Interesting Concept

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The above thought-provoking chart is from Chartophilia, and it got me to thinking about my home state of Alabama, and my relatively sparsely populated home county of Covington. If Alabama’s 2008 population of 4,661,900 were as tightly packed as Brooklyn, New York's 35,000 people per square mile, we’d get everybody into just 133.2 square miles, or an area 11.5 miles square. I know a couple of people whose combined landholdings exceed that. Covington County has 37,631 people, so at the Brooklyn density we could all fit on just over one square mile. But as it is we have just 36 people per square mile, about 1000 times less dense than Brooklyn. I kind of like the elbow room.

Smokin'!

When we had The Nature Conservancy's prescribed burning crew at the 70-acre Gator Pond property last March, the wind shifted and they were unable to burn the area in the northwest portion. Well, a few days ago, I got some help from Kent Hanby and Mark Hainds and we got it burned (thanks, guys!). At 2:00, relative humidity was down to a scary 11 percent and the air temperature was 70 degrees F, meaning we really had to be careful. But the objective was to clear out some of the hardwood scrubby regrowth that had encroached following longleaf pine planting three years ago, and it was largely a success. Coincidentally, pilot/photographer Alex Boldog happened to be flying over and today he sent me the above image. Look, it's still smokin'! Open Pond and Yellow Hill Pond to the north are on Forest Service land.