Tag: outdoor

Bottle Hunters Clash With Archaeologists

  • Though archaeologists may disagree, diggers Fortemeyer and Jordan say it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.(Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)

Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.

Transcript

Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.

If you ever went looking for buried treasure when you were a kid, maybe you can begin to understand just how crazy people can get about digging up bottles.

Take Jack Fortemeyer. When I met him, he was neck-deep in a hole in a backyard in Brooklyn. He was shoveling out a 19th century privy with his partner Scott Jordan. Not so bad for a 70 year old man.

“I told the kids you guys are going to have to do the digging while I sit up on the top in a wheelchair and you’re going to pass me the bottles and so forth. I’m getting to that point.”

Fortemeyer is a bottle digger – a person who digs up backyard privy pits looking for old bottles. The ones they find, they clean and keep. Or they sell them, or trade them with other collectors. Fortemeyer says he’s been hooked for decades.

“Found some bottles, had to find out about them, bought a book, and now I’m hopelessly addicted to it.”

Fortemeyer used to live in suburban Long Island. But he moved to Brooklyn because the buildings here are older. Older buildings mean privy pits – And privy pits… mean bottles.

“That’s why I moved to the neighborhood. To be closer to my pits. To be….I mean, that’s what it’s all about.”

“Jack, I see something….there’s a bottle there…”

So far today Fortemeyer and Jordan have dug up a nice collection of 19th century artifacts. Jordan spreads the pieces they like on a table.

“There’s a tiny piece of black pottery with floral design. a fragment of an 1840s teapot. A brass shirt button, little tiny stars going around the edge.”

He’s in the middle of describing them to me when I trip and step on a shard of pottery that’s been tossed on the ground.

“I think I….don’t worry about that. I think I just stepped on a plate and broke it.
Just more work for me. If we’re laying it on the ground, it’s not that important.”

What is it? Part of a white plate. So typical a lot of it doesn’t get kept.

And that moment right there is maybe the perfect example of why bottle diggers drive some professional archaeologists completely up the wall.

“It just makes us crazy. The bottle hunter, it’s all for them.”

That’s Joan Geisamar. She’s a member of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City – or the P-A-N-Y-C and yes, that acronym is pronounced ‘panic’.

“I have to confess the acronym came before the name, because we’re always in a panic about what’s going on.”

Geisamar says bottle diggers destroy the archaeological record. Professionals dig slowly. Painstakingly. They catalog every fragment, no matter how unglamorous. Diggers, she says, just barge in with shovels, looking for pretty things.

“They take what they want and throw everything else back in. It’s just a record that’s completely lost for personal gain and selfishness. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. And it’s
just morally wrong and professionally wrong.”

But Scott Jordan says in a place like New York, where there’s always development going on, it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.

“There’s enough being destroyed left and right that we can’t even keep up with it
ourselves. There are so many sites, especially during the building boom in New
York where entire blocks are lost. If we’re there it’s gonna be thrown in a dump truck, put in a landfill. So those artifacts will just be lost.”

He pointed at the schoolyard next door. The playground had been slated for redevelopment. The diggers wanted to get in there. They offered to do presentations at the school, show the kids what they found. Everyone was interested. But jumping through all the official hoops took too long, and in the end, the yard was bulldozed and the site was lost.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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O Christmas Tree

  • Lauren and her potted tree. It will stay outdoors until Christmas Eve, when it will be brought in for 14 hours. (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

It’s the holidays… which for some
of us means time to deck the halls
with boughs of holly and, oh yeah,
pick out a Christmas tree. We sent
reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which tree is greener –
real or artificial:

Transcript

It’s the holidays… which for some
of us means time to deck the halls
with boughs of holly and, oh yeah,
pick out a Christmas tree. We sent
reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which tree is greener –
real or artificial:

Lauren Northrop and her husband Tom are big fans of Christmas.

“We love celebrating it, I love decorating, but we always have this dilemma: what do we do about a tree?”

They didn’t want a plastic tree because it’s, well, plastic. And they didn’t like the idea of bringing a live tree into their house, only to have it die and then drag it out to the curb to be recycled.

So they skipped the Christmas tree thing altogether for the last four years. But then, their son Will was born in January.

“We decided that we have to have a tree because it’s, like, his first Christmas, and we want to have those family videos of him having his Christmas morning by the Christmas tree and opening his gifts, and just the whole experience because that was important to us growing up and we always had that.”

They bought a live, baby Christmas tree with its roots still intact. That way, when Christmas is done and the ground thaws, they can plant it in their backyard.

“I was planning to keep the tree inside until December 25th so that we could decorate it and put lights on it. When we went to buy it they said if you do that, it probably won’t survive. So keep it outside so the temperature is more consistent, bring it inside only for a short period of time. (Like how short?) As in December 24th. Will goes to bed, Tom and I are gonna be up decorating that tree and bringing it inside for about 14 hours.”

That’s probably way too much hassle for 14 hours of Christmas cheer. So a lot of people go for real, cut trees. Pat Fera would love to have a real cut Christmas tree in her house.

“But I’m very afraid of them. I had a friend of mine, this was back in the 60s, and she and her mother had gone to midnight mass and her father was home and he was sleeping on the couch and what woke him up was the sound of the tree just going wooosh.”

Apparently the TV shorted, it ignited the tree, tree caught on fire and the dad just made it out of the house. Fera says the ceiling was charred black and the whole place was smoke-damaged.

“Well yeah, if you’re not careful that’s certainly, yeah, a real tree is a hell of a fire hazard!”

That’s Bob Schildgen. He writes an environmental advice column for the Sierra Club called Hey, Mr. Green. So I called him up and asked him…

Guerra: “Hey, Mr. Green. Which is more environmentally friendly? Why don’t we tackle one at a time: let’s go with plastic trees. What do you think about those”

Schildgen: “Well, I don’t think they’re environmentally friendly for a number of reasons. One is that they’re made out of materials that use petro chemicals and metals and so forth. They get eventually tossed in the landfill, they have a life of about 9 years and then they’re tossed. They can’t be recycled.”

And since most plastic Christmas trees are made in places like China, they have to be shipped a very long way to end up in your family room.

So plastic is out.

Schildgen does like the idea of live bulb trees, but their survival rate once you plant them in the ground isn’t that great. So he says – aside from the fire hazard mentioned – real cut trees are a much greener option than plastic. With a real tree you’re using a renewable resource; the trees are raised on tree farms, so you’re not contributing to any deforestation. And they’re completely recyclable.

“I think another feature that I like about them is that, and this is not exactly an obvious environmental issue, but I think it’s very good for children to see something fresh, green, real, alive, and then watch it cycle as the needles fall off and it goes into its natural demise. I think that’s good for people.”

Schildgen says some farmers use pesticides on their tree, so if you’re concerned about that, you should look for local organic trees.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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Ten Threats: The Beloved Invader

  • Because alewives are the main source of food for some sport fish, some people forget that they're an invasive species. (Photo courtesy of NOAA Fishery Service)

As we look at the “Ten Threats to the Great Lakes,” we’re spending some time examining the effects of the alien invasive species that have changed the Lakes. One of the first invasive species to arrive in the Great Lakes was the alewife; it’s native to the Atlantic Ocean. It has become the most beloved of all the invasives. That’s because it’s food for the most popular sport fish in the Great Lakes. But in the beginning, the sport fish was introduced to get rid of the alewives. Peter Payette reports:

Transcript

Today we’re continuing our series on Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham is our series guide:


As we look at the “Ten Threats to the Great Lakes,” we’re spending some time examining the effects of the alien invasive species that have changed the Lakes. One of the first invasive species to arrive in the Great Lakes was the alewife; it’s native to the Atlantic Ocean. It has become the most beloved of all the invasives. That’s because it’s food for the most popular sport fish in the Great Lakes. But in the beginning, the sport fish was introduced to get rid of the alewives. Peter Payette reports:


When autumn arrives in Northern Michigan, salmon fishermen line the rivers. The fish, native to the Pacific Ocean, swim upstream to spawn and then die. That’s why Tim Gloshen says they’re not interested in his bait.


“But if you irritate ’em enough and keep putting it in front of them, they’ll snap at it sometimes and you got to be ready when they hit it and set your hook.”


Anglers caught eight million pounds of salmon in Lake Michigan last year. Most of the fish are caught out in the lake.


“I got buddies that are catching couple hundred a year out there. They’re out there twice a week at least, all summer long, you know.”


Tim and his buddies and everyone else who fishes for salmon in the Great Lakes are at the top of the food chain. The money they spend on food, lodging, tackle, and boats figures heavily into decisions about how to manage the Lakes.


But it wasn’t always so.


Pacific salmon were stocked here about forty years ago to control the invading alewives. The native lake trout had just about been wiped out by overfishing and the sea lamprey. With no big predators left, the alewife population exploded.


At one point, it was estimated that for every ten pounds of fish in Lake Michigan, eight were alewives. Occasional die-offs would cause large numbers of alewives to wash up on beaches all over the Great Lakes. Historian Michael Chiarappa says all this was happening as America was feeling the urge to get back in touch with nature.


“And that’s when you get this rise in greater interest in sport fishing, recreational fishing, hunting. Teddy Roosevelt sort of epitomized the spirit of the strenuous life; get back out there and engage nature. It’s good for the soul, it’s good for the body, it’s good for the mind.”


So the salmon was brought in to control the alewife population and transform the Great Lakes into a sport fishing paradise. And it worked. But alewives remained the best food source for the ravenous salmon.


So now a healthy alewife population is seen as a good thing by the states that benefit economically from the recreational fishing. Mark Holey, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says this has caused people to forget alewives are an invasive species.


“If alewives were knocking on the door today, there may be a much different discussion about it. It may be more like the Asian carp.”


How the alewife would compare to Asian carp is unknown, because the Asian carp has been found in the Mississippi River, but not yet in the Great Lakes. What is known is that when alewives are abundant, native fish don’t do well. For example, Holey says biologists used to think PCBs caused many young lake trout to die. Now they know early mortality is mostly due to thiamin deficiency.
Thiamine is a vitamin lacking in lake trout that eat too many alewives.


“From the studies that we’ve been involved with, anywhere, right now, anywhere between thirty to fifty percent of the females that we take eggs from show some… their eggs show some signs of thiamine deficiency. Which means survival of those eggs are impaired.”


In some cases, none of the eggs will survive. So a worse case estimate would be half of the wild lake trout in the Great Lakes can’t reproduce because of alewives. This is why advocates for native fish species have been happy to see the alewife populations decline in recent years. They almost disappeared from Lake Huron.


Mark Ebener is a fisheries biologist for the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority. He says the government agencies that stock salmon and lake trout should stock more than ever to keep pressure on the alewife. Ebener thinks with alewife numbers down, there’s an opportunity to reestablish the native herring as the main prey fish in the Lakes, especially in Lake Huron.


“Saginaw Bay used to have a huge population of lake herring that’s essentially gone. They used to have a tremendous commercial fishery for it, and people used to come from miles around to buy herring there, and everybody in the lower end of the state used to have herring come fall and the springtime when the fishers were fishing, but they’re gone.”


This opportunity to bring herring back might not last much longer. The warm weather this past summer will probably help alewives rebound next year.


For the GLRC, I’m Peter Payette.

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Wilderness Survival

There’s been an increasing interest in wilderness survival classes recently,
sparked in large part by Y-2-K doomsayers. But survival training isn’t
new – for years, hikers, campers and other outdoor enthusiasts have taken
these classes to improve their skills…and along the way, often realize a
deeper connection with the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Wendy Nelson reports:

A Backyard Encounter

Covering the wilderness experience during the cold winter months has
taken Knight-Ridder outdoors writer Sam Cook on snow-shoeing and camping
trips throughout the Great Lakes region. But in a
sampling from his latest book "Friendship Fires", Cook points out that
it’s not necessary go any farther than your own backyard to share a
winter encounter:

Crafting the Perfect Canoe

Jet skis have quickly grown in popularity. But paddling a canoe isstill a favorite with many outdoors enthusiats. While there are severalmodern materials canoes are made of, there’s one man who prefers morenatural canoes. And he prefers to build them himself. The Great LakesRadio Consortium’s Todd Witter has the story: