...bearded with moss

Perhaps you recall the lines to Longfellow's Evangeline, this is the forest primeval ... bearded with moss. For some reason quite inexplicable, I needed to escape this evening. And so I returned to the swamplands of Louisiana, where I made a point of photographing the Spanish moss festooning the cypress and other deciduous trees.

I first met Spanish moss as a little girl, when the family moved from Arizona to Florida. Mom and the kids made the trip by train. Once across the Mississippi in New Orleans, we transferred to a different train, which left late in the evening. I awakened in the middle of the night, looked out the Pullman car window and was both astonished at and a little frightened of the draped trees like something from a horror movie. Of course, once we were settled, the moss quickly became one more everyday plant that disappeared by becoming commonplace.

Here's what I found out from the Terrebonne Parish website: Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneoides) is an air-feeding plant or epiphyte found mainly upon cypress, gum trees, oaks, elms, and pecan trees in South Louisiana and Florida. It is not a parasite and does not live off the trees upon which it grows, nor is it harmful to the trees. It has been noticed, however, that its presence on pecan trees tends to reduce the yield, owing, no doubt, to the fact that to some extent it shadows the buds of the fruit.

Further: Spanish moss is not propagated by seeds but by fragments or festoons. These fragments are carried from tree to tree by birds and the winds. Birds frequently use strands of moss in building their nests, and in this way distribute the festoons. Evergreen trees seldom have moss on them, for the green leaves tend to ward off the festoons carried by the winds or dropped by birds. In the fall and winter when the trees lose their leaves, fragments of moss attach themselves to the bark. A moss which springs from a festoon or fragment grows to a great length, often reaching 10 to 20 feet. In the early summer this plant produces a very small yellow flower, hardly visible to the naked eye. Moisture and dust from the air produce all the nourishment necessary to keep the plant alive and growing.

The statement above is actually wrong about seeds; a Good Ole Boy down in Georgia has a web site selling Spanish moss to gardeners and craftspeople. Around the entire USA apparently. He notes that if the Spanish moss you're trying to grow up in Minnesota or Maine gets hit by the frost, there will likely be tiny seeds throughout the festoons which will regrow when the sun warms things up again.

At one time, the "moss" industry supplied furniture manufacturers with upholstery stuffing. Not so these days of foam and other man-mades, but it's a beautiful plant to just watch as it swings in the breeze, sometimes quite wildly. And just by the way, although Evangeline was written about Cajun Louisiana, the pines and hemlock bearded with moss were actually back in Canadian Acadia, where the sad tale began. No Spanish moss for Longfellow though I had never realized it!

Good Googling: Have you ever tried The Google's alert service? Very useful, it is. I have asked the oracle to notify me whenever a blog post mentions Prescott. Today, I received this fascinating link to UFOs seen over our hometown. (Between you and me, I didn't find the video very convincing.) Another intriguing use of The Google is to track trends, based on the rise and fall of particular search terms. Turns out that a rise in searches related to flu symptoms actually precedes reports from the government's Center for Disease Control.

The Louisiana oil bidness

With petroleum dominating much of the news currently, what better time to post the oil bidness pictures I took while in Louisiana. Aside from Cajun food, a university and local color, oil is what Lafayette is all about. We waited more than once at railroad crossings for tanker car after tanker car. And, on the highways (below), tanker trucks were everywhere.

When I asked the Sson about local industry, he noted that there were many specialty machine shops serving the exploration, drilling and pumping business. Very likely that well wrapped package on the truck below has something to do with oil.

More gear -- including pipes for moving the crude.

And there were storage tanks everywhere!

Trucks lined up to either fill the big tanks or to take the petroleum elsewhere. I have no idea which way the arrow points.

I caught sight of a couple of walking beam well pumps, though I was unable to get a picture. Mostly, they were hidden behind trees or way out in the bayous. (Not at all like those bizarre pumps that looked like insects which were all over the Long Beach that I recall from my childhood!) The picture above may be of a well -- or possibly a pumping station on a pipeline. I'm expecting my Aussie bro, who was once in the oil bidness in Louisiana to come down pretty heavily on my picture IDs, BTW.

Something related to oil is going on in the swamp behind those grasses (above). Other workings in the salt marshes (below).

A pipeline emerges here -- is there a name for such a location? Note fire plug!
These storage tanks were located in the Atchafalaya Basin bayous at the end of a pipeline. This immense wetland is where Robert Flaherty shot his prize-winning documentary, Louisiana Story, which contrasted the simple life of a Cajun boy with the coming of the oil wells.

Crude is transferred from the tanks to trucks at this point.

Of course, Louisiana oil is found not just in the countryside and in the bayous, but also in the Gulf of Mexico. Cameron is one of the little Gulf towns whose reason for being is the oil bidness. According to Investors Business Daily, there are 3,200 oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. During Katrina, not a single drop was spilled. More than 7 billion barrels have been pumped from these wells over the past quarter-century, yet only one thousandth of one percent has been spilled.

Here are two pictures of Gulf oil platforms. They were barely visible to the naked eye; it took all my telephoto zoom to get these faint images -- they certainly didn't spoil the view of this tourist! And, as Investors Business Daily notes, a study by Louisiana's Sea Grant college shows that there's 50 times more marine life around oil platforms that act as artificial reefs than in the surrounding mud bottoms. Some 85% of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these offshore rigs. The Flower Garden coral reefs lie off the Louisiana-Texas border. They are surrounded by oil platforms that have been pumping for 50 years. According to federal biologist G.P. Schmahl, "The Flower Gardens are much healthier, more pristine than anything in the Florida Keys. It was a surprise to me. And I think it's a surprise to most people."

We came across this wreckage on the beach; it had been one of escape pods kept at the platforms for emergency get-aways. One more note about offshore drilling -- apparently a Chinese company is drilling 60 miles off the coast of Florida in Cuban waters, tho Florida waters are closed to exploration.

And here's yet another side of the oil bidness, to make your day -- there will always be a lawyer!

Steps from Here to There -- and Nowhere

Stairs, like railroad trains and highways, are links between Here and There. Once in a very great while the There is obscure; usually, we're talking about the usual Up and Down. Example: these RR ties made into steps from the street up the incline to a yard here in Prescott.

Similarly, the pair of steps here (above and below). What caught my attention was how the stairs were integrated into the driveway. An interesting local innovation.

Back last month on my trip to Cajun country, which is also oil country, I scored these shots. I find stairs mounting a great tank (above) to be absolutely elegant and was pleased to get a replacement for pictures I took last year in Flagstaff, lost when my hard drive crashed. However, the tangle at the bayou oil collection point below is a bit of a puzzle. (One problem with Prescott is that we really have no interesting industrial stuff to photograph, except maybe old mines.)

But best of all in my stairway folder is a set of steps that deliberately go absolutely Nowhere. At all. Found at the National Ornamental Metal Museum, a favorite hometown showcase of the Famous Niece from Memphis. Names of cities and companies are featured on each rung; we couldn't figure out if all were steel mill towns/companies or not, though that's what we suspect.

Got water? Got birds!

Wow! Until an hour ago, when I looked more carefully at my folder of water bird pictures, I was not aware that I had managed to catch a pelican in flight. As you can see, the timing could have been better; his beak was definitely not holding more than his belly can. Yes, we're back in Louisiana for this post, and while some of the same birds might be found at our local lakes in the right season, there are several I've never seen before! BTW, praise be for the 12x zoom on the Canon; otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing most of these pictures.

The laughing gull, it turns out, is an easy bird to photograph. He's quite aware that food is to be had where there are humans. Pieces of bread. Popcorn. Potato chips. All the good stuff that your mother warned you about.

We saw a lifetime worth of gulls while waiting for a ferry to carry Sson's vehicle across a waterway. With cars accumulating, food was being tossed left and right to a large crowd of wheeling and dealing birds.

Snowy egrets (above) and cattle egrets (below) were plentiful in and around the bayous.

At one site, Sson and I frightened a large flock of cattle egrets .

Not sure, but this looks like a great egret landing.

The zoom was stretched beyond its limit to capture this stilt and his reflection. Not a single one of the stilts came any closer than what my LH used to call bird distance -- a careful spacing that keeps all birds the same small size for the observing birder. A very frustrating critter to try to photograph.

Now this is a lovely bird that does not appear in any of my books of Western birds -- a little blue heron. Yes, we have great blue herons at every pond or watering hole that is an acre or so in expanse, but the pretty bird above was a new experience.

As was the white ibis crowd we found in a dead tree on one bayou excursion. Again --I've seen many black colored ibis locally during fly-through season, but never one of these spectacular critters.


One very lucky day, Sson and I spotted a flock of roseate spoonbills in a crawdad pond. The birds were stirring up the water to feed by moving their amazing beaks back and forth. Just take a look below; no question where the name originated.

This guy must be a juvenile heron of some sort. But ... no idea of which sort. Yes, that is him below, too.

Linkage: Warren at TouchWind has found an amazing bit of totally misguided desert landscaping down in Tucson ... Rich is offering an interesting group of surreal Prescott prints for sale at a new site.