Vandalized!

We've been at the Writer's Lair on Lake Superior for two weeks now, and haven't seen much wildlife save for loons, mergansers and gulls just offshore. This year our encounters with local fauna seem to take place unseen and in the dark.

Last night our new bird feeder was trashed, even the steel standard bent. We suspected a mama bear and three cubs that have been spotted around the vicinity, but instead of bear tracks in the soft ground around the feeder, there were a number of deer imprints, according to the CSI squad that swarmed over the property shortly after dawn.

One of the investigators gravely concluded that the malefactor was large, possibly belligerent, maybe even antlered, and advised us to take steps to protect life and property.

We'll repair the feeder, but henceforth each evening we'll bring it into the cabin.

Vandalism always makes one feel violated, if one lives in the city. Up here in the semi-wilderness, however, residents are simply content not to get eaten along with the bird seed, and shrug off such four-footed depredations as part of the price one pays for living next door to nature.

Now if I can figure out how to rig a camera with a motion detector . . .

Changing the world ad nauseam

As a book review editor for 33 years, I quailed every time the UPS man brought me a new review copy of a book whose subtitle included the words ". . . That Changed the World." For some reason publishers believe that hackneyed and hyperbolic phrase sells books, even if it bears no resemblance to reality.

In fact, a couple of years or so ago some smart guy (was it P.J. O'Rourke?) wrote a hilarious sendup for (was it the New York Times Book Review?) on the subject. I wish I could find it and wallow in resigned indignation some more. (If any of you remember who it was and where it was published, please clue me in.)

My crankiness this morning is spurred by the discovery that David Maraniss, an otherwise sterling journalist, has produced a new book called Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. It may be an excellent work (many of the reviews are highly laudatory) but I do not plan to read it, just because of that goddam phrase.

Think I'm overreacting? Just Google "That Changed the World" (within quote marks, please).

Two million, nine hundred twenty thousand hits.

Dayumn!

This photograph from Wikipedia Commons shows the real Indian paintbrush.

Big error in the post last Wednesday about the wildflower called Indian paintbrush. Everything I wrote about it is accurate (as far as I know), but the photograph accompanying the post is of orange hawkweed, not Indian paintbrush.

I discovered my mistake by perusing the guidebook mentioned in Saturday's post and wondering why the illustration it carried of Indian paintbrush looked nothing like that of the flower I had photographed. A few pages later the orange hawkweed -- not even distantly related to Indian paintbrush, although it's often called "devil's paintbrush" -- cropped up, and it's a ringer for the photograph I took.

Pretty as it is, orange hawkweed, an immigrant from Europe, is considered a noxious alien in backyard gardens. It's not palatable, but it isn't poisonous, either. So much for being a potential murder weapon.

Sigh.

Of strawberries and stable flies

This one's a Wild Strawberry (Fragaria vesca). This time I'm sure of it. The Lady Friend, who spent her childhood summers here in Ontonagon County, upper Michigan, says so. She's backed up by What's Doin' the Bloomin'?: A Pictorial Guide to Wildflowers of the Upper Great Lakes Regions, Eastern Canada and Northeastern U.S.A., by Clayton and Michele Oslund.

I found that superb field guide last night at the visitor center in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, where a friend of mine, Joseph Heywood, who writes the excellent Woods Cop mystery series about an Upper Michigan conservation officer, was speaking as the park's artist-in-residence. The book was a serendipitous discovery, for as a retired journo and not-yet-retired mystery writer I have needed something new to occupy my time when the prose just isn't coming and the wildlife's hiding from my camera. And that's the photographic study of Upper Michigan wildflowers.

Photographing wildflowers in the field isn't as easy as it might seem. You've got to get really really really close to your subject, and when the wind's blowing it in and out of the camera's shallow close-up field of view, it's a tough moving target. Worse, at this time of year you've got to endure clouds of vicious stable flies; when I made it back to the Writer's Lair I was covered in them, despite liberal applications of bug spray, and their bites burned. Ten minutes outside was all I could tolerate.

The study of wildflowers ain't for sissies.

For those interested in photographic data, I used a Pentax *ist DS and a 50-200 Pentax zoom racked back to 50mm and topped with a Raynox 250 clip-on macro lens. Exposure was 1/60 second at f13, ISO 800, with on-board flash.

The bug spray was Cutter's and it didn't work at all. Nothing does against stable flies, except thick hazmat suits.

Now the leaves . . .

Continuing yesterday's discussion of the mysterious wildflower, the photograph above that I took in my driveway this afternoon shows the plant's elm-like leaves. Are we all agreed, then, that the flower is a species of common blackberry found in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

What's this?

For two days I've been searching white wildflower databases on the Internet and asking friends what they think this specimen is. It's about three feet tall, with half-dollar-sized flowers, and lives by our driveway on Lake Superior near Ontonagon in upper Michigan.

Friends have guessed dewberry and three-toothed cinquefoil. Photos on the Internet suggest it might be a toothed whitetop aster, a wood anemone, a beach strawberry -- and in a picture almost identical to the one I shot -- a California blackberry (Rubus ursinus). If it's really that last, it's waaaay east of its normal range on the West Coast and western intermountain states.

Can habitues of this blog come to my aid? There is no reward except the satisfaction of helping put a troubled mind to rest.

Murder weapon?

This isn't Indian paintbrush, but orange hawkweed. See the July 13 post for a photograph of Indian paintbrush.

A mystery writer is always looking for novel ways to dispatch a victim. That was not on my mind yesterday when the Lady Friend and I tramped about the woods near the Writer's Lair looking for woodpeckers to photograph. We came upon a copse full of Indian paintbrush, a familiar but always startling orange wildflower, the size of a quarter, whose centers burn fiery yellow in the sun.

I took the portrait of a clump, and when we returned to the cabin, looked it up. Dozens of species of Indian paintbrush -- called that because Native American tribes used it for that purpose -- are found all over the United States, and the flowers of this particular variety (Castilleja coccinea) are sweet and edible.

The flower is also full of selenium, and that is why the Ojibwa of Upper Michigan fluffed their hair full and glossy with a hair conditioner brewed from it. They also used it as a treatment for rheumatism.

The authorities, however, warn against eating a lot of paintbrush because heavy concentrations of selenium can be toxic. MedicineNet.com had this to say:

"Epidemiological studies of humans chronically (long-term) exposed to high levels of selenium in food and water have reported discoloration of the skin, pathological deformation and loss of nails, loss of hair, excessive tooth decay and discoloration, lack of mental alertness, and listlessness."

Does a killer ever stop to appreciate the flowers? Maybe in my next book one will. Could he use Indian paintbrush as a murder weapon? It would kill slowly, but surely, just as Victorian wives' arsenic dispatched hapless husbands.

But it would take a lot of patience and a long time -- too long -- perhaps, for a mystery novel.

Still the idea is fetching.