How to Identify the Only Two Venomous Snakes in the Hudson Valley

 Interesting article

 

Swims in the creek, but isn’t a member

Several people have seen a beaver in our swimming hole. This seems to be its den:

Japanese knotweed

It's everywhere, and keeps on growing. Tried to pull it out by its roots numerous times, but it is difficult. Also turns out to be pointless:

Oh, no, not knotweed Slate Science article dated 8 May 2019, by Henry Grabbar.

It’s been nearly four years since I bought hypodermic needles at a CVS, squatted in my backyard, and drew them full of glyphosate. I’d done my best to build a little garden in Brooklyn, only to see the ground begin to vanish beneath the fastest-growing plant I had ever seen. It sprouted in April with a pair of tiny, beet-red leaves between the flagstones, and poked up like asparagus through the mulch. By May the leaves were flat and green and bigger than my hands, and the stems as round as a silver dollar. My neighbor’s yard provided a preview of what was coming my way: a grove as thick as a cornfield, 10 feet high, from the windows to the lot line. I had to kill the knotweed. I tried a few different approaches: Yanking it out stalk by stalk was a sweaty, summer-long game of whack-a-mole—a thankless full-time job. Then a friend and I spent one long night digging a 10-by-4-foot trench, lining it with black contractor bags, and refilling it with dirt. It looked like we were trying to bury something, and in a way we were: the knotweed rhizomes—the plant’s creeping rootstalks—under our feet, searching for a ray of light.

I've been there, tried that.

Anyway, it didn’t work. Japanese knotweed has come a long way since Philipp Franz von Siebold, the doctor-in-residence for the Dutch at Nagasaki, brought it to the Utrecht plant fair in the Netherlands in the 1840s. The gold-medal shrub was prized for its “gracious flowers” and advertised as ornament, medicine, wind shelter, soil retainer, dune stabilizer, cattle feed, and insect pollinator. The stems could be dried to make matchsticks, or cut and cooked like rhubarb. It crested in the dog days of summer with tassels of tiny white buds. Oh, and it grew with “great vigor.”

Amen. Turns out even academic articles about that scourge have been published; to wit:

Optimising physiochemical control of invasive Japanese knotweed
Read at your own risk; bottom line: good luck.

How about this approach? Read it if you dare.

Potential of wild growing Japanese kntoweed (REYNOUTRIA JAPONICA) for briquette production

a visitor to Phoenicia

Photo by Liz Potter, Phoenicia Library Director

CPOA in Winter

On The Rocks: Two Glaciers Crash

Mid-March in Chichester

A foot,  or so, of snow remains in places in Chichester. There has been quite a bit of melt. Last Friday, 11 March, Phoenicia received 4.9 inches of rain. As a result of all that melting snow and precipitation, the creeks and streams are running fast, and muddy. I took this video (Spike Lee has nothing to worry about) early on Saturday afternoon. Take a look, and a listen, to how Stoney Clove Creek looks, and sounds. [Click on the four-arrow icon to pop out the video viewer to full screen.) Click on the title of this post to see a slideshow of how other parts of Chichester, and Wilson State Park, looked.

2010 Year end

Only 9 inches of snow fell in Chichester; New York City got 20 inches of snow from the Bloomberg storm.

Poet's Walk Park

Country Road 103 run north-south on the Dutchess County side of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, intersecting State Route 199 (between Route 9G and the River Hudson). Turning north from 199, up half a mile, sits the Poet's Walk Park. Said to have inspired Washington Irving, it is a lovely spot even in the throes of late autumn.

mid June

a single red leaf on Stone Clove Lane in mid June.

reduced water level exoses sides in beaver pond at Warner Creek.