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• Dairy cows pumped for new UT milking method
  in News
  By Ben Pounds

  Caretaker Kody Hash leads a tour and points out cattle with tags at the UT AgResearch and Education Center’s Little River Animal and Environmental Unit.  Ben Pounds/Hellbender Press
  Computer-based milking methods offer the best cream of the crop

  WALLAND — The University of Tennessee is using a new automated system to milk cows in the hope it’s easier on the animals than previous mechanized techniques.

  It’s the newest feature of the UT AgResearch and Education Center’s Little River Animal and Environmental Unit at 3229 Ellejoy Road in Blount County.

  As part of the unveiling of the equipment on May 2, visitors watched a cow on video walk through a ribbon to reach the new machines.
  

  The milking machines, developed by Netherlands-based Lely Corporation, allow for cattle to walk up to the machines voluntarily to get special food in what a UT news release called a more “stress-free environment.”

• To save butterflies, plant a billboard on an island for life
  in News
  By Ben Pounds

  Kat Johnson meets a butterfly during a recent event at the University of Tennessee Arboretum in Oak Ridge. Ben Pounds/Hellbender Press

  UT Arboretum event reminds us to love and care for the butterflies among us

  OAK RIDGE — With an orange flutter, a cluster of painted lady butterflies took to the sky.
  

  It was a timed release, coming toward the end of the seventh annual University of Tennessee Arboretum’s Butterfly Festival last month. 

  Earlier, other live painted lady butterflies were available to watch in mesh tents. Visitors got a chance to touch Madagascar hissing cockroaches and look at preserved insect collections with butterflies and other creatures from around the world. Children ran around the event with butterfly face paint, butterfly masks and butterfly wings. But the event was also a chance to buy butterfly-friendly plants and learn about butterflies and their relationships with other species. 

• Monarch butterflies, an ephemeral but regular glimpse of beauty, are fluttering toward extinction
  in News
  By Stephen Lyn Bales

   A monarch butterfly, recently declared endangered despite decades of conservation, is seen atop a coneflower. Stephen Lyn Bales

  Dramatic monarch declines mean the bell tolls for we

  KNOXVILLE — Monarch butterflies are ephemeral by nature. The orange and black dalliances that flitter through our lives, our yards, and our countryside like motes of dust are here one minute and gone the next. We pause for a few seconds to watch the “flutter-bys” and then move on.

  For about all of the Lepidopteran family, where they come from, where they go, their raison d'être, we don’t ask. They are winged wisps that pass through our busy lives. But that is not true with this orange and black butterfly, named to honor King William III of England, the Prince of Orange. But two people did ask.

  Norah and Fred Urquhart lived in Southern Canada and in the late 1930s they noticed that the monarch butterflies seemed to all be fluttering south this time of the year. Could they possibly be migrating and if so, where did they go? The notion that a butterfly might migrate south for the winter seemed hard to fathom. Yes, broad-winged hawks migrate. But a flimsy butterfly?

• In throwback to early naturalist techniques, Big Camera! helps us picture plants under the sun
  in News
  By Ben Pounds

  Donna Moore and Anna Lawrence are pictured at a Big Camera! event in May at Ijams Nature Center in South Knoxville. Ben Pounds/Hellbender PressLessons in early and enduring photo techniques are an organic way to spread the arts and cultivate love of nature

  KNOXVILLE — Donna Moore and Anna Lawrence showed people how to take photos with the sun.

  The method, demonstrated this spring at Ijams Nature Center, involved putting one or more leaves on photo paper and spraying it with two sprays. One spray contained lemon and water. The other contained water with vinegar.

  Children then placed these leaves on wet photo paper in the sun. The sun’s light gives a permanent impression of the leaf on the paper.

• Hellbender Press nets two top awards from Society of Professional Journalists
  in Feedbag
  By Thomas Fraser

  KNOXVILLE — Hellbender Press took home two awards from the 2021 Golden Press Card contest sponsored by the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists.

  Hellbender Press was recognized with two first-place awards for East Tennessee digital journalism: The Hal DeSelm Papers and Requiem for the Lord God Bird. 

• (Part 2) Flight to safety: Life finds a way like a great blue heron
  in News
  By Stephen Lyn Bales

  A great blue heron is seen above a nest in the Tennessee River Valley. Herons moved northward to the valley from tiny remaining Florida rookeries after the birds were annihilated in the early 20th century for hat decorations. Betty Thompson

  After their kind almost vanished, great blue herons took a minute to take to the Tennessee Valley. Now they are here in a big way. 

  “Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is,” said Jeff Goldblum’s Malcolm in ‘Jurassic Park.’ “Life finds a way.”

  In the early 20th century, after it became illegal to hunt for feathers, as referenced in this previous Hellbender Press story, herons began to recover.

  But it took a while. The curious thing with great blue herons, which perhaps attests to the tenacity of nature itself, is that for years they really had little presence in the Tennessee Valley, even after the principal dams and reservoirs were completed. There were plenty of shallow waters for fish eaters.

• (Part 1) Flight to safety: Herons barely survived a bloody fashion trend
  in News
  By Stephen Lyn Bales

  Great blue herons and other heron species were reduced to a handful of rookeries after numbers plummeted because of high demand for their plumage.  Courtesy Betty Thompson

  Herons were almost a victim of their own beauty

  plume. noun. a long, soft feather, or arrangement of feathers used by a bird for display 

  During our Gilded Age of opulence and corruption, members of polite society wore alligator shoes, top hats made from beaver pelts, ivory buttons, whalebone corsets and dead foxes draped around their shoulders. After all, status had its price and the surrounding wild lands were bountiful.

  In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most fashion-conscious women would not be seen in public without a hat adorned with feathers. In 1915, at the height of this fashion craze, an ounce of plumes sold for $32, the same going rate as an ounce of gold. The most highly coveted feathers were “aigrettes,” which are the long, silky white nuptial plumes of egrets and great blue herons. Plume hunters could make a sizable sum of money for a day’s work with a gun. 

• (News alert: Katy did it!) Seventeen-year cicadas were just an opening act. Now the woods are rolling with the rhythm of our annual insects.
  in Creature Features
  By Stephen Lyn Bales

  A true katydid is shown here. It’s one of the main insects that provides a permanent soundtrack to your summer life in the Knoxville area.  Stephen Lyn Bales/Hellbender Press

  What’s that buzz? We thought Brood X was over.

  In case you haven’t noticed: It’s hot!

  The “dog days of summer,” are so called because the season coincides with the period of time when the brightest star Sirius, aka the Dog Star, rises and sets with the Sun: early July through August into September.

  The ancients believed that when Sirius and the Sun were in the sky together, the days were hotter. I think they got it right.

  August has never been that thrilling to me, more of a month to endure. The birds have finished raising their families and are going through their late-season molt. Some of the migratory birds have already started to move south. But that doesn’t mean that our backyards are totally silent because late summer is cacophonous with insects.
  

  During the day, the trees are filled with large, green cicadas that generally spend three years underground in their larval stage, but they are not all in sync like Brood X was, so each summer we have plenty that mature to collect en masse in our neighborhoods.

  To attract females, the male cicadas do the chainsaw buzzing, but the songs are not made with vocal chords but rather special organs on the sides of their abdomens called “tymbals.” In effect, their sides vibrate loudly.

  Locally in the Knoxville region we have five species of these annual cicadas. Early in the morning and into the afternoon, swamp cicadas (Neotibicen tibicen) are calling. They are also known as morning cicadas because they usually crank up by 10 a.m. with a long uninterrupted rattle that builds in intensity.