Newsletters

September 2012-Coal, Groundnut, Bald Eagle, Hummingbirds

WELCOME TO GREEN FUTURES !

SEPTEMBER, 2012

“For greed all nature is too little.”

– Seneca

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”
- Chuck Palahniuk

ANOTHER PRESS CONFERENCE FOR CLEAN AIR – Dominion’s Brayton Point still in the news

Last month Coal Free Massachusetts held a press conference on the beach in Somerset outside the filthiest and largest fossil fuel fired power plant in New England.

It was our lead article in last month’s newsletter and if you missed it you can find it here:

http://www.greenfutures.org/?content=ScvmYG7qhmISYUw1

This month the Massachusetts Coalition for Clean Air, aka Coalition for Clean Air South Coast, held a similar press conference in Fall River at Kennedy Park with the Brayton Point facility as a backdrop on the other side of the Taunton River.

Read about it in this article from The Herald News, here: http://www.heraldnews.com/newsnow/x2038877262/Activists-call-on-gov-to-close-Somersets-Brayton-Point-plant-transition-state-away-from-coal

New England’s coal and oil fired power plants have been running at less than full capacity. Coal is no longer the cheapest fuel. Here’s an interesting article …and we like the title too …from a recent CommonWealth magazine.http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/Voices/Back-Story/2012/Summer/006-Coal-fired-power-in-state-down-to-embers.aspx

BIORESERVE FLORA OF THE MONTH – Groundnut (Apios americana)

The groundnut is a common, trailing, slender vine that is easily overlooked growing around and beneath more dominant forbs and shrubs along wetland edges and damp swales. Groundnut vines have oblong, smooth-edged, compound leaves arranged opposite each other on the leaf stem.

Groundnut range includes Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada south across the United States to Texas and Florida and from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast.

The groundnut is a legume in the pea/bean family and has a typical “sweet pea” shaped blossom. They bloom from late July through early September.

The large flower clusters are a ruddy purplish-brown in color and extremely hard to spot considering their odd “chocolatey” color. The heavy, cloying scent of the blossoms is usually how one first notices this plant. The fragrant odor usually hangs in the humid August air and everyone, it seems, has a different idea as to what the groundnut blossoms smell like.

Groundnut flowers have been described as smelling like old roses, lilies, mint, raspberry, old leaves, sweaty socks, violets and a host of other flowers and things. We describe the scent as a combination of old rose and wild turkey poop. If you are familiar with groundnut blossoms, what do you think they smell like? Tell us at info@greenfutures.org.

Once the flowers drop, slender bean pods develop. These pods are three to four inches long and filled with small black beans.

The groundnut vine grows from a long, shallow, string-like root that has numerous edible tubers found along its length resembling beads on a chain.

These tubers were a principle food of the Indians and are still known as “Indian potato” in some rural areas. Those Plymouth Pilgrims that survived their first bleak winter in their new home did so by subsisting almost entirely on nutritious groundnuts provided by their Indian neighbors.

Groundnuts were often the only available food during times of famine. Locally, during King Philips War, when the English and Indians were rampaging through the countryside burning villages and destroying livestock, corn fields and stored food supplies, both sides often found themselves with only the easily foraged groundnut for daily sustenance.

Mary Rowlandson was an English woman married to a puritan minister and living in Lancaster, Massachusetts, when the town was attacked by Indians on February 10, 1676, during King Philip’s War. She was captured and forced to live with the Indians as they fled west pursued by the colonial militia.

Eventually ransomed, she wrote a book about her time in captivity, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.

The groundnut is mentioned a number of times in her narrative as one of the few food items available in the winter to the fleeing Indians as they foraged for whatever edibles they could find.

“That day, a little afternoon, we came to Squakeag, where the Indians quickly spread themselves over the deserted English fields, gleaning what they could find. Some

picked up ears of wheat that were crickled down; some found ears of Indian corn; some found ground nuts, and others sheaves of wheat that were frozen together in the shock, and went to threshing of them out.”

If interested in reading the complete narrative of Rowlandson’s harrowing experiences while a captive in a totally different New England from the one we experience today, go here: http://gutenberg.readingroo.ms/8/5/851/851.txt

The groundnut is still widely available today and is a wild food you might be interested in experimenting with. Cooked groundnuts have a smooth, potato-like texture. They can be boiled, fried or baked.

Here’s what the iconic wild food forager Euell Gibbons had to say about them in his classic wild foods book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus.

“I like them just plain boiled in heavily salted water and eaten with butter. They should always be eaten hot, for they become tough and tasteless when cold. Leftover boiled groundnuts will regain their flavor if they are greased and roasted a while in the oven. I have also enjoyed groundnuts in camp just washed and thinly sliced, then fried in bacon fat. Even to those who have never experienced my long-drawn-out anticipation, the groundnut is one of the fine native wild foods.”

Euell Gibbons’ three popular foraging books "Stalking The Wild Asparagus"; "Stalking The Healthful Herbs"; and "Stalking The Blue-eyed Scallop" are still available today, even though they were all written in the early 1960's. The wild food identifications and information, recipes and foraging anecdotes make these books interesting, entertaining …and timeless.

This autumn, take a walk and discover the groundnut. Dig up a few tubers. Cook them up and while eating them Imagine life in colonial New England when the ancestors of the groundnuts you’re consuming helped Indians and English, alike, survive the cold and bleak New England winters.

BIORESERVE FAUNA OF THE MONTH – Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)

Don Pfitzer photo, US Fish and Wildlife

The bald eagle has a huge range inhabiting just about all of North America except for the extreme north in Alaska and Canada and extreme south in Mexico.

Adult bald eagles have dark brown body feathers with a white feathered head and tail. Beak and legs are yellow. The sexes are identically colored. As with most birds of prey, females are considerably larger than males.

A mature female eagle boasts an eight foot wingspan. The only Southeastern Massachusetts Bioreserve (SMB) bird topping that is the mute swan at nine feet. Coming in just under the eagle are the turkey vulture and osprey, both with six foot wingspans.

Eagles receive their full adult plumage at about five years of age. When immature, they are mostly a medium brown often with some white admixture which increases in area as they reach adulthood.

Bald eagles usually locate near large bodies of open water with an abundant fish population. In the SMB summertime eagles consume fish and turtles from local ponds. During winter they range widely and when local waterways are frozen over and fish are inaccessible we’ve watched eagles feeding on carrion, snatching herring gulls from the large solid waste dump northwest of the SMB and observed them watching patiently, on the ice or in a nearby tree, for an ice fisherman to toss a yellow perch their way.

Lacking cliffs, here along the relatively flat coastal plain, bald eagles nest in large conifers (nest in a white pine at Assawompset Pond) or deciduous trees (nest in a white oak at Watuppa Pond).

A mated pair will construct a permanent nest of branches, straw and debris that they return to every spring at breeding time. The pair add material to their nest every year and the size of the nest may reach gigantic proportions, sometimes getting so heavy that the weight of the nest breaks the supporting tree limbs and the nest falls to the ground.

The female eagle usually lays two white eggs, sometimes three. Over the past six years the eagle nesting in a large white oak on the southwestern shore of the Watuppa has not only consistently laid three eggs, but she and her mate have also consistently raised all three eaglets.

The United States Congress selected the bald eagle as our national symbol in 1782. As many know, Benjamin Franklin was not pleased. Ben initially suggested the rattlesnake as a good candidate and later settled on the wild turkey.

Here’s the famous “anti-eagle/pro-turkey” portion of a lengthy letter that Ben sent his daughter, dated January 26, 1784.

For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk; and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him.

With all this injustice he is never in good case; but, like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.

He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the kingbirds from our country; though exactly fit for that order of knights, which the French call Chevaliers d'Industrie.

I am, on this account, not displeased that the figure is not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey. For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours; the first of the species seen in Europe, being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the Ninth.

He is, besides, (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that,) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards, who should presume to invade his farmyard with a red coat on.

Bald eagles as well as ospreys and other large predatory birds have made a remarkable recovery since DDT was banned in 1972. DDT and other organochlorine insecticides interfered with the bird’s ability to develop strong egg shells. Such eggs broke during incubation. This thin eggshell problem also plagued many other species that fed on fish and/or other prey that bio-accumulated DDT in their flesh.

In 1972 there were fewer than 1,000 bald eagles in the lower forty-eight states. There are close to 20,000 bald eagles in those states today.

Similarly, there were only 324 pairs of peregrine falcons in the United States in 1975. None were nesting in New England. Today there are about 3,000 pairs breeding in North America. Peregrines now nest regularly on tall buildings and bridges in Providence, Boston, Hartford, Fall River, New Bedford and other New England cities.

Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was instrumental in awakening the general public to the detrimental effects of the widespread use of DDT on our eagles, other wildlife and environment.

For our recent article on the 50^th anniversary of Silent Spring, go here: http://www.greenfutures.org/?content=NcysuM6MLenN3QmV

The future for the bald eagle and other raptors looks bright, but their prey and our environment still contains PCBs, mercury and other heavy metals, dioxins and the latest pesticides and herbicides from Dow, Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer and a whole bunch more.

Keep your eye on the bald eagle. This generation’s …“canary in the coal mine?”

HUMMINGBIRD GALA – Dozens of ‘em!

Green Futures’ members recently gathered for our annual Hummingbird Gala and Potluck Picnic.

Below are a few photos. We thank Roger and Liz …and we know the hummingbirds do too …for once again hosting this wonderful hummingbird filled event.