Positive Changes

     Yes, it's been a while. Lots of thinking, lots of decision-making, lots of novel-reading over the last few months. The upshot: life is good.

    One of the best things is the Harmar Riverbank Pollinator Project undertaken by a group of local volunteers. This city-owned space adjoins a bike path and terminates at a kayak launch. At one time, a neighbor had put in a cottage-style garden on the steep slope next to his home, but time marched on, he got old and eventually died, and the friend who had helped with maintenance also got too old to clamber around the space. Another valiant neighbor took over mowing and using a string trimmer, but there had been no actual gardener tending the site for a number of years. This sunny slope with actual decent soil still flowered, but Johnson grass had invaded, invasive ditch lilies had proliferated in their thousands, and Japanese honeysuckle, bigroot morning glory, and Virginia creeper were creeping all over the hillside. And did I mention the enthusiastic spread of an opportunistic plant beloved of migrating birds--poison ivy? 

    The slope also contained quite a bit of native aster, goldenrod, and wingstem, so once the city gave its blessing to the reworking of the site, our group of volunteers did a plant rescue. We have since learned that the wingstem and aster on this site did not really need our help, but a nearby slope needs all the native composites it can get--a post for another day. We also opted to rescue the streetside border of bearded irises in honor of the site's former gardener.

    Even though the site became "ours" only in late October, we went ahead with solarization, hoping for a warm winter (which we did not get). 

    The site being in possession of good soil, we noticed in March that daffodils were attempting to force the plastic off the site, and, being tenderhearted, we opted to removed one of the plastic sheets and keep more of the historic planting. We also realized that the slope needs to continue to "cook" through the summer to kill off the existing vegetation. This led to a decision to plant only Phase One in the spring.

    The daffodils put on quite a show but proved to be another maintenance headache, as did the Lycoris squamigera (known around here as "naked ladies") at the bottom of the slope. Making room for our native plants required removal of most of the non-native bulbs, which are spending their summer off-site for replanting on the main slope in the fall. The current challenge is finding summer homes for five forty-pound bags and three five-gallon tubs of bulbs, most of which are young and need time in good soil to mature. Sigh.

    But Planting Day finally came. Yesterday, a team of eight volunteers removed the last of the daffodils and ditch lilies and planted a 12 x 35-foot stretch of bank with a mix of mostly native species. (We did include a few zinnias, since first-year blooms are a Very Good Thing, and replanted most of the rescued irises. Others are waiting for Phase Two.) The staircase (in need of a handrail, but still a most useful component of the site) is flanked by two arrowwood viburnums, with spring flowers useful to pollinating insects and fall berries to feed the migrating songbirds. Our main wildflower site got two fothergillas and a mix of Culver's root, spiderwort, anise hyssop, coneflowers, heliopsis, coreopsis, liatris, asters and  whatever else I have forgotten. A variety of native milkweeds will be added once they are available to us. The far end of the site got a dwarf red horse chestnut, letting the kayakers know that they are also included in our plans. 

Apologies to the volunteers who did not make the photo. 

    The Harmar Riverbank Pollinator Habitat may not look like much now, but stay tuned. As our youngest volunteer said yesterday, "These flowers will be here after we're all gone." Or so some of us hope.

Local Wildlife in Merida

Today has been el dìa de los insectos. Being aware of the likelihood of afternoon heat, I opted to close my windows before heading out for the day, a process that in this particular guesthouse involves lifting a portion of screen. Unfortunately, sometime yesterday a colony of wasps had, unbeknownst to me, chosen to build a nest on the window ledge and did not take kindly to the disturbance. Fortunately, I escaped with only one sting, and this variety of Yucatecan wasp is not particularly venomous--nothing compared to Ohio's yellow jackets. (The wasp colony is no longer present.)

Being thus reminded that I am currently in the tropics, I purchased a botanical insect repellent before returning home, ready for an interval of reading in the garden. Needless to say, the spray missed a spot or two, and the mosquitoes found exactly those spots. Fortunately, the same garden that is home to the mosquitoes (despite efforts to leave no standing water and the like) is also home to some lovely butterflies--not that they would hold still to be photographed.

Then this evening, I discovered that a nearly-microscopic species of ant had discovered a way into a just-purchased package of tostadas. Tomorrow will involve the purchase of plain tortillas to be stored in the refrigerator (a place not conducive to crisp baked goods) and a supply of ziplock bags. The contest with the little beasts will be won.

A stroll to the city's main plaza revealed some more exotic wildlife,

like this camel that formed part of the municipal Nativity scene.

Other creatures at the Bethlehem stable would be right at home on a Mexican farm.

And the ubiquitous European rock doves (aka pigeons) were making themselves right at home in the hay the plaster animals were not using,

totally ignoring the rampaging elephant a few feet way.

Would that all creatures would coexist so peacefully.

Maddening, Magical Merida

Yesterday, a friend made on my first trip to Merida in 2017 was thinking out loud about why she might not come back to this part of the world, though it ticks so many of the boxes of what she wants in a winter home: safe, affordable, warm, and full of accessible cultural activities. This year, the things that bother her (some of which I wrote about last year) have really bothered her: the barking dogs in most neighborhoods; the trash in the streets and on the sidewalks in so many areas;  the occasional burning of said trash, even in the city; the lack of promptness in many aspects of life; the crowds; the noise--from traffic, from the music that nearly every store plays at great volume, from celebrations that go on late into the night; from fireworks being set off for no apparent reason other than--hey, fireworks! 

I get it. Not being generally a city mouse, I find myself ready for quiet and green, open spaces when I head back north in the spring. The older parts of this old city are densely populated, and renovated homes sit cheek-by-jowl with piles of rubble as older construction is either rebuilt or replaced by concrete block--eventually.

Of course, old has its charms. Merida is full of historic churches

and the Beaux Arts confections that find their way into every tourist guidebook. (This one now houses an anthropology museum.)

And I must confess to being amused by this fierce watchdog wearing a pink pinafore.

Merida is a city of contradictions, as I suspect most are: wealth and poverty rubbing elbows as elderly beggars sit holding styrofoam cups in the city's restaurant and entertainment districts; beautiful colonial buildings reflecting centuries of exploitation and attempted genocide; civic pride in diversity at the same time that the descendants of the region's indigenous people are disproportionately impoverished; pampered designer dogs paraded on the Paseo while not-so-lucky canines and felines scrounge for garbage in less tony neighborhoods. 

And yet--this is a place that grabs the heart and the imagination. Every January brings a festival commemorating the city's less-than-admirable founding when the Spanish marauders of the Montejo family seized control of the Maya city known as T'ho and used the stones of its pyramids to build its cathedral, streets, and homes. For three weeks, the city's parks, streets, theaters, museums, and even shopping centers play host to arts events of most imaginable types, all of them free to anyone willing to brave the crowds (and the Plaza Grande does get crowded when Cirque du Soleil or Willie Colón performs).  Even during non-festival times, free live music is available in various parks every night of the week and on Sunday afternoons. Anyone who can afford a bus ticket (eight pesos unless one has a discount, in which case the fare is three pesos--or about sixteen cents) can find a bench, chair, or standing spot and get lost in music and spectacle--or join the dance, which lots of Meridanos seem to do.

A real lure of Merida, though, is the day-to-day life here. A walk in any ordinary area can reveal treasures, like a mural turning an ordinary small house into a tropical fantasy,

 or one of children playing that carries an important message, 

or a bronze sculpture of the spirit of ceiba, sacred tree of the Maya, out for everyone to enjoy in front of a government office tucked away on a mostly residential street.

The people are part of the magic as well. People here greet strangers on the street (rather like the Mid-Ohio Valley in Mexico, to be honest), and have no problem with elderly gringas admiring their children or their dogs. Strangers met on park benches share their stories and have thus far been totally kind despite the language barrier.  Taxi drivers share their insights and include language lessons as part of the fare. Downtown often features buskers, ranging from a truly amazing drum group to young breakdancers to living statues to a guitarist who lost his legs in a work accident in the US and shares songs and smiles in front of various theaters. A favorite example of the spirit of this place: heading back to the guesthouse, I admired the sunflowers of a neighbor who was sweeping her patio. In our mixed languages, I shared the sad information that sunflowers have a short season in Ohio and was informed that in Merida they grow todo el año porque hay mucho sol. Before I left, my new gardening buddy pressed two ripe seedheads into my hands, which I passed on to the owner of our guesthouse, who will now have sunflowers in her impressive tropical garden.

I can't not love this place.

Finding the right balance

Total strangers tend to strike up conversations in the parks around here. A few weeks ago, an athletic sixty-something guy preparing to do a little fishing at one of the Blue Creek quarries did just that. When I mentioned my fondness for Lucas County's Metroparks, however, a rant ensued. My conversational partner had recently moved back to the area after a thirty-plus-year career as a biologist and assured me that he had never lived anyplace where people despised nature as much as they do in Perrysburg, Ohio. Never having spent time in Perrysburg, I could not evaluate my new acquaintance's opinion but was troubled by his assertion that the area's parks all needed to have the word "preserve" removed from their names. After all, the county Metropark system contains over 12,000 acres; the parks found in individual cities, towns, and villages add several hundred additional acres of green space and the state and other nature preserves found in the county an additional thousand or so--between 13,500 and 14,000 acres of preserved greenspace in a county covering 596 square miles. In contrast, my home county, at 640 square miles, boasts only 1000 acres of city, county, or state-preserved land, in addition to portions of a national forest.

As my new acquaintance's complaints continued, it became clear that his objection was to what he saw as the commercial development of the county's parks . The park system is now selling t-shirts, allowing visitors to advertise their favorite parks. The riverside and lakefront parks feature boat launches, and some now have kayak concessions. In addition to the camping that has been done for decades at Oak Openings, some recently-acquired land is about to be home to a tree house village for an Ohio version of "glamping," and a 12-mile mountain bike trail has been added. The park system even has its own page of YouTube videos.

So, I get it. These 13,000+ acres are not pristine wilderness, and the park system managers would like to encourage people from other parts of the world to travel here and spend their money and encourage area residents to recreate here instead of traveling to other places for all their outdoor adventure. They would like people to bring their children to the playgrounds and pack a picnic lunch while they're at it. The goal is to have a Metropark within a five-minute drive of all 440,000 residents of this nearly-600-square-mile county, and for the parks to get even more visits than the four million or so they got last year. There is a danger of parks being "loved to death."

And yet: these relatively few sites in a single US county contain nearly 400 species of birds at various times of the year. People from all over the world flock (pun intended) to the area every May for the spring warbler migration. The Oak Openings and the remnants of the Great Black Swamp are home to rare plant species as well as healthy populations of common ones like the hoary puccoon used in earlier centuries as a dye plant

and wild spirea, or meadowsweet, here hosting an ailanthus webworm moth.

The plant diversity of the park system's forests, prairies, and meadows hosts an enormous variety of insect life, including butterflies like this Polygonia.

Because several of the Metroparks are in fact inside Lucas County's cities and towns, someone visiting the library in Whitehouse can walk a few hundred feet and watch the sun set over the Nona France Quarry.

Wildwood Metropark is bordered by busy roads (which can often be heard despite the park's over 450 acres) on three sides, but its trails can give the wanderer a real sense of isolation, as can much of the Swan Creek Preserve, surrounded by some of the busiest roads in South Toledo.

If there is a more peaceful autumn scene on earth, I do not know where.

More good news is that forests in the park system are regenerating. While young oaks are being shaded out by maples and hickories in much of their range, some of the Metroparks are home to young oak trees like this baby along the grassland trail at Wildwood.

    
Metroparks are maintained and therefore not truly wild, though it is the presence of sun along a trail edge or in a maintained clearing that allows young oaks to grow. Portions of most parks have also been made accessible to people with mobility challenges, with paved trails available. Some parks are on bus lines, rendering them accessible to people who do not drive or do not own a car.

We need wilderness, but most people cannot (and arguably, should not) go there. Still, all people should have access to wildness, whether it is a field full of butterflies and finches, a mayapple wood, an urban river harboring ducks and herons, or a second-growth forest sporting the brilliant red of baby oak leaves. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the construction of buildings with meeting rooms and modern plumbing in addition to their Windows on Wildlife and the building of trails that allow wheelchair users to get close to natural areas are a reasonable compromise between the needs of people and the needs of other species. People who never see wild things are unlikely to love them, and as Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum said fifty years ago, "In the end, we will conserve only what we love."

Perhaps helping people learn to love their  local (even semi-) preserves is the best way to foster a society that wants to preserve more of life on earth.

A meditation on noise

Walking around nearby residential neighborhoods yesterday, I was stunned by how noisy Parkersburg is. Maybe because winter has been so long and so cold that being outside for any length of time has been difficult, I hadn’t processed what life in an urban (well, okay, maybe semi-urban) environment is like. Our immediate neighborhood (where I spend most of my alone-outside time) isn’t on the direct route to anywhere except two schools, and the traffic there is confined to particular hours of the day. We get periodic traffic noise, but the noise is so periodic that it’s noticeable, not the norm. Working in the back yard, I can actually hear the last of the oak leaves rattling on the tree whenever the wind blows.

Visually, the neighborhoods where I walked yesterday are mid-American paradise: blocks of mostly smallish mid-century houses, set back from the street with a reasonable number of trees and shrubs giving living interest to the scene. This time of year, squirrels are everywhere, and the birds are getting active. But what struck me was the noise: the constant hum of cars, trucks making deliveries to Kroger, several blocks away, the incessant muffled roar from the interstate, over a mile distant. For a while it was hard to block out the traffic sounds to concentrate on anything else, a shame on a day as beautiful as yesterday was. My mood began spiraling into serious annoyance at the constant overwhelming presence of so many unseen motor vehicles. There seemed no escape from the omnipresent noise pollution.

Then, there it was: birdsong to “rinse and wring the ear,” as Hopkins said, sound so piercingly beautiful that it made all other noises temporarily meaningless. The song came from a tree in front of a small nondescript house on the busiest street on yesterday’s route: a wren, perched high and hurling repeated, joyous-sounding notes out over the neighborhood. I had to stop, and when I did, my ear focused on other sounds despite the cars going past only a few feet away: crows nearby, calling to each other, the buzz of chickadees not too far away, assorted unidentifiable (to me) chirps, twitters, and burbles. The realization of so many other lives being carried on, seemingly unbothered by all our busyness, brought joy.

My task for the upcoming spring break is to listen for the sounds of the world, the ones that exist apart from and underneath the machine noises that make up so much of the human world.