Outdoors Tomorrow by Bob Henke: Q&A and a Sighting

Plus a warm-weather soup recipe

Jul 13, 2025

As is our Sunday tradition, let’s start with a little Scrabble anagram to warm up the brain. Can you come up with a seven-letter word based on these letters?

Five million points if you get it in less than a minute; one million points if you get it in two; or 73 points otherwise! Points are redeemable at Blockbuster Video. Answer at the end.

Outdoors Tomorrow: Q&A

By Bob Henke
Journal & Press

I learn many things during the course of my daily visits to the Town Hall. One lecture I received from the twisted sisters (TS1 and TS2) recently had to do with the fact “men cannot find anything!” I was regaled with tales of sending someone to find something. They all had the same format. The most recent example involved one of them calling on the phone and asking the spouse to check the pantry for a taco mix. Said mix comes in a large bright yellow box. The hapless spouse looked through the kitchen and pantry, finally reporting there was none to be found. The TS went to the store, bought two packages, and when putting away the extra, placed it right beside the package already sitting in the pantry.

Having experienced the voodoo performed by women with regard to locating stuff, I was inclined to just bow under this onslaught. However, TS2, just came into the office in a great state of swivet. Seems she had lost her debit card. She went to all the myriad establishments she frequented that day without luck and finally went to the bank to report its loss. When the teller asked her for the last four digits on her card, she automatically reached into her wallet, took out the card in question, and read the last four digits. The ridiculousness of the situation took several seconds of the teller just silently deadpanning before it registered on TS2. I contended this surpassed any lost taco mix but was beaten down with assertions that I was now and always simply wrong! Based on some of the questions, this is a popular viewpoint.

You are wrong about Futhorc! It is actually called Futhark. How annoying! (Just kidding about being annoyed.)

Not to be argumentative but I think we are talking about two different things. I definitely hated the Linguistics 300 class that was part of my graduate degree requirements. However, one thing I did retain was the business about thorn. Here is my recollection: the early Germanic 24 character runic alphabet was definitely known as Elder Futhark. The anglo-Saxon alphabet developed from that base. Because there were more phonemes in Anglo-Saxon speech, the alphabet was expanded to a system including 34 runes and called Futhorc.

How could anyone possibly know there were polar bears in Washington County?

Same way we knew there was a whale in Charlotte, Vermont—bones. Contrary to a lot of the keyboard environmentalists, the polar bear developed because of global warming and was a specific adaptation to it. Its immediate ancestor is an earlier form of the grizzly bear. A few individuals managed to get around the edge of the glaciers and were then isolated when the ice extended again. Speciation is not complete yet (look at the next question) because in this warming trend, some grizzlies have traveled north and can still interbreed with polar bears. One poor fellow shot a brown-colored bear that turned out to have a long neck and sloping forehead. Fish and Wildlife personnel did a DNA test, discovered it was a hybrid, and prosecuted the confused hunter for shooting a polar bear. In the case of the Washington County polar bear, the evidence consists of one bone, which is slightly different in grizzly, black, and polar bears. It was a baculum.

I find it a bit hard to believe when you write about “evolution” happening since the Ice Age. Are you unaware that evolution takes millions of years to make a new species?

Whew! When this email came in, I looked at the subject line and was sure we were heading back into evolution/creation land. This is far easier. I could quibble and ask which ice age you are referring to—there have been several but that misses the legitimate point. Evolution is a process of sequential change based on characteristics being either an advantage or disadvantage to individuals in the face of changing environmental conditions. Complete speciation—making two separate population that cannot interbreed and make a fertile offspring—can be a lengthy process, but it does not have to be. Immediately after the Chicxulub meteor wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, the remaining tiny mammals spread out, very rapidly evolving into hundreds of thousands of species in only a few thousand years. It is also true that the process of evolution can be very rapid. The first hummingbird feeder was sold in 1947. Already hummingbirds have expanded their range dramatically and changed their beak shape in response to this new “environment.” A longer, thicker bill is an advantage when dealing with feeders but it makes them less efficient as pollinators so there will be a response from some of the flowering plants as well—all within a few decades. Bottom line, it is just not as simple and lineal as the model we learned in grade school.

I was interested in that material about the Champlain Sea. Do I remember a story in The Barkeater a number of years ago about a native spearing a seal on the shores of the Champlain Sea? I am pretty sure I do but what I do not remember as well was something in that about mammoths living on right up until colonial times?

I barely remember that. The artist did a nice rendition of the incident you described. As far as some of the post-Pleistocene animals having remnant populations for hundreds of years afterward, there is evidence of this sort of thing happening in other areas so it is not impossible it occurred here as well. It is more likely some of the longer-lived species may have lingered than things like birds. An elephantine species living a century or so could well have been in a situation to not reproduce enough to continue the species but producing enough to have individuals lingering for even centuries. There are tales along the Saint Lawrence of giant vicious animals on certain of the islands, very reminiscent of the giant beavers (which were NOT an aquatic species.) Algonquin tales include huge red animals with two tails and many spears that suddenly attack camps in the dark of night with great screaming and destruction of every building. This is interesting because, while male mastodons have two tusks, many of the females also had two lower ones as well. There is even a historical account of a group of Roger’s Rangers whose camp was attacked on a moonless night by an animal as big as a haystack, with small red eyes and multiple tusks, that stomped the fire and buffeted the men with its huge thick tail. They ran off and hid until it finished flattening their encampment. Apparently, campfires make mastodons freak out—remember that next time you build a bonfire.

I read that passenger pigeons were completely addicted to a certain tree and would only nest in that tree. This finally killed the tree and those birds would not move to another tree so they died off. I did not hear about the competition with Native Americans. There must have been other species intermeshed with the passenger pigeons. Any information on this?

In addition to the amount of manure they deposited, which had large implications for plants and insects, the species with the greatest population loss related to the passenger pigeons was the goshawk. These predators focused on passenger pigeons and followed the flocks on migration similar to the wolves following bison and caribou herds. Some of the earliest researchers noted this. James Audubon described them as follows, “When the Passenger Pigeons are abundant in the western country, the Goshawk follows their close masses, and subsists upon them. A single Hawk suffices to spread the greatest terror among their ranks, and the moment he sweeps towards a flock, the whole immediately dive into the deepest woods, where, notwithstanding their great speed, the marauder succeeds in clutching the fattest.”

Goshawks are far more rare nowadays and survive on a fairly generalist diet of everything from rabbits to songbirds. There is some evidence the body size of goshawks has decreased by as much as 25% since the demise of the passenger pigeon.

Tell the truth! Do you believe in Big Foot?

For matters of things like cryptozoology, I always subscribe to vehicular research models. Simply, everything that exists in an area will ultimately get squashed in the road. I will believe Sasquatch when the first one gets taken out by a semi. Of course, the Twisted Sisters will tell me I am wrong on that too because they believe…

Sighting

All mammals have a small gene frequency of both very dark and almost white hair coloration. In some, like gray squirrels, it has a high frequency so both black and white individuals are seen quite often. One that is rarer is woodchucks. Woodchucks have a winter coat year around because they spend most of their time in deep burrows where the temperature is a constant 50 degrees. They can only spend a few minutes at a time out eating in the field before becoming overheated and having to return to their burrow to cool off. It is worse if you happen to be dark colored, so it is not really an advantage for a groundhog. However, they still appear periodically, like this fellow munching clover in a lawn by McIntyre Street in Fort Edward.

Contact Bob Henke with your sightings or questions by mail c/o The Greenwich Journal & Salem Press, by email at outdoors.tomorrow@gmail.com, on Twitter at @BobHenke, or on Facebook.

Recipe: Seriously Simple: This versatile soup tastes great hot or chilled

By Diane Rossen Worthington
Tribune Content Agency
Special to Journal & Press

Here’s a soup you’ll enjoy in warm weather. Mint, lettuce and peas seem made for each other. While peas are often thought of as a springtime vegetable, they are lovely in the summer, as well. I’ve added snow peas to sweeten and enliven the taste of the English peas.

Butter lettuce, sauteed scallions and carrot add an interesting component to the simple soup. Lettuce leaves are usually associated with salad; but here lettuce is sauteed, offering up a subtle sweetness and thickness to the soup. If you want to mix it up, consider substituting arugula, romaine or watercress instead of butter lettuce in this recipe. It will have a lovely peppery-sweet underlying flavor.

This versatile soup tastes great hot or chilled. Serve steaming hot on a cool evening as a wonderful opener for light pasta with shrimp and tomatoes. If chilled, it can precede salade nicoise on a sweltering day. A chilled mango iced tea is a nice complimentary beverage. If you want something stronger, a California or French rose will do the trick.

Minted Lettuce and Snow Pea Soup

Serves 4 to 6

2 tablespoons olive oil
6 scallions, white part only, finely chopped
1 large carrot, peeled and shredded
1 medium head butter lettuce, leaves separated
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh mint
4 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1/2-pound (about 1 cup) snow peas, trimmed
1 cup shelled fresh English peas (about 1 pound unshelled) or thawed frozen petite peas
2 tablespoons whipping cream, creme fraiche or half-and-half
Salt and freshly ground white pepper
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

To garnish:

1/4 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh mint
1 tablespoon finely chopped scallion, green part only

1. In a large saucepan over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Add the scallions and carrot and saute, stirring occasionally, until slightly softened, 3 to 5 minutes.

2. Add the lettuce and saute until wilted, about 5 minutes.

3. Add the mint, chicken stock, all but a small handful of the snow peas, and the English peas (if using thawed peas, add during the last 5 minutes). Cover and simmer over low heat until the vegetables are softened, about 20 minutes.

4. In a blender or food processor, process the soup, in batches, until pureed. (You can also do this with an immersion blender right in the pot.) Return to the pan and add the cream and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a simmer over medium-low heat and cook for about 5 minutes to blend the flavors. Add lemon juice. Taste for seasoning.

5. Slice the reserved snow peas in julienne and immerse in boiling water until slightly softened, about 1 minute. Drain, let cool, cover, and chill.

6. To serve, taste the soup for seasoning. Ladle into bowls and garnish with the sour cream, mint, scallion, and julienned snow peas. Or refrigerate for at least 4 hours or until well chilled and continue with garnishing and serving.

Advance preparation: This may be prepared 8 hours in advance through Step 5 and refrigerated until serving. If serving warm, reheat gently until it simmers.