Wild About Utah Archives - Page 31 of 145

May 22, 2023September 11, 2023

Tulips and Daffodils- It’s Spring!

Daffodil Encore, Thanksgiving Point Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer — The Trumpet Choir
Daffodils at Thanksgiving Point
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Daffodil Encore
Thanksgiving Point
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

My Favorite Sign Along the Path
Lilja Rogers, Published as Hocus Pocus in the Saturday Evening Post, 1961
Image Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mary Eating a Tulip
Courtesy & © Mary Heers

Above Tulips From Rebound Visit
Thanksgiving Point
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

When I arrived at the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point I was informed by a guide that the tulips were running late.

“No tulips?” I asked. I had heard they had planted 250,000.

“It has everything to do with the soil temperature,” my guide explained. It was April 14. She wasn’t expecting the tulips to emerge for at least another two weeks.

All was not lost, she hastened to add.

“The daffodils are up.”

So off we went along the paths of the 50 acre Ashton Gardens. Sure enough, hundreds of daffodils were waving their heads in the light breeze. I was especially drawn to a patch that they were intensely yellow, almost orange.

“Those are the ‘Tweety-Birds’,” my guide said.

I knelt down to get a good look at the trumpet shape of the flowers. Wow, I thought. This is the trumpet choir heralding the end of winter and the coming of spring.

So with my return ticket secure in my pocket, I went back to Mendon to wait. Snow was still on the ground.

This gave me time to read up on tulips. I found they were originally from Turkey. Tulip, in Turkish, means turban.

The exotic plant arrived in Holland in the 1500’s., It soon became so popular that the price went through the roof. At the height of the tulip mania, some people were willing to pay the price of a house for a single bulb.

About this time, a friend loaned me a book about this phenomenon, Tulip Fever. It turned out to be a real page turner. Set in 1630, young lovers in Amsterdam concocted an incredible scheme to run away and live comfortably in the colonies – if they played their tulips right.

Back in Mendon, when the snow finally started to melt, my neighbors began to tell me how the hungry deer had come into their gardens and beheaded their tulips. Their daffodils were left untouched.

Time for more research. I learned the daffodils produce a toxic alkaloid, lycorine, which makes them taste bitter. Tulips, however, are not only edible, but delicious.

About this time I noticed a lone tulip popping up next to my apple tree. No one planted a bulb here. This tulip had arrived as a seed. Years ago, the wind, or a bird. or an animal dropped this seed . Tulip seeds only take a few months to germinate. But it can take up to 5 years for the plant to produce a bulb which, in turn, produces the flower.

During WWII, when the German army occupied Holland, a large part of the population found themselves with nothing to eat but the tulip bulbs they had set aside to plant. They survived because a tulip bulb has as many calories as a potato.

I was sharing this tidbit of information with my good friend and neighbor when she reminded me the early Mormon pioneers had staved off hunger by eating the wild Sego Lilies that were growing on the nearby mountainsides.

Then she disappeared into her kitchen. She came back with a flower pot holding a tulip that had already bloomed. She pulled out the bulb and asked me if I wanted to taste it.

Never one to refuse a gift, I peeled off the outer layers and took a bite.

I chewed. She waited. It wasn’t bitter and it wasn’t sweet. I chewed some more. I wanted to say

green. Finally it came to me.

“Celery!”

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio:
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Tulip Festival, Thanksgiving Point, https://thanksgivingpoint.org/events/tulip-festival/
Tulip Festival: Bounce-back!, https://thanksgivingpoint.org/tulip-festival-bounce-back/ [accessed 5/13/2023]

Pace, Eliza, Tulip festival to return to Thanksgiving Point, KSL TV, March 7, 2023, https://ksltv.com/530567/tulip-festival-to-return-to-thanksgiving-point/ [accessed 5/13/2023]

Stefanaki, A., Walter, T. & van Andel, T. Tracing the introduction history of the tulip that went wild (Tulipa sylvestris) in sixteenth-century Europe. Sci Rep 12, 9786 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13378-9 AND https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13378-9 [accessed 5/13/2023]

The Amsterdam Tulip Museum, https://amsterdamtulipmuseum.com/tulip/
Tulip History Outside Of Holland, The Amsterdam Tulip Museum, https://amsterdamtulipmuseum.com/topics/tulip-history-in-many-nations/

Moggach, Deborah, Tulip Fever: A Novel, Dial Press Trade Paperback, April 10, 2001,https://www.amazon.com/Tulip-Fever-Novel-Deborah-Moggach/dp/0385334923

Eating tulip bulbs, Fluwel, https://www.fluwel.com/pages/eating-tulip-bulbs

Brown, Janice, First a Howling Blizard… A Poem by Lilja Rogers, Posted May 31, 2007, Cow Hampshire, https://www.cowhampshireblog.com/2007/05/31/poem-first-the-howling-winds-awoke-us-by-lilja-rogers/

May 15, 2023September 11, 2023

Community Trees

Jack in 560 year old Limber Pine tree 7/27/16 Courtesy & Copyright Hilary Shughart — Jack in 560 year old Limber Pine tree 7/27/16
Courtesy & Copyright Hilary Shughart

Jack and Darren McAvoy measuring the champion Engelmann Spruce at Tony Grove Lake.
Jack has identified this tree as a close contender for the state Champion listing
Courtesy & Copyright Hilary Shughart, Photographer

Urban Trees
Courtesy and Copyright Ron Hellstern, Photographer

Jack and Darren McAvoy measuring the champion Engelmann Spruce at Tony Grove Lake. Jack has identified this tree as a close contender for the state Champion listing Courtesy & Copyright Hilary Shughart, Photographer — Jack in 560 year old Limber Pine tree 7/27/16
Courtesy & Copyright Hilary Shughart

Jack and Darren McAvoy measuring the champion Engelmann Spruce at Tony Grove Lake.
Jack has identified this tree as a close contender for the state Champion listing
Courtesy & Copyright Hilary Shughart, Photographer

Urban Trees
Courtesy and Copyright Ron Hellstern, Photographer

“I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree” Joyce Kilmore. I’m a forest person, my psyche deeply rooted in the forests of northern Wisconsin from my toddler days forward. Now as an octogenarian tree committee chair for Smithfield, Utah, trees have once again invaded my mental space and I feel the mychorrhizal fungi creeping back into my roots.

Arbor Day has come and gone a wonderful opportunity to celebrate these magnificent, towering relatives. As a biology teacher, I would have my students form a circle with each student offering a different benefit we receive from trees. Without any repetition, they never disappointed, each voicing another arboreal gift.

Every dollar spent on planting and caring for a community tree yields benefits that are two to five times the investment. The benefits urban forests provide include jobs, higher property values, improved physical and mental health, pollution mitigation, heat mitigation, lower energy bills, safer streets, flood protection, and biodiversity. Trees connect communities, cultures, and generations. Neighborhood trees have shown the ability to reduce stress, improve overall health and development in children, and encourage physical activity.

Climate change is arguably the greatest challenge facing the health of our planet, which is our health. While it will take many solutions working together to make a difference, trees are the proven, affordable, natural way that can be implemented quickly to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Every tree planted is a step in the right direction.

One of the biggest line items in the Inflation Reduction Act’s forestry budget goes to urban forests: $1.5 billion has been appropriated for the Urban and Community Forest Assistance program, which provides technical and financial help to local communities so they can plant and maintain urban trees, educate citizens about tree care, and train tree workers.

“Access to urban green space and trees do a lot of wonderful things for people,” says Rachel Holmes, urban forestry strategist for the Nature Conservancy and co-chair for the Sustainable Urban Forest Coalition. Study after study validates the benefits of urban tree cover: Views of trees outside classroom and office windows can positively influence kids’ test scores and behavior, office workers report significantly less stress and more satisfaction; greener neighborhoods experience less crime.

An excellent resource for all things trees- selecting best tree for your landscape, planting, pruning, watering, mulching, is the Arbor Day website- www.arborday.org Smithfield has the high honor of holding the title “Tree City, USA”. Does your city? If not, the Arbor Day website has the criteria for attaining this esteemed title.

Are trees sentient beings- capable of thought and caring? May I suggest you read “Finding the Mother Tree- Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest” by Suzanne Simard for the answer.

Jack Greene for Bridgerland Audubon Society and I’m Wild About Utah trees!

Credits:

Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
Text: Jack Greene, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading: Lyle W Bingham, Webmaster, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading:

Jack Greene’s Postings on Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/author/jack/

Joyce Kilmer, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joyce-kilmer

Smithfield, Utah Tree Committee, https://smithfieldcity.org/bc-tc

USDA Forest Service Urban & Community Forestry, Inflation Reduction Act, Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), USDA Forest Service, https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/UCF-IRA-NOFO-04122023.pdf

About Tree City USA, The Arbor Day Foundation, https://www.arborday.org/programs/treecityusa/
Inflation Reduction Act News, UDSA News, https://www.usda.gov/ira

Kuhns, Michael, Mooter, Dave, Tree Planting Rules, https://extension.usu.edu/forestry/trees-cities-towns/tree-planting/tree-planting-rules

Tree Browser, USU Extension, Utah State University, https://treebrowser.org/

May 8, 2023September 11, 2023

Find the Story

Percy the Utahraptor by Justin Tolman, USU Museum of Geology, https://www.usu.edu/geo/info/geology-museum/ Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer — Percy the Utahraptor
by Justin Tolman
USU Museum of Geology
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah
https://www.blm.gov/visit/fossil-point-trailhead
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah, Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer — Percy the Utahraptor
by Justin Tolman
USU Museum of Geology
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah
https://www.blm.gov/visit/fossil-point-trailhead
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

In their picture book “Everywhere, Wonder,” Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr challenge readers to find a story in places and phenomena both ordinary and extraordinary. Black ants marching in a line have a story just as interesting as red-rock canyons and a footprint on the moon. Sunlight patterns through a window are just as beautiful as Brazilian jungles and wildebeests in Kenyan savannas. They remind us to keep our eyes open and weave the stories of our noticings. As I wander among Utah’s wild wonders, it’s easy.

This spring I realized the fun of finding my wonder story as I stumbled upon the sign for Fossil Point in the San Rafael desert near Green River, Utah. The odds were pretty good, I suspected, that I could find fossils there, but I didn’t know exactly what I was hunting. My eyes are always drawn to the fact-filled stories on interpretive signage, even if I’ve read them before, but at this spot all I knew was the title. No kiosks with hint-filled maps and tips for discovery or guardrail paths making it obvious where to walk. Just a pile of boulders.

Although I wouldn’t consider myself a dino-fanatic, I have been a frequent visitor throughout my life at the Dinosaur National Monument and other Utah fossil museums as well as more dinosaur trackways and quarries not housed in buildings. I’ve read hundreds of dino readers and scanned even more dinosaur books, but here I was without many clues to what I might find. Resisting the urge to look up internet hints, I started up the Fossil Point slope. Was it trilobites the size of dimes and quarters or prehistoric swamp ferns? I will not reveal what I found at Fossil Point so that you can discover the wonder yourself, but it motivated me to catch up on Utah’s contribution to the more than one hundred characters in the dinosaur story, as depicted beautifully in the Dinosaurs of Utah tools at the Utah Geological Survey website.

So many students I’ve met have been fascinated by the T-rex and Utah state fossil Allosaurus, and they know all sorts of theories about how the Utahraptor, our state dinosaur since 2018, might have had feathers and hunted in packs. Fossils provide hints to the size and shape of prehistoric life, but they leave a lot of the colors and textures to the imagination. Tucked in the back corner of the Geology Museum at Utah State University I found another story, this one titled “Percy.” While the stories of Percy’s relatives are preserved in the nine-ton Utahraptor Megablock extracted from the area that is emerging as Utahraptor State Park, this story took sculptor Justin Tolman an astounding 350 hours to create. This incredible replica sports colors resembling my grandbabies’ Easter egg-dying hands as they toddled along the base of Fossil Point with me hunting evidence of a Mesozoic story. It is a story I’m glad I found
almost all on my own.

For Wild About Utah, I am Shannon Rhodes.

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Friend Weller, https://upr.org/
Text: Shannon Rhodes, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Shannon Rhodes

Additional Reading:

Wild About Utah Pieces by Shannon Rhodes, https://wildaboututah.org/author/shannon-rhodes/

Bureau of Land Management, Fossil Point trailhead, https://www.blm.gov/visit/fossil-point-trailhead

Rodgers, Bethany, Governor Spencer Cox signs bill to create Utahraptor State Park near Moab. 2021. The Salt Lake Tribune. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/03/17/gov-spencer-cox-signs/

Sidwell, Owen. University student sculpts Utahraptor for USU Geology Museum. 2018. Utah Public Radio. https://www.upr.org/arts-and-culture/2018-04-12/university-student-sculpts-utahraptor-for-usu-geology-museum

Swanson, Matthew. Everywhere, Wonder. 2017. Imprint: New York. https://robbiandmatthew.com/everywhere-wonder/

USU Museum of Geology, Come meet Percy the Raptor, https://www.usu.edu/geo/info/geology-museum

Popular Geology: Dinosaurs and Fossils, Utah Geological Survey. https://geology.utah.gov/popular/dinosaurs-fossils/#:~:text=Utah%20also%20contains%20abundant%20fossils,of%20millions%20of%20years%20ago.

May 1, 2023May 1, 2023

Mountain Lions Are Keystone Providers for Birds!

Cougar or Mountain Lion(Felis concolor). Courtesy US FWS — Mountain Lion
*Felis concolor*
Courtesy US FWS
Larry Moats, Photographer

Cougar or Mountain Lion
*Felis concolor*
Courtesy US FWS

Yellow-billed Cuckoo
*Coccyzus americannus*
Courtesy & © Eric Peterson, Photographer

When we think about World Migratory Bird Day, we often think about providing for their needs with water, bird feeders, and native plants, and hopefully we are keeping cats indoors and taking steps to prevent the lethal danger of window-collisions. We may even think about the importance of sponge city landscaping and beaver dams to slow and store snowmelt runoff, but it is the Mountain Lion which has the unique distinction of being a keystone provider ranked as the top vertebrate feeder of birds – in fact they “feed more mammals and birds than any other predator, increasing the number of animal interactions – the links in food webs so essential to maintaining ecosystem resilience. And they are ecosystem engineers on top of this as well.”
(1) Researchers have found that large carcasses create essential habitat for carrion-dependent beetles – these are not just food for beetles, but the very places beetles spend their lives, hiding from predators, seeking mates, raising young, and morphing from larvae [lahr-vee] into adult forms which disperse in search of the next carcass to begin the cycle all over again. (2)The food web gets to the very heart of bird migration, and the very real challenge of ensuring a future in which people and birds can thrive with dwindling habitat resources essential for survival.

Consider the Yellow-billed Cuckoo [koo-koo], one of the World Migratory Bird Day Ambassador species, to highlight the importance of water and riparian habitat for birds. A long-distance migrant, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo breeds in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and migrates through Central America to reach its wintering grounds in South America. It seeks wooded habitats with water nearby, where it feasts mostly on insects, especially caterpillars, during the spring and summer, transitioning to a more fruit- and seed-heavy diet in the fall and winter.

The Yellow-billed Cuckoo was selected for this year’s World Migratory Bird Day campaign to help shed light on the decline of riparian habitats along our rivers, streams, and freshwater lakes, particularly in the American West, where species that rely on these areas are experiencing population declines and are in possible danger of extirpation from some states. These western riparian species include Summer Tanager, Yellow Warbler, Willow Flycatcher, Yellow-breasted Chat, and Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Loss of native forest to farmland, housing, and other development has led to significant population declines in these species, especially in the case of the Cuckoo, which relies on large patches of streamside forest for breeding.

The Yellow-billed Cuckoo is becoming an increasingly rare bird in the American West. We need to increase awareness and encourage decision makers to explore ways to protect riparian areas, remove invasive species, restore habitat, and conserve water. World Migratory Bird Day 2023 aims to contribute to these efforts by highlighting the importance of water conservation and habitat management for migratory birds, and by providing resources to help promote these important issues. Bird Day is every day, but especially mid-May and mid-October. Learn more at migratorybirdday.org, and learn more about how to conserve water for sustaining bird life!

I’m Hilary Shughart with the Bridgerland Audubon Society, and I am Wild About Utah!

Credits:
Images: Mountain Lion images Courtesy US Fish & Wildlife Service, Larry Moats, Photographer
Yellow-beaked Cuckoo, Courtesy & Copyright, Eric Peterson, VikingPhotographyUtah
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections/kevin-colver
Text: Hilary Shughart, President, Bridgerland Audubon Society
Additional Reading: Hilary Shughart and Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

WildAboutUtah pieces by Hilary Shughart, https://wildaboututah.org/author/hilary-shughart/

“In research recently published in the prestigious journal, Oecologia, we show that mountain lions are ecosystem engineers that create essential habitat for carrion-dependent beetles. It is the first research to show that an apex predator plays the role of engineer. In collaboration with graduate researcher, Josh Barry, and Dr. Melissa Grigione at Pace University, we collected and identified 24, 209 beetles across 18 sites, representing 215 unique beetle species. The carcasses abandoned by mountain lions were not just food for beetles, but the very places beetles spent their lives, hiding from predators, seeking mates, raising young, and morphing from larvae into adult forms that dispersed in search of the next carcass to begin the cycle all over again.”
Barry, J.M., Elbroch, L.M., Aiello-Lammens, M.E. et al. Pumas as ecosystem engineers: ungulate carcasses support beetle assemblages in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Oecologia 189, 577–586 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4315-z

Mountain Lions as Ecosystem Engineers, MarkElbroch.com, , [Accessed April 29, 2023]

Mountain Lion Conservation, MarkElbroch.com, , [Accessed April 29, 2023]

EOC 206: Mark’s Cougar Conundrum, Eyes on Conservation Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-eyes-on-conservation-podcast/id916341600 [Accessed April 30, 2023]

Elbroch, Mark, The Cougar Conundrum, Sharing the World with a Successful Predator,, Island Press, August 2020, https://islandpress.org/books/cougar-conundrum [Accessed April 30, 2023]

Panthera USA, https://www.panthera.org/ [Accessed April 30, 2023]
Mark Elbroch, Ph.D., Panthera USA, https://panthera.org/mark-elbroch-phd [Accessed April 30, 2023]

MarkElbroch.com, [Accessed April 29, 2023]

Wiggins, D. (2005, March 25). Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus): a technical conservation assessment.
[Online]. USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region. Available: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5182002.pdf [Apr 30, 2023].

Yellow-billed Cuckoo Coccyzus americanus, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Yellow-billed_Cuckoo/

May 13 & October 14, World Migratory Bird Day 2023, WATER, UNEP/CMS Secretariat and UNEP/AEWA Secretariat, https://www.worldmigratorybirdday.org/