The Water Closet, Feb 22, 2013
February 22nd, 2013 | by Middleton Stream Team
One of a score of NASA satellites daily and yearly monitoring their dynamic patient for Earth scientists and us.
VIEWS FROM ABOVE
In the Water Closet, a shack that moves in the mind along the banks of the Ipswich River, Stream Teamers and Closeteers are without electricity and electronics. Sun, candles, and moon provide light. As old timers we take some perverse pride in this. PBS’s NOVA and other good TV shows are watched in our homes.
Last week’s two hour long NOVA entitled “Earth from Space”1 really got us thinking. Humans have added another layer above the atmosphere, and we are not speaking of green house gases and pollutants. It is near space with sensitive satellites that receive electromagnetic waves from land, sea, ice caps, (more…)
The Water Closet, Feb 15, 2013
February 15th, 2013 | by Middleton Stream Team
A fast flowing riffle of Boston Brook has melted an opening in the deep snow at Mill St, Middleton. Pamela Hartman photo
SNOWBOUND
(The great blizzard of February 2013 has us repeating this WC written after snow storms in February 2011.)
Confined in the Closet during recent storms some of us old timers harkened back to John Greenleaf Whittier’s long poem Snowbound1 that many of us Yankees had to read in school. Whittier lived two centuries ago just up the road on a Haverhill farm.
Snowbound’s first four lines are perfect:
The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon. (more…)
The Water Closet, Feb 8, 2013
February 8th, 2013 | by Middleton Stream Team
This photo of a foot-long yellow perch, a fish common in our ponds, doesn’t begin to do justice to its fresh caught beauty.
FISH AND MEN
An old Closeteer and his wife were given a beautiful gift last week. A half-dozen yellow perch shone their wonderful gold and pink-oranges in waning afternoon light. An ice fishing friend brought them directly from their home in Putnamville Reservoir, Danvers. The grateful recipients quickly cleaned the fish with some sadness. Cleaned is a blasphemous verb here, desecrated is more apt. Three females were plump with orange-yellow roe. Millions of eggs would never get a chance at fertilization. (more…)
The Water Closet, Feb 1, 2013
February 1st, 2013 | by Middleton Stream Team
This beaver lodge of sticks, logs and mud may well be the largest in the relatively wild lands of Boxford State Forest and surrounds. J. Schneider photo
VISITING THE WORKS OF BEAVERS ON ICE
In the northern tip of diamond shaped Middleton is a wonderful yet in ways a sad place that Stream Teamers and friends visit several times each year to view dramatic habitat changes and wildlife. Last weekend, thanks to the welcome cold snap and the resulting long awaited ice, we visited it again. In 1999 beavers built a substantial dam down drainage of Pond Meadow Pond. The impoundment formed behind it drowned more than 100 acres of “red” or “swamp” maples and Atlantic white cedars. By 2002 the cedars leafed out no more. The maples looked peaked. A few mature white pines among the maples were yellow instead of their usual dark green. A couple of springs later great blue herons’ nests appeared high up in dead pines. More followed each spring; now there are over 40 stark gray stick piles perched against the winter sky in the pines still standing. (more…)
