Natural Resources Trust Of Easton - NatureTalk Blog

Be Egg-cellent!

9/19/2018

If you have ever been to Sheep Pasture, you know that we have lots of chickens! There are silkies, hampshire reds, turkens, brahmas, barred rocks, buff orpingtons, and bantams, and our staff works very hard to take to take care of all these chickens. And what do we get in return for all our hard work? Well, eggs of course! You can buy farm fresh eggs right inside our main office building for $4 a dozen, which might seem like a lot, but they are worth it. Most people who have eaten farm fresh eggs will tell you the flavor is unbeatable when compared to store bought. Others will say that they do not taste a difference at all. However, there is no denying the nutritional and conscientious benefits when choosing farm fresh eggs.
When cage free chickens are able to roam around, engage in natural chicken behavior, and eat things like bugs and leafy greens, they automatically have more nutrients available to them, which increases the amount of beneficial nutrients in their eggs. Farm fresh eggs are proven to have less cholesterol and saturated fats while having more vitamins (A, E and D), omega-3 fatty acids, and beta carotene. Omega-3s are so important for everyday bodily functions and preventing chronic diseases, and keeping your vitamin-D levels up is important for staving off other health issues.
Also, when you buy farm fresh eggs, you know exactly where those eggs came from and how the chickens were treated. Here at Sheep Pasture, our chickens are free to forage, take dust baths, and chase each other around all they want. We know that they are happy and healthy. What about store bought eggs though? How do you know anything about the carton you are picking up at the Shaw’s or Stop & Shop?
Unfortunately, most commercial poultry industries keep their chickens packed in small cages where hens barely have any room to turn around. Conditions are less than ideal with little access to fresh air, natural light and fresh food. The bottom line for these industries is made up of dollar signs, not comments about how wonderfully they treat their hens. So, if you want to support farms that raise their chickens in humane conditions, the Human Society of the United States has provided some tips on how to decipher egg cartons. Click here to read about the differences between the cage-free, free-range or free-roaming, pasture-raised, and certified organic labels. Or you could support your local farms and buy fresh eggs from places like Sheep Pasture!

Red Tide Rages On

9/12/2018

For the past 11 months, the state of Florida has been experiencing a red tide event that has left much of the Florida’s Gulf Coast devastated. The toxins produced by a specific species of algae called Karenia brevis have killed an incredible amount of marine life, including many fish species, crabs, eels, manatees, dolphins, turtles, and much more, and there have been no signs of it slowing down. Several Florida counties are now in a state of emergency as the economy, local residents, and wildlife populations suffer.

The term red tide is used to describe a harmful algal bloom, which happens when algae grows out of control while producing toxic or harmful effects on people, fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and birds. The algae is so numerous that the bloom often turns the water red, which is why the event is dubbed ‘red tide.’ The toxins produced by K. brevis, a species found in the Gulf Coast, attack the nervous systems of wildlife when accidentally ingested and the fumes given off can affect people's’ breathing.
However, red tide events are naturally occurring events. Reports of massive fish kills and aggravating fumes go back centuries in different parts of the world. Florida’s Gulf Coast does typically experience a red tide event every summer to some extent. However, this year’s occurrence, which began in October of 2017, has been particularly devastating. The question is why? We know that this species of algae, K. brevis, is always present in the water columns off of Florida’s Gulf Coast. So what is the reason behind this year’s intense and deadly algal bloom?

Dead loggerhead sea turtle washed up on Florida's coast.

One explanation could be the amount of agricultural runoff coming from the land. Typically, algal blooms will occur offshore but travel inland via water currents and winds. Then, when the algae meets the nutrient-rich coastline provided by runoff, we see dramatic algae blooms. Basically, the algae population has a steady food supply which could account for it to continue blooming and a red tide event to occur if harmful toxins are produced.

Researchers have also documented significant red tide events after major hurricane years in Florida. When all the rainwaters flood the land, they eventually bring nutrient-rich runoff back into the Gulf resulting in red tides, which occurred in both 2004 and 2005. Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017 which brought massive amounts of runoff back into the ocean. Therefore, the red tide the state is experiencing now would be consistent with this theory. Also with climate change scientists predicting more frequent and intense storms, more severe red tide events could continue to occur in the future.

Meanwhile, the debate over the causes of red tide, mainly man-made vs. natural, rages on. There are researchers, scientists, politicians, and members of the public that fall on both sides of the argument, while many believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Nutrients are most definitely produced naturally in environments, and in some circumstances, naturally produced nutrients have caused algal blooms. We also know man-made nutrients have driven many algal blooms worldwide as well. Therefore, the answer is not entirely clear.

Either way though, solutions are needed and there is one interesting idea in the works for mitigating this problem. Mote Marine Laboratory has created a device called the “Ozone Treatment System” that can filter 300 gallons of water per minute and is designed to break down toxins in the water by injecting the water with ozone. Currently Mote scientists are still in their testing phases, but there does seem to be a ray of hope on the horizon.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

9/5/2018

Balloons have been a tradition at celebrations like birthdays and weddings but they are actually causing more harm than good. Balloons released into the air must come down eventually, right? Well where do they go after that?

Most of the time they end up in the ocean where many sea creatures mistake them for food. When an animal eats the balloon it blocks it digestive system leading to starvation. The balloon itself is not the only dangerous part, the string can also be wrapped around many animals and cause serious damage, even suffocation. Some balloon are marked as 'biodegradable' but they take a very long time to decompose, even longer in the water, where so many end up.

There are a number of states that have banned the release of balloons including California, Connecticut, New York, and Tennessee. The Blue Ocean Society does studies in New England from whale watch boats and found that balloons were the most common trash found.

Many people release a bunch of balloons to celebrate or remember someone but there are many alternative ways to celebrate. Instead of releasing a hoard of balloons plant a pollinator garden, fly a big group of kites, and use banners or streamers to decorate. You can also float native flowers down a stream, create wildflower seed bombs, create a rock garden or even blow bubbles!

Follow these links for more information!

https://balloonsblow.org/

https://www.fws.gov/news/blog/index.cfm/2015/8/5/Balloons-and-Wildlife-Please-Dont-Release-Your-Balloons

Oh Dam!

8/29/2018

This Monday is Labor Day, a day dedicated to American Labor workers in the time of the labor movement. An animal that is a very hard worker and comes second to humans in manipulating and changing their environment is the beaver. Worldwide there are only 2 species of beavers; the American Beaver (castor canadensis) and the Eurasian Beaver (castor fiber). The only differences are that the Eurasian Beaver has a slightly narrower skull and tail.

The aquatic lifestyle of the beaver requires it to have some special adaptations to help it survive and thrive. Like most semi-aquatic animals beavers have webbed feet, but they also have very oily fur to repel water and to keep them warm. One of the most famous features of a beaver is its large, powerful tail. They use their tail as a rudder to help them swim like a torpedo underwater. Not only does their tail help with swimming, it helps with talking to; beavers slap their tail on the water to communicate with other beavers in their colony and with intruders of their territory.

As one of the biggest rodents, beavers have strong powerful teeth that never stop growing, so their herbivorous diet is crucial to their dental health. By gnawing at wood and bark their teeth remain healthy while also helping build their habitat and change their environment. Because they stay in their lodges for most of winter they cache a lot wood to eat during the season. In the warmer months they also eat a lot of aquatic vegetation.

When building dams and lodges, usually located in the middle of ponds and streams, they can change the direction of the water flow.Their lodges provide protection from both predators and the elements with their underwater entrances. Sometime this is helpful to protect watersheds for migratory birds and other species, but more times than not it can severely affect the chemical and sedimentary makeup of the ecosystem.

If you’re as busy a beaver make sure to relax this weekend!

Kid Creations for Environmental Protection

6/4/2018

Teaching climate change to students, especially younger students, can be a difficult task. You can explain how burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases into the air, making it difficult for heat to escape our atmosphere. You can show how this greenhouse effect is resulting in increasing average global temperatures, which in turn affects weather patterns, ocean chemistry, sea levels, and the overall balance of most major ecosystems. You can emphasize that if we don’t make major changes now, then our planet is going to be in serious trouble in the very near future. But after instilling all this knowledge, all the student really feels is a sense of despair and helplessness, which is why teaching climate change and its impacts is so hard. Therefore, the next step is proving that they aren’t helpless, there are kids out there doing incredible things for the environment, and you are never too young to make a difference.

Let’s start with a young man named Nikita Rafikov from Evans, Georgia. At age 11 Nikita envisioned a futuristic home that would light itself without the use of any electricity. Inspired by the humble jellyfish, Nikita found a way to create windows that emitted their own light! He took a protein called green fluorescent protein, which is found in certain jellyfish and causes bioluminescence, and embedded it into windows. Nikita is working on perfecting his prototype but he may be the future when it comes to lighting our homes without electricity!
Listen to Nikita himself explain how he developed his own self-lighting windows in the video below!

Jai Kumar of South Riding, Virginia also created an invention but his project focused on air quality. At the age of 12, Jai understood that air pollutants released from burning fossil fuels can be very dangerous, especially for people living in developing areas where factories are typically located. So Jai found a way to purify air before it enters homes by building a window-mounted solar powered air filtration device! For his creation Jai had won third place for the Discovery Education and 3M 2014 Science Competition.

Now if you are thinking you have to be a science and/or engineering whiz and then build a complicated device to make a difference, you’d be wrong. Lynnea Shuck of Fremont, California found her calling in education to help other kids connect to the environment. When she was 17, Lynnea started a Junior Refuge Ranger Program at Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. In 2010 she had started as a volunteer for the refuge and quickly recognized a greater opportunity for environmental education. For her efforts Lynnea received the prestigious Earth Islands Institute’s Brower Youth Award in 2014 and has continued to expand her Junior Ranger Program to other wildlife refuges.
Listen to Lynnea describe her experience as a refuge volunteer, the importance of environmental education, and why she developed the Junior Ranger Program!

Crazy Canine Careers!

5/29/2018

Dogs are excellent family companions but did you know they can do so much more!

Canines are known for their awesome noses and when they get put to good use they can save wildlife all over the world. For a long time we’ve heard about dogs helping people either by working with police, search and rescue or even with people with special needs. But they can also help their fellow animals such as salamanders, turtles, and even penguins!

In New Mexico there is a Border Collie who helps protect the Jemez Mountain salamander. This salamander is endemic to that mountain range, which means that is the only place on earth it is found. Finding and trapping salamanders is very hard for humans but this border collie sniffs them out in order to conduct population surveys.

Another helpful hound is Captain Ron the turtle sniffing beagle! Captain Ron uses his outstanding olfactory skills to smell the thin layer of mucus that surrounds the eggs. Once the nests are found wildlife protection agencies can mark where those nests are and make sure they are left alone.

Finn is a rescued yellow lab rabbit-infested islands to protect penguins and petrels! On an island in New Zealand there are out of control rabbits that strip the land of vegetation and take over penguin and petrel nests. They tried introducing foxes but that didn’t work so not they use a very targeted pesticide. They need to get the rabbits before they burrow in a nesting hole and accidentally spread the pesticide, so Finn sniffs out the rabbits to keep all the birds safe. Finn is easily motivated, his reward for sniffing out the rabbits is some playtime with a rabbit skin-covered tennis ball!

Who new dogs were so talented!

Support Your Native Plants!

5/21/2018

CALLING ALL GARDENERS!! CALLING ALL GARDENERS!! PUT THOSE FORGET-ME-NOTS DOWN. Yes, those beautiful blue, low growing plants would make an excellent border for your perennial garden but you cannot use them. The reason for that is these plants, along with a long list of others, are highly invasive in the state of Massachusetts. This means that they do not naturally occur here, and if introduced to the area, these invasive plants will grow rapidly and push out the native plants. Your native plants are the ones you want to support!

There are many super important reasons why you want to plant natives and here are just a few:

They are low maintenance because these plants are from this area, are generally disease resistant, have natural protections against insects!
They are highly adaptable! Environmental conditions of New England change consistently throughout the year and your native plants are adapted for these changing conditions, making them much hardier and more likely to survive!
Native plants are good for the local ecological community because they naturally support the local animal populations by providing food!

So, steer clear of invasive and exotic plants. This spring, when you are planning your gardens, make a conscious effort to plant natives, and if you need help getting ideas on what to plant, click here for a list of useful resources!

Click here for the Massachusetts Prohibited Plant List.

Not sure how to start that garden with native plants? For more tips on native gardening, please visit: http://www.grownativemass.org/

Whoa Baby!

5/15/2018

Now I know you know the basics like a baby sheep is a lamb and a baby cow is a calf but do you know what a baby alpaca is called? An alpacapette? An alpacapup? An alpaclette?
Well the proper term is actually, cria, which comes from the Spanish word for baby. Llamas, vicunas, and guanacos, types of camelids, are all called crias when they are babies. Alpacas are native to the Andes mountains in countries like Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Chile. Alpaca wool is some of the best around, its warm, smooth, fine and soft, what more could you want?

Have you ever been in the woods and seen a tiny spiky creature running along the forest floor? Well be careful because those little porcupettes will grow into a porcupine! Porcupines can’t actually shoot their quills so if you stay a safe distance away and leave them be you should be fine. If you hear a porcupine stomping its feet, much like a child during a tantrum, they feel threatened and they could come after you with those quills!

Opossums are the only marsupial found in North America so just like other marsupials, like kangaroos and wallabies, their babies are called joeys. Marsupials are a group of mammals in which the babies are born prematurely and develop outside of the womb with access to milk most of the time in a pouch. Opossums are special in another way as well: teeth! They have the most teeth of any land mammal, ringing in at 50 teeth.

Another interesting mammal is the platypus whose babies are called puggles! They have a duck bill and feet, beaver tail, and otter body, oh and they lay eggs too! Females lay their eggs in a burrow and keep them warm between their tail and body but even after they hatch there is a lot of parental care to be done. The males have an additional adaptation as well: venom. On the inside of its ankle males have a venomous spur to protect themselves from any arising danger.

Back to Kindergarten: Butterfly Basics

5/7/2018

These past few weeks NRT naturalists have been visiting Easton's kindergarteners to teach them about butterflies! Students learn not only how butterflies sense the world around them but also how they transform from a tiny egg to a beautiful creature. A touch of acting is required from students as well! However, the interesting part about an adult teaching a seemingly simple lesson on butterflies is the amount of new information the adult learns just by brushing up on their butterfly facts.

For instance, did you know butterflies taste with their feet? Unlike humans, whose taste buds are on their tongues, butterfly taste buds are on their legs, which enables them to taste the plants they stand on. Also, not only will they use their taste buds to figure out what is food and what isn’t, but these sensors will let them know whether or not they are on a suitable leaf to lay their eggs. Who knew being able to taste with your feet could be so important!

Also, when most of us think of butterflies, we tend to picture these graceful and beautifully colored insects. However, those wonderful colors and patterns we are seeing are not actually there. Butterfly wings are clear! The colors we see come from light reflecting off their scaly wings. And they aren’t necessarily fluttering around all lazily neither. While most butterflies only reach speeds between 5 and 12 miles per hour, there are some butterflies that can move faster than a running horse! These fast butterflies are known as skippers and can fly up to 30 mph or faster!

So yes, heading back to kindergarten might not seem like a big deal because as adults we assume we learned everything there was to learn during that time. However, don’t be surprised when you do learn something new, like where butterfly taste buds are or how fast different species can fly. It is never too late to get in touch with that inner student and expand your knowledge!

In-tree-guing Trees

4/26/2018

Tomorrow isn’t just the last Friday of the month. It also happens to be Arbor Day! For most, Arbor Day comes and goes each year without so much as a second thought. However, Arbor Day is an important holiday with an impressive backstory. The very first Arbor Day was celebrated on April 10, 1874, when a Nebraska pioneer named J. Sterling Morton used his prominent position as editor of Nebraska’s most popular newspaper and spread his enthusiasm for trees. When Morton became secretary of the Nebraska territory, he proposed a tree-planting holiday called “Arbor Day,” and prizes would be awarded to individuals who planted the most on their properties. It is estimated that over one million trees were planted on our nation’s very first Arbor Day. So in honor of this year’s Arbor Day, we decided to share some of the coolest trees our Earth has to offer.

The Giant Baobabs of Madagascar
The baobab trees of Madagascar are famously known for being located in a place called the Avenue of Baobabs, which is a dirt road stretching between two different regions in western Madagascar and lined by these trees. These baobabs are some of the only remaining ones left in this region, seeing as many surrounding forests have been cleared to support the growing populations. However, these particular trees are held in high esteem amongs the locals, who treasure the baobabs. There is even a local legend of two entwined baobab trees that have grown together throughout the centuries to represent the love between a young man and woman from two different villages. The couple, who could never be together, had asked the gods for some way to let their love live on and the entwined baobab trees was the answer to their prayers.

The Aptly Named Rainbow Eucalyptus
Perhaps the most colorful tree you can find is the mind blowing rainbow eucalyptus, named for its special bark that bears the colors of the rainbow! To find these trees you could travel to their native regions of the Philippines, New Guinea, and Indonesia where the rainbows will be growing in the tropical forests. The rainbow eucalyptus is incredibly fast growing; it has the ability to double its height every year and can reach a whopping 250 feet in no time! Obviously the most outstanding feature is the rainbow bark itself, but how does that even happen? Well, the bark from the previous season peels away, revealing colorful parts of the tree underneath. This leaves the trunk with streaks of grays, reds, oranges, greens, and blues!

The Otherworldly Joshua Tree
If you drive to 74485 National Park Drive in Twentynine Palms, California, you will find yourself entering the land of Joshua Tree National Park, which of course is home to the peculiar Joshua tree. The Joshua tree, which is part of the yucca family, grows only in the Mojave Desert and can live up to 150 years old. The tree is said to have been named by Mormon travelers who, during the mid-19th century, thought the tree’s unusual shape looked like the biblical Joshua raising his hand towards the sky and waving them in the direction of their promised land. Of course the tree had long been known to Native American tribes, who would use the leaves for making baskets and footwear while eating the buds and seeds.

To read more about J. Sterling Morton and history of Arbor Day, visit the link below!
https://www.arborday.org/celebrate/documents/history.pdf