It’s International Rock-Flipping Day, so I thought I’d try making a poetry video with footage of the underside of rocks, shot this afternoon in the woods above my house. The poem is a couple of years old, and may be found at my online collection Shadow Cabinet.

UPDATE: Here’s the complete list of bloggers who participated in IRFD this year.

Wanderin’ Weeta
The Natural Capital
Fertanish Chatter
Roundrock Journal
Just Playin’ Around
What It’s like on the Inside
KrisAbel
BugSafari
Sofia_Alexandra
Growing with Science
ChickenSpaghetti
NaturalNotes
Yips and Howls
Rock, Paper, Lizard
Outside My Window
The dog geek
Dave Ingram’s Natural History Blog
Unplug Your Kids
ORCA: Observar, Recordar, Crecer y Aprender
Will Rees Fine Woodworking …
The Marvelous in Nature
Pohangina Pete
Ontario Wanderer
Bare Baby Feet
The Homefront Lines
Crazy Maize World
Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival

And don’t forget to check the Flickr group, too.

Please direct all rock-flipping correspondence this year to Susanna: wanderinweeta [at] gmail [dot] com (email spelled out to foil the evil robot servants of the spam lords). Bev and I had a great time being IRFD coordinators the first two years, and we’re sorry we can’t continue,* but I’m sure Susanna will do a terrific job. Please help spread the word about the new date. Happy flipping!
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*In case anyone is interested in our lame excuses: With all that’s going on these days at qarrtsiluni and the other sites I manage or attempt to contribute to, my online time is already pretty much spoken for. And Bev is in even worse shape time-wise, having just sold and moved out of her house and being on the verge of a new “journey to the center.” We both do plan to get out on the 20th, though, and flip some rocks!

For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.
Job 5:23

Dear Teju,

Rocks are the roofs of a city
we barely know. On a dry ridgetop
at the end of a dry month,
I find little under them but burrows
leading deeper into the earth,
a colony of ants frantic
at the sudden inversion,
and on the talus slope, more rocks:
a puzzle that was put together wrong
8,000 years ago, but over the millenia
has settled into its own kind
of rightness. I follow a bear’s trail
through the woods, marked by black
cherry-pitted cairns of bear shit,
& note the series of overturned rocks,
flipped by an expert claw.
Only a human, uneasy at the way
our grotesque bodies no longer
quite fit into the matrix,
would ever return a flipped rock
to its bed. Birds have nests,
foxes have holes; culture
is not a thing unique to humans.
The song that makes the songbird
must be taught. Instinct borrows
always from improvisation —
the true two-step. But watch
a human child, too young
to hunger for our made world’s
humdrum El Dorados, playing
in the creek with a stick —
how she projects her dreams
into the teeming, pulsing flow,
how she punctuates
& fabricates — & tell me
this is not more wondrous
than any gold, this human
being!

If you don’t have a blog (and even if you do), you can upload photos to Flickr (it’s free to join) and post them to the IRFD group there. I will also be glad to post photos and other material here for anyone who’d rather not bother with Flickr. (My co-conspirator Bev Wigney has been forced by circumstances beyond her control to step back from heavy involvement in the festivities this year.)

I will post about my own rock-flipping activities later today or tomorrow, but I will continue to add links at the bottom of this post to all the IRFD-related posts I can find — I’ll republish it multiple times a day for the next several days as more stuff comes in. And just like last year, we encourage everyone who blogs about Rock-Flipping Day to link to everyone else, as well. Let’s keep things as decentralized as possible, read and comment on each other’s posts, and share the link-love. If you email me with a link (bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, or use the Contact form on this site), I will include you in the list of folks to email daily for the next three days with all the links I can find. Alternately, you can simply plan on bookmarking and revisiting this post and copying and pasting from here; scroll down for the complete list.

Also, as I noted in this year’s guidelines, we’d like to award two prizes, one to whomever documents the greatest biodiversity under a single rock, and the other to whomever appears to have the most genuine epiphany as a result of flipping rocks. Bev and I haven’t had a chance to discuss how we will choose the winners, but it seems to me that the latter prizewinner in particular could be decided by popular acclamation. Leave comments here or email me with your nominations in one or both categories.

Here’s something you can sing while you’re out peering under rocks, from a Via Negativa reader and regular commenter who is tragically blogless.

The Rock-Flipper Song
by Joan Ryan

(with apologies to Fiddler on the Roof’s “Matchmaker”)

Rock-flipper, rock-flipper, flip me a rock.
Please do not knock
This game as “schlock.”
Rock flipper, rock flipper, look in the yard
And find me the perfect rock.

Rock flipping’s fun-dipping under a stone
Not far from home.
Hey, do not moan!
Day tripping, rock flipping yields so much fun
And even when you’re alone.

Chorus:

Our Johnny
Hopes for a lizard

Our Benny
Looks for some worms

Our Sara,
Just found a beetle

All kids like
Something that squirms.

Rock flipper, rock flipper
Find me a cache.
Careful! Don’t mash
Some of your stash.
Rock flipper, deep dipper
Into the loam,
Please find me a pet of my own.

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Anticipatory posts (a selection)

Marcia Bonta — Rock-Flipping (summary of IRFD 2007)
fish without faces — the tanager and the scorpion (poem)
Fragments from Floyd — Today is Rock Flipping Day: Get Out There!
Going Like Sixty — International Rock Flipping Day: the First Sunday in September

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Rock-Flipping Day Reports

Pohanginapete (Pohangina Valley, Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Blaugustine (London, England)
Nature Remains (Ohio, USA)
Pensacola Daily Photo (Florida, USA)
KatDoc’s World (Ohio, USA)
Notes from the Cloud Messenger (Ontario, Canada)
Brittle Road (Dallas, Texas)
Sherry Chandler (Kentucky, USA)
osage + orange (Illinois, USA)
Rock Paper Lizard (British Columbia, Canada)
The Crafty H (Virginia, USA)
Chicken Spaghetti (Connecticut, USA)
A Passion for Nature (New York, USA)
The Dog Geek (Virginia, USA)
Blue Ridge blog (North Carolina, USA)
Bug Girl’s Blog (Michigan, USA)
chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
Pines Above Snow(Maryland, USA)
Beth’s stories (Maine, USA)
A Honey of an Anklet (Virginia, USA)
Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
The Northwest Nature Nut (Oregon, USA)
Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
The New Dharma Bums (California, USA)
The Marvelous in Nature (Ontario, Canada)
Via Negativa (Pennsylvania, USA)
Mrs. Gray’s class, Beatty-Warren Middle School (Pennsylvania, USA)
Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
Pocahontas County Fair (West Virginia, USA)
Let’s Paint Nature (Illinois, USA)
Sleeping in the Heartland (Midwestern U.S.)
Three Oaks (Ohio, USA)

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Photos

IRFD group on Flickr
IRFD gallery on Via Negativa

Please help spread the word. For more information, see the complete Rock-Flipping Day file.

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Festival of the Trees #27 is up.

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Postal Poetry shifts to a M-W-F posting schedule, starting today with a postcard from Tom Montag and Marja-Leena Rathje, “blue.”

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After briefly alighting at WordPress.com, the dynamic group of female online poets calling themselves the Poetry Collaborative have settled into beautiful new digs at thepoetrycollaborative.org. This is an exciting, ground-breaking site: where else can you watch collaboratively written poems grow by the day and by the hour, and be privy to side discussions between the authors? Start following the PoCo now and you should have clear bragging rights in six months or so. Because it’s gonna be huge, the Huffington Post of the poetry blogosphere. You read it here first.

Again this year, Bev Wigney and I will help coordinate things by acting as distribution points for blog links. Drop me a line to join the email list. On the day itself, and in the days immediately following, we’ll circulate a list of blog links to every participant to publish at the bottom of his/her own IRFD post, or in a separate post if they prefer. Or they can simply link to Bev’s or my posts containing the links list.

You don’t have to be a blogger to participate. We encourage everyone with a Flickr account to join the International Rock-Flipping Day Group and post photos or sketches to the photo pool. Those who would prefer not to join Flickr can send images to Bev (bev AT magickcanoe DOT com) for posting in a gallery on her site.

In case you missed all the hoopla last year, here’s the post that started it all, and last year’s participants are linked here. On 9/2/2007, people flipped rocks on four continents on sites ranging from mountaintops to urban centers to the floors of shallow seas. Rock-flippers found frogs, snakes, and invertebrates of every description, as well as fossils and other cool stuff. As before, we advise wearing gloves for protection, and getting the whole family involved — or if you don’t have a family, rope in some neighborhood kids. Be sure to replace all rocks as soon as possible after documenting whatever lies beneath them.

Any and all forms of documentation are welcome: still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry. We encourage those of a scientific bent to try and identify everything they find, but we’re also open to purely lyrical or impressionistic responses. Our coveted, if wholly imaginary, Grand Prizes this year will go to: 1) whoever identifies the most species under a single rock; and 2) anyone who appears to have a genuine epiphany as a result of flipping rocks. This second category may seem like a long shot, but the Zen literature does record that a monk named Kyogen achieved Great Satori when he heard a stone strike a bamboo trunk, so it seems at least conceivable. So mark September 7 on your calendars, and get ready to rock-flip, y’all.

IRFD badge by Digital Frontiers Media — get yours here.

My young cousin Morgan had so much fun exploring the mountain with her Great Aunt Marcia last year on Labor Day weekend, she brought along her best friend Devon this time. They arrived around 10:00 and wanted to go down to the stream and start looking under rocks right away.

Salamanders of two main species — slimy and northern dusky — live under the rocks in abundance, but not the ones out in the water, which was mostly where the kids wanted to be. With two kids, the energy level was quite high, and splashing in the water, debarking rotten logs, and looking for wild mushrooms often diverted their attention from the task at hand. Plus, only Mom was quick enough to actually catch a salamander — or perhaps it was just that she didn’t recoil from their slimy skin. The kids wanted to take one home with them, but we explained how these were lungless salamanders that breathed directly through their skins, and that they would die if removed from their subterranean homes.

We found a couple of earthworms, and Morgan was delighted with a small one that quickly came to life on her hand and circled her thumb. She was having such a good time, Mom and I couldn’t bring ourselves to mention that it was a non-native, invasive species, like almost all earthworms north of the Mason-Dixon line. Why risk spoiling the magic of discovery with a dose of gloom and doom?

Other rock-flippers had preceded us that morning, but we weren’t lucky enough to catch sight of them — unlike Fred First, who won the IRFD Grand Prize for getting a picture of something other than a human flipping a rock yesterday, which we will consequently have to rename Interspecies Rock-Flipping Day. (And no, I still haven’t figured out what the prize will be. Any suggestions?)

Many of the rocks in the stream concealed crayfish burrows, which Devon in particular took great delight in finding. When I caught an actual crayfish, though, neither one of them could be convinced to hold it. It waved its claws belligerently at me as I crouched to take its picture.

About a quarter mile below the houses, we came to an area where Mom had taken a couple of other kids earlier in the week. Judging by the print on top of this rock, not all the rocks had been returned to their exact positions. That’s probably O.K. for creek stones, though — they get moved around quite a bit in the normal course of events, so the creatures that live under them must be adapted to a fair amount of turmoil.

The rock with the rock-print on it turned out to be hiding a wood frog! Mom said they had found a frog here the other day, too, under a different rock — presumably the same individual. As their name suggests, wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) live in the woods, and we tend to think of them as needing water only during their brief mating season in early spring, when they crowd ephemeral woodland pools for raucous orgies. The rest of the time, they are off in the forest doing who knows what, and perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to discover one in what is essentially salamander habitat. They may not breathe through their skins, but they do need to keep cool and moist, and the humus isn’t nearly as deep as it used to be with all the non-native earthworms gobbling it up.

To read other bloggers’ posts about IRFD, please refer to the links list at the end of yesterday’s post.

What I found was nothing rare, but beautiful nonetheless. The Narceus millipedes, as I mentioned here a while back, are superabundant composters of forest litter throughout the northeast, where they apparently serve as a significant reservoir of calcium and phosphorus in otherwise acid, well-drained mountaintop soils. Out here on the powerline, where the leaf litter is thin to nonexistent, it makes sense that they would shelter under rocks.

Whereas with my first rock, the low-light conditions under the early-morning forest canopy made photography difficult, out on the powerline the strong sunlight created too much contrast. You’ll have to take my word for it that the sandy soil under the millipede’s rock was a maze of millipede-sized galleries. You can see the millipede at left of center. It curled up immediately upon the removal of its roof and didn’t budge.

A close-up of the shaded portion of the trough-shaped hollow does show some detail of these halls of the mountain millipede. After I replaced the rock and headed back down to the house, I tried to picture it there, uncurling, traveling the labyrinth of its home, its feet rising and falling in silent waves.
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OTHER ROCK-FLIPPERS
(last updated Sept 5, 8:30 a.m. EDT – newer additions at bottom)

Flickr photo pool
Bev’s Pbase gallery

Windywillow (Ireland)
Heraclitean Fire (London, England)
Sheep Days (Illinois, USA)
Earth, Wind & Water (somewhere in the Caribbean)
Pocahontas County Fare (West Virginia, USA)
chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
Fragments from Floyd (Virginia, USA) – GRAND PRIZE WINNER
Watermark (Montana, USA)
pohanginapete (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
Thomasburg Walks (Ontario, Canada)
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Woman (Queensland, Australia)
The Transplantable Rose (Austin, Texas)
Nature Woman (New York state, USA)
Marja-Leena Rathje (British Columbia, Canada)
A Blog Around the Clock (North Carolina, USA)
Busy Dingbat’s Sphere (West Virginia, USA)
Hoarded Ordinaries (New Hampshire, USA)
Congo Days (Kinshasa, Congo)
this too (London, England)
Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
Blaugustine (London, England)
A Honey of an Anklet (Virginia, USA)
Looking Up (Ohio, USA)
Ontario Wanderer (Ontario, Canada)
Bug Safari (California, USA)
Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
Pure Florida (Florida, USA)
Burning Silo (Ontario, Canada)
Musings from Myopia (Texas, USA)
Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
Joan (Missouri, USA)
Nature Remains (Kentucky, USA)
prairie point (north Texas)
Cephalopodcast.com (Florida, USA) – VIDEO

The above post is Part 2 of a four-part series on IRFD festivities in Plummer’s Hollow, Pennsylvania (USA). See Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.

If you don’t see your own blog post listed, please email me: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com. And feel free to reproduce this list on your own blog, or anywhere else.

That’s where these rocks come in. Thanks to our new neighbor’s territorial ambitions, about seven years ago we were forced to shell out over $10,000 to survey our entire property, in part to prove that the line was not, in fact, two hundred feet farther in our direction than the customary understanding had held.

I thought it would be fun to take a look under one of the stones on a corner of our newly surveyed property line. See the one in the middle, without the orange paint? At some point a few years ago, it had been flipped over by a passing black bear (bears are rather obsessive-compulsive about flipping rocks) and nudged back into place by the next human to happen along. What, besides the buried corner stake, lurked underneath?

A very small woodland cockroach…

and a pile of moldy rodent droppings. It seemed strangely appropriate.

Send your IRFD links to me, bontasaurus (at) yahoo(dot) com, for recirculation to all participants tonight and tomorrow. (If you missed the orignal post explaining the event, it’s here. See also Bev’s thoughts here.) In the meantime, you can upload your photos to the Flickr photo pool and check out the other early entries from Windywillow, Heraclitean Fire, Sheep Days, Earth, Wind & Water, Pocahontas County Fare, and chatoyance.

Badge designed by Jason Robertshaw of Cephalopodcast and free for use in association with IRFD events. Alternate design here. Thanks, Jason!

Word about International Rock-Flipping Day has been spreading steadily across the internets, and it looks as if a fair number of people will be taking to the woods and fields and shores to flip rocks tomorrow.

One thing I forgot to do in the initial post is to caution people about flipping rocks in poisonous snake or scorpion habitat. In that case, I’d suggest wearing gloves and/or using a pry bar — or simply finding somewhere else to do your flipping. Please do not disturb any known rattlesnake shelters if you don’t plan on replacing the rocks exactly as you found them. Timber rattlesnakes, like many other adult herps, are very site-loyal, and can die if their homes are destroyed. Also, don’t play with spiders. If you disturb an adjacent hornet nest (hey, it’s possible), run like hell. But be sure to have someone standing by to get it all on film!

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I learned about a slightly more respectable rock-related activity on the radio this week: stone-skipping (that’s “ducks and drakes” for you Brits). The Penn State-supported NPR station WPSU has an occasional feature called “Sports That Are Not Football,” and this week, producer Cynthia Berger travelled to Franklin, Pennsylvania for the Rock in the River Festival.

Listen to the podcast.