The News from Malabar

Volume 3, Issue No. 5 ***Over 135 Served*** Organic, manure-enriched news since 2011. Monday, February 25, 2013 more downward than upward. The bulk of the skunk cabbage is never seen, as it sends out rhizomes that burrow deeper and deeper every year, growing larger and larger. Malabar's skunk cabbages may be extremely old. Their lavish leafiness was what prompted Louis Bromfield to name the marshy lowland stream where they grow the Jungle Brook. As the plants predate Bromfield, and the area where they grow shows no signs of cultivation, the current skunk cabbages may be the revitalized descendants of plants harvested by the Lenni-Lenape Indians for medicinal purposes centuries ago. With such age, the rhizomes below ground are likely to be a thick as telephone poles. It would take dynamite to blast the well-ensconced plants out of there. We hope no one will ever want to do so. We'll share some pictures as the cabbages grow big and strong this year. Meanwhile, we decided to dateline this article Perrysville, because the skunk cabbages are at the eastern end of the park like the restaurant, and it gets its mail from the Perrysville post office. Thanks to that quirk, combined with the lines of telephone exchange districts, it is long distance to call one mile from the Malabar Farm Hostel to the Malabar Farm Restaurant.

Calendars, schmalenders. The News hereby declares that it is spring, because the first wildflowers of the season, the homely skunk cabbages, have begun poking their heads up through the frozen ground near the low-lying Jungle Brook at Malabar Farm. See a close-up bonus picture of one of the pods on page four.

It's official: It's spring!!!!

(PERRYSVILLE) We don't know about you, but we here at The News are calling it a season, because we don't much care for late winter, and we now have an excuse to say that things have moved on to spring. The skunk cabbages have arrived! What, pray tell, is a skunk cabbage? It is the first native wildflower to bloom in the central highlands of Ohio. We must admit, it is sometimes rivaled for early blooming by the much more standard and polite looking snow drop, but that is a European import. The eastern skunk cabbage has been melting its way up through the snow here for untold millenia. Melting its way? Yup. This peculiar plant sends out a spathe, a tough pod with the pale, tiny, yellowgreen flower in its hollow center. The plant is one of the few that generates heat in order to bloom. Temperatures inside the spathe can get from 60 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing it to literally melt the ice and snow so the pod can poke its head up. Once it is above the snow, the spathe creaks open, and the flower's fetid scent floats out, attracting the first insects of the season. The bugs love it because not only is the smell attractive to them, the spathe is also a nice place to hang out and keep warm on a cold night. Once the flower is fertilized, the plant begins sending up leaves. The spathe changes from purple and green streaks to a dark brown, and the vivid, rich green leaves unfurl. Once they reach full size, the leaves can measure a foot by two feet. Stinky snow flowers aren't the plant's only oddity. It also grows

Mather FORECAST
Monday will get up to the hypotenuse of a right triangle with the sides measuring Sunday's low temperature and the square root of the relative humidity. Tuesday's low will be factored for 'x,' while Wednesday's high will be the empty set. Thursday will get up to infinity, while Friday will be as sweet and easy as working in a 3.14 factory.

Correspondence
Mary Ann Calhoun wrote to say that Patricia L.H. Black's article about shrinking prison populations was her kind of humor. She had no comments about the remainder of the issue. Rob Ryder called from Columbus to say he was really enjoying The News. All right, he was really calling to make a reservation at the hostel for himself and his wife, but he did say in passing that he enjoys the newsletter. We'll take whatever scant praise we can get.
A new road is being built to help the flow of wagon traffic up to the sugar shack and back during the upcoming Maple Syrup Festival. The bucket in the foreground illustrates the traditional method of tapping sugar maple trees.

Twisted History
with Professor Petee

Today's Lesson Plan:

JillY Bean's
Picture of the Week

Sweet street
(LUCAS) The old Newville Road, which runs up past the Malabar Sugar Shack and the Pugh Cabin, is getting a commuter lane. A new road, running through the fallow field aside the original road track, is being carved into the mud and lined with gravel just in time for the Maple Syrup Festival, the first two weekends of March. In the past, the narrow width of the old road made it impossible for horse-drawn wagon loads of tourists jonesing for a syrup fix to pass each other. This rural gridlock will be alleviated by the side road, allowing a smoother circulation of wagons. Meanwhile, rural resident M. Jordan was very excited to discover that syrup comes from trees. He has since tapped every other tree or treelike object in the immediate vicinity of his home and looks forward to tasting walnut syrup, fence post syrup, and telephone pole syrup this spring.
Call for submissions

Twisted history for the birds

Being that the editor of this here News from Malabar seems attracted to nature and the critters that inhabit it, it seems appropriate for me to explain the mysteries surrounding two fabled birds that make their way to San Juan Capistrano, California, and Hinckley, Ohio, respectively, each year on nearly the same day, March 19 for the former and March 15 for the latter.

Either this horsefly has weird mouth parts or else he has a beard and mustache that melds the vivid color of Vincent Van Gogh's self portraits with the sardonic twirl of Salvador Dali. Nice pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, tho.

Jill Poloni is the chief of our Washington, D.C. News Bureau, located just outside the beltway in suburban Ashburn, Virginia.

Squatch Watch
Nancy Nixon, co-author of the play The Bigfoot Letters, documents recent local encounters with the mystical Sasquatch.

Bow to peer pressure and write something for this newsletter. McQuown? Gladden? Kaufman? Boor? Thomas and/or Mathos? Must I name all? I know you are all good with words. Join in, guys. Do it!

None.
The hard to swallow of Capistrano.

In the case of San Juan Capistrano, swallows have been returning from college spring break in Florida since the earthquake of 1812. As legend has it, the Spanish Mission in San Juan Capistrano was left in ruins from the quake but the swallows swallowed their pride and came back to Capistrano after receiving a phone call from St. Joseph, who asked if theyd do him a favor and build mud homes in the ruins of the mission so the town could have an annual party and sucker a bunch of tourists to spend money on watching birds do stupid things. The swallows asked St. Joseph what was in it for them and he told them they would share in the profits. They liked that idea because then they would have more money to spend on their spring break. Not to be outdone, the tiny town of Hinckley got wind of the Capistrano ploy and figured if people were dumb enough to pay good money to watch birds build mud houses, they knew theyd be just as many suckers who would come to their town if they could make a deal with birds to do something similar to the swallows. So, sniffing around, they noticed that the local buzzards sure enjoyed the roadkill and butchered remains the local market threw in the streets of Hinckley and decided right there and then that they had their bird. So they grabbed the leader of the buzzards and said that if they came to town every year on the appointed day they could have all the roadkill and butchered remains they could ever want. The buzzards tried to get more, but the town folk said to take the deal or their goose would be cooked. [Ed. note: Hey! Don't cook my gooses!] The buzzards figured if these people were too stupid to recognize they werent geese, maybe they could get all they could eat and split the monetary profits the town took in and thus was born the buzzards' annual return to Hinckley. So where does that leave us? Well, if you think theres a market (and I say there is), Malabar might consider enlisting one of the breeds

from the Songbird Aviary right there at Malabar and start their own money making endeavor. I suggest using the tufted titmouse.

have never seen a deere before, so I thought I had better shoot it. When asked if deer isn't usually spelled without the extra e on the end, Wild was flummoxed. That's what I thought, he said. I have seen plenty of those eless deer, but never one of these. Asked what he thought the significance of that extra letter was, Wild said that he figured that meant it was an Olde English deere instead of the more common Virginia deer. Deere, deer, and Mr. Wild, can all be spotted frolicking in the local woods around dusk.

The alarm clock buzzard. (Groan.) In honor of Mike Petee, we in the editorial department would nominate the dodo bird. Mike Petee lives on a hill near Amity, Ohio, where he writes songs, plays, puns, this column, and more. Much involved in the creation and promotion of community arts events, Mike is a gem. That's the only reason he hasn't been ridden out of town on a rail for some of his most vile and despicable puns.

A picture of a more conventional deer spotted by Otto B. Wild during his scratchy jaunt through the woods.

The wildlife image submitted to The News by naturist naturalist, Otto B. Wild.

Deere in woods
(LUCAS) Pleasant Valley's naturist naturalist, Otto B. Wild, was taking a chilly stroll through the woods when he spotted an unusual woodland creature: a deere. I hated to take a picture of it, Wild said, Because my camera was the only thing giving me any protection from the icy wind. But I

Alert reader Allan South of Columbus caught some big time nature drama right in the city when he saw a redtailed hawk noshing in the alley behind his home. But as the hawk sat down to dine, he was interrupted by a curious calico cat. Kitty may have hoped to score a big ol' bird for lunch, but the hawk flew off before she could pounce. It just goes to show that nature isn't just what goes on in the country. It is what goes on all the time, everywhere.

Meet Pokey the Zeeba. He's a redbellied woodpecker, and he and his mate have dug out a nest in a dead limb in the maple tree in front of the Malabar Farm Hostel. A picture (below) of the bird on the suet feeder located directly below his nest shows the black and white stripes that make these woodpeckers be popularly known as zebrabacks to birders. Thus, his surname is based on the zebra in the cartoon strip Pearls Before Swine, who is called Zeeba by the dim-witted crocodiles always trying to eat him. Fortunately for this Zeeba, no crocodiles have been seen in this tree.

and help the critters out when they wander downstairs. One abruptly came flying through Wednesday afternoon while Mark was in the midst of an interview with Mansfield News Journal reporter Kaitlyn Durbin about the upcoming Borderlands poetry reading series at Main Street Books in Mansfield. Fortunately, Kaitlyn was not thrown by the interruption and helped usher the wayward critter out the door. The bad thing is, if the bats are flying around while it is still cold out, that means that white nose virus is still attacking the colony, disorienting the bats and causing them to come out of hibernation too soon, often to die of freezing/starvation. There is no known cure for the malady. It hit the hostel bats last year, but they recovered. Only time will tell how they fare this year. This was the second bat visitation of the season, thus the official bat count so far for the year 2013: TWO.

It's about time they put us in charge, Tweeted one cardinal, identified only as @redbird1. The birds made immediate plans to go into enclave. Leading topics of discussion were, 1) Didn't anybody bring any safflower seeds?, 2) When we choose a pope, does anybody have any matches to make a fire to send up the smoke signal? and 3) If someone has matches, does anyone know how to light them?

Queenie the Goose has announced herself as a candidate for the papacy, though she admitted she doesn't speak a word of Latin, has never read the Bible, and likes to poop wherever she's standing when the urge comes. She said if all else fails, she will content herself with her current monarchical position.

Cardinals are already beginning to gather in order to select a new pope as leader of the Catholic Church.

(LUCAS) - For those readers who have joined us more recently, the Malabar Farm Hostel has a decadeslong history of bat buddies. Though we haven't had much to report on over the winter, last year's bat adventures have resumed this spring. Like any old country house, the hostel has some bats in the attic (much like some say the hostel keeper has bats in the belfry). Since they are an endangered speciesIndiana brown batswe try to manage them,

Cardinals BAT COUNT will elect new pope

(LUCAS) In a surprise move, Pope Benedict announced he would be resigning this week as head of the Catholic Church. When the birds at Malabar Farm heard that the new pope would be elected by a college of cardinals, they grew very excited about it, both tweeting and Tweeting to all their friends.

A bonus picture of the spathe of an eastern skunk cabbage melting its way through the snow. Those interested in seeing the plants might want to just enjoy these photos. The Jungle Brook Trail at Malabar Farm is now closed. The News from Malabar is edited and published by Blodgett Industries Worldwide, Mark Sebastian Jordan, president. All material is copyright 2013 by Mark Jordan, except that contributors retain their own copyrights. This week's contributors are Mike Petee, Jill Poloni, Allan South, and Nancy Nixon. Special thanks to Nancy Nixon and Dawn Shimp. This newsletter does not represent the official views of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, nor Hostelling International, nor Chuck Salmons of Canal Winchester, who may or may not still read this small print. I guess we'll find out after this issue goes out, eh, Chuck?