Category: Arb Talk

It is winter and we all know what that means at Carleton; short grey days, biting cold, and lots of snow and ice. Those of us who live in the complex are thanking our lucky stars and those of us who don’t are, like badger, telling our friends that we are really ‘busy’ and so cannot walk to the other side of campus to visit them. But what are all our neighbors in the Arb up to these days? And what kind of company do they keep?

If you’re getting the winter blues, come out to the Arb. In town, winter is a nuisance – sidewalks are icy, everything is gray and white, and the wind whips your face. Winter feels like an ordeal, something we’d all be better off without. When you go outside to the Arb to see the trees and prairie, it’s clear that the land needs the cold weather– winter isn’t punishment; it’s as beneficial as any season.

The Arb. Hopefully you’ve explored (at least a little bit) by now. Perhaps you go there to run, to cross country ski (if it ever gets cold enough), to stargaze, to complete work for a biology lab, to spot wildlife, or to clear your head after a long ninth week full of looming due-dates. In general, the Arb has a comfortable place within the lives of most of the student body. However, the Arb is not the only piece of natural land Carleton owns.

With Winter Term approaching, it’s time to review your hibernation strategies. While we hole up in heated buildings, the burrowing wolf spider digs a den below the frost line to protect herself from the snow and cold.

Friday evening approaches and with it the event during which more people on campus will be paired off then at any other time in the year. Set up your roommate is tonight and, whether you are wondering who your roommate could have set you up with or wondering what they will think when they finally find the cookie to their milk or the Piglet to their Pooh, you might also want to take a moment to wonder about one of the potential pairings in the Arb.

In addition to Professor Dan Hernandez’s fences, the stakes that indicate Professor Mark McKone’s plant community studies and the bird count posts there is another set of very interesting, but often overlooked markers hiding in the Arb.  In at least two spots, it is possible (though not always easy) to find markers that correspond to early land surveys of Rice County carried out around 1850!

The term Indian Summer has many proposed origins but the earliest to date gives credit to a letter written by Frenchman St. John de Crevecoeur in 1778. He described an Indian Summer as having a “tranquil atmosphere and general smokiness” following a period of cold before the true winter sets in. The term now most commonly and more formally describes a stint of warm weather in the fall, usually occurring just a few days after a frost. As it turns out this can usually be explained within the common fall meteorological patterns.

While the Cannon River flooding gave us many unique sights (the Great Wall of yellow sandbags, a soggy Froggy Bottom’s, and Carleton’s football-field-turned-toxic-swimming-hole, to name a few), one sight that you may or may not have witnessed was what washed up after the floodwaters began to recede—many of the river’s fish.

The flooding in Northfield last weekend was bad for Froggies, but good for the Arboretum’s floodplain forest. In the Lower Arb, river and forest ecology depend upon periodic flooding events.

If you get out to the Arb once in a while, you may have noticed some changes since you left last spring. That’s because while you were sitting inside looking at a computer screen, working some important internship, playing video games or going to the beach, this summer’s Arboretum Crew was wreaking death and destruction upon the invasive species of our beloved Arb.