About Fred Paillet

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So far Fred Paillet has created 17 blog entries.
12 12, 2019

In Celebration of the Farkleberry: Our Wild Ozark Blueberry

By |2020-01-21T18:04:58-06:00December 12th, 2019|Categories: News & Updates, Winter 2019|

Before there was Saturday Night Live there were the Farkleberry Follies. Founded in 1967, this performance convened every other year was a time when a collection of Arkansas journalists conducted skits to spoof state politics in general, and Governor Orval Faubus in particular. In a recent editorial, Rex Nelson reported that the main objective of the show was to “skewer the inflated egos of the political class.” The show got its name from an editorial by local cartoonist George Fisher who poked fun at the governor over a folksy meeting where Faubus had lectured a brush-clearing highway crew about the native species of shrubs in our region. One of the most obscure of these was the tree blueberry or farkleberry (Vaccinium arboretum) with its amusing name. There is a direct Ozark Society connection here because the family of current Ozark Society President, David Peterson, received one of the prized farkleberry awards bestowed from the hands of Dale Bumpers some 30 years ago on behalf of a folk music group founded by Fisher in Pulaski County. The shrub itself is especially common in the Ozarks and Ouachitas where it is found growing on the edges of cliffs and around rock ledges. [...]

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3 06, 2019

What Will Global Warming Look Like in the Ozarks?

By |2019-07-23T14:16:39-05:00June 3rd, 2019|Categories: Pack & Paddle, Summer 2019|

Global change will affect the Buffalo River and the surrounding ecosystem along with the rest of the world, but do we have to worry about that in our lifetime? The experts are quoting a temperature increase of a few degrees. How big a deal could that be? After all, we see daily temperature changes of several tens of degrees. Maybe we would hardly notice a degree or two difference. Can we even expect to recognize that difference against the background of daily fluctuations? On the other hand, we know that greenhouse gasses have a major effect on how the planet absorbs heat, and that there has been a 40% increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That sounds like a big change. Are we going to see a real impact on the Buffalo River in the coming decade? Let’s start with a couple of firmly established facts. First, it is obvious that the globe heats mostly at the equator and that the heat then moves down the temperature gradient towards the poles. That heat transfer occurs by turbulent mixing - a fancy way of saying that heat exchange occurs in the form of exchanging parcels of warm and cold air. [...]

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6 03, 2019

Chert – One of the Most Common Ozark Minerals

By |2019-06-03T12:08:48-05:00March 6th, 2019|Categories: Pack & Paddle, Spring 2019|

As an outdoor enthusiast relocated to northwest Arkansas more than a decade ago, the observation of abundant chert was one of my very first Ozark impressions.  And it was not necessarily pleasant.  The chert attracted my attention in the form of baseball-sized angular rocks hidden in the deep leaf litter of Ozark National Forest hiking trails.  These potentially ankle-twisting nuisances came as a real surprise and forced me to pay far too much attention to my footing when I would rather have been enjoying pleasant fall scenery.  Almost at the same time I began to notice sections of trail constructed into the sides of hills that seemed to have been deliberately paved with gray gravel composed of similar angular rock fragments.  By now all of this is a familiar part of my local hiking experiences.  But what exactly is chert, and where did all the chert in the Ozarks come from?Chert is a glass-like form of rock composed of tiny quartz (silicon oxide) crystals verging on a true glass where molten rock cooled so quickly as to be left with no crystal structure at all.  Trace minerals mixed in with the silica give the various forms of chert their color.  Common [...]

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10 12, 2018

Free-flowing Rivers Versus Dams

By |2019-06-03T12:09:37-05:00December 10th, 2018|Categories: Pack & Paddle, Winter 2018|

Many of us think of rivers and streams as fixed geographic features.  In fact, stream channels and the ecosystems that go with them are dynamic parts of our landscape that depend on a delicate equilibrium of natural forces.  Streams are characterized by a channel and surrounding alluvial flood plain that represent the geomorphic process of erosion and sediment transport. This channel structure results from an ongoing state of adjustment where local reaches of the stream are intimately interconnected with each other. A local change to the stream as seemingly inconsequential as occasional access for off road vehicles can affect the stream over large distances both up and down stream.  And it’s not just the structure of the stream itself.  The surrounding ecosystem depends upon the processes that create the stream environment.  Trees such as sycamore, box elder, and sweetgum are adapted to use exposed gravel bars as seedbeds.  Some of our favorite wildflowers require the rich soil of regularly refreshed alluvial soils that result from infrequent overflows during flood events. Dams, of course, represent an extreme alteration of the stream environment with especially severe consequences for the entire river corridor.  The body of stagnant water held by the dam causes the [...]

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7 09, 2018

Buffalo River Bur Oak – A Blast from the Distant Past

By |2018-12-10T14:33:37-06:00September 7th, 2018|Categories: Fall 2018, Pack & Paddle|

The Ozark Plateau is considered to lie in what the Forest Service designates as the oak-hickory biome.  Early land office survey data show that Ozark forests were about 70% oak at the time the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase.   The oaks growing on the ridges and cliffs around the Buffalo River come in so many varieties that many of us find it hard to tell one from another.  Some like white, black and post oaks are common and widespread, while others are associated with special habitats such as limestone outcrops (chinquapin oak) and poorly drained lowlands (pin oak).    Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) is a relatively infrequently encountered oak that grows throughout the Ozark region, telling an interesting story about our region’s deep past. Investigations of the prehistory of Midwest America showed that giant mammals such as mastodons and ground sloths once roamed our region while a great sheet of ice covered almost all of Canada.   Investigations at sites where such fossil remains were found showed that the vegetation associated with those fossils was very different from what is found in the Ozarks today.  Before the cause of these geologically recent glacial events were known it was sometimes thought that the [...]

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28 08, 2018

The Trouble with Mussels

By |2018-08-28T14:56:25-05:00August 28th, 2018|Categories: Pack & Paddle, Summer 2018|Tags: |

Everyone who has ever floated the Buffalo River is familiar with freshwater mussels. Their shells litter the gravel bars and living mussels can be seen embedded in the rocks in riffles. Although most of us enjoying the Ozark out of doors think of these “river clams” as peripheral to our activities, the lowly mussel has played an inordinate role in our local economic history. This little creature has had a strong influence on industry as well as ecological management in Arkansas, serving as both an economic resource and an ecological management problem. The industry part is nicely summarized in an article in the March-April 2017 issue of Arkansas Wildlife. It all started with a late 1800’s pearl rush after the discovery of valuable pearls in White River mussels. In the meantime, Arkansas mussel shells were found to be a valuable source of mother-of-pearl goods in the manufacture of buttons. New cutting techniques and President Harrison’s protective tariff bill spawned a surge in button manufacturing based on blanks cut from White River mussels. The industry lagged during the depression, but then surged again when buttons had to replace zippers during WWII metal rationing. After that, the Japanese cultured pearl industry found that [...]

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8 03, 2018

The Cucumber Magnolia

By |2018-08-06T12:47:50-05:00March 8th, 2018|Categories: Pack & Paddle, Spring 2018|Tags: |

The Rodney Dangerfield Tree of Buffalo River Ledges Illustration is a profile of the mature tree found growing in Boen Gulf. The leaves are thin and supple “shade leaves” from an understory sapling. Many Ozark hikers are familiar with the common trees such as oak, beech, black gum, and hickory that make up our scenic upland hardwoods.  Other trees such as sycamore, sweetgum, and river birch are notable for the way they line our waterways.  But one important Ozark tree, like that famous comedian of old, just cannot get any respect. Exactly how important the cucumber magnolia (Magnolia acumenata) is in our forests was revealed by a recent study.  The significance of this unassuming tree was demonstrated in a dendrochronological study completed as part of a University of Arkansas student Master’s thesis.  The project selected a remote and inaccessible gorge in the upper Buffalo drainage as a location where the difficult access by loggers could have allowed the trees there to escape logging. These trees just might represent a fragment of virgin Ozark forest and the student’s tree ring study was designed to test that hypothesis.  The remoteness of the study site is indicated by the fact that the [...]

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