Alex Palmer's Natural History Notes and Thoughts

Introduction The following are some of my notes from a lecture I attended at the headquarters to a national park in Indiana on wetland restoration and cattail invasion.   Wetlands  are any area of land that is soaked with water for most of the year (but is not just open water such as in a lake).  Normally, wetlands have a diverse array of aquatic plants  such as various grasses, sedges, waterlilies, etc.  Within the last few centuries, however, many wetlands - both natural and man-made - are quickly giving way to a monoculture of cattail ( Thypha spp. ), a reed that frequently grows in shallow water (see Figure 1).  This lecture I attended discusses how and why cattail has become an invasive species, what people can do to monitor the situation, and how to control the invasion of cattail reeds. Figure 1:  Cattail reeds in a marsh.  Photo by Joy Marburger Cattail considered invasive since the 1950s. Cattail is in the Family Typhacea and its only genus is  Typha. Has wind-dis

I remember traveling though an airport in Salt Lake City, UT and hearing the loudspeaker play a pre-recorded announcement reminding travelers not to smoke in the terminals, and that this rule was a apart of Utah's "indoor clean air" act. Cigarette smoke aside, I could not help but ponder the quality of indoor air in any public facility - including school classrooms, restaurants, and health clubs.  It almost seemed to me that indoor air quality was worse than outdoor air quality, including the air in urban and industrialized areas. Could the fact that our society spends large amounts of time indoors be a contributing factor for poor health?   Certainly our sedentary lifestyles are a culprit.  We sit inside and and watch TV, drive our cars to nearby places, hire carpenters to lift heavy household objects, other things to mitigate our need to perform physical labor.  Of course, this immobile lifestyle combined with a diet of low quality, high-fat foods contributes to a s

Itchy feet would have been a good way to describe how I was feeling a few days ago.  It was the end of a much needed weekend, and there was still a few hours of daylight left.  I looked at a map of the park to see if I could locate a trail I had not yet been on.  Rather inconspicuous in the corner of my wrinkled fold-out map was a small loop trail called the "Great Marsh Trail."  It was a trail that the park had built a few years ago to provide public access to a recently restored wetland complex I pulled into a gravel parking lot.  At then end of the lot was a modest brown sign that just said "trail" with an arrow pointing off into a mowed grassy walkway. The sun was shining through the trees and I could hear red-eyed vireos ( Vireo olivaceus ) and eastern towhees ( Piplio  erythrophthalmus )   singing their springtime calls with a hint of summer lethargy.  Warblers of all colors and shapes scurried around in the brush, and brightly colored red-headed woodpe