Cue the music from Jaws.   The 17 year Brood V Cicadas are due for emergence in the next few weeks and Hocking County is smack in the middle of the target area.  I have been getting a few questions about them so here is a very nice video courtesy of the folks at Cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer. Get your earplugs ready for a fun spring!

Let me know when you start to see emergence.  When temps at 8″ deep in the soil hit the mid-sixties for four days in a row watch out!  All heck is going to break loose to the tune of 1.5 million Cicadas per acre.  This is a once every 17 year event, it is time to party like its 1999!

The Bugdoc at OSU has a publicaton you can print on Periodical Cicada Control Tactics

This is a summary of the information presented to the Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalists, Hocking County chapter at the 3/8/16 spring meeting.

I have been fighting tick borne diseases for most of my twenty year Veterinary career.  They cause some of the most difficult to diagnose, poorly understood syndromes of diseases in both humans and companion animals.  I have noticed professionally that the incidence of disease has been slowly increasing in Ohio and that what was once rare 5-10 years ago is now becoming more common.  I personally have diagnosed canine patients in the last few months with both Lyme disease(Borreliosis) and Erlichia canis.

Click for the OHIOLINE TICK FACTSHEET This is an Ohio State University Extension publication

Here is the typical tick life cycle using the Deer Tick as an example, note they feed as they move through the stages of development. (Source:CDC)

As we head into spring it is crucial that proper prevention and repellant strategies are followed.

• Wear long pants and long sleeves, tape collars and cuffs or tuck pants into socks.  Tuck in shirts.
• Wear boots with regular length socks.
• Do a proper tick check after leaving woods(or parks, or pasture, not every tick lives in a forest,  my biggest reported area in practice is a mix of public parks and metropark hiking trails.)
• Remove ticks immediately if found, OHIOLINE HAS REMOVAL PROCEDURE
• Want to Identify the tick species?  IDENTIFICATION GUIDE
• Use a repellant on skin that actually has the strength to deter ticks.   TOPICAL INSECT REPELLANT LIST
• Treat clothing properly with Permethrin, do not use on skin, follow directions carefully.  HOW TO TREAT CLOTHING

Left to Right:

1.) Permethrin spray for use on clothing only

2.) Cutter backwoods DEET level = 25% (minimally effective vs. ticks)

3.) Cutter skinsations DEET level =  7% (ineffective vs. ticks)

One new allergy that has been only recently discovered is called Alpha-gal Allergy.  Hocking County is Beef country.  This allergy would not go over well here.  Alpha-gal allergy is when a persons immune system becomes sensitized to red meat after a bite from a Lone Star Tick.  Another name for this disease is called Mammalian Muscle Disease or Allergy as after eating beef or pork(or any mammal) a person has an allergic reaction, in some cases a severe one.  Any disease that causes me to be allergic to cheeseburgers has my full attention.

So please as we get ready to head out into the woods with spring ahead of us, please take the time to protect yourself and take the potential of tick borne diseases and allergies seriously.

My friend Chris Nabergall, who works at Hocking Hills Canopy Tours asked me to come out and look at some trees for him on an extremely cold january day recently.  We hopped into his ATV(with no doors or roof) to start the consult and I asked him to please turn up the heat.  He stated “the heat is broken, but the A/C works fine”  On we went.

Here are some pics I took of the adventure.  I don’t like heights, so this is as close as I get to the canopy

Here is a picture of an ash tree that had been abraded from waist high all the way to the top.  It had perished of Emerald Ash Borer.

The damage to this tree was done by woodpeckers of all things.  It seems the silver lining in the EAB destruction is that woodpeckers love the borers, and this has caused an increase in numbers of many of our Ohio Woodpecker species due to increased food availability.

The damage is called Flecking

All in all a good way to spend a morning in the woods.  If you have questions or concerns with your trees, contact me at Extension and I will come out and see if I can help.

The Hocking County chapter of the Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalists will be holding a 2016 training class.

Space is limited!   For any questions feel free to contact me.

Contact information and class/instructor information is found HERE

Ash Cave is one of the trails inside of Hocking Hills State Park, one of the crown jewels of the State of Ohio.  Recently I partnered with Ohio Department of Natural Resources naturalists, Hocking College foresters, Hocking Soil and Water Conservation District foresters and Federal Natural Resources conservationists, under the direction of Extension Forestry Specialist, Dave Apsley, to start to chart the Hocking Hills region’s hemlocks by diameter class.

The research will be used to combat the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid invasive pest to hopefully stop it before it devastates these beautiful trees and leaves large bare spots in our beautiful county.

Extension will continue to partner with these smart and dedicated individuals, but it will take a massive amount of work and resources with everyone at the county, state and federal level to prevent the spread of this pest.

We were able to chart 1309 Hemlock trees in only a 17 acre small plot that is the hollow of Ash Cave where the trail winds to the falls.  There is still much work to be done.  The total area of Hocking Hills State Park is much larger and is still only a small part of the county.

Local resident Russell Jenkins stopped in with this mushroom that he found in his yard. By his estimation it weighed between three and three and a half pounds and was 8″ x 8″ x 7″ in size.

          Note the coffee maker for scale.

Unfortunately my knowledge of edible vs poisonous mushrooms was not accurate enough to advise whether to eat this or not.  I did promise Russell however someday I will be an expert.  Learning about foraging for edible wild mushrooms is on my to do list for someday.

Do you want to learn about such things?  Make sure you have become an expert before you try or you might regret it. The mushroom Russell brought in could very well be edible, but like most mushrooms there is a close relative of it that is poison.

Some helpful Links

Ohio Mushroom Society

White Puffball Mushroom

OSU Extension Wild Mushroom Factsheet