Eagerly, I turn this post over to my dear friend, artist Tasha O’Neill.  Her images, as everyone always insists, are worth more than 10,000 words.

Tasha O’Neill, Gallery 14, Princeton Photography Club, braves ice to honor winter

The meteorologists’ approach to ‘ice events’, quite literally, leaves me cold.  Ice goes way beyond danger, suffusing our everyday surroundings with new beauty, all the more wondrous for being evanescent.  There may be no dawn more spectacular than that which reaches us through ice.  Recently I learned that ice is essential for wild winter creatures, such as foxes.  When it’s cold enough for ice, for enough days, microbes that cause diseases such as the dread mange, cannot survive.  Our red and our grey foxes can live and thrive to another season, because of the gift of ice.  For me, however, much as I treasure foxes, beauty is enough.

One reason I number so many photographers among my friends is that they go out in all conditions to find and capture beauty where others quail.  This is the highest wildness - to take whatever Nature dishes out, and turn it into fine art.are worth more than 10,000 words.

To see Tasha O’Neill’s new departures in the photography’s realm – Etudes:amazing evocations of trees, “trees in a new light,” visit Hopewell’s Fine Arts Cooperative Photography Gallery 14 for her Opening on Friday, March 20. In an open house reception from 6-8:30 p.m., we will wander a Tasha forest, experience mosaics of light to outshine Ravenna.

We are also welcome to “Meet the Photographers” on Sunday, March 22nd from 1-3 pm.

Tasha’s musical theme of Etudes will prove startling yet familiar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Marty Schwartz, Gallery 14, Princeton Photography Club, captures Winter’s Stark Majesty

Winter needs a press agent. I volunteer. Spring is seriously overrated, winter unfairly castigated. My love affair with this season sneaked up on me. Having grown up in Michigan, then begun married life in gelid Minnesota, I had considered winter my enemy. Until I moved, that is, [1987 - 1989], first to Provence, then to Savannah, Georgia.

Living through two snowless years [well, flakes did descend, once in each place] birthed in me a passion for winter that I never expected to hold. I didn’t WANT marguerites [airy white daisies] in January, as in Cannes. I didn’t LIKE Georgia’s year-‘round roses!

Living without the crimsons and scarlets of autumn was bad enough. Come December, I found myself aching for the sculptural starkness of leafless trees. I required January’s tumultuous gold/purple skies, clouds scudding like galleons before a gale. I was stunned, in 1989, to re-encounter in New Jersey’s weed fields, whispers of rose and mauve and lavender. To have winter pour over me tumults of brass and bronze. New Jersey’s winter palette still stuns me — all subtlety and minimalism, –a potpourri of hues I insist on calling warm.

Even though editors tend to think Nature ends with Labor Day, Read the rest of this entry »

Soup, like the splitting of wood, blesses us twice - in the preparation, and in the use.

In denial of winter’s stringencies, I’ve been shopping at farmers’ markets MORE now, not less.  Farm food isn’t exactly wild, but it’s the next best thing to hunting and gathering.  I require real nourishment far more in cold and dark times.  One way to assure fresh local real meals is to attend Slow Food’s dynamic and pleasurable Winter Farm Markets.  See listing in second part of post for two at Tre Piani in Princeton Jan. 25 and March 22.

Like many NJ WILD readers, I’ve been giving a number of supper parties over previous weeks.  Between rare food quests for guests and my own requirements of live food if not wild food, I some very promising items remained in my refrigerator after those lovely evenings.  On the coldest, iciest day yet, I warmed first my apartment and then my body, mind and spirit, by making what I have christened, “Market Soup.”

Here you see it, steaming and ready for lunch on an equally cold though sunny Sunday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Listening to our new President, Barack Hussein Obama, this morning, taking his pivotal oath, my heart, mind and memory returned to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic of another courageous journey, Ulysses.

This was Robert F. Kennedy’s favorite poem, quoted as he declared his own run for the Presidency. Each leader in his own way, each in his own time, challenged the rest of us to make this storied voyage with him. Bobby’s travels were aborted.  Barack Obama’s were well and truly launched this historic morning.

The new President makes it very clear, each of us ‘mans’ an oar on this journey, the fate of our country and our world riding with us.  President Obama makes it very clear, we are to pull together.

Wishing President Obama, wishing America and the globe, again, at long last: “Calm seas and prosperous voyage.”

Excerpts from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses (1833). which seem to evoke the very life of our new President and the people who voted him into this storied office:

     I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
     Life to the lees. 

     All times I have enjoyed
     Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
     That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
     Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
     Vext the dim sea. 

     I am become a name;
     For always roaming with a hungry heart
     
     I am a part of all that I have met;
     Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
     Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
     For ever and for ever when I move.

     How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
     To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
     As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
     Were all too little!

      …this gray spirit yearning in desire
     To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
     Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

    There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
     There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
     Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me,
     That ever with a frolic welcome took
     The thunder and the sunshine.

     Death closes all; but something ere the end,
     Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
     Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

     The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
     The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
     Moans round with many voices. 

     Come, my friends,
     ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
    

     Push off, and sitting well in order smite
     The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
     To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
     Of all the western stars, until I die.
     

     …that which we are, we are,
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

O.K., normally I write to NJ WILD readers about beauty and poetry, about peace and restoration/revivivication.

Every once in awhile I simply boil over and this is one of them.  The spurious president is going out with a bang not a whimper, and the bang dooms wolves.  Can YOU SIT BACK and let this happen unopposed?

Our President-to-be is quoted as seeing Genesis as a mandate for STEWARDSHIP.  He is determined to keep reminding the world, not just his own followers, not just Americans, that we are BORROWING THIS PLANET FROM OUR CHILDREN AND OUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN.

WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO DO TO PRESERVE OUR WILD BROTHERS?

a furious Carolyn

Jasmine, of the Lakota Wolves of New Jersey, gazes with her riveting eyes, deep into the eyes of her human brothers and sisters…

Dear Carolyn Foote, We warned you it could happen soon — and it has. In a cruel parting shot before leaving office, the Bush Administration has stripped wolves in Idaho and Montana of their Endangered Species protection — leaving them at the mercy of two states that are gunning for them. Hundreds of wolves are effectively on death row. As soon as the hunting seasons begin and “Open Fire” orders are issued, state officials and hunters will fan out through Greater Yellowstone and Central Idaho in search of an animal that should be on the Endangered Species list. NRDC is racing to court to stop this slaughter before it can begin. As you know, this is the second time that the Bush Administration has removed federal protections from wolves in the Northern Rockies. Last spring, more than 110 wolves were brutally killed in as many days. The wolf-killing rampage only stopped after NRDC and 11 other conservation groups prevailed in federal court — thanks to your support! We must win again — because the plight of wolves has never been more dire. Yellowstone’s wolf population has already declined, as wolf pups die of a yet-to-be-determined disease. The bottom line is: Greater Yellowstone’s wolves urgently need and deserve federal protection. And thanks to your steadfast support, they will have NRDC attorneys — America’s toughest wildlife advocates — fighting for them. I will be sure to share any new developments with you as this case progresses. Thank you for caring so deeply about the plight of wolves — and standing with us in their defense. Sincerely, Frances Beinecke President Natural Resources Defense Council P.S. If you want to help NRDC win another life-saving reprieve for wolves, please make an emergency donation now. We’ve been able to save wolves from years of relentless attacks by the Bush Administration only because of your steadfast support at critical moments like this.

Brenda Jones shares one of winter’s best gifts - a healthy male cardinal.

As sleet falls all around our state, I remind NJ WILD readers — You don’t have to go outside to experience the wild.  There is a simple way to bring the wild to you — FEED THE BIRDS.

In the second half of this post, I’ll share feeding secrets learned over my decade-plus years attracting the winged creatures to our Braeburn-off-Snowden gardens, [in the northwest section of Princeton.]

My best success came when I placed soup’s turkey bones on snow near our woods, during the Blizzard of ‘78.  Seconds later, an enormous hawk swooped through ceaseless flakes, ‘roared off’ with the steaming turkey neck in its talons.  I had never before seen a raptor with dinner-in-hand!

Meanwhile, everything you always wanted to know about birds can be found through Cornell Ornithology Lab. Their publications reveal wise and long-experienced staff on all fronts.  Each is passionately committed to excellence in science, word and image.  There is no better source for learning about our winged brothers and sisters.  http://www.birds.cornell.edu/

Research-addicts such as myself, on that site, can master the features, needs and histories of birds.  We can track ivory-bills, mourn the dodo and passenger pigeon.  We can contribute to Cornell to speed their vital work, –such as radar tracking of migrants and their ever-increasing library of sound recordings.  Cornell’s experts capture the sounds not only of courtship and territorial assertions, but also migrants’ communication on the wing in darkness.  We can contribute to “Citizen Science,” participating in Christmas bird counts and tallying bird visitors at our feeders.

But there is an even simpler, more direct, vivid way to learn about birds:  FEED THEM!

Bird seed not only provides nourishment in this dire weather.  Its fat calories are fuel, besides preparing the winged ones for succcessful courtship and breeding.  The better their food, the brighter the colors. Females go for bright males.  Male brightness means health, as well as revealing excellent hunting and gathering skills. Read the rest of this entry »

Brenda Jones immortalizes one of my wild dinner companions, the great horned owl.

My first solo dinner of the New Year held interesting components.  My west-facing table held hefty home-made spaghetti, evidence of my split loyalties, featuring the new product, Jersey Fresh (canned! –available at Trenton Farmers Market) tomatoes, accented by herbes de Provence, complete with lavender.  Bayberry candles fluttered before lace curtains, framing the relentless darkness of this time of year.

I could call this another “Silent Night.”  I might add “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”  As I relished this deeply nourishing food, I relived sustaining moments with dear friends who know how to honor the sacred times.

My room was quieter than a whisper.  Suddenly, out across the floodplain, I heard the haunting courtship calls of the great horned owl.  January is their spring.  Each year, the male returns first, sounding forlorn to human ears, seeking the return of his mate.  Immediately, the dark and my hushed room came alive, throbbing with true wildness.  I rushed out onto my Canal Pointe porch, so that my very being could be brushed by sound waves from this welcome dinner companion. Read the rest of this entry »

Are winds of change really sweeping through our country?  Are we really turning the tide re our endangered brothers and sisters of the wild?  Here is more good news re saved creatures - thanks to activism on the part of ordinary humans like me.  Reason to be thankful, yet vigilant.

VICTORY! Dear Carolyn Foote, I’m thrilled to report a major victory for polar bears, endangered bowhead whales and other species that live in and around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A federal appeals court has just ruled that the Bush Administration’s approval of Shell’s plan to drill for oil next to the Refuge in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea is illegal. You share the credit for this fantastic victory because it was your generous support of NRDC that allowed us to wage this long but successful legal battle against Big Oil’s disastrous scheme. NRDC and Earthjustice — along with a coalition of Alaska Native organizations and conservation groups — went to federal court and proved that Shell’s rush to industrialize this fragile ecosystem posed a greater threat to wildlife and the Inupiat people than the Bush Administration was willing to admit. Now the court is sending the government back to the drawing board to study and disclose the “significant harm” that Shell’s drilling could cause. Our courtroom victory shows that oil companies can’t get away with simply killing wildlife and destroying the Inupiat’s way of life, which depends on that wildlife. The government’s own experts predicted that drilling in the Beaufort would cause at least one oil spill, which would have been an unmitigated disaster for wildlife as there is no known method for cleaning up oil in this icebound sea. That’s why we are so determined to keep Shell — and all the oil companies — out of our most sensitive Arctic environments. Thank you again for steadfastly standing with us and defending the coastline of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge! Sincerely, Frances Beinecke President Natural Resources Defense Council P.S. The polar bear is not out of danger yet. In fact, right now NRDC is fighting the Bush Administration, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and America’s biggest polluters for the sake of polar bear survival. Donate now to help us win two critical cases that could help save the polar bear from rampant industrialization of its home.

Brenda Jones sends Happy Ending:

 ***

Lead-poisoned eagle rescued

 Benjamin Montgomery and Kathy Malok, two staff members at the Raptor Trust, rescue an injured bald eagle on Dec. 17 from a reservoir in Millburn.

***

By Halley Bondy/For The Star Ledger

December 21, 2009, 6:01PM

 

MILLBURN — An eagle was found fighting for its life here last week after ingesting large amounts of lead.

The juvenile bald eagle was rescued from a Short Hills reservoir on the property of New Jersey American Water.

 

A maintenance worker discovered the female eagle on Dec. 17 in a tall grass embankment between two company reservoirs. The eagle eventually wandered into ice-cold water in a marshy area nearby, and due to heavy winds and neurological damage from the lead it had consumed, it could not fly away.

 

“At one point, it tried to get out of the water and flapped its wings, but it only got six inches from the surface before falling,” said Gary Matthews, environmental manager at New Jersey American Water, who was the first to identify the injured bird as a bald eagle. “We needed to rescue it before it drowned in one of the reservoirs.”

 

Matthews called Raptor Trust, a Millington-based bird sanctuary, to rescue and rehabilitate the bird. Cathy Malok, one of two Raptor Trust staff members who rescued the bird using a kayak, said it will take at least two weeks to recover.

 

Often, Malok said, eagles contract lead poisoning after eating deer carcasses that have been loaded with buckshot and left to rot.

 

“She seems to be in good shape because we caught her in time,” Malok said.

 

The Department of Environmental Protection’s 2009 Eagle Project report documented 69 egg-laying eagle pairs last year, an increase by 49 since the 1980’s. The report said that eagles were almost annihilated in the 1970’s due to DDT pesticide use in the area, but the population began to increase steadily after the harsh chemical was banned from widespread use and the state kept a tighter watch on eagle nests.

 

The majority of the eagles’ nests are located in Cumberland and Salem Counties in the southwest part of the state. No eagles were spotted in Essex County according to the report.

Malok said that, while at the reservoir last week, she spotted a second adult eagle. Matthews said that, in the last eight or nine years, he has seen several eagles near the reservoir, which is a protected wetlands area with plenty of game.

 

“We’ve been fortunate in that our whole reservoir property has been a great habitat for migratory water fowl,” Matthews said. “Over the years, the eagle sightings have become more numerous.”

 

Malok said the effort last week marked Raptor Trust’s first Essex County eagle rescue. The eagle is being treated with medicine and exercise at the Millington site.  If it recovers, the eagle will be brought back to the New Jersey American Water reservoir and released.

“We’re hoping to get her clean, eating well and stabilized,” Malok said. “We don’t want to just let her go and hope for the best.”

 

 

 

 

My father, James Wendell Stower, of the Detroit Times, would be heartbroken at the current perils of print journalism and freedom of the press in  our nation. Those ever more slender papers arriving at home and work would break his heart.

I wonder if this man, born in 1910, would rejoice or be baffled that our Packet has requested this blog, this form electronic journalism, NJ WILD.

The poem celebrates my father, Jim Stower, veteran of the Toledo News Bee, the Detroit Times and the Detroit News.  He had worked for newspapers, starting in Ohio, managing carrier boys from the age of eleven on, then head of Circulation Promotion at the Times.  With the News, Daddy envisioned track meets in Detroit.  Soon he was shepherding the building of Cobo Arena, then em-ceeing the opening meet in his tuxedo, which he wore with such panache.

Our father managed the resurrection of the Soap Box Derby; only ending his long tenure after a rich Western boy won by hiding lead in the nose of what was to have been a simple wooden crate on wheels.

Throughout our Michigan childhood, Daddy would take inner city and suburban boys on reward trips for selling and maintaining the greatest number of subscriptions.  On trains, we recently discovered, he’d sing all the way, with a rich Crosby croon.

Our father became known amongst hoteliers and municipal leaders throughout our country, for standing for the right of black children to be entertained in chosen cities.  He would involve mayors as well as hotels and restaurants in swift cancellation of cities that did not share Daddy’s  vision of rewards for all who had earned them.  In the late 1950’s, his “Junior Ambassadors” of all races were richly hosted by heads of every canton in Switzerland.  They brought an alphorn home in the cabin of the Swissair plane, along with chocolates and cheese.

At the Times, Daddy instituted Newspapers in the Schools, and the Green Pennant safety program for young crossing guards.  My father brought ski clinics and gun clinics to city boys; and regattas to wealthy Detroiters, under the umbrella of the Detroit News.

Daddy believed in crusading journalism, and integrity was his middle name.  However, when he passed away in his eighties, people at those ceremonies kept referring to this dapper man simply as “Gentleman Jim.”

James Wendell Stower would be heartbroken at the current perils of print journalism and freedom of the press in  our nation. Those ever more slender papers arriving at home and work would break his heart.

I am now reading the seminal Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln-Prize and New-York- Historical-Society-Book Prizewinner.  This Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian brings to life my lifelong hero, Abraham Lincoln, (subject of my first term paper) and those he conquered in his bid for the nomination for the presidency.  Her compelling chapters that generate page-turning energy equal to any of Dickens’ sequels.  Over and over, in the sagas of William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates and the simple man of Illinois who became president, we read of these determined ever-self-educating men, even as boys, “devouring newspapers by firelight.”

Daring abolitionists all, one of the key factors in the success of the would-be-nominees and those who buttressed them in their campaigns, is the presence of, even the founding of, newspapers to teach the public the truth about the evils of slavery.  Phrases ring out on the importance of journalism in Lincoln’s time:  “…influential Journal which eventually became the party organ for the Whigs… brilliantly shap[ing] public opinion for nearly four decades.”  How have we lost the voice of newspapers?  Is this laryngitis terminal, or can it rise anew, with renewed strength, on issues every bit as vital to our times?

In memory of “Gentleman Jim” and the world of print he so honored - knowing, for example, the name of every linotype man and every truckdriver at the Times - I share with you this poem, Down at the Times, about visiting the paper with my father on his working Saturdays.  Read the rest of this entry »