Orchid School: A Few Pointers

There's a whole lotta pottin' goin' on on Indigo Hill. 

Nothing like about 10 days in the 80's in mid-October to get me out and washing orchids! It's the kind of thing that I have to be in the right mood to do. If I'm in the right mood, it's fun. Not in the right mood: endless wet drudgery. 

What? You don't wash your orchids?  Every couple of years, I repot mine. I knock them out of their pots, rinse every bit of medium off their roots.  Before I put them in new medium and clean pots, I wash their leaves with a hard spray of cool water, rubbing away scale and the sugar deposits they leave. Then I clip off anything rotty: brown spongy roots, old withered pseudobulbs if they're the type of orchid that makes pseudobulbs. 

This year, I'm potting everything in nice long-staple sphagnum moss. It's the blonde stuff that comes in dried bricks. I'm using sphagnum not just because it's way cheaper than Aussie Gold. I'm using it because I've noticed that the best, firmest, greenest roots are forming in the orchids I've potted in sphagnum. They're healthy and not rotting because they've got ample air in this light weight, non-packing medium. For some fine pointers on sphagnum quality, go here.

Your results may vary. Sphagnum works well for me here in Ohio. If you live in a super-humid place,  you might do better with coco fiber medium or even bark. 

I'm sprinkling some Aussie Gold medium into the sphagnum, but overall it's 90% moss.  I soak the moss before packing it loosely around the roots. 

I took the opportunity to hack up a massive jewel orchid that was overgrown and flopping out of its pot. In the center is the mother plant. All around it are the long floppy stems I snapped off at their joints. I got 13 of 'em, and put them all to root in moist sphagnum in another container. 

I noticed that jewel orchids seem to send down roots to about 5" deep in the pot, then quit. The growth habit is to spread, laterally. So what they want is a pot that's wider than it is deep. Not having one of those, I put some  spacers in the form of deli containers and lava rock in the bottom of a big 10" pot, and heaped the sphagnum medium atop that. That should help get air to the roots, and encourage good drainage.

Mother plant to the left, nicely trimmed back and now with room to expand, and cuttings to the right. Discarded stems at bottom. I didn't use any rooting hormone because this is one badass orchid...I think those cuttings will root without any help. 

Add Bacon and sun, and you get happy Zick. I like to say that plant propagation is my only vice. I would happily develop some more, but opportunity is lacking. 

This is what jewel orchids do in midwinter! I love them best in candalabra bud.

But when those little white flowers open: Redonk!! It's too much.

The nice thing about this plant is the glorious velvety leaves with deep maroon reverse. Also the fact that it cannot be stopped, and I've never found an insect that bothers it. So I'm propagatin' on with my bad self.

I have 32 orchids, and tending to them all took parts of three days. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to spend the time it takes to tend them.  I'm not replacing my big orchids as they slowly pass on. I don't need more stuff to care for. But the collecting urge is still strong, so I'm downsizing. The only orchids I buy any more are the mini Phalaenopsis that I find at the grocery store. I love them so.  They fit on my kitchen windowsill: big plus.  I can add just one or two more without too much crowding. And the bunch of them in midwinter, going nuts on my kitchen sill, gets me through February.

If you're an orchid connoisseur, don't walk by ones that look like this one, below.  It may not be the most striking in color, but it's got a secret. It's got Phalaenopsis schilleriana in its parentage, which you can tell by its lightly mottled leaves, pale pink coloration, and heavenly incredible paradisiacal FRAGRANCE. Muguet from Venus.

These get to sit on my drawing board, and get picked up and inhaled about 60 times a day.

Since orchids in grocery stores rarely are warm or happy enough to emanate any fragrance, the other tipoff for P. schilleriana is the little moustache at the bottom of the flower's lower lip. 

This one's a real dandy--beautiful leaves. You probably won't find a beauty like this in a grocery store. But these are the characteristics that say it's going to be fragrant. Keep in mind that they may not emanate if the ambient temperature is under about 75 degrees. When mine bloom in mid-winter, they rarely emit any fragrance. But ohhh those midsummer and autumn blooms.There's a wee schilleriana at my elbow right now.

Slurping October Down

This time of year, the middle of October, is the exact correlate to when everything blooms and the leaves pop out in late April. It's suddenly all too beautiful and you can't possibly take it all in. But you try.

I love October so much. 

I'm doing this post for Phoebe, as much as for anyone. I miss that girl like I miss the moon when it's cloudy for weeks. I miss her like I miss  the scent of tuberoses in February. And I know she misses this place, but oh! she's having such fun in Panama, learning how to sweat around the clock while

studying abroad, watching birds,  making great new friends in the 15 other girls in the program; learning about forests and agriculture, loving on sloths,  

and sharpening her Spanish to a fine point. Anyway, I figure she and her friends (please bring them all home with you as I want to meet them!)

 would like to see what the place looks like about now. And maybe you would, too. 

Every spring, I come up the deck stairs and say sadly, "Well, it looks like Rio Samba (a rose I planted in 1993) didn't make it through the winter. It's dead."

And Phoebe says, "You say that every year!" Well, I am here to inform her that it has died. Again.

It looks good, I know, but it's dead. Just like I predicted. And that bud coming? Just a final salvo. It's a lot less dead than it was last summer, but it's definitely dead.

The morning glories are FINALLY blooming. I've been hearing from lots of quarters that morning glories waited all summer long, waited into October, to bloom. Whaa? And now, just in time for a balmy week, they are going nuts.

This was my first view this morning.  The low last night was 68, so the ones that opened yesterday morning never closed. And there they were smiling back at me at first light. Fabulous.

The vines around the back deck are monstrous. 

 They make a great pillar of green, studded with sky-blue saucers.

I managed to catch the elusive Liam on his way to class this morning. He's there for scale.  He's over 6' tall now, so let's see. That's about 2.5 Liams of morning glories. 

And a peek of Rio Samba in the lower left corner. 

Yep, still dead.

The pond garden is bursting with life. See the white pitchers emerging from the corner of the pond? My pitcher plants are happy and now grabbing pollinators. Not sure how I feel about that. They're greedy, exuding a honey scent but offering no nectar, only death by digestive fluids. I check every day and let some of the trapped insects go.  I stick a straw down in there and the grateful insects climb out. Hate to see ctenuchid moths and honeybees struggling in there. Those plants can eat houseflies. 

Sheffield Pink, a super-hardy mum (formerly known by me as Suffolk Pink), which legend has was the first mum brought to America by English colonists, is doing its pre-frost thing. Some jaunty orange calendulas I planted are a nice surprise. The zinnias self-sowed, and I fear I may have to bring some seedlings in the greenhouse. What I'll do when they get big I don't know.

A gift from painter Cindy House, who grows it in New Hampshire, Sheffield Pink is one of my favorites, for the cheery burst of new color it lends to the autumn landscape.

I'm planting bits of it all over the yard, filling bare spots, and now have enough to give some away, too, as some happy Reader Rendezvouers found out. Sheffield. Not Suffolk. I think. It's pink, anyway.

It's been a long time since the back gardens looked so pretty. They make me happy. 

And so do the myrtle warblers pouring through right now. Fall warblers and flowers...that's a good combo for a hungry eye. I'm slurping October down.

Happy National Feral Cat Day, 2016!

Gentle readers:

 I don't usually post book reviews on this blog.  I don't use it for advertising or political purposes. I don't tout anything but stuff I make myself (books, notecards, puzzles and stuff) or the stuff I just happen to love (plants, some jewelry, heated dog dishes, for example). This is a highly personal journal, probably 99% of it a simple celebration of all I find beautiful.

But today, according to Alley Cat Allies, is National Feral Cat Day. Nationwide, events are being planned to celebrate the presence of feral cats in our communities and rural areas. It's OK if you need to read that last sentence twice. All right. So I am celebrating, as an avian rehabilitator and unabashed celebrant of natural diversity. My celebration of National Feral Cat Day might proceed a bit differently than some people's.

I just read a book called Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer by Peter Marra and Chris Santella. And while I was flying to and from South Africa, I had something like 34 hours to work on my review, which was commissioned by a major national newspaper. I had read the book carefully at home, but had yet to write the review. I started it over Newfoundland on the outbound leg, and finished it somewhere over Cameroon on the way home.  Well, it came out too long and my editor couldn't figure out how to cut it without gutting it, so he had to pass on it. That's OK. There will be other books to review.

So, in honor of National Feral Cat Day, I'm going to publish it for the first time right here.

My painting of the cat that took the power of flight from Vanna, the savannah sparrow who bounced around a cage in my studio for 17 1/2 years.

Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer. Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella. Princeton University Press.

It’s not often that the word “important” floats up as a descriptor for a new book, but Cat Wars amply qualifies; in its treatment of a subject nobody wants to embrace, this fast-paced, gritty and occasionally terrifying book could sit comfortably on the shelf beside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Ornithologist Peter Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, plunks study after scientific study on the table, while popular writer Chris Santella, author of the Fifty Places series, pulls back for the long view, then zooms in with anecdote, constantly changing both scene and topic. The resulting narrative pulls the reader in like a cat to a laser pointer.

The wake-up call to conservationists and cat owners alike began in 1989 with Stanley Temple and John Coleman’s University of Wisconsin study, which attempted to quantify the number of birds killed by free-ranging rural cats in that state. Through direct observation of radio-collared cats, fecal analysis, and analysis of stomach contents of live-trapped (unharmed) cats, they established what their subjects were eating: primarily small mammals and birds. Using extremely conservative modeling, Temple and Coleman determined that at least 7.8 million birds die annually at the claws of cats in the state of Wisconsin alone. Subsequent studies by others refined the counts of cats as well as birds, taking aim at a nationwide figure. Even with the charitable guess that only one in ten free-roaming cats takes a bird per day, ornithologist Rich Stallcup arrived at the estimate of 4.4 million birds per day, or over one billion birds taken annually by owned cats in the United States. In his analysis, Stallcup didn’t even address the problem of feral cats, which is likely much larger.

“Along the California coast it is common to see 10 to 15 during a day’s outing (and these are nocturnal animals.) Certainly, there are many million, country wide. What do they eat? Wildlife. Nothing but wildlife.”

Scott Loss and colleagues used two independent pet owner surveys to come up with a mean figure of 84 million owned cats in the U.S. as of 2013. Using eight independent studies, Loss was able to estimate that more than half of these are allowed outdoors, and about two-thirds of those animals hunt. An additional 60-100 million unowned cats likely roam the nation, and every one of them hunts to survive. Median estimates of the yearly national toll on wildlife run to 2.4 billion birds per year, 12.3 billion mammals, around 200 million amphibians and more than 600 million reptiles. This study points at cats as responsible for more bird deaths than all other anthropogenic (wind turbines, window collisions, car collisions, pesticides) factors combined. These figures, sickening as they are, are conservative. They do not, as cat enthusiasts claim, represent a subjective, emotional vendetta against cats. Nor would any scientist deny that habitat loss is a major factor in rapidly declining songbird populations. Direct mortality from cats is real, and it is preventable. This book sounds an alarm too long silent.

Cat Wars could serve as a textbook for its clear explanations of subjects such as the processes of extinction, island biogeography, and population modeling, as cat impacts on wildlife are discussed. But the book hits its stride in illuminating the rarely discussed and truly terrifying role of domestic cats as vectors for zoonotic disease in humans. What more perfect vehicle could zoonotic diseases employ than an animal that kills and eats sickly wildlife, then defecates around and inside human homes? Black plague, carried by rodent fleas, but now thought to spread through aerosol transmission, killed one third of Europe’s population, starting in China the 1300’s. It’s still present in eight western states, infecting small rodents, the cats who eat them, and (rarely) the people who own those cats. 

Far more common, and now taking hold in managed feral cat colonies in Maryland and elsewhere, is rabies. The baffling double standard where dogs and cats are concerned is here thrown into sharp relief. Dogs are registered, licensed, confined with fencing and leash; vaccinated yearly, and annual U.S. cases of rabies in dogs had dropped to 59 in 2014--a 34% decrease from 2013. Cats, on the other hand, roam freely; are not licensed and are often unvaccinated; and 272 rabid cats were reported nationwide in 2014, a 10 % increase from the 247 reported in 2013 (CDC data). While people managing colonies with TNR (trap-neuter-release) vaccinate the cats against rabies on first capturing them, cats are clever. Once caught, a cat will very rarely enter a trap again, meaning they do not receive rabies boosters.  About 13,000 post-exposure rabies treatments are given annually in the U.S. due to cat exposures, which is approximately 1/3 of all rabies exposures (Gerhold and Jessup, 2012).

Black plague and rabies are rare. There is a cat-specific parasite which is extremely common; which finds its way into soil and drinking water; which works in silent, seemingly calculated concert with rodents, cats, and humans alike, and has been recently found to have public health implications undreamt of. Toxoplasma gondii reproduces wildly in the digestive tracts of felines and is shed in oocysts in their feces; most people recall warnings that pregnant women should not clean cat boxes, as the parasite can cause birth defects in people. Rodents pick the oocysts up through contact with contaminated soil and water. And from here, it gets stranger and stranger. Controlled experiments with Toxoplasma-infected rats have shown that the parasite alters the limbic regions of their brains such that the rodents lose their fear of cats, and the smell of cat urine, which repels them when they’re healthy, becomes irresistible. Seeking out cat urine, of course, helps ensure that the parasite-laden rodents end up in the guts of cats, where T. gondii reproduces and is shed in feces to start the cycle again. Most disturbing are findings that people are similarly affected by toxoplasmosis. It is the most common parasitic infection in humans, affecting up to 22 percent of the U.S. population. Outdoor cats defecating in children’s sandboxes and the loose garden soil and mulch around homes present a concentrated risk of human and cat infection. Even more insidiously, the hardy cysts of Toxoplasma can persist for years, finding their way into streams, rivers and marine environments, as well as drinking water. Toxoplasmosis kills endangered monk seals in Hawaiian waters; sea otters and seals elsewhere.

Recent studies have shown that humans bearing Toxoplasma antibodies show some of the same behavioral changes as rodents, including decreased anxiety and an attraction to the smell of cat urine. If you actually like that smell, having more and more cats around you is a good thing. Along with these changes come a stringer of others, including tendencies toward severe depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even schizophrenia. Toxoplasma-positive individuals were 2.7 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than uninfected people. Wait. 22% of the U.S. population is Toxoplasma-positive??

In the face of scientific evidence that cats take a shocking toll on wildlife; that they are frighteningly efficient vectors of zoonotic diseases, some of them real doozies, it is puzzling that society has turned a blind eye to the impact of their largely unregulated, unchallenged, omnipresence in our ecosystems. Cats kept indoors for life are vastly less likely to come into contact with diseased animals, and transmit disease to their owners. They don’t kill birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and are safe from cars, dogs, fights with other cats, and persecution by people who take exception to their presence. Indoors, they are graceful, loving, amusing pets. Left free to roam they are, collectively, a disaster for already-struggling songbird and small vertebrate populations.

A strong and vocal segment of the population lobbies for the “rights” of feral cats, such that municipalities nationwide have been convinced to sanction the maintenance of cat colonies in their midst. Over and over, TNR (trap-neuter-release) has been shown not to reduce cat numbers, but rather to provide obvious dumping places for unwanted pets, which go on taking prey as cats naturally do, subsidized with food and shelter or not. Yet, because it is presented to municipalities as a solution, however imperfect, for addressing the feral cat problem, TNR is endorsed, as a less politically repugnant option than advocating the removal of the animals once and for all. Cat Wars gives cat lovers and pro-cat lobbyists a chance to be heard, profiling several devoted colony caretakers who work tirelessly to feed, water and care for street cats, and give them the best lives possible under the circumstances. It is clear that, along with the belief that free-roaming cats have a place in communities, goes denial at their real impact. The most vocal cat advocates hold the "right" of this domestic species to live free and kill wildlife above any concern for affected wildlife, and stridently question the validity of the studies cited. Calling any work--no matter how exhaustive, careful or conservative--that counters their conviction "junk science" is a defensive pose that looks all too familiar to scientists and citizens speaking out, for example, about climate change.

Ironically, it is a microbe—Toxoplasma gondii—which has been predicted to “dethrone” malaria as the protozooan most dangerous to humans—that may hold the key to changing hearts and minds. In the end, the multiple public health threats that roaming cats present look to be the only force that could propel any real initiative to reduce free-ranging cat populations.  Cat Wars gathers together an ironclad case for action over emotion; for a turnabout in public policy that in many municipalities literally supports the perpetuation of an introduced domestic predator of dwindling native wildlife; for an overhaul of the lassiez-faire attitude of more than half of America’s cat owners. If we would have cats in our midst, we must learn to keep them inside, for they create nothing but havoc—and countless more cats--when they slip out the door.

If you'd like to do something about all this, please send donations to American Bird Conservancy, whose Cats Indoors educational campaign is the most effective I've seen. You can donate here. Please tell them Zick sent you, on National Feral Cat Day.

You can purchase Cat Wars here. And pay no mind to the stack of one-star "reviews" from cat enthusiasts who haven't read the book. They flooded in before it was even released. Read the five-star reviews now rolling in, then get your hands on this book! It's a beautifully constructed and paced page-turner...I literally couldn't put it down. Thank you.

Happy National Feral Cat Day, 2016!