With Winter Term approaching, it’s time to review your hibernation strategies. While we hole up in heated buildings, the burrowing wolf spider digs a den below the frost line to protect herself from the snow and cold.

Friday evening approaches and with it the event during which more people on campus will be paired off then at any other time in the year. Set up your roommate is tonight and, whether you are wondering who your roommate could have set you up with or wondering what they will think when they finally find the cookie to their milk or the Piglet to their Pooh, you might also want to take a moment to wonder about one of the potential pairings in the Arb. A den which Arboretum Director Nancy Braker found this past week suggests that there is a pair of coyotes in the area.

In addition to Professor Dan Hernandez’s fences, the stakes that indicate Professor Mark McKone’s plant community studies and the bird count posts there is another set of very interesting, but often overlooked markers hiding in the Arb.  In at least two spots, it is possible (though not always easy) to find markers that correspond to early land surveys of Rice County carried out around 1850!

The term Indian Summer has many proposed origins but the earliest to date gives credit to a letter written by Frenchman St. John de Crevecoeur in 1778. He described an Indian Summer as having a “tranquil atmosphere and general smokiness” following a period of cold before the true winter sets in. The term now most commonly and more formally describes a stint of warm weather in the fall, usually occurring just a few days after a frost. As it turns out this can usually be explained within the common fall meteorological patterns.

While the Cannon River flooding gave us many unique sights (the Great Wall of yellow sandbags, a soggy Froggy Bottom’s, and Carleton’s football-field-turned-toxic-swimming-hole, to name a few), one sight that you may or may not have witnessed was what washed up after the floodwaters began to recede—many of the river’s fish.

The flooding in Northfield last weekend was bad for Froggies, but good for the Arboretum’s floodplain forest. In lower Arb river and forest ecology depend upon periodic flooding events. Some of Carleton’s floodplain tree species include:  cottonwoods (Populus deltoides), silver maple (Acer saccharinum), and willows (Salix spp.). Flooding is also an important disturbance event, leveling trees or other vegetation leaving bare soil for new seeds to colonize. In this way, it works much the same as the Arboretums burning of the tall grass prairie.

If you get out to the Arb once in a while, you may have noticed some changes since you left last spring. That’s because while you were sitting inside looking at a computer screen, working some important internship, playing video games or going to the beach, this summer’s arboretum crew was wreaking death and destruction upon the invasive species of our beloved Arb.  Armed with a variety of cutting implements and herbicides, six Carleton students boldly stepped out to wage war against the buckthorn, honeysuckle, thistle, and wild parsnip that has plagued us for too long.

With the end of spring term upon us, the familiar sights and sounds of summer have returned to the Arboretum: the singing of birds, the chattering of squirrels, the raucous yelling of bonfires from the Hill of Three Oaks. But there are other things that we notice more passively, like the flight of dragonflies, for example. Many of us will be familiar with the sentry-like flight of dragonflies over open areas on a summer evening, but few of us are familiar with the Odyssean struggle taking place in our lakes, ponds, and rivers that allow dragonflies to enjoy a brief moment of terrestrial sunshine at the end of their lives.

My alarm went off too early on Saturday morning; I groped for my clothes and shoes in the dark before embarking on the chilly ride over Lyman Lakes. As shouts and blasts of music from Rottblatt floated through the morning air a smaller, more sober and considerably older-on-average group of Carleton students, alums, faculty and Northfield residents gathered in Saturday’s dawn to complete Carleton’s annual bird survey.

The Marc Von Trapp Memorial: Phase II
The Arb will be acquiring some sizable new residents.  No, it’s not buffalo, rather, some magnificent samples of local geology will soon be residing on the crest of the prairie in the Lower Arb. 

A strange substance coating a few feet of grapevine recently attracted the attention of your student naturalists.  It was so brightly orange that it resembled spray paint from a distance, but up close it looked and felt more like a damp mushroom skin full of Jell-o, and, when poked, emitted a clear liquid that tasted and smelled like water.  Had an extraterrestrial invaded the Arb?

It is burn season in the Arboretum. Maybe you’ve smelled it when the wind shifts and draws the scent of burnt prairie grasses across campus. Burning is visible in the blackened patches in lower Arb from the hill past the Memorial, and even a small patch next to the baseball fields.