February 6th, 2010 by Tim Parsons
Hello all, I’m back now. Thanks for your emails wondering if I am still around. I am. I had the pleasure of teaching a Winter Term course, BIOL 1003- Trees and the Urban Forest. What fun it was to join in the Middlebury experience from the faculty side, as opposed to being the staff guy with the dirt on his knees.
I love how random Middlebury is, how it appears out of nowhere, popping up in your life when you least expect a dose of academia. A good example of this was Nancy and I driving home from one of those inevitable but still unpleasant Taft Corners runs (Plato’s Closet and Once Upon a Child, have pity for me with 3 girls), and tuning the radio into WRMC, Middlebury’s own radio station. Sunday night, 4 Pm, and the show was The Jet Stream. Now granted, I’m a bit of a weather obsessive, but I was blown away by the quality of this show. Two guys, doing nothing but talking about the weather for the upcoming week. (who are you two? If you see me up in a tree on campus pruning stop and introduce yourself) Easily the best forecast discussion I’ve heard in a long time, with talk of computer models, trends, and facts for the obsessive in all of us. As high quality as the Eye on the Sky guys at noon on Vermont Public Radio. My only comparable experience while driving was listening to a book on tape, A Brief History of the Universe by Stephen Hawking. I remember listening to that one and having to pull off the side of the road to sit and think for a little bit.
Another Middlebury random experience was just this morning, while reading Slate. The article was on Lost, and it mentioned another article by Jason Mittell. I thought I’d recognized the name, and sure enough, he’s in the Middlebury faculty. It’s not a small world, it’s just random.
Winter Term was a blast. I was warned by someone-it comes at you fast. Did it ever. 4 days a week of classes for four weeks didn’t even leave enough time to sneeze. The class did a couple of large service projects I’ll be writing about in the upcoming weeks. One was the start of applying to the Arbor Day Foundation to become a Tree Campus. Another was developing a street tree plan for an area in Middlebury known as Buttolph Acres. Yet another was taking the Middlebury Campus Tree Map and running the information through a computer model called iTree to determine stormwater abatement, pollution control, and carbon sequestration, among other items. Good blog fodder until the landscape starts greening up to be sure.
What an honor to work with Middlebury students. It was an experience I won’t forget for a long time, and one should the stars align correctly again I’d love to repeat. 23 students, all smarter than I am, teaching me as much as I was teaching them. Hopefully I’ll get a little random as well.
January 3rd, 2010 by Tim Parsons
Snow, so far, is a very fluffy 12″, and it is still coming down. I’m betting another 3″ or so. The rain guage has only measured about .16″ of preciptation, just to give you an idea how fluffy the snow is, although I wonder how about the accuracy of that. That would make the snow/water ratio astronomical.
The Main Quad work is finsished, and for those of you that haven’t seen it yet I think you’re in for a treat. Here’s a couple of web cam shots, before and after. Enjoy the snow!
 View from Old Chapel-Before
 View from Old Chapel-After
December 29th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
Snow or not, the subcontractors are doing the work for the Main Quad Tree Removal. They started by Old Chapel Road, and I arrived in time to watch the removal of tree number two, the tree that was struck by lightening.
 Wound on Tree Number Two Read the rest of this entry »
December 20th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
Being part of the snow removal crew at Middlebury, it’s a little disconcerting to awaken on a lazy Sunday morning, look outside the window, and see it snowing like the dickens. So I go downstairs, start the coffee (priorities), boot the computer, and look at the Old Chapel Web Cam. Phew, not snowing on campus. Fooled by lake effect snow again.
Fortunately, we don’t live in Buffalo, but we certainly do get lake effect snow in the Champlain Valley. Lake Champlain is deceiving, as it is only 12 miles wide at the widest point, and much less wide down our way. It is, however, 125 miles long, north to south. (While we’re at it, average depth is 65 feet, with the deepest part a whopping 400 feet. That’s down where I used to live in Charlotte, and I can remember getting the heebies cross country skiing over that area when the lake completely froze one year. The lake is about 700 square miles). Lake Effectsnow requires several meteorological items to align, the major two being fetch and temperature. Fetch is simply the wind blowing across the lake, picking up moisture. The fetch needs to be at least 100 km, so the wind on Lake Champlain needs to be from the NNW, which it was this morning.
 - Lake Effect Snow Radar Map
The temperature is the other major factor. The air temperature at altitude (850 mb temp, roughly 1500 feet up) needs to be 15 degrees celsius less than the lake temp. The air temperature this morning was about 15 degrees, and the lake was a balmy 43. So, as you can see on the radar map, no snow at Middlebury, where the white circle is, while at my house, due west of Middlebury, we are seeing snow.
There is a great paper (PDF) studying this phenomenon published by the Burlington Office of the National Weather Service. The updated forecast just called for several tenths of an inch more snow through 2 PM. Read the rest of this entry »
December 16th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
A new category in the Middland blog, and a guest post to boot. I’m sure most of you have seen the new plaza at McCullough, but have you noticed the rocks out there? Read the rest of this entry »
December 10th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
Here at Middlebury we seemed to have missed the brunt of the storm all around us. Trees are down all around Lake Dunmore, East Middlebury, and up into Huntington. No major tree damage here, although some Weeping Willows look like the base of the chair you sit in after a haircut-we’ll be picking up sticks for a day or so. Snow Reports from around the area include 6″ in Cornwall, and 9″ in Bridport, while on campus we only seemed to be shoveling 3″. Our peak wind gust was 48 MPH, from the southeast at 2 PM. Some brave souls out making snowmen on Battell Beach went inside pretty quickly after that…
December 6th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
The National Weather Service is getting all excited about breaking the record of the latest date of first measurable snowfall (measurable meaning more than .1″). Being that they keep the record in Burlington, which didn’t get snow yesterday, they are poised to break it tomorrow. I never get too excited about records, what the hottest day was, the coldest, all that. It’s like baseball statistics-dry, interesting on the periphery, but not riveting reading.
Here in Middlebury we got about 1/10th of an inch, exactly .04″ in liquid form. (The weather station melts the snow and pretends it is rain.) The sidewalks and roads were warm enough to melt the snow as well, so facilities got this one off (yea!). Look for colder weather this week, and a big storm on Wednesday, the jury is still out as to amount of rain/snow/sleet/junk that may fall.
December 1st, 2009 by Tim Parsons
While we dislike removing trees, sometimes we must. The Landscape Department is overseeing the removal of some hazardous trees in the main quad over winter recess. (We like removing trees over recesses–there is no pedestrian traffic and hopefully the ground will be frozen enough so we don’t make much of a mess.) Since the trees are in a very prominent location, we’ve been consulting with the President’s Staff, as well as the Master Plan Committee, and all are in agreement about the removals. When finished, the look and feel of the main quad will be very different, yet much improved. And, in a bit of synergy, the work aligns with Campus Master Plan. Read the rest of this entry »
November 25th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
Still no snow in the Champlain Valley, and it’s almost the end of November. (No complaints) According to the National Weather Service, on average the first measurable snow in Burlington falls around November 6. Here’s the 10 latest snow falls, going back from 1906, along with the amount of snow in that entire season.
Season total
rank -date -snowfall (inches)
1. 12/7/1937 45.1
2. 12/5/1915 54.4
3. 12/1/1948 40.7
4. 11/30/1918 69.6
5. 11/30/1953 83.6
6. 11/30/1960 51.6
7. 11/28/1913 56.5
8. 11/27/1941 57.7
9. 11/26/1982 80.5
10. 11/25/1957 94.9
And no, I’m not making any predictions. There is a link on the right for the Long Term Forecasts from the weather service, if you wish. Have a good Thanksgiving all!
November 20th, 2009 by Tim Parsons
I’m a big believer in tree karma. After all, I spend much of the winter at high altitude pruning trees in the canopy. (Don’t tell my mom-she still worries about running with scissors, so she wouldn’t be so into climbing with chainsaws). So do the trees still like me? I like to think I plant more than remove, but what’s the ratio here at Middlebury?
Trees in an urban forest such as ours are under more stress than in a natural forest environment. Granted, they adapt well, growing wide, as they don’t have their brethren next to them breaking wind (wait, that doesn’t sound right). They rely on each other for support, protection, and for all we know, companionship. Trees on campus get walked upon, climbed, swung from, and occasionally cut into with an axe. Root systems are walked on, soil compressed, all sorts of little indignities befall a campus tree.
Most fight valiantly, but, sadly, some succumb. It’s our job to remove the victims before they fall on something like a building, or, more importantly, someone. In arboriculture, a hazardous tree is defined as a tree that can fall on a target. That means if a tree falls in the woods, it doesn’t make any noise, because there is no target. Many trees on campus have targets-students seem to walk everywhere. So we worry. And cut the occasional tree.
Middlebury College has a vigorous tree planting program. It’s necessary in an urban forest to be continually replacing trees, much like succession in the woods. It should be on-going, as a mixed age population is more sustainable. We aim for diversity as well. No more than 30% of the trees in an urban forest population should come from the same plant family, no more than 20% from the same genus, and no more than 10% from the same species. We’ve been planting trees all along, but also removing some. So, we wondered, what was the karma factor here, were we planting more than removing?
I spent my lunch break looking at pictures of removals, and going through my planting files, worried about our department’s karma. Happily, we’re good, and by quite a bit. I’m in my fourth year here, three growing seasons, and in that time our department has removed 37 trees from the main campus. This does not include 5 or so lost to student damage, and a couple “weed” trees growing out of woodlines. We have planted over 128 trees, for a ratio of better than 3.5 to 1.
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