The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Digressions on snails, fish, insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds and/or flowers, are all worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located.
Most people have heard about the majesty of Yellowstone Park, or Yosemite, or even the Serengeti of Africa, where thousands of square miles of natural areas remain, and charismatic critters, from moose to grizzlies, to elephants, can run free.
Not every creature can make its way to a national park. Many must design their existence around much more modest areas. And it’s those modest spaces this diary honors today.
South Houston, Texas, a few miles from the Ship Channel, just east of Hobby Airport, is probably in the quarter-finals for one of the most degraded places on the planet. Fifty yards from my motel, the water must be 90 degrees in the drainage ditch waters that are surging under the dully-named Airport Blvd, after flowing through the abandoned PCB refinery a mile upstream.
Still, the doves watch the magpies dive at my head when I walk to the muddy-bottomed ditch, past the scattered, tall sunflowers among the weeds. The magpies must be nesting in the Acadia and palm trees that line the street.
There’s a couple of feet of flowing water in the ditch. And there’s fish! Not just minnows, but a school of a dozen fish, some a foot long, making a life in this very modest place. Probably not carp, nor whiskery-faced catfish or bullhead, although the turbid water hinders identification. Maybe a drum fish, with a reddish cast?
Half an hour later, from the 6th floor motel window, I watch an egret stalk its way upstream in the ditch, towards the fish. I want to shout to it, "Don't eat the tainted crayfish." That’s one modest place.
Here is another.
I am told to weed whack the tall grass under the maple tree and around the Rhodies in our front yard. But I keep forgetting to do it, because I know there’s a grasshopper-sized tree frog that I’ve seen in that long grass. And that unmowed square is enough modest space for the frog to keep body and soul together, because I’ve seen that frog or its close relatives year after year.
And here is a final modest place.
My job curses me with the obligation to read environmental impact statements, which routinely scoff at the marginal habitat present in small wetlands, and often allow their destruction without any mitigation. I always object.
The quarter-acre wetlands on the golf course, for instance, harbor poplar and willow trees, and a foot or two of standing water until June, just long enough for the tadpoles to grow legs, and the ducklings to put on weight. There are bushes, berries, bugs, hiding places, and everything else a few sensitive plants, or birds or ducks or small mammals depend on, to hide and feed and breed, in this modest place.
And now please let us know about the modest places whose presence bring you peace, or any other aspect of the natural world you’d like to expound on.