Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost – J.R.R. Tolkien
Julie will be temporarily living in the Pacific North West until June 2021!
Why not? Earth Arts is on break from teaching in person programs. I am tutoring a few folks via zoom this Winter and Spring……which can be done anywhere with wifi. Also, what an opportunity to dream on what Earth Arts will become when I get back to town!
Why? My partner, Mark’s, life passion is to protect Eastern Hemlocks from demise from the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) bug. He is from the Pacific Northwest, and out here HWA is controlled by natural predators (other bugs) – and he knows how to find them! He and a wonderful crew of other Cornell folks (including an Earth Arts/Women of the Forest alumni this Winter/Spring!) are breeding this predator in labs in Ithaca in preparation for release – to eat the HWA in the east. Pretty cool eh! The samples that we send back east will also be helping with HWA Phenology, the study of the timing of major life cycle stages of an organism. HWA phenology is a complicated multistep process. In the eastern US, HWA reproduces asexually and goes through two generations per year, both of which take place solely on hemlocks.
More information on the Hemlock Initiative: https://blogs.cornell.edu/nyshemlockinitiative/
Mark and I will be collecting branches/bugs from North of Seattle to Olympia. He has been doing this for years, and has gotten to know some wonderful landowners out here that are happy to “help the cause”. I’ll introduce you to some of these folks later…..
AND, during these COVID times, we are staying safe, staying in “contact free” airbnbs and socially isolating from folks as much as possible…..all while having daily wildlife sightings and adventures along the way! We decided it would be fun to record some of these adventures on a Blog in case folks were curious about what we were up to….so here goes! My First Blog!
