Jackson Civil War Muster

There are so many things in life that capture my interest.  Nature, of course, is right at the top, but I'm also quite keen on history.

One of the big events here in Jackson, MI is the annual Civil War Muster, which I thought I'd check out this year.  This year is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, so that was one of the battles they did this weekend (Sunday - I had to work).  On Saturday they did parts of the Battle of Chancellorsville, so I got to see that.

The Civil War has been on my personal radar since I was a kid.  My grandparents (and great-grandparents) had real Civil War Stuff in their attic, which belonged to a man named David Getman, whose family partially raised my great-grandfather.  David Getman had been captured and escaped from Libby Prison, and they had the uniform that he escaped in, along with his sword, and a stack of ledgers that I remember sitting in the attic reading when I was very young.  These ledgers listed the names of the soldiers, their height, hair and eye colors, their ranks, and what they were paid.  I have no idea what happened to those ledgers or any of the other things.  I did, however, inherit a chest full of clothes that dated back to the late 1800s, although I don't think they quite went back to the Civil War.  Most of the contents of that chest were donated to the Adirondack Museum before I left NY - they could take better care of them than I could.

So, Saturday I went to the muster.  It was a beautiful sunny day - quite hot in the sun, but pleasant in the shade.

First I toured the vendors.  There were two categories of vendors.  On one side of the road were the reenactor vendors - Sutlers and period foods.

On the other side of the road were more flea-market types of vendors - I didn't patronize them.

There were also musicians!  Some "impromptu" groups met under this tree to regale us with songs from the Civil War era.


 This New Orleans Jazz band was on a bandstand - I just love this type of music.



Once past the flea market, one headed toward the encampment(s) and the field where the battles would take place. 

I've been doing a little research on the role of freed slaves during the Civil War and was pleased to see reeneactors here representing some of these troops.

At the bandstand some industrious soul had written the Gettysburg Address on the pavement for all to read.

There was also a great display of period bottles and the "snake oil' that peddlers used to sell.

I love this one, which tries to convince parents that their children need this product:

One tent was set up as a tavern (The Emerald Peacock):

and there was a village with all sorts of "businesses."

I saw more than one "Abe Lincoln."

What a beautiful funeral parlor:

which was probably supplied with victims of the surgery:

As 2:00 approached, the spectators started to really crowd in.  Shade was at a premium.

The reenactors were getting cannons in place on the hillside,

and troops moved into position.  Here we see the southern troops moving down the road.  In the Chancellorsville Battle apparently the Union Army was taken by surprise, thinking the southern troops were further away than they actually were.  What we would see today was the Confederate Army catching the Union soldiers unprepared.

The Union officers would occasionally sally forth on their horses.  The most exciting thing was when one of the horses bolted sans rider.  I'm not sure what happened - I just saw the riderless horse tearing down the field with another (with a rider) in hot pursuit.

Before long, the Confederate soldiers had the Union soldiers on the run, nearly surrounded under the tree.

Part two was the Battle of Salem Church (I hope I got that correct), which was another section of the Chancellorsville Battle.  Here we see the Confederate soldiers in a skirmish line.

The cannons of both sides fired intermittent volleys - what a noise!

The southern troops were finally driven back.

At the end, the reenactors from both sides lined up and paraded before the spectators.

I'd share some of the video I shot, but it is all very shaky because I had to hold the camera over my head to get it above the heads in front of me. 

Meanwhile, back in the bandstand, we had Harold Becker, one of 15 surviving children of men who fought in the Civil War!  His father was 16 when he joined the Union Army, and was 70 when Harold was born in 1917.  Harold was there to shake folks' hands and to hand them postcards about himself and his father.  I got one that he had signed.

Back in the encampment, there was activity at the field hospital.  It was all very melodramatic, but sadly all my video shots of it captured the heads of the people in front of me - must master the camera angle when holding the camera over my head!  Needless to say, this poor young man had a gunshot wound in his leg and the surgeon amputated the food to save the leg.

I retired at this point to the shade, where I watched a couple kids in period dress playing in the stream.

Very cute.

The muster continued into the night with lots of activities, but I was ready to go home about 4:00.  Learned a bit about history, had a pretty good time.  If I go again, I'll get a spot in the shade early enough to take photos from the edge of the battle field, instead of over the heads of everyone who got there earlier!

Sad Update

I came into my office a couple weeks ago, after my weekend, to find the little hickory horn devil deceased.  :(

I'm not sure what caused its demise.  It had food, and it had been eating.  I'd also provided water, just in case.  Maybe it was lack of sunshine - my office is very dark.

On the other hand, my coworker is the caterpillar queen, and she has a house full of cecropia, polyphemus, imperial and monarch caterepillars.

Yes - monarchs!  At last we are starting to find some.  We now have TWO at work (whereas by now we normally have had 50+ go thru our monarch monitoring containers.

Plant more milkweed!!!

Incredibly Busy Days

No time to do any posting these days...but here are some of the natives in bloom around my house:

Rattlesnake Master

One of the Sunflowers....

Purple Coneflower

 Wild Senna

 Bee Balm

Monkeyflower

Showy Tick Trefoil

 Giant Purple Hyssop

 Compass Plant

Rosinweed

 Three-lobed Coneflower

Hoary Vervain

 Thimbleweed

 Rose Mallow - inside and out

Green-headed Coneflower (the plant is pushing 7ft. tall...maybe 8)

Culver's Root

Great St. Johnswort

These were from a couple weeks ago.  And now it's August!  Must get back out there and see what's changed.

It's Hatched!

Eight days ago, a regal moth laid her egg on my hand.  We brought it in and put it in a jar.  We looked it up to find out how long it would be until it hatched, and then what it would eat.  The experts said the egg would hatch in seven to ten days.  

Yesterday was day seven.  The egg had a dark spot on it.  I went out and grabbed a hickory leaf and we placed leaf and egg into a larger container.

This morning I came in about 10:00.  The egg was all black.  I looked at it again about 12:30 - the egg was empty.

 

It had hatched!  Over on another leaflet, there was the baby hickory horn devil!  And what a baby it is - check it out:

  Look at all those spines and things! 

And here it is with my finger in the background...just to give you an idea of scale.  It is maybe 6mm long.

If you take your motion sickness tablets, you can watch the video of it's first steps in the sunshine:

It hasn't taken even a tiny nibble from the leaf we gave it.  So we added a fresher leaf and a leaf of another hickory species.  We don't know which one it will prefer, but whatever it first snacks on, that will be the one we will have to keep feeding it.

 I will keep posting the progress of our little friend, either here or on the Dahlem blog:  Dirt Time at Dahlem.

Turk's Cap Lily

"The Turk's cap lilies are blooming," my co-worker said early this week.  I had been out on the trails on Sunday, and had not seen any, but apparently by Monday they were there.  So, I had to go out as soon as I had a few spare moments to get some photos; this was a new flower for my life list, after all.

Luckily, there were three in bloom only a short distance down our trails.  It's been ridiculously hot and humid this week, so being outside has not been high on my list of desirable things to do.

So I hiked out the trail, past the campers, across the bridge, and there they were.  I was surprised at how small the flowers were.  The plants stood 2.5 feet tall (although according to the literature they can get 6-7 feet tall), but the flowers were each smaller than my fist.  I'd say that they are maybe three inches across.  

The strongly recurved petals are the source of the plant's name.  The person who named it was apparently reminded of a turban.  There are more than one species of lily called the Turk's cap, and the ones we have in this part of the country are Lilium superbum. We also have Michigan lilies (L. michiganense), which look quite similar (I have yet to see one of these, too).  Apparently the best way to tell the two apart is to look down the throat of the lily.  If there is a distinct "green star" on the inside, it is a Turk's cap.  No star...Michigan.  The flowers I photographed are pretty tightly closed in the center, so we can't use the photos to look for this trait.  The anthers of the Michigan lily are also never more than half an  inch long, whereas those of the Turk's cap are generally over half and inch.  I will have to go back out and take another gander...just to be sure.

Apparently the roots are edible and once formed a part of the diet of local natives.  Many native insects and even birds (hummingbirds) will sip nectar from these flame-colored beauties.

Regal Moth

Camp was just winding up and the camp director pointed out to me "there's a moth flopping on the ground."  And sure enough, there it was - a regal moth.

 Regal moths are in the silk moth clan - note the very large furry body (this photo is not mine...it is from Dave Smith's blog "ylmb25").  How large is it?  Well the wing span is larger than my hand, and the body was as big as my thumb (I have chubby thumbs).  

Well, of course, I had to go and pick it up.  It was fluttering and flapping, but all that effort was not resulting in any flying.  I figured it must be injured, so I placed my hand in front of it and up it crawled.

Poor thing was missing it's left front foot (which I later discovered was recent, because the camp director had taken its photo earlier and it was fully footed).  Well, it scrambled and fluttered and refused to sit still on my hand.  I had no camera with me, so I couldn't get any pics of my own.  It climbed on my shirt, then back on my hand, and while "sitting" there in a complete state of agitation, it left a small white blob on my hand.

  

Now, normally, you'd be thinking "oooo - it poo'd on my hand," right?  But no - it's an egg!  I had a gravid female!  

She fluttered some more and then, pfffttt, suddenly she was airborn!  Up she went to the edge of the pavilion roof, and dropped another egg.  Then she fluttered up to a hickory tree and we can only presume she laid a few more eggs on the undersides of a few leaves.  And then she was off again, like a very ungainly bird, flapping across the trail and into the tangle.

I've brought the egg inside - we are going to see if we can raise it.  But how long will it be before it hatches?  And what will it eat?  Research!!!

The regal moth, aka the Royal Walnut Moth (Citheronia regalis), is the largest of the silk moths, going by mass (think weight), in North America.   You many know it better in its larval form:  the hickory horn devil (read my post about these here).   They lay their eggs in groups of one to four on the undersides of preferred host plant leaves, like hickories and walnuts (being neither of these, it must just be she had to "go" while in my hand and I got a deposit).  In 7 to 10 days we can expect the egg to hatch...and then we've got to feed it.

Stay tuned...

Dark Skies

One of the things that I miss since moving to Michigan is the star-soaked night sky. Back in Newcomb I could go out any night that was not completely socked in by clouds and see millions upon millions of stars. I couldn't hold up a hair and not have it touch stars. Here, when I go out at night, I can hold up my hand and move it across vast areas of sky and not hit a single star. People here say how lucky I am to live where I live because I'm "out in the country" and get to see so many stars. They have no idea.

I found this video today from Yosemite - perhaps it'll give you a taste of what I have lost.