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14 April 2014
Shadblow (serviceberry)
A sure sign of the advent of spring in Fort Valley is the blooming of the shadblow, an understory tree species with clusters of white flowers: My wife and I took our son for a hike yesterday, and the shadblow was pretty much the only tree with anything on its branches: I infer that shadblow is named for the fact that its flowers “blow” (bloom) when the shad swim upstream …
25 March 2014
Root wedging: examples from Maryland and Texas
While I’m showing photos from last week’s Billy Goat Trail field trips (3 in total), let me share a striking example of root wedging from Olmstead Island, on the walkway out to see Great Falls: And, since I meant to get back to blogging about west Texas this week, here’s another example of the same process, seen with a different kind of tree in different sorts of rocks, in the …
11 November 2013
Monday macrobug: milkweed bugs on milkweed pods
Monarch butterflies aren’t the only insects that like visiting milkweed…
9 September 2013
Monday macrobug: pine sawfly larvae
These “caterpillars” are the larvae of the pine sawfly, Neodiprion sp. They were grazing on a small pine in my front yard. Sawflies are relatives of bees, wasps, and ants – they’re members of the Hymenoptera. But their larvae look so much like the larvae of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and flies (Diptera), don’t they? Beetles, too (Coleoptera) have “grubby” larval morphology. They’re wormy things, long bags of hungry guts …
5 June 2013
Stone tools of the Piney Branch quarry, DC
Archaeology meets geology in this visit to the Piney Branch valley of Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. Cretaceous deposits of cobbles of Cambrian quartzite were quarried by Native Americans and modified into tools thanks to the fact that they break with a conchoidal fracture.
30 May 2013
Springy stuff in my yard this morning
It’s been a busy week. Hardly any free time. Here are a few pictures from my yard, taken this morning. Please accept them in lieu of a real blog post: Eastern cottontail: Mountain laurel: The cicadas are trilling in a mad, constant, siren-like noise. It’s intense, and otherworldly. Talk to you later…
23 March 2013
Skunk Cabbage
On Friday, I took a field trip to DC with Geologic Map of the Washington West Quadrangle author Tony Fleming, City of Alexandria Natural Resource Specialist/Plant Ecologist Rod Simmons, and a host of interested folks from many different professions and localities. We were interested in looking at ecological relationships between rocks and plants, and had a pleasant afternoon hiking through Rock Creek Park. We also got in a little archaeology! …
10 January 2013
Hoerikwaggo Trail 4: fynbos vegetation
Callan continues his week-long recounting of his five-day backpacking trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Town, South Africa, along the Hoerikwaggo Trail. Today, we examine the ‘fynbos’ plants seen along the trail.
29 November 2012
Living in the Appalachian Forest, by Chris Bolgiano
Last week, I finished reading Living in the Appalachian Forest: True Tales of Sustainable Forestry, by Chris Bolgiano. It’s a grab-bag of stories from the forested mountains of the south-central Appalachians, ranging from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky and maybe Georgia, too. West Virginia and Virginia get the most attention. The driving question behind the book is: How should I manage my land? Since this is a key question in my …
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.