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Come back to this page each day to read another entry from Frederick R. Gehlbach's almanac of suburban natural and unnatural history, "Messages from the Wild," which chronicles the world of a forested ravine in central Texas.
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Only five times in thirty-five years has the ravine experienced more than two days below freezing. Today ends the earliest such spell. The landscape thaws at 11:00 a.m. after fifty-nine hours, and fox squirrels decide to get up. Pushed here by Arctic air, the season's first cedar waxwings settle on possumhaws and "whine." They eat the berries just as furiously as the squirrels dig for buried nuts. Under a cloudless sky the bright sun warms the air three degrees per hour to forty-eight by mid-afternoon, whereupon red admiral and questionmark butterflies appear. Someday I'd like to find just one hibernating butterfly. With glycerol as the antifreeze in its blood, how sheltered must it be? |
Frederick R. Gehlbach is Professor Emeritus of Biology and Environmental Studies at Baylor University. His ecological studies have taken him from New Zealand to Slovakia and, in the Americas, from Alaska and Newfoundland to Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. His research interests include the life-history strategies of small owls, small burrowing snakes and urban wildlife ecology.
From MESSAGES FROM THE WILD: AN ALMANAC OF SUBURBAN NATURAL AND UNNATURAL HISTORY by Frederick R. Gehlbach, Copyright © 2002. Courtesy of the University of Texas Press.
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