Cone-Cone-Chweee!
Posted on April 14, 2007, by kiliii.
Filed Under Community |
The song of Red-Winged Blackbirds trills the morning air as we walk along the shores of the marsh. Suddenly, a flock of thousands explodes off the water, honking and darkening the sky. The geese are heading north again!
We had ventured to Eugene ostensibly to harvest cattails, though we spent a great deal of time simply playing in the wetlands, as usual. Here Ellen fluffs a cattail head, reseeding the plants we harvest, trying to learn how to manage the land in a respectful and sustainable fashion.
The cattail harvest was not as fruitful as I had hoped. The weather in the coast range was colder than the Willamette Valley (which includes our home territory in Portland), and the cattails were a good twelve inches shorter than the ideal harvesting height. Nevertheless, we harvested a good bunch, even in the face of the dry soil that made shoot harvesting difficult.
A number of the group were from Lewis and Clark University (spring break), so to make it a proper trip for us all, everyone put in with kayaks and canoes to experience the wetlands at water level. Paddling through tule rushes, the boats helped the group get closer to the truth of the wetland– bass under the surface, a juvenile bald eagle overhead.
Not to be daunted by the cattail situation, Pete, Thaddeus and I spent the last morning down by the stream picking lady fern and bracken fern fiddleheads. There is some controversy over the potential for bracken ferns to be mildly carcinogenic, though the literature certainly supports that notion. Considering how wonderful they taste and how prolific they are, I’ll still be happy to eat a few.
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