Uncontrollable

When managing land for biological systems, there are many factors over which you have no control.  Some of these have an enormous influence over your success.  A prime example is the weather.  Yesterday evening, Blue Jay Barrens was visited by a thunderstorm exhibiting high wind, heavy rain and hail.  Physical evidence of the storm’s passing was abundant.  Downed tree limbs, broken plant stalks and flooding were found everywhere.  What I observed from the relative safety of the front porch, was the toppling of the milkweeds.  It all began with the simultaneous arrival of howling straight line winds and a heavy downpour of rain that sent an impressive wave of water spray breaking over the eves.

Wind and rain subsided slightly as a flurry of hailstones joined the mix.

Milkweeds near the water garden, heavy with rain and battered by hail, began to give way before the wind.

As the hail thinned, rain increased in intensity.  Several milkweeds have remained upright.  At this point, I was thinking the worst of the storm had passed.

I was wrong.  Heavy rain continued, hail resumed and the wind returned with a roar loud enough to send me running to the other side of the house to see if anything dangerous was headed in my direction.  When I returned to the porch 20 seconds later, the wind was driving straight down and pushing spray into the porch and onto the ceiling.

We went from hurricane like conditions to a light summer shower in just a few seconds.  I watched the back end of the storm thrash the woods on the hill across the road and then it was gone.  Amazingly, some milkweeds are still standing.

Violent summer weather may be uncontrollable, but that doesn’t mean it’s unpredictable or unexpected.  The milkweeds around the water garden, as well as many out in the fields, get flattened every year.  Younger specimens can almost bring themselves back upright after a storm, while those at this stage will gradually reorient the top of the plant so the flowers are held up for insect visitors.  Their susceptibility to storm damage does not diminish their importance as a valuable part of the natural ecosystem.

The milkweed stalks have not broken at the base and can be returned to an upright position if stakes are provided for support.  Since these are growing right outside the front door, I’ll do my best to return them to their proper orientation.  My wife claims that they remind her of Triffids lurking in wait near the porch and I don’t want them to appear as though they are reaching out to her.

The leaves will carry their hail damage for the rest of the season.  The milkweeds colonized the water garden flower beds on their own several years ago.  I left them alone to grow and increase their numbers because this patch seemed to be a preferred egg laying site of the Monarch butterfly.  Monarch caterpillars have always been present on these plants by this date in past years and evidence of their feeding should be present on the leaves right along with the hail damage.  This year I have yet to see my first Monarch.  Plenty of other insects utilize the milkweed, but it just doesn’t seem right without the Monarchs.

Hail You Say

Last night, I made my arrival home from work just in time to greet a quite vicious thunder storm. The duration of the storm was only six minutes, but in that time we accumulated 0.4 inches of rain, not counting the hail. That’s a rainfall rate of 4 inches per hour. The ferocity of the event kept me confined to my car.

These hailstones are what kept me from making a dash for the house. Well, those and the almost continuous lightning and the sticks and other debris that kept blowing past the windshield. Not record breakers, but the large ones qualified as dime sized and seemed to have a lot of pent up rage they were trying to release. I was glad to be under cover.

Looks like an explosion of ice mushrooms beneath the pines. As the storm hit, I watched dozens of birds zip into the pine thicket. Wind blew, rain poured, hail struck, lightning flashed and the pine trees shook in all directions. When the storm began to subside, the birds emerged and went about their normal business. After witnessing the beating the trees took, it was not unreasonable to expect the ground to be littered with bird bodies. Not even a feather on the pine needles. The birds were unscathed.

I guess, even though the hail appeared at the time to be sufficient to batter any exposed life form, the actual distribution of the stones was broad enough that even a bird sitting on the open ground had a good chance of being missed. Add in the fact that only a small percentage of the hail was actually large enough to damage a bird plus the protective advantage of the trees and the chances of a damaging hit seem slight. I often wonder how wild animals survive some of our most violent weather, but I’m usually imagining myself stuck out in the storm, not the animals.

The storm was moving fast and soon spun itself off to the east. This is what you have to expect when it hits 80 degrees on the first full day of spring. At least we weren’t buried in snow again.