balloon. The farthest we can observe—by either the math or the Hubble Telescope—is out to the skin of the balloon; not at all beyond.

But if the cosmos was once dancing on the head of a pin (when the balloon was tiny), can anything ever have been outside the expanding Big Balloon? Any “thing” beyond the Big Balloon is by definition outside the universe. Huh? Does that mean there is no “beyond?” I feel another headache coming on.

But it gets even more interesting. Recently a group of astronomers analyzed the motion of a group of galaxies. After cranking their computers for a few days, their results suggest that the speed and direction of this group of galaxies is being controlled by “something” outside the balloon! So, if they’re right, there is something out there in the vast nothing. It’s gotta make you chuckle. Stick around—this story’s ending has yet to be written. Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will help us out.

Two Months After the Mast—Part 2

I looked last time at the need for people to predict the coming winter’s severity by consulting folk omens. It was first the wooly bear caterpillar. Now the masting of acorns…

Another favorite winter prophecy is the size of the fall crop of acorns. This story goes that if a hard winter is coming, Mother Nature is planning ahead for the protection of her charges. She’s directed the oak trees to grow an extra large batch of acorns so the squirrels, mice, deer, and turkeys will have enough to eat, to get through the coming severe winter. It’s nice to think that nature does such a kindhearted job of planning, so all her critters are well cared for.

Squirrels, the belief goes, return the favor by helping to grow more oak trees, when they bury acorns and then forget where some of their stash is. Well, there’s a little truth to that, but your average squirrel has a better memory than this gives it credit for. Moreover it kills far more acorns than it plants—either by eating them or simply biting into them and destroying the seed. The squirrel is more a foe of the oak, than a friend. In turn the oak would consider squirrels to be a menace—not a friend to feed.

So what’s going on? A heavy acorn crop is an example of the genius of Mother Nature, but not as a prognosticator of winter. Instead, it’s her way of ensuring the survival of the oak forest. A bumper harvest of acorns is called “masting.” If oak trees were to put out the same number of acorns every year, the squirrel population would stabilize at a level that would see most all acorns consumed. If there were more squirrels than that, some of them might starve; fewer in number and they’d quickly multiply, with all those extra nuts available.

The oak survives by keeping squirrels (and other acorn-eating critters) off balance. The trees put out a conventional (even predictable) supply of acorns for several years, fooling the eaters into thinking that it’s all they’re gonna get. Then, when the animals are looking the other way, the oaks surprise them by masting—producing a copious crop of acorns and carpeting the forest floor with them. The animals may gorge themselves, but cannot eat them all. Some acorns will survive and sprout new oaks. Since oaks live for so long, they need to mast only every few years.

One marvelous feature of the masting process is that most all of the oak trees in a locale will mast the same fall. You can imagine what would happen if the trees didn’t coordinate their crop: randomly scattered oaks would mast when their cohorts would be taking it easy. Such randomness would negate the masting effect. But oak trees are in unison when they mast. How do they do this? We don’t know for sure, but plant research is showing us that trees communicate chemically with each other. They do this in defense of insects—to alert their buddies about invasions. Might they use the same technique to coordinate their masting?

I sure don’t want to take the fun out of checking out wooly bears and monitoring the abundance of acorn crops. Being attentive to nature is a wonderful thing. I love to examine those cute caterpillars, as well as marvel at the abundance and many shapes of acorns during a mast. We might be careful, however, about projecting our idiosyncrasies and hankerings onto Mother Nature. She’s beautiful enough in her own right, that we don’t have to dress her up in anthropomorphic clothing.

Nestled Acorn

Two Months After the Mast—Part 1

Humans—since we alone seem able to ruminate over the past and fret about impending events—love to look for omens that prognosticate future happenings. The past is finished and fixed (although we hate to admit that our memory of it is quite faulty). So be it. The future, however, holds infinite possibilities—some pleasant, some painful, all intriguing. If only we could get a glimpse today of tomorrow’s fate, we’d be in such an advantageous position. We’d fare far better than the guy next door, who ignorantly faces each new moment. Or so we tell ourselves.

Weather prediction has become an obsession for many people. We moderns don’t have to deal with the complex and ambiguous process that our ancestors did—such as pulling out the pack of tarot cards to get our weather forecast; it’s instantly available 24/7 from the Weather Channel. The National Weather Service cranks its many computers, giving us quite accurate predictions for the next couple of days. This service has encouraged people to become fixated on tomorrow’s weather, or to endlessly watch images of the aftermath of today’s extreme storms.

An accurate forecast for the next few days may be one thing, but we want more. We want to be able to peer months into the future and to become privy to its weather conditions. The fall is a favorite time for folks to be seeking a glimpse of the nature of the impending winter. Is this going to be a “bad” winter? Lots of snow? Is global warming going to make it balmy again? There are numerous forecast gurus, who claim to have special knowledge about the coming weather. They hawk almanacs to sell the results of their secrets to eager fans. But there are also a couple of simple folk methods for weather prediction, that are accessible to everyone.

A favorite such predictor around here is the wooly bear caterpillar. You see them marching over the ground in the fall, as if parading their winter prophecy. The wooly bear (fully as cute as a teddy bear) has a black band around its middle, that separates two brown ends. The wider the central black band—so the story goes—the colder the coming winter. (I wonder why scientists have not been monitoring the bellyband width of wooly bears, these last few decades, to give them proof of global warming.)

Of course, this cute caterpillar has no way of gazing into the future. I fail to see why Mother Nature would bother with such a notion. Besides, if you examine several parading wooly bears, you’ll find that their “predictions” vary widely—as their bellybands are anywhere from a thin line to covering the complete caterpillar’s body. It’s like a simultaneous prediction of anything from a Brazilian to an Alaskan winter.

But I would guess that a died-in-the-wool wooly bear aficionado would counter my argument by protesting that you only get the “real” prognostication from the first preordained caterpillar one encounters. That initial one—like the “First star I see tonight”—has special powers. Well, maybe so.

What’s the other folk weather forecasting technique? What’s the meaning of this posting’s title? See you next time.