January 2009 Vol. VI No. 5

Directors & Officers

Ruth Loper, Director

Lynn Sherrod, Director

Clyde McKinney, President

franclyde@peoplescom.net

903-967-3998

Liz Soutendijk, VP Programs

Elizabeth Parks, Sec/Treasurer

Ron Loper, VP Field Trips

Marjorie Sherrod, VP Membership

Herb Jarrell, Newsletter Editor

herbjarrell@letu.edu

903-986-2332

FROM THE PRESIDENT

Happy New Year! Dr. Lynn Sherrod will be our speaker this month and he prefers Posados for dinner, so let’s meet there at 5:30 PM prior to the Chapter Meeting. Everyone is invited!  Posados Cafe is west of Loop 323 at 2500 (on the north side) E Fifth St (903-597-2573).

Spring is just around the corner I keep telling myself. Watch for the first Acer rubrum bloom. It looks like this:

Photos from Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

(Note: This picture was taken in Pennsylvania. I’m sure the Texas flowers are much prettier!)

Acer rubrum is our red maple and it blooms in the very early spring before the leaves break out. The flowers are followed by the fruit in the form of samaras carrying the seeds. They look like this:

It is easy to germinate a fresh seed, provided you pick it at the right time—off the tree (not off the ground!), and plant it immediately in a small container, samara and all. It is a little harder to keep the transplanted seedling alive. The tree requires moist soil so keep that in mind if you attempt to propagate one. Confusion seems common in the plant world; one source claims the trees are long lived, another claims they are short lived. Regardless, most newly planted Red Maples will outlive me, I’ll bet.

The confusion continues in East Texas over variations of the red maple. Some sources ignore variations. Some sources say we have three variations: var. drummondii drummond red maple, var. trilobum trident red maple, and var. rubrum. Other sources only recognize Acer rubrum and var. trilobum. All agree that the red maple belongs to the family Aceraceae, the maple family.

The differences between the three variations according to Shinners & Mahler’s Illustrated Flora of North Central Texas are:

Acer rubrum var. rubrum: The lower surface of the leaf blades are glabrous (smooth, hairless) or with hairs only along the veins, leaf blades usually have five lobes, the lateral basal lobes small, leaves become bright crimson in the fall.

Acer rubrum var. drummondii: The lower surface of the leaf blades are densely and usually permanently hairy, leaf blades usually have five lobes, the lateral basal lobes small, leaves become bright crimson in the fall.

Acer rubrum var. trilobum: Differentiated by having the leaf blades with only three lobes, the smaller lateral basal lobes suppressed (failing to develop). Shinner’s implies that the leaves become bright crimson in the fall. Other sources state that the leaves are yellow in the fall.

I hope we see the flowers soon – I’m ready.

Clyde McKinney

NEW MEMBERS—none

JANUARY PROGRAM

Trees of East Texas

by Dr. Lynn Sherrod

Dr. Lynn Sherrod, Charter Member and Director of the Tyler Chapter and Professor Emeritus of Biology at UT Tyler.  Dr. Sherrod is also the Botanical Advisor to the Texas NPSOT.

Information will be presented about the basic biology, reproduction, and characteristics of several families of trees.  Focus will be on the hickory-walnut family, the oak family, and time permitting, some other smaller tree families.  General information about ID of species will be discussed. 

Liz Soutendijk

PONDERINGS

What’s In a Name?—Part I

by Dr. Herb Jarrell

One of the best qualities of a good name is brevity—thus the title of this article has been kept short intentionally—otherwise, the reader might not have even begun reading it. But, of course, the context of this newsletter probably causes the reader to suspect, correctly, that we will only be pondering what’s in plant names. But, since exclusivity makes a good name even better, this first in, hopefully, a series of articles intends to examine primarily the most exclusive type of plant names. And, in the world of plants, this means their Latin names.

Now, before the reader is completely turned off (as in, “Oh, Latin!—Gag me with a spoon!”), please allow me to remind us of a couple redeeming values of good names, regardless of the language. But before I do that (next month in Part II), please be disabused of one of the most commonly mistaken assumptions students make regarding Latin names—the term “Latin” does NOT indicate that only Latin words are allowed! No, Latin names do NOT exclude words from ANY language. In fact, although there are 4 Latin languages listed in my Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms (Donald J. Borror, Mayfield Pub.,1988), there are also 31 non-Latin languages listed.

So why are these names called Latin? Well, it turns out that most of us were just born too late. You see, the universal language of science at the time binomial (Linnaean) names were first proposed and adopted just happened to be Latin, which over the centuries since ancient times had replaced the prior “language of science”—Greek. So why don’t we recognize words from other languages in our plant names? Well, it turns out that a great many Greek plant descriptors had been in use centuries before Latin superceded the Greek. And a great many more Latin plant descriptors had been added to the Greek ones centuries before Latin became a “dead” language, that is, long before we had a shot at naming plants with terms from modern languages. So, yes, a great many of today’s species names use Latin plant descriptors, but hardly more than those using Greek plant descriptors, and, as we saw above, not necessarily to the exclusion of plant descriptors from dozens of other languages.

However, there is yet another, even more significant reason for calling these names “Latin” than the fact that the use of Latin superceded the use of Greek among the learned a few centuries ago. Since our modern languages have inherited innumerable Greek and Latin words in various spellings, all of us should be able to admit to having recognized words from our non-Latin vocabularies in some of the Latin names. (Even though, to my chagrin in later life, I managed in school to exclude almost all Latin words from my vocabulary, I, too, can admit to noticing some of these “misspelled” words).

So what is my point? Well, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that “Latin names” themselves are actually misnamed! They are NOT necessarily Latin words—they are just as often Greek words or even words from our own languages that are Latinized, that is, they are NOT required to be Latin—they are only required to take Latin endings! In this sense, since this convention would be expected to be adopted, no matter whose language had been originally adopted for formally naming plants, do we have any reason for resisting the use of Latinized names?

Another point to be raised in this Part is that, had all terms chosen for formal plant names not been required to have the endings appropriate to a single language, can you imagine the cacophony of sounds we would all be making to pronounce the names of different plants today? Thanks to the foresight of our scientific forefathers, all we have to do is learn to pronounce the endings of only a single language—the one from which so many terms have been drawn into all our modern languages, especially our very own English! In other words, why should we “throw out the baby with the bath water” (throw away perfectly good plant descriptors just because their endings may not yet be familiar to us).

Finally, I should demonstrate what is, other than the Greek language, by far the most common source of non-Latin terms for Latin names—proper names. Two of my favorites are the names Berlandiera ssp. for one of the first botanists to explore Texas (Jean Louis Berlandier) and Herbertia spp. for an English authority on bulbs (William Herbert)—a name for which I, in particular, have developed a particularly strong attachment!

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND EVENTS

January Joint Master Naturalist & Audubon Meeting—Tuesday, January 13^th at the Pollard United Methodist Church, 3030 New Copeland Road in Tyler.

Please park in the front parking lot and enter through the main doors. When you enter the building, go right down a long hall to the meeting room.  The meeting will begin at 6:30 PM with a bird identification class at 6:30 usually led by TMN Cheryl Beck and the formal meeting begins at 7:00 PM in which Clifford Shackelford will speak on Hummingbirds.

BRIEF BIO-SKETCH FOR CLIFF SHACKELFORD (December, 2008):

· Cliff is a 5th generation Texan and started birdwatching at the age of nine.

· He made his first tropical birding trip at the age of 17 to Peru where he spent a few days birding with the late Ted Parker. Several birding trips later, at the age of 21, Cliff saw the 1,000^th species on his world life list. He published his first bird book, Hummingbirds of Texas, at the age of 37.

· The Shackelfords have deep roots in the Tyler area. Cliff’s great, great, great, great grandfather, Richard Shackelford Jr. and wife Frances were buried in the historical Smith Cemetery just north of Gresham in 1867 and 1862, respectively. Cliff often visits the family farm that is located near Troup – it has been in the family since approximately 1910.

· He received both a B.S. and an M.S. degree in biology with an emphasis in avian ecology from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. His Master’s thesis dealt with the habitat characteristics of 5 species of woodpeckers.

· Cliff is the statewide Nongame Ornithologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department where he’s been employed for almost 12 years.

· Cliff has authored about 60 publications on birds and birding. Over a dozen of these are peer-reviewed papers mainly on woodpeckers, raptors, and migratory landbirds in journals like The Wilson Bulletin, The Journal of Raptor Research, The Southwestern Naturalist, the Bulletin of the Texas Ornithological Society, and more.

· He and his wife, Julie, and their 2 young children live in Nacogdoches. Julie works for a non-profit land conservation organization called The Conservation Fund where she buys land to add to existing refuges and parks like The Big Thicket. They also have a busy garage hobby of building screech owl boxes known as Owl Shacks.

2009 East Texas Master Naturalist Class—Saturdays, January 24 through March 29, 2009 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

The East Texas Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists (TMN) will begin a new class on Saturday, January 24. Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas AgriLIFE Extension Service jointly sponsor the program.

Certified Master Naturalists are a corps of well-informed volunteers who provide education, outreach, and service dedicated to the beneficial management of natural resources and natural areas within their community. Since December 2000, TMN volunteers have dedicated over 650,000 hours of service to natural resource community projects. During this period, over 105,000 youths, adults, and private landowners have been reached through TMN education, outreach, and technical guidance efforts.

The training program consists of over 40 hours of intensive classroom and field base instruction from educators and specialists from universities, agencies, nature centers, and museums. During this ten-week course, the emphasis is on local ecosystems. Subjects include ecology, soils and geology, botany, aquaculture, birds, archeology, paleontology, weather and climate, wildlife diversity, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and forest/wetland/prairie management. Field trips will include Common Trees and Plants at The Nature Center in Tyler; Bottomland/Hardwood Habitat, Herpetology, and Birding at Old Sabine Bottom Wildlife Management Area near Mineola; and Blackland Prairie Ecology at Clymer Meadows near Greenville.

After graduation, Master Naturalists continue their education with eight hours of advanced training a year and 40 hours of volunteer service in activities and projects sponsored by the Chapter. Project examples include wildscape maintenance, interpretive trails, marsh and prairie restoration, fish, wildlife and plant surveys, seed collections, and youth education. Many service project opportunities exist in Wood County including at the new Quitman Arboretum, Lake Fork, the Mineola Nature Preserve, and various citizen scientist projects.

The cost of TMN program is $125 per person and includes all classroom instruction, TMN manual, and lunch. Application deadline is January 15, 2008. For information, go to the website - http://www.woodduck.org and click on "About TMN How to join,” e-mail info@woodduck.org, or contact East Texas Master Naturalists Vice President Clyde McKinney, 903-967-3998, or Irene Hamel, Texas Parks & Wildlife, 903-566-9394.

Contributions to the Newsletter

This newsletter is normally published monthly, September through May. Members are especially encouraged to submit articles for publication in this newsletter. Contributions will be considered on the basis of interest, suitability, and available space. Grammar and spelling corrections will be made at the discretion of the editor. Email your articles, announcements, etc. to the editor at herbjarrell@letu.edu.

Access our website for previous newsletters at www.npsot/Tyler/index.htm. If you have never attended one of our meetings, and you are interested in learning more about native plants and their habitats, we invite you to give us a visit. Our meetings are usually held at the Fairwood United Methodist Church in Tyler and usually on the first Monday of each month, September through May. Fairwood United Methodist Church is located just east of the East Loop (Route 323) and south of Fifth Street (Highway 64) at 1712 Old Omen Road.

Please note: if you would like to forward this newsletter to someone via “snail” mail, simply fold a printed copy in half so that a blank side remains on the outside for postage, addressee and return addresses, then staple or tape the two sides and the bottom together.