BOCAGE COUNTRY CLUB HIGHLAND JEFFERSON TERRACE KENILWORTH PERKINS SOUTHDOWNS UNIVERSITY CLUB
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T H E A D V O C AT E.C O M
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W e d n e s d ay, J u n e 11, 2025
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Danny Heitman AT RANDOM
Wildness might be summer’s best gift From the window in our south Louisiana kitchen where I make coffee each morning, I can see that our big sycamore is shedding again, as it always does at this time of year. The trunk drops its outer layer each summer, and long strips of bark litter the lawn like a manuscript tossed to the wind. We’ll mow and rake to straighten things up, but a sycamore, like summer itself, can only be tidied so much. Here and there throughout the yard, I spot other signs of rebellion. Our night-blooming cereus has grown so wide and woolly that its long, green arms slap at anyone who crosses the threshold. Climbing fig vines amble toward the roof, an assault I’ve spent years keeping at bay. Our patio bird feeder, its seed spilled like a broken piñata, tells me a raccoon has been marauding again. Maybe the best gift of summer is its essential wildness, its refusal to fit within the neat boundaries and boxes in which we assume a sober life should dwell. We’ve come to a profligate stretch of the calendar, when there might be merit in answering summer’s abandon by being a bit looser ourselves. We do, after all, live in a copiously curated age, with every moment, it seems, arranged in a careful tableau for the sake of our friends on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. Little wonder that so much of summer, once lauded as a carefree idyll, can now feel as if it’s been soberly staged in advance. That thought tugs at me more often these days as I open a newspaper or magazine and find yet another brightly edited list of ideal vacation spots or a Top 10 summary of great beach reads. I find those features irresistible, and in my years as a journalist, I’ve written many of them myself. But one can always have too much of a good thing, and I wonder if, in our zeal to celebrate summer as a bucket list to be achieved rather than a respite to be enjoyed, we risk making the season into just one more grudging obligation. The trick, I suppose, is to simply savor summer — holding it loosely enough that we can breathe lightly within its embrace, or perhaps even doze. Last month, while visiting a loved one in the hospital, I noticed that the clock in her room had lost its hands. It was an odd thing to see the circle of numbers now mute on the question of minutes or hours, as if time itself had stopped.
PROVIDED PHOTO BY STEPHANIE YAN-CHAU
James Gregory shows the cone-like molars on a mandible of a mastodon he and Mason Kirkland discovered in an obscure creek in West Feliciana Parish. The molars belonged to a female mastodon estimated to have been 35 years old.
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Treacherous terrain, a nameless creek and pieces of a mastodon: Unearthing treasure in Louisiana
BY ROBIN MILLER Staff writer
he tree roots caught James Gregory’s eye the moment he waded into the No Name Creek, which isn’t
really the creek’s name. And the roots weren’t really tree roots. They were
weird, shaped like mini stalagmites in their sideways projection from the creek bank. Gregory alerted fellow fossil hunter, Mason Kirkland, who immediately knew they were about to unearth treasure on the periphery of West Feliciana Parish. Make that treasure in the context of paleontology, which is Kirkland’s area of expertise. He’s LSU’s vertebrate paleontology collection manager, but ownership of fossils from this hunt would be shared by him and Gregory, whose day job is director of LSU’s Brookshire Military Museum in Memorial Tower. ä See FOSSILS, page 2G
PROVIDED PHOTO BY JAMES GREGORY
Mason Kirkland shows the mastodon tusk he and James Gregory discovered in an unmapped creek in West Feliciana Parish. Kirkland preserved the tusk by tying zip ties around it to keep it from crumbling.
ä See AT RANDOM, page 2G
Do you see fewer palm trees around New Orleans? Lethal bronzing disease is killing off New Orleans’ tall palm trees. STAFF FILE PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
BY RACHEL MIPRO
Contributing writer
When Thomas “T” Diemer moved to New Orleans in 1988, he noticed the palm trees everywhere — especially the ones with bright orange fruit. “Once, even I stopped the car because a tree had so many and so bright dates that I thought it was on fire! Well, I have not seen any dates on trees since Katrina,” wrote Diemer, now a resident of Kenner.
“I assume Katrina killed them, but how and why?” LSU AgCenter Assistant Extension Agent Anna Timmerman confirmed that many date palm trees died during Hurricane Katrina, especially due to prolonged submersion, but, she said, efforts were made to replant these palms. The real threat to the city’s palm-lined avenues is disease: lethal bronzing and lethal yellowing, said Horticulture Extension Agent Joe Willis. The two
palm diseases are transmitted by species of planthoppers, tiny insects that suck sap from palms and infect the palms with deadly bacteria. Although the maladies are similar, lethal bronzing has been in the city longer and is the more common disease, according to Willis. Lethal bronzing was first found in New Orleans around 2013. Lethal yellowing was documented in Baton Rouge around 2017.
ä See CURIOUS, page 2G