Grays River Grange #124

How 'bout Those Woolly Bears?

Gray's River Almanac, Number 4

by Robert Michael Pyle - Lecturer

            I'm sure everyone has noticed the many big shaggy caterpillars crossing the highway this month.  Folks often ask me about them: What are they, why are they crossing the road, and why are there so many this year?  What do they eat, where and when do they make their cocoons?  What do they turn into?  And do they really foretell the weather?  Children everywhere love how Woolly Bears gallumph across the road and curl up in your palm when you pick them up.  As Anna Botsford Comstock wrote in her Handbook of Nature Study (1911), "it seems to them a companion of the road and the sunshine; it usually seems in a hurry."  But where is it going?

Robert Michael Pyle at Redmen Hall

Friends of Skamokawa is celebrating the re-release of our Grange Lecturer Robert M. Pyle's The Thunder Tree with a short reading and book signing on Sunday, May 1, at one o'clock.

First published in 1993, The Thunder Tree shows how powerful the relationship between people, especially children, and the natural world can be.

An engrossing memoir and eloquent portrait of place, this reprint of the classic book makes  one of Pyle's important early works once again available for a new generation of readers.

This event will take place at Redmen Hall in Skamokawa, 1394 State Route 4 (Ocean Beach Highway).  Please call 360.795.3007 for further information during business hours, Thurs-Sunday, Noon to 4 PM.

THE WORLD AT OUR DOORSTEPS

May Day, 2010

Gray's River Almanac, Number 3

 By Robert Michael Pyle - Lecturer

           Never and nowhere has the aphorism "April showers bring May flowers" been truer than in Gray's River in the year 2010.  We experienced precipitation twenty-seven days in April.  And now our May Day gardens are fairly bursting with blue in the form of  bluebells, forget-me-nots, and camas lilies, the pinks and mauves of lilacs and bleeding hearts, the yellow of poppies.  Thea managed to get her lettuce starts into the wet ground, almost big enough to harvest in their pots. The lettuce, the grass, the bluebells, and everything else green is perfectly happy in the continual drip, even if it tries the patience of cats, cattle, and people.

            It is easy sometimes in the small Edens of our own backyards, in our green and pleasant valleys, to imagine that we are somehow removed from the larger challenges the world serves up, and that abundant rain is the biggest challenge we face.  Blessed we are to be here, to be sure; but does that really render us immune to the big-picture woes of the world?

Of Butterflies, Bigfoot, and Toads

Gray's River Almanac, Number 2

By Robert Michael Pyle - Lecturer

In his poem "Blue Butterfly Day," describing Spring Azure butterflies, Robert Frost wrote:  

It is blue butterfly day here in spring 

And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry 

There is more unmixed color on the wing 

Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.  

                  Some years our "blue butterfly day" has come in February, and with our pale-pink pioneer camellias in full flush almost a month early, the first blues could  be out any day.  So far, in the fitful sunshine, two kinds of  little inchworm moths flutter around first-bloomers such as spiraea and heather in the garden and native coltsfoot in the hills.  One sort is warm cocoa brown, the other black and white with blue and chestnut highlights if you look closely.  I call them "honorary butterflies" because they fly by day and look like tiny butterflies, though they emerge a few weeks earlier.   You'll know it when the first real butterflies come out: the brilliant sky-blue of our  Echo Azures is unmistakable. 

Gray's River Almanac

 Robert Michael Pyle - Gray's River Lecturer

Welcome to Gray's River Almanac.  In this series for the Gray's River Grange website, I intend to contribute brief observations on some of the natural goings-on in our charmed and challenged valley and its embracing hills.  Many of these will have to do with the passage of the seasons, and the annual events that follow the orbit of the globe.  What better time to begin than soon after the winter solstice?  Spring starts early here, and soon the daily changes will come hot and heavy, so I'd better begin.