Plants, And A Surprise Find

[Teegate]

Headed out today to explore the Buck Run area and revisit a plant site we were at a few weeks back as well as other places.

Took this at one second.

But the surprise of the day was totally unexpected. For years I have been searching for a monument I took a photo of close to 50 years ago, sometime between 1975 and 1978. I would have to find the slide to narrow the date down. Today we decided to randomly cut through the woods to get where we wanted to go and ran right into it. I will try and contact Princeton and see what they can tell me about it and maybe help me find others.


Then And Now....Mid 1970s and today.

And later in the morning Jessica found this while we were checking on the Morning Glory we discovered and reported quite a few years ago. The glory seems to be growing well this year. It is already budding.

 

[er-birds]

beautiful!! That yellow asphodel...so nice!

 

[Teegate]

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I have been in contact with the man who did the study at Buck Run in 1971/1972.His favorite place of all of them. His work in the pines set him onto a lifelong career in plant ecology and evolutionary biology.

I know where the report is and I can acquire it through a library loan service but have never done that before. Has anyone here acquired something from a distant library and have it delivered to your local library?

BTW, there was a site in Atsion, Webbs Mill and a few others it appears. One was near the Oyster Creek nuclear station. I have asked him to narrow these places down for me. He is currently in the field and hopefully when he returns I will hear back.

 

[stiltzkin]

Has anyone here acquired something from a distant library and have it delivered to your local library?

I haven't done this myself but I think all you do is submit a request for interlibrary loan (ILL). BCLS has an online form for it. Or I'm sure a librarian would help you in person.

Is the report you're after up at the state library in Trenton or something? Or just a different local library system?

 

[Teegate]

Thanks for the tip. The items are in Princeton but I think I have to use a local library to acquire it. But I am unsure. I have contacted Princeton to clarify the info they told me.

 

[Beach&Barrens]

Great shots!

 

[Teegate]

I put in a request this afternoon for the book on the cedar swamp study from 1971/1972. Not sure how long it takes to acquire it. Hopefully, I will find something interesting in it. I suspect it will be a digital copy of the book and we shall find out eventually.

 

[Teegate]

I put in a request this afternoon for the book on the cedar swamp study from 1971/1972. Not sure how long it takes to acquire it. Hopefully, I will find something interesting in it. I suspect it will be a digital copy of the book and we shall find out eventually.

I have the book. I am not sure if it will have any important info that will help me but I have not looked through it all yet. The book is in pristine condition and may never have been read.

 

[Teegate]

Basically, the first page.

 

[Teegate]

The book mentions the benchmarks and says to contact the student project director for more info on them. I had contacted him and he responded a while back but was out in the field. I just wrote him again asking for the locations so we shall see what I can learn. They were at Webbs Mill, in the cedar swamp at Atsion lake, Penn Swamp, Oyster Creek, obviously Buck Run as my photos show and the Skit Branch.

 

[stiltzkin]

Would love to read this myself - the writing style of that first page already has me hooked. I wish we had a digital library of more of these out-of-print works. The Open Library is the closest thing. I'm considering contributing some of the rarer books I've collected. Legally I don't think anyone's got into trouble for it, especially if the publisher no longer exists, but I'd like to do some more research on it.

 

[Teegate]

I forgot to mention the Albertson Brook as well.

 

[Teegate]

I am not getting any help narrowing down the locations so I have to make guesses and start looking on my own.

 

[Scroggy]

I have been in contact with the man who did the study at Buck Run in 1971/1972.His favorite place of all of them. His work in the pines set him onto a lifelong career in plant ecology and evolutionary biology.

I know where the report is and I can acquire it through a library loan service but have never done that before. Has anyone here acquired something from a distant library and have it delivered to your local library?

BTW, there was a site in Atsion, Webbs Mill and a few others it appears. One was near the Oyster Creek nuclear station. I have asked him to narrow these places down for me. He is currently in the field and hopefully when he returns I will hear back.

Were you asking Tom directly? Was riding the bus to a field trip with him yesterday (we're at a conference) and he's glad to know things are still perking away in the wet savannas. I can try to get him to show me on a Google Map if I run into him again, which is likely.

 

[Teegate]

Were you asking Tom directly? Was riding the bus to a field trip with him yesterday (we're at a conference) and he's glad to know things are still perking away in the wet savannas. I can try to get him to show me on a Google Map if I run into him again, which is likely.

Yes I was writing him directly. His book said to contact him for more info on the monuments and when I asked for it he said a few things. He told me the book was all there was but he also said he had notes. Either contradictory or he just wanted me to give up or he was busy. And he told me that I had to remember this was before GPS. Basically, he was not too helpful for what I wanted to know but he did say he was in the field and was not home to look at his notes.

His book was flooded in the library within a year of it being made, and the library made a second book. It says so right in the book. And the illustrations in the back had aerial photos of some of the locations but they appears to have been MAYBE photographed from the original book. Not really sure. They were horrible and I just could not even make a guess where anything was except maybe Atsion.

I am seriously interested in getting info from him to find at least a few of the others. I have a general idea of the Atsion one I THINK and have to spent time in the fall looking if he won't help me.

Basically, you can see I was disappointed. He wanted future researchers to read his book and know where they were but would not give the info. If I was asking for info that may cause something to be destroyed then I would hope he would not give that info out.

The Atsion site.

 

[Scroggy]

Yes I was writing him directly. His book said to contact him for more info on the monuments and when I asked for it he said a few things. He told me the book was all there was but he also said he had notes. Either contradictory or he just wanted me to give up or he was busy. And he told me that I had to remember this was before GPS. Basically, he was not too helpful for what I wanted to know but he did say he was in the field and was not home to look at his notes.

I haven't been able to corner him just yet, but as a general rule I'd consider it near-miraculous for an academic to be able to *find* their notes from 50 years ago, let alone extract GPS coordinates, and he runs a pretty busy lab...on the other hand, as a Bargain Basement academic, I can tell you we usually have all kinds of projects whizzing around and it can take a few iterations to fulfill any given request.

He probably shared with you, but it sounds like his lab has an interesting paper coming out on bog ecology and where different species of plants get their nitrogen. Last year he and his collaborators showed that the western relative of the sticky asphodel is, in fact, a carnivorous plant.

 

[Teegate]

I understand that he would not be able to pinpoint exactly where the monuments are. I just was asking for a general area. I will do the leg work. Just a quick point on Ben's map to a couple area's and I would be on my way.

NJPineBarrens Maps

maps.njpinebarrens.com

 

[Ben Ruset]

Totally unrelated to any of this, but when I worked for Princeton University I had borrowing privileges at Firestone Library (where I assume this book came from) and it was such an amazing place to walk among the stacks and smell that "old book smell".

I believe there's also a grad student's thesis on Pine Barrens folklore from the 1970s in there that I regret not spending more effort trying to find.

 

[bobpbx]

Totally unrelated to any of this, but when I worked for Princeton University I had borrowing privileges at Firestone Library (where I assume this book came from) and it was such an amazing place to walk among the stacks and smell that "old book smell".

I believe there's also a grad student's thesis on Pine Barrens folklore from the 1970s in there that I regret not spending more effort trying to find.

Ben, I do have a book related to your Pine Barren folklore, but it covers the entire state. I really enjoyed it, and it's available to anyone on the site to borrow from me. Rutgers Univ. Press. 1983

 

[JerseyDevil]

Headed out today to explore the Buck Run area and revisit a plant site we were at a few weeks back as well as other places.



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Took this at one second.

View attachment 17481

But the surprise of the day was totally unexpected. For years I have been searching for a monument I took a photo of close to 50 years ago, sometime between 1975 and 1978. I would have to find the slide to narrow the date down. Today we decided to randomly cut through the woods to get where we wanted to go and ran right into it. I will try and contact Princeton and see what they can tell me about it and maybe help me find others.


Then And Now....Mid 1970s and today.

View attachment 17482


And later in the morning Jessica found this while we were checking on the Morning Glory we discovered and reported quite a few years ago. The glory seems to be growing well this year. It is already budding.

View attachment 17483

Very nice!