global warming | Hill-Stead's Nature Blog

Posts Tagged ‘global warming’

It’s a Puzzlement!

June 1, 2009

\"A Puzzlement\" sung by Yul Brynner, from \'The King and I\'
Press Here to See a Video Recording

“There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know-oh!

Very often find confusion in conclusion I concluded long ago -oh!

In my head are many facts that as a student I have studied to procure,

In my head are many facts of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!”

So sings the King in “The King and I”. Anyone who has ever given five minutes thought to the issue of climate change probably feels much like that. It’s hard to know what to think because there are so very many opinions as to why, if, how much and how bad climate change is. But as another famous figure said, “I know what I know.”

What I know is this. Theodate Pope and John Riddle were married May 6, 1927. It was a nice day according to the weather records. A low tempurature of 45 degrees overnight rose to a nice spring temperature in the low 70′s for the wedding day. Picture perfect. Naturally, there are lovely photos of the wedding day. John and Theodate are smiling together near the stone wall by the Sunken Garden. The household staff is lined up on the front lawn facing the house. And it looks like the middle of winter in the pictures.

In an earlier post, I discussed studies being undertaken at Boston University that examine Henry David Thoreau’s records of wildflower blooming dates. Thoreau kept exhaustive records which scientists are comparing to the average bloom dates today. Nature coordinates blooming times to the return of certain insects and birds, so that pollination can occur (now you know why they call it the “birds and the bees”.) Should the bloom and the bird/bug arrival get out of synch, the plant risks becoming obsolete. Fully a third of the species on the Thoreau list are extinct. I wanted to take an informal look at possible climate change at Hill-Stead seeing if there had been a noticeable change in the onset of spring over the years since the Popes and Riddles lived in the house.

Knowing what a great archive we have here at Hill-Stead, I asked Cindy Cormier (Director of Curatorial Services) and Melanie Anderson (Associate Curator for Rights and Reproductions) for some help. Mel waded through box after box until we found a couple of good ones from the wedding between Theodate and John Riddle. I wanted something with a sure date that took place in Spring. The wedding fit the bill. EVERYONE wants to have wedding pictures done in the Sunken Garden! Surely Hill-Stead’s owner and muse would have done it! So, we figured, there would be some nice outdoor shots of the happy couple.

There are some terrific photographs. I chose two and decided to duplicate them with my own photographs around the date of the wedding day to see how much ahead we are now, if we are ahead at all. I took them in color and then edited them into black and white so the comparison would be fair.

Here are the originals:

It’s nice seeing such a happy day. Wedding pictures are always fun to look at. But look at the trees in back. True, some are evergreen. But the deciduous trees to my eye anyway look just barely budded out.

OK, now to the pictures I took on April 28, 2009. I had good weather that day, with temperatures about where they were for the Riddle nuptials. I couldn’t bank on that being the case a few days later. And although in a few days’ time the trees would be more leafed out than when I took the photos, I seized the moment and clicked the shutter. Here they are:

Try to imagine the staff posed in front of this wall in the picture to the right. Now, below is a picture of where I think John and Theodate Riddle posed:

I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. I don’t presume to take a position on the whys and wherefores of global warming. But to my eye, in the modern photos there are clearly trees with flowers, buds and leaves on them. They look advanced to me. The dogwood in the staff picture is in full bloom as is the beauty bush in the “couple” photo. Maybe I am a few feet off, maybe that shrub wasn’t prominent then. In the vintage photos, I do think there are some buds here and there, but not much. Things look more like the beginning of April to me.

As in the King’s song, It’s a Puzzlement. Is the climate changing? It seems like maybe so. Is it a natural cycle, or did we place ourselves on the edge of the precipice we’re on? I’m not sure it matters, all I know is that the view from here is scary.

See you on the trails,
Diane Tucker, Estate Naturalist

Tags:environment, outdoors, wildflowers, nature calendar, global warming, sustainability, Uncategorized, climate change
Posted in Nature, environment, outdoors, Connecticut nature, walking, Conservation, plants | 4 Comments »

The Past is Prologue?

April 2, 2009

I hear that there are already tree swallows in shoreline towns here in Connecticut. I’m told that Eastern Pheobes are also here. I know it’s true, because they are both already right here on our property. They say that bluebirds are nesting. That’s true, too. While I cleaned the bluebird boxes a few weeks ago, male bluebirds watched and scolded me for lateness, popping right into the boxes as soon as I was done.

In the Sunken Garden, early bulbs are starting to poke up. Things are improving from a weather perspective, but that doesn’t make too much difference to plants and animals. The signs of season change occur whether or not the weather is cooperating. We may have crocuses blooming today, and six inches of snow tomorrow. However, birds, plants and animals will faithfully migrate, sprout and reproduce based solely on the hours of sunlight each day. Some get caught out by a late snowstorm, a long, raw spring, violent thunderstorm or another of the ups and downs to which nature is heir.

Scientists are gathering information to see whether this kind of climate-driven calamity is happening more frequently as the planet warms. Cooperation between species provides for plants to leaf out at the right time for certain birds and insects to come along and pollinate the plant. Should a link fail, for example, if a plant blooms too early, then its usual pollinators (the insects and birds) may not be there to spread the seeds. Consequently, early blooming caused by climate change could possibly endanger whole plant families. But is there any real evidence for earlier bloom time, migration and breeding? Phenology, the study of seasonal biological events, may help point us to an answer.

Traditional ‘hummingbird wisdom’ has it that you should hang out your feeder on May 1. Last year, I had my first yard hummingbird on April 25. He had to wait politely for me to fetch the feeder from the closet and whip up some nectar for him. The andromeda alongside my house flowered on April 10 in 2008. As I write this on April 1 , 2009, (no fooling,) it’s blooming now. My “stats” are anecdotal to be sure, but naturalists and scientists have always been keen on keeping these kinds of records.

Henry David Thoreau, for example, kept careful note of what- bloomed- when on his patch at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Today those records are the basis for scientists at Boston University who study climate change using his lists of blooming wildflowers. A sad statistic demonstrated by the records is that nearly thirty percent of those flowers are extinct today. During the one hundred and fifity intervening years, the mean annual temperature in Concord rose four degrees. Another thirty percent of “Thoreau’s wildflowers” are so scarce, they are likely to become extinct in the near future.

We keep records at Hill-Stead, too. Listings on the Carriage Porch, the Bookshop and the Trail Log Book (at the trailhead at the end of the parking lot) describe what is blooming in the formal gardens as well as what has been seen lately on the trails. And we love it when visitors share their sightings with us. So please tell us what you see, or leave a question or comment either here or in the log book.

For my own curiousity, I am doing a little informal review of some photographs in our archives. Using dated pictures, I’m going to try and see whether our plants today are blooming earlier than they did in Theodate Pope Riddle’s time. Wish me luck, and I’ll let you know how it goes.