Cedar Bog with Science Chimp

On our field trip to Cedar Bog outside Springfield, Ohio, most of us were kneeling and snapping away and oohing and aahing on the boardwalk

led by Jim McCormac, one of the finest naturalists I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.

If you don't read his blog, Ohio Birds and Biodiversity, you must. He's a sparkly writer, good photographer, and best of all he knows what's interesting. He's always got a little wrinkle in the story, something I never knew. In short: Silverback Science Chimp.

There were some much rarer things yet at Cedar Bog's lovely visitor center. For one, I would really, really love to see a giant beaver. Alas, I would be seeing wooly mammoths, too, were that in the cards.


Here's a tooth. Imagine finding a tooth from a beaver the size of a black bear. The tooth was about 9" long. Eeeee-gad.

The cicadas were singing, and Jim taught us the difference between the Lyric Cicada's song (virtually no oscillation, just a steady buzzing trill) and the Lens Cicada (a gentle oscillation) and the Swamp Cicada (a heavy oscillation, all zizzy and snappy), and the Scissor-Grinder Cicada, the classic summer evening in-town species that goes ZWEOOO ZWEEEOO ZWEEOO.

Don't you love knowing that?
Again, no idea which one this is, but I was glad to spot him resting in a sumac. Speaking of spotting things, here's a young ruby-throated hummingbird hiding out in a tall umbellifer:


It was tending a patch of jewelweed. Always such a treat for me to see hummingbirds feeding from something other than red plastic.

A Snout butterfly, Libytheana bachmanii, only the second I've seen in Ohio. Jim says this is a "big invasion year" for this southern butterfly with the Jimmy Durante rostrum. They are very cute, if you can catch them sitting long enough. That's not actually a snout, but elongated labial palpae. I'm not sure what the snout does with its elephantine projection, but it is fond of fermenting fruit and nectar, so perhaps there's a food-gathering advantage. Or maybe it's a weevil with big dreams.


A net-winged beetle, Calopteron terminale. It was moving slowly about the leaf surfaces, raising its soft wing covers over its back in a semaphore display. I owe this ID to Eric Eaton and Kenn Kaufman's wonderful Kaufman Field Guide to the Insects of North America. Get it, and figger out the bugs in your world.


As I neared the end of my allotted time at Cedar Bog, Jim casually pointed out "that thing that looks like a human brain lying on the forest floor."

The Science Chimp was not fooled for an instant. This softball-sized object was the fruiting body of a skunk cabbage, from which the leaves had nearly melted away. She considered it for a moment, then asked aloud,

"And what would be the dispersal agent for the human brain fruit?"

To which, without missing a beat, my new friend Rich quipped,

"Zombies?"

Out of focus because I was laughing.

Rich and I bonded good, making jokes about prickly ash and such.

I love a plantsman. He works as a horticulturist by day, but clearly his avocation is Resident Stinkpot. We were trouble when combined.

Alas, all too soon it was time for me to bolt. I had an hour's drive to Columbus, where via the magic of cellaphones I was to connect for a torrid 20 minutes with my bestest Oklahoma buddy Timothy Ryan, he of the peerless photographic eye and the glorious blog From the Faraway, Nearby.

On my way I saw the most auspicious of automobiles, a Hot Rod Lincoln,
boding well for our quick reunion.


Is that not the baddest car you have ever seen? Nice color, too.

Tim was literally passing through Columbus on work, shepherding a platoon of mini Coopers from party to party. Tim has the most interesting life, which makes him great company. He is full of beans and ready for anything.

Seeing Timmers, however briefly (he had to leave within the hour) was the cherry on top of a perfect Zick weekend! We were both steamin' sweaty but we didn't care. My brutha from anotha mutha.


Why does he have to live in Oklahoma? Doesn't he know that he should move to Southern Ohio? I have amassed quite a list of people who should do that.

The May 10 Tornado

photo by Rich Thompson, meteorologist and stormchaser, www.chasetolive.com

My friend Debby has lived with her husband Mike Kaspari, a renowned expert on ants (dude hangs with E.O. Wilson!) near Norman, Oklahoma for 15 years. Mike teaches at the University of Oklahoma, and Debby works from a studio at home, drawing and painting and sculpting and illustrating and launching shows of her work. Their arc is somewhat similar to Bill's and mine; they got married about the same time, bought an awesome place in the country, and shaped it into a little Eden for birds, bugs, animals and themselves. Here's the house, a shot best taken in winter, because it was surrounded by magnificent oaks that beautifully hid it in the grove.

They'd lived there several years when they decided to build a storm shelter beneath the floor of the garage. In fact, they built it on May 10, 2001. Remember that date.

Oklahoma, as anyone who reads the news knows, is smack in the middle of Tornado Alley. I just read that the farmer whose picturesque place north of Oklahoma City was used for much of the filming of "Twister" just had most of his buildings leveled by a monster tornado this May.

The Kasparis had had the shelter for nine years, and so far luck had been with them. Debby had spent quite a bit of time there, in fact, but they'd never yet been struck. She doesn't like storms; she doesn't like lightning or thunder and she has always feared tornadoes. Like me, she was marked by the Wizard of Oz as a child, and has never really come to grips with that snaky monster from above. Oklahoma is a tough place to live if you fear tornadoes. And you'd be a damned fool not to fear them.

Storm shelters are no fun to be in. They're dark and windowless, underground and spidery and claustrophobic, and although Debby would retreat to it, Mike never liked it one bit, and he'd often go under a stairwell when threatening clouds piled up. On the afternoon of May 10, 2010, Debby was weeding away in the garden when she decided she didn't much like the look of those clouds--dark, dirty and coppery-colored.
Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com

She headed to the storm shelter, and Mike stayed upstairs, making homemade bagels, and planning to go under the stairwell when it got really ugly.A photo taken the night of May 10, 2010, in another storm cellar. Little Gizmo's bundled in a towel, because there was no time to hunt up the cat carrier. May 10 was a wild, wild day in Oklahoma. Photo by Mike Kaspari.

Meanwhile, Tim Ryan was checking the weather on his computer while on assignment for his work in Barcelona, Spain. He didn't like the looks of the radar, nor did he like what he was picking up on the Twitter feed from his Oklahoma friends and family. His thoughts darted to his dear friend Debby, who would be bumming out and probably already sitting in her storm shelter with Gizmo the cat on her lap. So, being Tim, and always thinking of the ones he loves, he called her up. He's done that for me, too. Not with a tornado, but just because.


He'd talked Debby through a tornado warning before, and he was going to be there for her, whether from Oklahoma City or Barcelona. Yep, she was safely down in there, but she'd been in there a long time and she really wanted to come out NOW. "No, no, stay there! Stay put!!" Tim urged. "And get Mike down there with you! It's hitting Lake Rupert RIGHT NOW. It's right over you!!"
Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com

Debby called Mike down; he grabbed his Kindle, in case it would be a long time, and they shut the door over their heads, and just a few minutes later there was a low humming sound. Not like a freight train, not a roar, just a hum. This hum was the vortex of the tornado passing right through their house. It isn't that noisy in the vortex. But then their ears popped hard.

And when the noise stopped Debby noticed that there was light coming through the cracks in the shelter roof, and that shouldn't be so, because the shelter was under the floor of the garage, and wasn't there a garage roof over them? Tim was still on the phone, talking to Mike, when the humming stopped and Mike tentatively opened the shelter door.

"It's gone. It's gone. Everything is gone. We should be dead! We should be dead! We should be dead!!" Mike said, as Tim listened helplessly from Spain. For there was nothing left of their house, their grove of ancient oaks, their garage and their barn but a huge triangular pile of rubble with giant oaks uprooted and thrown on top of it.

Photo by Debby Kaspari

The iron-framed bed is the one I slept in only three weeks earlier. I think I see the shower, too. It was a great shower.

Photo by Debby Kaspari

The front of the house. Both their cars were totaled, too.

The barn. Photo by Debby Kaspari


Photo by Debby Kaspari

The storm shelter, blown full of debris, that saved Debby, Mike and Gizmo's lives. The stairwell Mike favored was crushed flat under the second floor.

Debby and Mike, wearing borrowed clothes, pause on the first day of assessment at the entrance to the tiny shelter that kept them among the living.


Photo by Debby Kaspari

The backyard, once a grove of noble oaks, now blasted flat. The red stripe, from a can of paint that was carried along by the funnel. The indigo sky, a receding wall cloud from the storm.


Photo by Debby Kaspari

The house, as viewed from the water garden. This is where Gizmo and I took our wonderful nap, where iris and bougainvillea once bloomed.

These are incredible times we live in. To have photos from a storm shelter, to have photos of the immediate aftermath; to receive them via computer and to be able to post them, is humbling, amazing. But stormchasers posted photos of the actual tornado that ate Debby and Mike's home, and I have those, too, even though it makes my stomach squirm to post them.


Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com

It was an F4 tornado, a huge wedge with a funnel a half-mile across. Stormtrackers told Debby and Mike that it was a single F3 tornado until just before it hit them, when a second funnel merged with the first. And 100 yards beyond their house, a third funnel merged with those two, and it became a monster F4 with a path a half-mile wide. And who needs monsters from outer space, who needs myth and legend and horror movies, when things like this can reach right down out of the sky and obliterate everything you hold dear?

Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com


On May 10, 2010, 22 tornadoes touched down across Oklahoma. One had a track of 150 miles. Debby and Mike were square in the path of an F4. Her firsthand account is here, on her blog, Drawing the Motmot. And in this post, Anatomy of a Tornado, Debby figures out just what happened to her and her neighbors.

Right after the tornado, when Tim called to tell me what had happened to our friends, we began scheming about how to help. There was an outpouring on Facebook and in emails of people asking how and where they could donate. It has taken me a month to pull this together, but our hope is that having a single, centralized place--right here on this blog--where people can donate makes the most sense. So here it is. We've put the word out to the great bloggers at the Nature Blog Network and to friends who Debby has touched with her art. Thank you for coming here.

If you would like to reach out and help Debby and Mike, please see the animated mini-story created by my WebWitch, Katherine Koch, on the right sidebar of this blog. Clicking on the DONATE button leads to Debby's PayPal page, with easy instructions for donating.

If you'd prefer to mail a check, please send it to

Deborah Kaspari
Dept. of Zoology
University of Oklahoma
730 Van Vleet Oval
Room 314
Norman, OK 73019

Thank you.

Off to Oklahoma!

A scissor-tail takes flight in the rain

It all started innocently enough. Well, what eventually happened was going to happen anyway, but none of us knew it, at least not in our conscious minds. I've been waiting to tell this story for a few weeks, but it keeps unfolding, kind of like the Zick- bats story, and I'd like to know how it ends. Failing that, I'd like to help make it end better. I've been working on a series about Oklahoma for awhile now, and because there is so much to tell and because continuity is important, I will break my twice-weekly blogging cycle and be posting on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I hope you enjoy it.

I was asked over a year ago if I would like to give a keynote at the brand-new Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma. Knowing that this bird has thus far eluded me, and more importantly, that two of my favorite people on the planet: traveler/writer/photographer Tim Ryan and fearlessly versatile artist Debby Kaspari--live in Oklahoma, I grabbed the chance to see the chickens and my friends in their native habitat.

You'll remember the prairie chicken poster from earlier how-to-paint-like-Zick blogposts:Well, this was the 2010 poster. And 2009's kickoff festival poster was done by none other than Debby Kaspari!


I love her palette, and the daring angles and rock-solid drawing. Mmm.

Tim Ryan picked me up at the Oklahoma City airport on April 15 and brought me to his beautiful Arts and Crafts cottage in a gorgeous suburb of OKC. There, Debby met us for a delightful lunch on his terrace, and then spirited me off to her little rural paradise near Norman. We were gabbing away at lunch when Debby glanced up at the sky and said, "I'm not crazy about the looks of those clouds. Let's head for my house." I heard the resolve in her voice and didn't protest. The clouds didn't look all that bad to me, but what do I know about Oklahoma weather?

So off we went to Debby's house, where I'd spend the night. I was exhausted from a 4:30 wakeup in Ohio, so after a little garden tour of Debby and Mike's magnificent rural contemporary house and yard, nestled in hundred-year-old oaks, I collapsed in a hammock under the oaks and drifted off to the songs of black-and-white and yellow-rumped warblers. Every once in awhile I'd crack an eye to the drifting clouds, and once Debby's little cat Gizmo leapt up and landed on my stomach, curling up contentedly. Which flattered me, since Gizmo, who arrived on the Kaspari porch as a pregnant teenager and proceeded to work her way deep into Deb and Mike's hearts, is a very cool, smart cat. Here she is, nuzzling one of Debby's many incredible sculptures--a harpy eagle planter (!) Who else would think of it? Told ya Deb could do anything.

I slept off the weariness and let the peace of wild things settle over me. I felt cared for and welcome and unpressured and content. It was one of my Top Three Naps of All Time.

Sure enough, there was weather moving in, just in time for the festival. As I think back over the many festivals I've worked, I remember rain at most of them. Of course, most of them are in spring, and it rains in spring, but still! it gets old. Rain at the Lesser Prairie Chicken festival is especially problematic because the road to the main chicken lek (display grounds) gets gumboliciously impassable after only a few hours' downpour. And boy, did it.

Tim and Deb and I, world travelers that we are, were (naturally) woefully unprepared for such conditions, and so, in the grand festival tradition started by Bill of the Birds in a Jamestown, ND Wal-mart, we repaired to Woodward's WallyWorld for things like rubber boots and heavy fleeces, because not only was it pouring; it was freezing cold. After all, we had packed in deep denial of how cruel Oklahoma springs can really be.

First order of bidness: rubber boots. These weren't bad, and they had all three of our sizes. iPhone photo by Tim Ryan. We're being Gumbies. And our brains hurt!


We couldn't resist a little People of Walmart safari of our own. The pickin's were rich. I posed for a surreptitious shot of a gender-bender: a woman in a wifebeater. Unfortunately, the tats aren't showing up too well. There's a angel on my shoulder...


From there, it was on to Atwood's, which is the most spectacular farm-supply store I've ever seen. And I savor farm-supply stores like I savor morels in April.

Tim found a hat, but it wuz too small. That did not stop him from vamping a bit.


iPhone photo by Debby Kaspari

Yes, we were having loads o' fun. In fact, as I think about that trip to Oklahoma, I think about our shopping trips and the crazy foods we ate and the laughter in store aisles just as much as I think about dancing prairie chickens and prairie dogs and coyotes and longhorns and my nap under the oaks at Debby's house.

When we got to the denim section of Atwood's, my eyes nearly rolled back in my head. Because ever since September '09 when I left my favorite ever denim shirt in a hotel in Wisconsin, I have been pining for a shirt like that. I didn't find an exact replica--maybe I never will--but I came back from Oklahoma with four perfectly decent denim shirts (one for Bill) AND the most fabulous pair of Round House Oklahoma-made overalls you have ever seen. I have been living in them this spring, with pruners and trowels bristling from every pocket, and I think about our good times in Oklahoma every time I put them on. I regret not having taken a photo of the Sizing Chart for Round House Overalls that was posted at Atwood's. It advises would-be overall wearers: "If your belly hangs over your beltline, add four inches to the waist."

I did, just because.

iPhone photo by Debby Kaspari

Tim and Zick at Atwood's, flushed with joy at having found the ultimate plain denim shirts and real overalls. When's the last time you saw real overalls? No pearl buttons, no yoke-stitched frippery, just good plain clothes. And the dearest of friends.