"Odyssey" by Aldo Leopold

Another story I have recently read out of "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold is "Odyssey". I really did enjoy it and saw there were ways I could relate it to some of my class lectures. In this story Leopold relates to this thing he calls X and Y. If you don't know or can't figure out I should say, what these two things stand for, then the whole story is sort of confusing. It is kind of like a riddle. I have come to the conclusion (whether it is right or not) and X could be red phosphorus, and Y could be mercury. Neither of these things have related to what I have learned about in class recently, but I have read this story before, and tried to figure out what X and Y might be. I have had little luck, but in being asked what elements X and Y could be, those are the two that made most sense to me. This story helps explain bio-geochemical cycles mostly when talking about Y, but also touches on it with X. When the story talks about X being moldered underground and then sprouting a plant which is then being eaten or how it produces a plant that is burned and the smoke goes up into the atmosphere that talks about a portion of the abiotic factor of the cycle. When Leopold talks about Y in terms of its trips through the watershed that goes into talking about another element of the abiotic factor of the cycle. When reading about x and y they both give examples of what ever these two things are and their part in a cycle, the cycle they are talking about is the bio-geochemical cycle. This explanation of these elements in terms of the bio-geochemical cycle really made me think of them as a small molecule. It made me look at these things and think of them on a small scale than I think I normally would have. I feel sort of disturbed when I start to think of the atoms and molecules in my body. So much of the things we eat and drink are so bad for us, who knows what that is doing and how it is effecting the molecules in our body. I don't like not knowing where the meat or vegetable I purchase at the store come from, who knows what has been done to them chemically and that is what I am putting in my body...That is a disturbing thought to me.

"Thinking Like A Moutain" Aldo Leopold

I recently read the story "Thinking Like A Mountain", out of "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold. For those of you who haven't read it I strongly suggest reading not only that story but the whole book. I have and I really enjoyed it. The story starts out with a great description of a mountain, but from the perspective of everything on the mountain seeing the effects off the wolves and what they do on the mountain. From there Leopold goes on to tell about the day he watched a wolf die. This part of the story starts out by explaining one day him and a friend were eating lunch together on the mountain and they looked down to the river and thought the saw a doe, but to their error  when they saw this "doe" climbing the bank toward them they realized it was actually a wolf. As the wolf started toward them, half a dozen grown pups jumped out of the trees and joined the original wolf. Back in Leopold's time if you saw wolves, you killed them. So that's what they did, they started shooting at these wolves aimlessly. They had managed to kill the initial wolf they saw and when they went down to check it out, Leopold says they had reached it in time "..to watch a fierce green fire, dying in her eyes." This was the point at which Leopold realized there was something new he had never felt before when looking at a dead wolf. Something known only by the wolf and the mountain. Now this is a very famous part of the story. Many people may not know Leopold, but they probably have heard this part of the story. The story goes on to talk about how this happening was sort of a turn in Leopold life. It changed his life in a way that actually came to educate him and make him realize that less wolves does not in fact mean less deer. The story resumes from here talking about from that day on Leopold noticed a wolf-less mountain and new deer trails along the mountains side. This is because without the wolves there to hunt the deer the deer population rises. He also talks about how he has seen every last bushes being eaten, this is because there are more deer than food so everything is being eaten away down to nothing. The story continues to talk about bones (the deer dying off because there is not enough food) and how he now understands that just as the deer fear wolves, the mountain fears deer. He says this because with that many deer, they are eating away the beauties and lush greens of the mountain. The rest of the story talks about Leopold's realization such as these that he has learned due to the killing of that one wolf.

 The beginning of the story holds a lot of weight. It is really descriptive in an unique way and makes you really think. It is very deep, but also very creative in the way he introduces the mountain and how he goes about it in a way that plays part to every member that comes in contact with it. The first part made me feel sort of confused at first. I wasn't really understanding what I was reading. Once I dug into it a little more I felt very, holistic, in my thinking. It is hard for me to say if the beginning of this story is one that goes along with my feeling because I don't agree nor disagree. I feel like I am more of a holistic thinker than most people in our society today, but all in all I know I don't think the same way as Leopold. This to me is because I didn't grow up like he did. I have always grown up away from mountains and wolves. Yes I have always been a hunter, but I have never hunted wolves like Leopold. We lead very different lives and have experience different encounters with the things we have seen so it is hard to have a similar opinion which in turn makes it hard for me to have an opposing opinion as well. No part of this story made me feel uncomfortable. I think that hunting is a part of life and it will always be a part of life. I think people who don't educate their kids about hunting are foolish. No, Aldo's hunting techniques back then were not ethical, but they didn't know any better. They learned from their mistakes and worked to fix the damage they caused, and to me that's what counts.  Like I said before, I really like the story "Thinking Like A Mountain", I think it is really inspirational and an interesting read. I think anyone could think this way. Anyone that has read Leopold's work should know that he is a holistic thinker. I think the way he thinks is benificial to not only the environment, but to us too. It wouldn't be hard for me to think that way about where I come from. We don't have wolves but we do have deer. Funny yet sad enough it seems one of the biggest predators to the deer in my area is cars. Deer are getting hit by cars every night where I am from. Does it have the same effect on them in the area as the wolves did there? No, but it is still a factor to be taken into consideration. I don't think we should be hunting wolves in the U.P. just yet. I think they need a little more time (especially in certain areas) to continue to grow. If they aren't a problem, let them be. Once they start to show over population and begin causing problems, then I think it is time to do a little regulating.

Chernoff Face Activity

I have never done anything like this before, but found this to be a fun activity that you really can do with any age of students. In our class we did a "Chernoff Face" exercise. What this was is your teacher displays slide by slide what each feature of your soon to be face means. So you have this piece of paper and on it you are going to draw a face. On each slide you see the same three shapes (a horizontal oval, a vertical oval or a circle) but on each slide each shape means a different thing and stands for a different feature. So for example on the first slide you need to know what shape to draw your head. The shape you choose depends on your major. I am a math major so as you can see below, I had to have a vertical oval head. On the next slide you had to choose the shape of your eyes based off of where you were from. I was from the lower peninsula so I had to draw horizontal eyes. This continued for four more slides where you had to pick your pupils based on which types of sports you liked, your nose based off of which of the three pets on the slide you prefer, the mouth on the genre of food you prefer (out of the three given) and finally which type of music you liked the best based off of the three types given. Below you can see an example of what my face turned out like. After our faces were drawn we split into three groups based off of which of the three head shapes we had (from slide one). From there we split our groups up even further based off of what feature our group found as the 2nd most important feature on our faces. We did this one more time and then discussed how each group split up and why we each felt those were the 2nd and 3rd most important features on the faces. It was a fun exercise and like I said before can be done with just about any age with the tweeking of questions (features). 

Presque Isle; Marquette MI

A few weeks ago my class took a little field trip down to Presque Isle. Here, we started off talking about the different types of trees in the area and how to identify them. From here we went off into the woods and looked for specific things. Such things included; parasitism, commensalism, mutualism, intraspecific competition, interspecific competition. Also, we were asked to look at the micro habitat and how how it is different from the surrounding area, find an animal and describe its niche, as well as observe the biochemical cycle of Presque Isle.

This being said I will start with the example of parasitism I observed. It was really really hard finding all of these things in the area. This was because it is not a very big area and while we were there we did not see many animals at all. While we were there though I did manage to get eaten by many many little mosquitoes. I later realized that these mosquitoes where like parasites benefiting from living off of my blood.

An example of commensalism that I saw while we were there was with a squirrel and a tree. Even though we saw very few animals there two animals we did  see were squirrels and chipmunks. The example of commensalism that I saw was the squirrel using the tree to its benefit to house not only itself but all of its acorns. This helped the squirrel but neither helped nor harmed the tree.

I saw an example of mutualism before we even got up to the woods. Down by where you turn to come into the parking lot there are some flowers, sort of over by the playground. Over there when we were driving in we were stopped because the car in front of us wasn't moving while we were sitting there I was looking at the playground and then the flowers and I noticed a bee in the flowers. This is an example of mutualism because both the bee and the flower are benefiting from one another presence.

Finding interspecific competition was hard, but finding intraspecific competition was easy. As we were walking there were two squirrels fighting over something, I assumed some sort of acorn or food substance. This was funny to my because you usually don't see squirrels fight, or I don't at least. So even though it was kind of funny to me it was still a nice live example of intraspecific competition. I though I was seeing this again later in the day when my partner and I were walking back, but this time it was a squirrel chasing a chipmunk. This chipmunk had its cheeks full and my guess is that squirrel wanted what ever it was that chipmunk was carrying. Although to some that might have looked like playtime, to me it was an example of interspecific competition.

The micro habitat on Presque Isle is different from it's surrounding area because unlike everywhere else that part of the land hasn't been touched. Deer and chipmunks and birds and other animals are still able to and still do roam around freely in those parts because the have the food, trees and other plant life needed to survive. The areas surrounding Presque Isle are full of buildings, cars, roads and all this other stuff that has taken the place of these beautiful animal and plant organisms. These trees and animals couldn't survive in the surrounding areas because of the lack of space and other things.

The animal I choose to write a niche about was the squirrel; mostly because it was the only animal I saw more than 2 of. The squirrel has a niche of seed dispersal. They store food for the winter, but they do not find it all. So what ends up happening is they plant seeds in locations other than where they found them.

The biochemical cycle of Presque Isle is this; Nitrogen in the animals proteins (like deer) go into the ground where there is nitrogen in decaying matter and waste. Fro there bacteria "fix" nitrogen to be useful to plants which goes up through the soil into helping plants grow, the plants that the animals eat. The nitrogen in these plant proteins go back into the animals that eat these plants and the cycle starts all over again.