Tag: Environment

Archaeologists at James Madison’s Montpelier have spent the last three years excavating bits and pieces of the president’s world, searching for clues about his life on the plantation.

A team led by archaeologist Dr. Matt Reeves—working with a grant from the National Endowment for Humanities for a study of slave communities—spent years digging up layers of red dirt where a building used to stand on the property, and were surprised by what they found the deeper they went. Now, parts of Madison’s threshing machine from the 1790s are on display in the Montpelier lab.

“We’re interested in learning about slave life and how it changed through time,” Reeves said. “And it turned out to be more complex than we initially thought from earlier surveys.”

While excavating the top layer of soil, they came across iron machinery parts, which they initially assumed were from early 20th century tractors.

“You don’t imagine there will be things that look like tractor parts in the 19th century,” Reeves said. So they assumed the pieces were from later years.

As they approached the layers from Madison’s era, they came across ceramic bits, a trench, several postholes, and more iron pieces.

“We finally figured out that what we’re looking at is a building with three occupational phases,” he said. “The site was used over a 40-year period in three different ways, which presents a really wonderful storyline for the changes happening at Montpelier.”

The discoveries reveal that the building was originally used as a tobacco smokehouse, then as living quarters for slaves, and ultimately housed Madison’s threshing machine, a device used to separate harvested wheat from chaff.

The most intriguing part of the discovery, Reeves said, is the legal story behind the threshing machine. After the property was sold to Henry Moncure in 1844, Dolley Madison’s son, John Payne Todd, allegedly attempted to steal the machine by yanking it through the door and tearing the building down. Moncure sued Todd for the attempted theft; Reeves said archaeologists have the legal documents, but the new discovery humanizes a lawsuit that, up until now, was just words on paper.

He said it’s hard to know for sure if this discovered barn was in fact home to the machine Todd tried to steal, but there’s compelling evidence that it was.

“The fact that we’ve got postholes where posts have been pulled out suggests it was not a structure that was simply abandoned, nor neatly taken apart,” Reeves said.

Farming machinery was the iPhone 5 of Madison’s day, Reeves said. The technology was likely not available on the market in the late 1700s, which means Madison had his specially made.

“He wanted to mechanize agricultural production,” he said. “Which is something Jefferson was also doing at Monticello.”

Madison was well-known as a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, and the two kept up with one another politically and personally until Jefferson’s death in 1826. Reeves said they kept tabs on one another, and archaeologists found a letter from Madison requesting that Jefferson come check out his new toy.

Nearly 200 years later, visitors can stop by the plantation to see the machinery pieces in the lab, and even participate in archaeological digs through October.

Those seeking guidance in the garden have a new resource at their fingertips: the Piedmont Virginia Native Plants Database, a searchable list of 341 native grasses, trees, and wildflowers, all found in the region before the arrival of European settlers, and all accompanied by information about where they can be put to best use.

Want to find out what plants will grow in that swampy, shady corner of your yard? The database can narrow it down, and go further. Want your plant to have flowers that don’t clash with your existing lilac? Check. Need it to be unappealing to the hungry groundhog that lives under the shed? Can do. Builders and landscape architects can search by use, too, to help pinpoint plants suitable for everything from green roofs to detention basins.

There are a number of good reasons to encourage people to grow native plants, said Albemarle County Natural Heritage Committee chair and Thomas Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District Director Lonnie Murray, who helped develop the database with Albemarle County Water Resources Specialist Repp Glaettli and a volunteer team of local plant experts. For one, he said, they’ve had millennia to adapt to Virginia’s soil, climate, and pests. As a result, he said, “site-appropriate use of native plants can really help reduce our use of water and pesticides, and reduce sedimentation.”

A landscape rich in natives is, by default, a diverse one, Murray said, and that comes with benefits, too.

“Anyone that works with water quality issues knows the gold standard of knowing whether water is safe to drink or swim in is biodiversity,” he said. “If nothing can live in it, you don’t want to swim in it.” The same principle can apply to land, he said, and efforts to clean up brownfields and contaminated areas through habitat restoration show it can work in reverse: Increase biodiversity and you can encourage the health of an ecosystem.

Getting developers, landscape architects, and other stakeholders onboard isn’t always easy, though. Albemarle Director of Community Development Mark Graham pointed out that developers often have to prove the viability of plantings in order to get money back from municipalities in the form of performance bonds.

“There are questions as far as plant availability, too,” he said—desirable natives aren’t always easy to find at your local nursery.

As a result, developers and planners alike have historically favored fast-growing, easy-to-find plants, including some invasive species now targeted for eradication.

In fact, both the county and the City of Charlottesville’s recommended plant lists name invasives like autumn olive and privet
—species the city is currently trying to remove as part of the costly Meadow Creek restoration project.

The new plant database is part of a trend to update those lists and encourage more use of native plants. Chris Gensic of the Charlottesville Parks & Recreation Department said revised recommendations are in the works for the city, and according to Graham, the new searchable list dovetails nicely with the county Comprehensive Plan’s emphasis on native plants as natural resources.

It may not have a huge impact on the landscape right away, Graham said, but he and others think the database will prove an important tool—for governments looking to shape policy, developers trying to restore disturbed areas, nurseries seeking the right plants to stock, and homeowners in search of suggestions for their own gardens.

“I think it’s one of things, like the ball rolling downhill, that’s going to start picking up speed,” he said.

On a slow September Saturday back in the early 1990s, Brenda Tekin took a drive up Afton Mountain in search of something to occupy her for the afternoon. She’d read about the Rockfish Gap Hawk Watch, a group of birders who kept tabs on migrants from the parking lot of the Inn at Afton each fall, and decided to drop in.

The binocular-slinging crowd was buzzing about broad-winged hawks, but at first, she only saw a few distant specks against the blue.

“Then the birds came straight toward us across I-64,” said Tekin, an administrator in UVA’s Sociology Department who lives in Stuarts Draft. “There were just hundreds and hundreds. They were so close it was almost like you could just reach out and pluck them out of the sky. I never knew there were so many hawks.”

Just like that, Tekin was hooked, and she’s now one of the lead volunteers keeping the 36-year-old Hawk Watch going. The dedicated group triesto have people with their eyes on the skies at the mountaintop site from August through November, counting birds of prey and feeding the data to the Hawk Migration Association of North America, which tabs populations nationwide.

The numbers from HMANA and other count organizations are important, said volunteer Vic Laubach, who also works at UVA and lives in the Valley, because they provide a rare window into raptor populations for researchers and conservationists from key sites that see a steady stream of birds each year. The Blue Ridge Mountains, which lie along a major migration path for a number of species, narrow to a slender isthmus where the Rockfish Gap cuts through the range west of Charlottesville, concentrating the long-distance travelers following the Appalachian ridgelines to warmer climes. From their perch immediately south of the interstate exit for the Skyline Drive, dedicated counters and casual enthusiasts have a panoramic view of hawks, eagles, kestrels, and other birds coasting on mountain air currents.

The volunteers said it’s hard to stay away once the migration season starts.

“We sneak out, play hooky, take vacation or whatever we can during the weekdays to come up and count,” Laubach said.

Occasionally, high winds and bad weather force them down from the high gap, but Tekin said they return as quickly as they can.

“Once those fronts start moving out, we head up to the mountain, because we know that if the birds are in the pipeline, as soon as theweather starts breaking, they’re going to take to the air,” she said. Sometimes, the conditions are rough, even for the hawks. Tekin recalled one blustery day when everyone was confused by a hurtling shape they couldn’t make heads nor tails of.

“We knew it was a bird, but we couldn’t figure out what we were looking at,” she said. They peered through their binoculars, and realized it was a red-shouldered hawk flying flat-out backwards, powerless against the wind that was bearing it along.

Sometimes the drama is in the sheer numbers. Last year, the birders logged a new record when they counted 10,000 broad-winged hawks in a single day. Peak season is winding down, Tekin said, but a wide variety of species will be flying through for two more months, and anyone who wants to take a look and ask questions is welcome. Even those whose days and years on the mountain have turned them into de facto raptor experts find they have questions themselves with each new migration season. “It’s a learning process,” she said. “We’re all still learning.”

Each week, C-VILLE’s Green Scene page takes a look at local environmental news. The section’s bulletin board has information on local green events and keeps you up to date on statewide happenings. Got an event or a tip you’d like to see here and in the paper? Write us at news@c-ville.com.

Night watch: Get a new view of the heavens at the Ivy Creek Foundation‘s Star Party at 7:30pm Friday, September 21. Bring your own telescope or use those of the Charlottesville Astronimcal Society, which will be setting up in the field next to the barn at the Ivy Creek Natural Area.

Gawk at hawks: See raptors soar and help with crucial hawk counts with the Rockfish Gap Hawk Watch, a group of dedicated birders who monitor the fall hawk migration, which is currently under way. Each year, volunteers stake out the parking lot of the Inn at Afton, just above where I-64 intersects with the Skyline Drive. Join them there for great views as the birds fly through the gap. Check out the group’s website for more details, and read C-VILLE next week for more on the hawk watch.

Celebrating wilderness: The Virginia Wilderness Committee, Wild Virginia, and the U.S. Forest Service have teamed up for events to raise public awareness of Virginia’s wild places in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act in 2014. The next event takes place at 7pm Thursday, September 27 at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, and features talks by nature writer Chris Bolgiano and former Wilderness Society president Bill Meadows. Visit www.celebratewildreness.org for more info.

David Via’s first memories of mushroom hunting are from his Crozet childhood. His father—a descendant of early Blue Ridge settlers who grew up in a high hollow on Buck’s Elbow Mountain—would take him out hunting for morels each spring. They would follow the time-honored seasonal cues locals use to mark the start of the treasured mushroom’s season: start looking with the first warm rain of spring; when the oak leaves are the size of mouse ears; when you have to mow your lawn for the first time.

“He showed me where to go, and we’d look in old apple orchards, even orchards where there were only remnants of old trees totally taken over by the woods,” said Via, who now lives in Loudoun County but returns home often.

Earlier this month, Via and about two dozen other enthusiasts gathered at a mountain cabin west of Staunton at the peak of the late-summer mushroom season. The trip was the latest organized by Wild Virginia, a Charlottesville-based forest preservation group whose members frequently spend weekends exploring the woods and wilds they work to protect. On the agenda: a little learning, a little hiking, and a lot of mushrooms.

Mark Jones—founder of Sharondale Farm in Cismont, a permaculture operation that harnesses the power of fungi in nutrient cycling—was on hand to guide the group. Besides being a successful cultivator of edible mushrooms, Jones is an avid and skilled hunter of the wild kinds—an asset on any mycological outing, as the diversity of fungi one can encounter in the woods can be bewildering.

Of the estimated 1.5 to 2 million species in the fungi kingdom, “we’ve probably identified about 10 percent,” Jones said. Not only are there are a staggering number of species that pop up locally as summer weather cools, he said—some delicious, some deadly—they can look surprisingly different depending on their age.

As they walked up the gently sloping hollow in the George Washington National Forest—an area near Wild Virginia member Jack Wilson’s West Augusta home that he grinningly called “bemushroomed”—the group took time to explore the diversity of fungi coaxed out of the ground by days of cool, wet weather. They carried brown paper bags for choice finds, like a gelatinous oxtongue mushroom, a cluster of elusive pale-blue Clitocybe, and the prize of the fall forager, the faintly apricot-scented golden chanterelle.

But it wasn’t all about the edibles. The group stooped low over a delicate black inch-high Cordyceps mushroom, a parasite that preys exclusively on insects, and marveled over a fairy ring of pure white and lethally toxic Amanita.

Whether you’re picking or not, said Via, the thrill of the hunt is a big part of the joy of the amateur mycologist.

“I lost my excitement for hunting with a gun when I was 18,” he said. Seeking more sedentary quarry has been a good reason to get back in the woods with a purpose, he said. “There’s value in the focus. You’re searching, hunting, gathering, and then all of a sudden you’ll find yourself in this incredibly beautiful spot that you probably wouldn’t have found if you were just looking for it. It’s like the mushrooms lead you.”