The Pictured Rocks: Lake Superior

I wanted to see peregrine falcons. I heard they were nesting on top of  the Pictured Rocks. So I took the tourist  boat that cruises by the Pictured Rocks and was rewarded with the rare sight of a falcon.  This is a good spot for this swift bird because they like to dive on their prey.  The disadvantage is that preditors can raid their nests at this location.

Peregrines do well on tall buildings and the stacks of  municipal power plants where they can’t be reached by wolves, foxes, bobcats and other  predators.

Years ago, before DDT was banned, these beautiful falcons were nearly wiped out.  They were sensitive and the poison.  The banning of DDT was an environmental victory.

Read more about this in The Dynamic Great Lakes.

Available at bn.com, Amazon and Amazon’s Kindle reader and many other stores.

The Pictured Rocks: Lake Superior

Review of the Dynamic Great Lakes

The Dynamic Great Lakes

 

Review of The Dynamic Great Lakes

U.S. Water News – Peter Wild
Are dinosaurs cruising the benthic depths of the Great Lakes even while we go about our daily tasks? Not exactly. Yet sturgeon, fish weighing up to 300 pounds and similarly plated with armor,are nosing around down there. Occasionally you can see the monsters appear, making their spawning runs up rivers and surfacing like submarines in the pools beneath waterfalls.

The five Great Lakes, holding nearly twenty percent of the earth’s fresh water, are quite young. Gouged out by glaciers, they assumed their present shapes a mere 3,000 years ago. For that, they are a dynamic shifting system, still changing and exhibiting surprising differences. Lake Ontario, for example, the easternmost, although smallest of the bodies, holds more water than Lake Erie, its shallower nearby sister. Here’s a handy primer for all such things, from the interaction of phytoplankton and calcium carbonate that gives a white cast to these inland oceans come August and helps clean the water to the charming ice volcanoes spouting chilly “lava” in the winter.
This is intriguing stuff for adults, but the straightforward presentation also lends itself to use in schools, beginning about the sixth grade and up. And yes, we get the latest news on the zebra mussel, the tube nose goby, and other threats to the natural scheme of things. Also good news; how since the banning of DDT in the 1970′s, the bald eagles have come back.

The Dynamic Great Lakes for our Planet

A critically acclaimed non-fiction book.

 

 

I wrote my non fiction book, The Dynamic Great Lakes to share some of the important information I have learned over the years, even before the first Earth Day. The book has a search inside feature on Amazon.com with key words, reading levels and now it is available for the Kindle reader. It is also available at Barnes & Noble and many other bookstores.

Above all, it is a book that encourages people to take care of the planet. It’s the only one we have.

Maybe the Manitous

The Wilderness Within by Barbara Spring

It’s getting colder now on the Great Lakes. The water looks heavy, dense, and usually by Thanksgiving, the first ice begins to form on the shore. First one crystal grabs a grain of sand and then it begins and a stiff collar of ice forms along the shore on the eastern side of Lake Michigan. Maybe the Manitous is a poem from my book, The Wilderness Within.

Maybe the Manitous

Eastward rolling water
pellucid dense and slow
Karo syrup gloss or
flowing molten glass.
One crystal grabs
one grain of sand and
the beach blooms
with frost flowers—
a stiff white collar grows
all along the sandy shore.
Cold.
Icy winds blast.
Ice balls bob, wink, crash.
An eagle’s cry hangs
midair
above a white horizon line—
when sweetwater seas
freeze.
Late afternoon sun—
deep blue shadows on snow
manitous whisper to ice shelves
sibilant spirits speak —
murmur to structures below.
From Milwaukee to Muskegon
cold rollers flow, then splash through
ice volcanoes on the shore
troll caves and canon balls
shot from polar storms
or maybe the manitous.

The Dynamic Great Lakes

A Critically Acclaimed non-fiction book about the five Great Lakes

The Dynamic Great Lakes is available in the new edition at Barnes & Noble online or in stores. It is also available at Schuler Books and Music, The Bookman, Amazon.com (paper and Kindle edition) and many other fine stores.

Whitefish Run in the Great Lakes

Sophia's Lost and Found by Barbara Spring

Whitefish Run December

They speed upstream to spawn after dark
slick as ice and pearly white:
whitefish from Lake Michigan’s depths
torpedo home.
With sure instincts
with DNA of generations
with chartreuse eggs; with white milt
their sleek white shapes streak
through dark river waters
now starting to freeze.
It’s been this way in the Great Lakes
since Edenic times
when Ice Age glaciers melted away.
And now in this coldest December
anyone alive can remember
fishermen risk a walk the piers
wear cleats on their boots
tie themselves to something solid.
They jig rigged lines on the river bottom
and sometimes land a sleek, slick, delicious fish
while west winds howl.

Excerpted from Sophia’s Lost and Found: Poems of Above and Below.

This book is available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and many other fine bookstores.

Invasive Species of Shrimp in four Great Lakes

Is this critter good or bad?

Pesky shrimp may prove a food source

By Elliot Ferguson The Whig-Standard

An invading species of shrimp may offer a new food source for fish in the Great Lakes, a report from a team of Queen’s University researchers states.

First discovered in Lake Michigan in 2006, Hemimysis anomala, more commonly known as the bloody red shrimp, has been found in all of the Great Lakes except Lake Superior.

The shrimp is native to the Black and Caspian seas, the same area from which the zebra mussel came. Like the zebra mussel, the bloody red shrimp likely arrived in ballast water dumped out of ocean-going ships.

But while zebra mussels brought almost nothing but trouble with them, the Queen’s research team determined several native fish species are feeding on the new red shrimp.

“We’re not exactly sure about the impact yet,” said Queen’s biology graduate student Mike Yuille, the lead author of a study that is to be published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research.

“It’s a very different organism than zebra mussels.”

The research was a collaboration between Yuille, Queen’s associate professors Shelley Arnott and Linda Campbell and Timothy Johnson at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources Glenora Fisheries Station in Picton.

The ministry took samples at 19 sites along the north shore of Lake Ontario.

The populations of bloody red shrimp are higher in the western end and lower in the eastern end of Lake Ontario, Yuille said.

The shrimp tend to favour habitat with structures such as docks and piers or port areas, which are more common in the west end of the lake, Yuille said. The shrimp are also common in the St. Lawrence Seaway near Montreal, he added.

The Queen’s researchers focused on four of the ministry sites, collecting extensive samples of water, plants, insects and fish.

The team looked at the stomach contents of three potential predators, including round goby, yellow perch and alewife, for signs of the shrimp.

In addition, the team looked at the carbon and nitrogen levels of the fish muscle tissues, which would indicate whether they are eating the shrimp.

The team’s research showed that in areas with dense populations of red shrimp, the fish are eating them.

Yuille said the research is being conducted to investigate if the bloody red shrimp has an effect on the growth of fish in the Great Lakes.

Surfing Lake Michigan

Two Surfers About to Enter the Washing Machine

My watercolor of surfers about to jump in the heavy waves. Steve Damstra took a photo of this scene and I liked it so much that I made a watercolor based on it.
This is a dangerous spot to surf. Lives have been lost here.

Oil Spill in Kalamazoo River, MI

Read more about oil and the Great Lakes in my book, The Dynamic Great Lakes now available on Amazon’s Kindle.

Fall Turnover of Water in the Great Lakes

Here is an excerpt from my book The Dynamic Great Lakes

available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble

Fall Turnover of Water

On a cold November night with no clouds, the reflections of the
moon and stars sparkle on the calm surfaces of the lakes, and the
silhouette of a vee shaped string of geese migrating southward
crosses the salmon colored moon. Cold north winds have cooled the
Great Lakes waters.
As the air cools, the water becomes cooler and cooler. When
water reaches 39.2/ F, it reaches its greatest density. Waves rolling
in on the beach look heavier, almost like boiling sugar water as it just begins to thicken. The fall turnover of water is about to occur,
an important event in the natural cycle of the Great Lakes. When
surface lake water reaches 39.2/ F, its maximum density, the water
sinks since the surface water is heavier than the water below.
The sinking top layer of water causes the lake water to turn over.
The fall turnover of water in the Great Lakes is important because
oxygen poor water in the deeper areas of the lakes mixes with
surface water containing more dissolved oxygen (DO). This keeps
the bottom from becoming depleted of oxygen.
Bottom dwelling fish and plankton need dissolved oxygen in
water just as we need oxygen in air. When the layers of water turn
over, there are no longer three layers of water since mixed water
results in uniform temperatures.