It’s been awhile since I’ve had time or anything to write about here. However I also am an author at the Stop Mountaintop Removal blog and I wrote a post about wind power.
Visit One Alternative to Mountaintop Removal - Wind to read more on the subject.
Pennsylvania is doing quite good with funding renewable, green energy, but it needs to do more, just as the whole country should be.
As I write this I am sitting outside enjoying the nice weather. It’s a little breezy, but otherwise its a beautiful spring day. I took a short hike and heard a turkey gobble rounding up his hens while I was in the woods. Here is a picture of the leaves all torn up from them scratching looking for grubs and other goodies they like to eat.
The groundhogs are coming out of their holes looking for some grub as the hawks ride the thermals scanning the ground below for a tasty critter or two.
The pond is nice and clear with all of the fresh spring water flowing into it the last month or so. Here are a couple of pictures I took of it today.
I guess the bass and bluegill are still hibernating down deep, but after a few more sunny days like this you won’t be able to walk by the pond without seeing at least ten of them swimming by.
Lastly here are some spring pictures of various birds at the feeder. Make sure you click on the first one to see it larger then it is here… quite a lucky shot, and these little guys will disappear until next winter.
Denny over at The Backwoods Drifter has another report on the damage being done by Massey Energy and the likes in West Virginia.
… brought to you by the coal industry.
The more I talked with people in Drews Creek the more it became obvious they didn’t have a clue about the new mountaintop removal site. It was just like one day there is peace and quiet and the next day your picking broken picture frames up off the floor and wondering how many explosions it will take to knock your house down.
….
If I have to start 20 websites - I’m going to hang the coal industry’s dirty laundry all over the internet. The new mountaintop removal site in Spring Hollow - now you are on my turf - just try to keep my camera away. I can get to the site a half dozen different ways.
…..
Don Blankenship, Bill Rainey, Roger Lilly - ignorance defined.
Make sure you check out Denny’s other blogs: Bolt Mountain and Stop Mountaintop Removal
Help spread the word!
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I’m not sure what was with this goose today. I was in the house doing some cleaning and I heard it honking. Thinking it was a gaggle flying over, I looked out the window and there it was. The goose was alone and stayed around for close to an hour honking away.
I’m not sure what exactly was wrong with it. I know that if a goose is wounded or sick, that one from the gaggle will stay behind with the lame bird, but I didn’t see any other geese around with it. It ended up flying south, honking as it flew until I couldn’t hear it anymore.
Although the Canadian goose can be a nuisance animal this one was actually kind of nice to see. Seeing them lets us know that spring is finally back, even though you wouldn’t know it with today’s temperature.
On another note, I took some more pictures from up on gobblers knob, there is just such a nice view up there that I’m frequently taking pictures up on that hill. In fact the photo in the header of this blog is shot from up there.
On closing, there were 4 turkey out at the end of the corn field this evening. Two of the smaller ones were gobblers for sure, in fact one had about an 8 inch beard. The other beard I saw was pretty short, probably a jake from last year. The biggest bird never gave me an angle to see if there was a beard or not, but it sure had a wide tail as it pecked along looking for grubs.
I received an email today from David Masur over at Penn Environment asking me to write my state senator to support House Bill 1281, the Pennsylvania Appalachian Trail Act. It seems that the trail in our state is being threatened by expanding development. According to Penn Environment :
One of Pennsylvania’s best known and most cherished historic and natural places is the Commonwealth’s portion of the Appalachian Trail.
The Appalachian Trail includes 229 miles of trails in Pennsylvania alone, and is home to dozens of threatened and endangered species, and may contain the greatest biodiversity of any unit of the National Park System.
Unfortunately, the Pennsylvania portion of the Appalachian Trail is being threatened by encroaching overdevelopment. For example, Reading, PA-based developer Richard Muller, Jr. has been pushing to build a $25 million auto racetrack and road course adjacent to the Appalachian Trail in Smith Gap Township, in the Poconos, since the township was lacking appropriate zoning laws and protection for the Trail. This is just one extreme example of many proposals where overdevelopment and extensive construction projects are encroaching on Pennsylvania’s section of the Appalachian Trail.
We need to preserve Pennsylvania’s portion of the Appalachian Trail from encroaching overdevelopment and other threats. Penn Environment is supporting the Pennsylvania Appalachian Trail Act (HB1281 sponsored by Rep. Bob Freeman of Easton), which will give local townships more ability to protect the Trail from further destructive activities.
To read the full text of the bill, visit The Pennsylvania Legislature website and to make it easy to write your senantors, Penn Environment has an online form to fill out here: write your senator .
For more information on the entire Appalachian Trail, visit The Appalachian Trail Conservancy website.
After seeing the pictures Denny posted on his Stop Mountaintop Removal blog about acid mine drainage, I decided to take some similar pictures from my area. The effects from mining coal last for decades and possibly 100 or more years. These pictures are of runoff from the Sagamore Mines in Armstrong County, PA. These basins are on slightly different elevations, with the water flowing through 1 then dropping down into the next. I guess this gives the compounds that are suspended in the water time to settle and end up in the soil. They recently dredged these to remove the contaminated soil, but I wonder how red it was before dredging and how often they clean it out.
Below is a pile of soil contaminated by the sulfuric runoff from the abandoned mines.
Below is an image from Microsoft Virtual Earth. I have marked the area in red where the above images were taken. You can clearly see the polluted water still entering the lake in this image. Make sure you click on the image to make it bigger.
I guess this is an effort to keep our waterways safe, but the disturbing reality of this area is that it is located at the head of a very beautiful lake less than a mile away from where I live. The lake itself was built to keep a supply of water for steam and the cooling towers at The Keystone Power Plant a few miles away, which is one of the “dirtiest” power plants in the nation, releasing more mercury than any other power plant.
Pennsylvania has quite a few problems related to coal mining. According to ActionPA.org Pennsylvania’s Dirty Energy Legacy…:
Abandoned Mines and Subsidence
- Pennsylvania has one-third of all the abandoned mine-related problems in the country, more than any other state in the nation. Pennsylvania is home to over 250,000 acres of abandoned surface mines. Abandoned mines, coal refuse banks, old mine shafts and other relics of past mining exist in 45 of our 67 counties.
- Approximately 200,000 acres of land throughout Pennsylvania are prone to subsidence, a type of shifting in the ground caused when mines collapse, that can crack homes’ foundations, redirect streams, damage roads and more.
Pennsylvania is home to 90% of the country’s mine-related hazardous and explosive gas problems and half of its hazardous water bodies.Acid Mine Drainage
- The single biggest water pollution problem facing Pennsylvania is polluted water draining from abandoned coal mining operations. Over half of the streams that don’t meet water quality standards — more than 2,400 miles of the state’s 54,000 miles of streams — don’t meet standards because of mine drainage.
- Pennsylvania is the worst state in the U.S. for acid mine drainage.
While here in Pennsylvania, we don’t have to worry about Big Coal ripping the tops of our mountains off and pushing them into valley’s(although strip mining sometimes comes very close), we do have some of the most serious environmental issues in the nation related to coal.
You can read more about acid mine drainage on Wikipedia’s acid mine drainage page.
Man I can’t wait for Spring to completely arrive! I’m sick of everything being so dull and gray. At least there are still sights to see that aren’t so bad. These turkey were in the corn field behind the house when we pulled in.
They had already started to head out of the corn field and into the Christmas trees when we pulled in, so I had to jump out in order to get the pictures. The last 2 were at full digital and optical zoom, so they are a little blurry. It’s odd that there were only 2 there. We have been seeing a flock of at least 10 of them.
I’m sure by the time “Spring Gobbler” has arrived, they will have moved elsewhere anywhow, so its nice to see them while they are here.
I couldn’t find any pictures that show just how difficult the morel mushrooms are to find here in the woods of Pennsylvania. However, I think you can see from the image on the bottom. Now just imagine the forest floor covered in oak leaves and trying to spot these guys poking their heads up through!
If, you know where a patch is, they are easier to find, because you know they are there and once you spot the first 1, they are easier to find. Just try finding a new patch tho, you can be in the woods for hours and not find a single 1.
Around here they mature around the end of April into the 1st part of May coinciding with the 1st week of Spring gobbler season.
They seem to grow in a variety of environments. The spot we find them in I believe was an orchard at 1 time. I have read that they grow mainly on south facing slopes, that they like soil underneath Ash and Oak trees, and that they also like the ground under dead Elms. I don’t know if there are any elms left around here, there was a disease that nearly wiped them off of the face of the planet a few years back.
If you like mushrooms, then you will definently like these things. Fry them in butter and serve as a side dish to anything you like.
I’ll start this post with 2 of my nicest pictures. To me, these 2 pictures define what I thought the “country life” was all about when I still lived in the city. The views around here never fail to amaze me! Sometimes I wonder how I ever lived in the city at all. It’s so much nicer being able to walk out the back door and be in the woods in minutes. Or to jump on the quad and go riding, without having to load it up and take it somewhere to ride it. Or to go outside and shoot a gun anytime I might want, without having to worry about getting in trouble.
These are just a couple of the pictures I have added to the new Pennsylvania Backwoods Photo Gallery. I got the idea for the new gallery from Denny over at The Backwoods Drifter after he put up his gallery at
Backwoods Drifter Photo Gallery
Actually, I kinda get a lot of influence from Denny, including the idea for my blog and part of its name, so thanks Denny! Make sure you stop over at his blog and say hi. Denny does many posts on the destructive behaviors of big coal, so if you like the pictures of the scenery in my gallery and enjoy nature, make sure to give him your support so we can keep nature looking like the 2 pictures up there instead of this:
I also want to say hi to Adam in California. He will be here to visit next week and he also likes the scenic vistas around here. I told him this summer that I was planning on starting a blog to show off the scenery around here, so here it is! If you want you can register here and if you want to show your friends pictures from here go to the photo gallery. Cya Wednesday!
