The Pawpaw Festival!

One of my favorite photos from the 2008 festival.

For those of you who saw this post on Tuesday, then watched it and your comments disappear, my apologies. The monarch piece rared up and grabbed the spotlight. So here it is again. Whew. what a week it's been!

Celebrating pawpaws--we've done it in our own woods, and every September I like to celebrate them with others. In Albany, Ohio, right outside Athens, there's a little festival that reached its tipping point this year. Now it's a medium-sized festival, headed toward largeish.

Everything was good this year, better even than last. The big Percherons were still giving carriage rides. Picture the four of us stuffing ourselves with all manner of food made with pawpaws (a creamy white sauce over chicken breast, a pawpaw/peach/hot chili salsa, a pawpaw beurre blanc over scallops,

(all of the above made by Chef Dave Rudie)

who showed us how to flip onions in a sautee pan, which I'm sure I could do if I had hours to practice and a tarp on the kitchen floor.I just came from the kitchen, where, following Chef Rudie's lead, I made a pawpaw cream sauce sweetened with our own pawpaw pulp and some sourwood honey from the Smoky Mountains, a gift from our editor, Lisa White of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Heavy whipping cream, softened butter, caramelized shallots, salt, pepper, and a dollop of honey mustard...and heaven can wait. We're going to try it over pork tenderloin at Margaret and Zane's. It was just ridiculously good. How can you go wrong with that ingredient list? I totally winged it, no recipe--just remembered how Dave demonstrated it, and it was ossum as creamed possum.

But wait--there was more in the vendor stalls that we sampled, including a
pawpaw crepe, pawpaw jelly roll, and a pawpaw mango ginger mint smoothie to name just a few.

But wait, there was still more...great live music and a mess of our friends who simultaneously and serendipitously decided to make the hour-plus trek to Albany for the festival at the same time.
David and Zane consult an iPhone for something...iPhone users are forever consulting them.

We hung out and listened to the music and watched the kids dance with Oona, who can really shake her moneymaker.

There was a lot of moneymakershaking going on at the bandstand.
I lost track of Bill for quite awhile...he was watching the hula-hooping, I think. Who could blame him.

This is quite a different demographic than we are accustomed to seeing, only an hour and a half away. Having Ohio University in Athens certainly results in more interesting people-watching than we get in Whipple. For me, most of enjoying a festival is people-watching, but this one has delicious food and great music, too. I give it a five out of five.

Many of those interesting young folks brought their dogs--it's hard to find a place where you can bring your dog anymore.

I did not because, having brought Chet to the last two festivals and having had a loose pitbull straddle and growl at him in 2008, I deemed it not worth the angst or the constant pull on my arm. It's hard to drink a pint when there's an unearthly strong steady pull on your other arm.

This little pied beauty stopped every few seconds to scratch, another reason I was glad I hadn't brought my as-yet-flea-free puppeh.

A dog rumble went down--Chet would've gladly flown into the middle of it.
It was rowdy but friendly, and fun to watch. Dogs who are socialized can do this without getting all snarly. Chet's not quite there.
He likes to be Numba One. He'd have been Offisa Puppin' all over those dogs.

The moon rose, the pawpaw wheat beer was wonderful, and still the children played.

A man walked by with a little light that put sparkles on the ground

arresting the attention of a sweet baby who pointed (don't miss that tiny finger...) and then knelt to try to rub the sparkles out

charming me even more
                             

And the moon rose in a pastel sky and Mary Jane showed us how to catch it

and Phoebe tried, but her photographer couldn't see very well, as the photo of Mary Jane attests...
but Phoebe could see the moon in the viewfinder, so with her help I finally captured the shining orb

and the sky went blank for a moment

nothing but watercolor tints I could never replicate.

As it got dark there hove into view a giant and hilariously funny pawpaw whose barely audible voice came from the depths of his foam costume, asking us to give him a high five
but he had no hands so we squeezed him instead. And nothing popped out.

Plan to come to the Pawpaw Festival at Lake Snowden in Albany, Ohio, next September. I guarantee you'll love it.

If you'd like to get some fresh pawpaws shipped, or, after they're out of season in late October, some frozen pulp to play with in your own kitchen, see Integration Acres' cool web site. We have them to thank for this wonderful festival, and for making "pawpaw" a household word in Appalachian Ohio. Well, in some houses. Soitainly ours.

Here end the pawpaw posts.

Monarch Metamorphosis

I have been busy this summer studying and documenting monarch butterflies on my little monarch ranch off the back patio. It became an all-consuming pursuit as I strove to position myself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to document the dual transformation of the monarch caterpillar: first, from caterpillar to jade-green chrysalis; and second, from chrysalis to butterfly.


It is not as easy as it sounds. Well, maybe it doesn't sound easy, but I can assure you it's tricky. The caterpillars and chrysalides have a sneaky way of doing their magic when nobody's watching: early in the morning, right at breakfast and bus time. They wait until you're completely distracted, trying to take care of your family and wham! they transform into something entirely else while you're buttering toast or answering the phone or signing a planner or digging up lunch money or racing to Athens to record a piece.


I decided that if I was ever going to catch the caterpillars at it, I'd have to have a whole lot of 'em, to increase the chances that one might decide to metamorphose when I was available to document it. And one...one of the 20 or so that I raised in a big glass vase on the kitchen table decided to cooperate. I set the camera up on a tripod against a neutral background and by gum I got it, the whole breathtaking thing, in over 600 exposures taken over about 10 hours.


National Public Radio solicited a submission to mark the first day of fall, so I wrote and recorded a piece about the whole experience. I sent hundreds of photos to their multimedia wizards and Mito Habe-Evans produced a wonderful video from them. I am grateful to her for all her work.

In the end, NPR decided not to air my commentary. But you can still find the video on the NPR website. It takes my breath away, just as sitting before a metamorphosing caterpillar always does.

Please go see how I spent my summer. I would be much obliged if you would comment and hit "Recommend." Since the commentary didn't air, sharing it on Facebook and Twitter and recommending it is one way to help it get seen by more eyes. For my part, I'll hope that it leads more people to my blog.

Thank you.

All photos in this post and on the NPR website are copyright2010 by Julie Zickefoose. Use without permission is expressly forbidden.

Hickory Horned Devil!

All photos in this post by Bill of the Birds.

Bill of the Birds was off to one side, peering up into the pawpaw branchtes, looking for fruit. Suddenly he hollered, three words, three times in a row, at the top of his considerable lungs. It sounded like this:

HICKORYHORNEDDEVIL!!HICKORYHORNEDDEVIL!!
HICKORYHORNEDDEVIL!!

We peered up where he was pointing and saw something that looked like a thorny hot dog hanging, backlit...how he ever saw it much less identified it in a nanosecond, I still don't know.

When he had composed himself, he held the camera up closer, and the little Canon G-11 did its very best in a difficult light regime. And that best is real darn good.

By this time, the caterpillar--for a hickory horned devil is a caterpillar, though it looks more like the hero of a planet-destroying Japanese horror flick--had composed itself into its most fearsome persona, compressing and drawing itself up into a sigmoid shape. It drew all its kabuki spines and swords--schwinnng! and made itself ready for whatever terrifying battle it might have to fight.

Dig those crazy black eyespots! Devil, indeed! I can't get over them, nor its enormous, leg-like claspers. (The caterpillar's real head is the little orange unit above the fearsome black eyespots). It was making short work of the hickory's leaves, eating each leaflet entirely before moving onto the next, then presumably backing up the petiole to go destroy another.

This is the larva of the royal walnut moth, or regal moth, as it's sometimes called. Latin: Citheronia regalis. We'd found it in its last growth instar, when it turns from brown to green.

We'd found it on a hickory tree, but they're also found on ash, butternut, cherry, lilac(!!), pecan, persimmon, sumac, sweet gum, sycamore, walnut, and other trees, according to David L. Wagner's WONDERFUL Caterpillars of Eastern North America.
This is a book you simply must have on your shelf. It changed my life.


Grab a Bic or a Flair pen off your desk. That's how long this monster is. And it's as big around as Winston Churchill's fattest stogie. You'd have to use two hands to contain it. And, despite its fearsome appearance, you'd come out unscathed.

For the Hickory Horned Devil is harmless: not poisonous, not even itchy. All he's got to defend himself is

BOOGABOOGABOOGA!

You've got to figure he's delicious, or why would he be so thoroughly frightening?

So we photographed him in situ--Bill of the Birds holding the Canon G-11 waay up over his head while I held the end of the branch down enough to get our frightened quarry in range. But for Bill's long arms, we'd have not much to show for our first-ever encounter with the most coveted caterpillar in North America--on our pawpaw hunting grounds, on our land, no less! Not long from now, he'll climb down to the ground, wander about for awhile, and dig in and pupate underground in a silk-lined earthen cell, resting for the winter like an enormous brown seed before emerging next year as a glorious royal walnut moth.

From Wikipedia. Wish it were mine! This huge moth more than covers your hand. This is a very fresh one, probably still drying its soft, limp wings after emerging from the pupal case.

Being a Science Chimp, I didn't get very far down the trail before I smacked my forehead and said, "I've got to go back and find some horned devil frass!" I'd read that one way to find devils is to see their poop and then look up--a neat trick in deep leaf litter, but still...most of us look down in the woods, and I'm likely to spot something like that someday. I wanted to find the poop so I'd know it the next time I saw it. Now Bill of the Birds--he's always lookin' up.

So I went right back under that horned devil and got down on all fours and muttered and rummaged around for a long time while my family kind of chuckled and rolled their eyes and darned if I didn't find me a very nice bit of fresh devilpoop, a little grenade of compressed used up hickory chaw. It was big enough to completely cover my wedding ring which I can assure you after 17 years is still in situ.

As if the pawpaws weren't enough, I had fresh devilpoop. I think the pawpaw/devilhunt was the best expotition we had all summer. That's nature at its top-of-lungs hollerin' best.

And it's all FREE.

BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!

All photos in this post by Bill of the Birds