Grasses Wear Robes

learning a new grass

We never get very far when we go on a Pennsylvania Native Plant Society field trip.  But we always learn and see more than we bargained for.  Take the grass field trip to Rothrock State Forest in central Pennsylvania that my son Dave and I joined last July.  Let by Sarah Miller of the Penn State Cooperative Wetlands Center, who is an expert on wetland plants and ecology, fourteen people from as far away as Lewisburg rendezvoused with her along Pine Swamp Road deep in the heart of the forest.  When Miller handed us the draft of a key she had devised entitled “Do I Have a Grass, Sedge or Rush,” we realized that we would be identifying not only the grasses but also the sedges and rushes along the trail.

A quick glance at the intricately-designed five sheets of paper, and I knew that my dependence on the old jingle, “Sedges have edges and rushes are round and grasses are hollow and move all around,” would not suffice.  In truth, I always forget what grasses are in that jingle so later I googled it on the Internet.  Apparently, I’m not the only one who can’t remember the exact wording of the grasses part because I found several versions of it including “grasses have nodes from the top to the ground,” “grasses are hollow right up from the ground,” and “grasses wear robes all the way to the ground.”

Despite the multiple versions of the grass line in the jingle, it turns out that they are the easiest to sort out.  If the stems are round, hollow, and jointed, with its leaves 2-ranked or 2-dimensional when viewed from above, it is a member of Poaceae — the Grass family.

three-way sedge

Sedges and rushes, on the other hand, are not as simple as the jingle implies and, in fact, took up the remainder of Miller’s key. For instance, the three-way sedge – Dulichium arundinaceum – which is common in bogs, swamps, marshes, lake margins and ditches, shares all the same characteristics as a grass except that its leaves are 3-ranked or 3-dimensional.

Still, there were several botanical terms I had to absorb as Miller launched into her identification of a couple grasses growing beside the road.  “Node,” it turns out, is another word for the joints on a grass stem, which is called a “culm.”  Those 2-ranked, alternate, parallel-veined leaves of grasses have two parts, the “sheath,” which surrounds the culm, and the “blade” which sticks out from the culm. Where the blade joins the sheath at the culm, on the inside usually is a papery structure or ring of hairs called a “ligule.”

I should have identified the first grass Miller showed us, but I was so intent on grasping the botanical terms that I didn’t even recognize the notorious Japanese stiltgrass until Miller named it.  Also known as “Nepalese browntop,” “Mary’s grass,” “Nepal grass,” and “Japanese grass,” Japanese stiltgrass, Microstegium vimineum, was accidentally introduced into the United States in Tennessee, probably because the dried grass was used as packing material for porcelain.  Since then, this invasive has spread to eastern states from New York to Florida.

Japanese stiltgrass in late September, Plummer's Hollow

Japanese stiltgrass thrives in disturbed areas.  In the last several years, it has invaded the poorly-logged portion of our property that we purchased after it was cut 18 years ago.  It spreads both by rooting at its nodes and by its seeds.  Each plant produces between 100 and 1000 seeds that remain viable in the soil for at least three years.  A native of not only Japan, but also Korea, China, Malaysia, and India, it seems to thrive in eastern North America almost everywhere from forests to fields, wetlands to roadside ditches, gas and powerline corridors to lawns and gardens.

Japanese stiltgrass doesn’t flower until late summer or early fall, but it was easy enough to identify the silvery stripe of reflective hairs down the middle of the upper surface of its alternately-arranged, asymmetrical, lance-shaped leaves.

To identify the next grass, the terminology was even more complex for my aging brain to grasp, and I never did sort it out until much later when I sat down with Agnes Chase’s excellent First Book of Grasses. First published in 1922, the Smithsonian Institution printed a third edition in 1959 in honor of Chase’s ninetieth birthday. My own 1977 hardcover copy was the second reprint of that edition. Despite nearly 60 years engaged in productive scientific work that resulted in more than 70 scientific papers, she is best know for this little gem of a book.

Chase was a self-taught botanist, but she became the dean of agrostology (grasses) after many years at the United States Department of Agriculture working for Albert Spear Hitchcock. She helped him compile the Manual of the Grasses of the United States, which she illustrated lavishly with her drawings, and then she revised all 1040 pages of the book after his death.

She also made two exploring trips to Brazil and another to Venezuela in the 1920s and 30s when she was in her fifties and sixties.  Botanical collector Ynes Mexia, who spent a couple days collecting with her in Brazil, described her as “almost a human grass, who lives, sleeps, dreams nothing but grasses…”

Chase’s clear drawings and explanatory material finally made sense of Miller’s insistence that we must look carefully at a grass flower in order to identify it.  A grass spikelet is the equivalent of a leafy flowering branch and consists of the flowers themselves or “florets,” which are held in the axils of small green bracts called “lemmas.”  They, in turn, are enclosed in a second bract — the “palea.” The equivalent of a stem is called a “rachilla.”  Below the grass flowers are two bracts without flowers — the “glumes.” All of these terms are important because often a grass can only be identified by its spikelets and their arrangements, for example, the shape of the glumes and the lemmas.

As we worked our way through the next grass, examining the spikelets in detail, Miller eventually identified it as Poa trivialis or rough bluegrass, a native of Europe but often cultivated here and found in wet meadows, swamps, and wet forests.

Rattlesnake Manna Grass, by Petroglyph on Flickr (CC BY-NC license)

Another spikelet she showed us was that of poverty grass, Danthonia spicata, in which a long hair emerged from between a pair of stiff hairs or teeth at the tip of each floret.  And we admired the wavy branches of rattlesnake mannagrass, Glyceria canadensis — an easy way to identify this distinctive wetland grass.

We shuffled onward as folks stopped to look at every grass, sedge, and rush.  Rushes (Family Juncaceae), Miller told us, have miniature flowers with three petals and three sepals, an arrangement called “tepals” that enclose a capsule containing three or more seeds.  As an example, she showed us soft rush, Juncus effusus. This perennial native has densely-clustered stems and clumps of flowers that grow from the side of the stem.

Because the flowers of the soft rush “are individual, they are prophyllate, if they are in heads, they are eprophyllate,” according to Miller’s key, and that’s where the botanical terminology defeated me.  I knew I would need many more hours to sort out and memorize words I had always avoided.

I had never had a botany course and tended to rely on pictorial field guides to identify wildflowers as well as the more common grasses, sedges, and rushes with the help of Ernest Knobel’s Field Guide to the Grasses, Sedges and Rushes of the United States and Lauren Brown’s Grasses, which also includes sedges and rushes.  For an amateur like me these guides are invaluable. Still, they do take some work and occasional glances at botanical glossaries.

The rest of the plants we looked at were sedges (Family Cyperaceae), which usually have triangular solid stems, small flowers, and 1-seeded fruits or nutlets that are often called “achenes.” There are 15 genera of sedges in Pennsylvania, 160 species of which are in the genus Carex.  This is, by far, the largest genus of flowering plants in the state.  A couple that we saw with Miller was Carex folliculata and Carex torta, both common, native, wetland perennials and both known commonly as “sedge.”

We also looked at Scirpus cyperinus, another sedge with the common name “wool-grass,” which should explain why botanists prefer to use the scientific names.  Other members of the Scirpus genus also have variations on the name “bulrush,” even though they are neither grasses nor rushes.

Botanizing at the Beaver Dam in Rothrock State Forest

After more than an hour, we reached the Beaver Dam as the wetland is known by the locals.  Miller called our attention to another grass, Calamagrostis canadensis or Canada bluejoint, a denizen of bogs and swamps, as some of us deftly moved from sphagnum hummock to sphagnum hummock over the former impoundment and tried to avoid the places where knee-deep water flowed swiftly.

But one elderly man, in an attempt to catch a praying mantis, fell into the water.

“Bob’s down,” son Dave said.  “Are you okay?”

As if in answer, he scrambled to his feet and showed us the mantis he held between forefinger and thumb.  This was, after all, a group of amateur naturalists interested in every aspect of the natural world.

Next, a younger woman plunged in up to her knees and emerged muddy but cheerful.  After that, we were even more careful.

Then Miller showed us another grass.

“It’s a Panicum,” she said.

“What is the species?” I asked.

“I have no idea.  I have trouble with Panicum,” she answered.  With that honest reply from an expert, I felt better about procrastinating trying to learn all the grasses, sedges, and rushes even on our mostly dry, mountaintop property.  The least I could do, I resolved, was identify those plants.

ebony jewelwing damselfly at the Beaver Dam

The Beaver Dam wetland is a lovely place.  Masses of purple steeplebush bloomed in the middle of it, and we knelt in the mud to examine the delicate flowers of blooming sundews with our hand lens. Ebony jewelwing damselflies flitted over the water, a wide expanse of cotton grass grew on the far side of the wetland, and large white pines towered over its edges.

But I was distressed to see the telltale tire marks of an all-terrain vehicle imprinted in the mud.  It had been driven heedlessly through the sedges and rushes.  Such incursions, especially in wetlands and along streambeds, continue to destroy habitat and frustrate those of us who value such places.

At last, we were marshaled back to our cars, and off we went.  But the adventure was not over.  The lead car suddenly braked to avoid a tiny porcupette crossing the road.  Everyone stopped their cars and rushed to get a better look at it as it scurried into the underbrush.  Son Dave scared it up a tree, which it looked as if it was climbing for the first time. At the first branch, barely six feet from the ground, it paused to rest, and eager naturalists and photographers gathered around to admire and take its picture. Only Dave had ever seen one before and that was on our property several years ago.

Then, farther along, at the side of the road, Dave spotted a wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum) in bloom.  By that time, our car was on its own.  All four of us got out to photograph that gorgeous, deep orange, purple-spotted wildflower standing erect on a stem above whorled leaves.  This last, unexpected floral gift from Rothrock State Forest ended our grass field trip on a high note.

Lilium philadelphicum

All photos were taken by Dave on the day of the outing, except where noted otherwise.

Little Clay Pots

In late April, little clay pots appeared on our forested trails.  Thumb-sized and sturdy, most were circular but some were oval-shaped.  Never before had I seen such constructions.  Near some of them, I also found small holes deeper than my forefinger could penetrate.  It was as if some tribe of lilliputians had emerged from the ground and secretly constructed them of mud, tiny stones, and bits of moss.

After studying dozens of the clay pots and finding acorns in some of them, I decided that they had somehow formed around squirrel-buried acorns and, in removing the acorns, the squirrels had uncovered the clay pots.  I contacted my favorite squirrel researcher and showed her the clay pots.  But she too had never seen anything like them.

The author's collection of mysterious "pots"

The artistry and diversity of the pots fascinated me. I filled a shoe box lid with them and put them on my desk.  Sooner or later, I hoped to find out what they were.

It turned out to be sooner.  On June 7, the second day of heat and humidity, our son Dave showed me photos of the little clay pots on the Penn State University Entomology Department’s website. They had been constructed by the nymphal stage of Brood XIV of the periodical cicada. Brood X, known as “the great eastern brood,” had emerged in many Pennsylvania counties, including our own, in 2004, but on our mountain, only Brood XIV, the second largest brood of periodical cicadas in Pennsylvania, emerges.

“In April, they [the nymphs] burrow to about an inch beneath the soil surface,” Senior Extension Associate Greg Hoover wrote on the Penn State website, “where they stop and await the proper time to emerge. If the ground is too damp, [as it was in April] mature nymphs build a protective earthen turret.”

But I wondered why I hadn’t seen them during the two previous emergences of Brood XIV on our mountain in 1991 and 1974. I e-mailed David Marshall, an expert on the periodical cicada at the University of Connecticut, for more information.

Cicada on the powerline right-of-way

“No one knows for sure why the cicadas build the turrets when they do,” he answered.  “Most of the time they do not, and yet sometimes a whole area will have them built way up several inches.  Theories range from differences in soil moisture/recent rainfall (nymphs somehow reducing the risk of drowning) to artifacts of differential exposure to light.  People were writing about this 100 years ago in USDA publications, and we have hardly learned any more since then!”

Furthermore, Marshall had no idea who or what had knocked all the tops off the turrets and why some contained acorns.  Neither did any other expert I consulted.  So I had to be content with solving half the mystery of the little clay pots.

We had started to hear the “phar-oah” calls of Magicicada septendecim, one of the three species of Brood XIV periodical cicadas, drifting up from bucolic Sinking Valley 500 feet below our mountaintop, a week earlier.  The day before we partially solved the mystery of the clay pots, Dave had reported that the periodical cicadas were emerging on the powerline right-of-way.  Summer had arrived with a vengeance and clad only in shorts and tank top, I hiked to the top of the right-of-way to welcome back the longest-living insects in North America.  Although I could hear the cicadas screeching down in the valley, those on the right-of-way were silent.

With their red eyes, golden-edged translucent wings segmented like stained glass windows by narrow bands of black, and the first segment of each leg the same orange-red as their eyes, they are strikingly handsome creatures.  They flew up from the scrub oaks and spun head-on toward me, veering off only at the last minute, their wings flashing in the sunlight.  Seemingly lurching under their own weight and barely able to maintain their equilibrium, they reminded me of miniature, poorly-loaded cargo planes.

Cicada on scrub oak

Still known erroneously by many people as 17-year locusts, the more than 2400 species of cicadas worldwide belong to the insect order Homoptera, whereas locusts are members of the Orthoptera insect order.  Back in the spring of 1634, when they emerged in Massachusetts, the pilgrims called them “locusts” because of their overwhelming numbers, which reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts.  They had never seen any insects like them because periodical cicadas occur nowhere else in the world but in eastern North America.

The Royal Society of London Journal reported this plague and wrote “that for the space of 200 miles they poisoned and destroyed all the trees of that country; there being found innumerable little holes in the ground, out of which those insects broke forth in the form of maggots, which turned into flyes (sic) that had a kind of taile (sic) or sting, which they stuck into the tree, and thereby envenomed and killed it.” Thus, the misnomer of “locusts.”

However, the truth about these insects is even more amazing than the folklore. Because cicada larvae have sucking mouthparts, they are closely related to aphids, scale insects, mealy bugs, tree and leaf hoppers.  Their small, fishlike larvae use sharp beaks to puncture tree rootlets and suck watery liquid out of them as sustenance during their 17 years underground. When one rootlet dies, they move on to another.

After more than ten years as deep as two feet underground, they move closer to the soil surface.  One researcher, Monte Lloyd, back in the early 1960s, dug up the larvae at various stages and found that they take a four-year rest during their underground growth.

It is probably the soil temperature — around 64 degrees Fahrenheit — that finally triggers the larvae to emerge from their tunnels after sunset, climb a shrub or small tree, and wriggle out of the exoskeleton of their fifth instar or juvenile stage.  The adults are white when they first appear, and cicada connoisseurs recommend eating them at that stage either plain or sautéed in butter and parsley.

Empty cicada exuviae on the powerline

“They have a nutty flavor, almost like a pistachio nut,” writes David George Gordon in his The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, while Monte Lloyd says “they taste like a cross between an avocado and a raw potato” and maintains that they are delicious.

Even after they harden, in a day or so, they are excellent food for spiders, snakes, birds, and fish.  The largest wasp in the East — the cicada killer — paralyzes a cicada with its sting, pulls it up into a tree, flies to its nest still holding the cicada, and feeds it to its wasp larva.  But because of the cicadas’survival strategy called by researchers “predator satiation” or emerging in overwhelming numbers as high as 1.5 million per acre, predators couldn’t begin to eat all of them.

A predator fungus, though, Massopora cicadina, that infects the larvae as they burrow into the soil, can be a problem to populations.  The fungus stays with the larvae when they emerge 17 years later and while infected females mate, they don’t lay eggs. Infected males try to mate with both males and females.  This spreads the fungus.  But most cicada populations are fungus-free and perform as they should to perpetuate the species.

After four days of hardening and rest, the males form aggregations, also referred to as choruses or leks that sexually attract females.  There are actually three species of 17-year periodical cicadas, and their calls are their best identifying characteristic.  The most common is the “phar-oah” calling M. septendecim, followed by the ticking and buzzing of M. cassini, and the much rarer M.septendecula, which sounds like a lawn sprinkler.

Video link.

The males produce their songs using ridged membranes on the first segment of their abdomens, which are hollow and probably act as resonating chambers.  The silent females hear them through their tympana or ear drums–membranous organs located on the undersides of their abdomens.

The aforementioned David Marshall and John Cooley caged unmated females and after several days, when the females could hear calling males, they flicked their wings.  Evidently, males end each of their screeches with a downward slur.  If a female is interested in a male, she then flicks her wings.  The favored male makes a buzzing sound meant to keep other males away.  Then he changes his song into courtship mode and, if that works, the female allows him to approach her, whereupon the male performs a final serenade before mating.

All this singing drives many humans to distraction. Some even lock themselves in their homes and call the fire department.  But I enjoyed moving from the lek on the powerline right-of-way to the chorus at the top corner of First Field to another aggregation at the Far Field.  As dawn strengthened every day, the tide of sound began, swelling to a crescendo as the day progressed, fading away to a diminuendo and then a numbing silence at daylight’s end.  After three weeks, the sound became an integral part of my life.

A female cicada deposits eggs in a black locust branch

But even while some males continued to sing, I watched the females scrape Y-shaped egg nests in scrub oak branches on the powerline right-of-way with their long, black ovipositors, and, pumping their hind ends, deposit up to 20 eggs per nest.  A single female lays as many as 600 eggs in multiple nests.  Sometimes those nest-filled branches will break off and drop to the ground, but, for the most part, “nature’s pruners,” as periodical cicadas are sometimes nicknamed, do little harm to trees.  Even the adults’ feeding by sucking plant fluids during their four weeks aboveground, is relatively harmless to the plants.

By the first of July, most of the singing was over.  In six to seven weeks the eggs would hatch and the white, antlike nymphs would wriggle out of their nests, drop to the ground, and burrow into the soil.

Altogether, I enjoyed hearing and seeing my third emergence of Brood XIV on our mountain. Had I been born here I would have heard the 1940 outbreak a month before my birth, their thrumming calls reaching me through my mother’s womb.  The next outbreak–in 1957–would have occurred the June I finished my junior year in high school.  We had lived on the mountain three years and I was 33, at the peak of motherhood, my three little boys excitedly collecting cicadas in glass jars, when they emerged in 1974. During the 1991 emergence, the boys were off on their own, and I was 50 years old and busily engaged in my writing career. Last June I was 67 and, like William T. Davis, the so-called Cicada Man of Staten Island, who identified and named half the cicada species in North America, I have been pleased to track my life through Brood XIV periodical cicada outbreaks.  Such tracking gives me a keen sense of my own mortality.

***

For more information (and entertainment), consult cicadamania.com.  This website, started in 1998, is “dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world.” They post photos and information about cicadas from as far away as Australia, and they diligently track the major broods of periodical cicadas in North America.

The Penn State webpage includes a timetable of expected appearances of the periodical cicada in Pennsylvania and the counties in which they may emerge.

The wings of cicadas eaten by predators littered the trail above the garage

All photos and video shot on Brush Mountain, June-July 2008, by Dave Bonta

An Enigmatic Warbler

Cerulean Warbler in Silver Maple swamp (by Petroglyph, on Flickr - CC BY-NC-SA license)

“Wee, wee, wee, wee, bzzz” sings my favorite yard bird.  For two months most years — mid-May to mid-July — the male cerulean warbler sings his monotonous song from dawn until dusk. The first year this happened, back in 2002, I worried that he hadn’t found a mate.  Why else would he sing on and on like some demented suitor?

Then I did a little research and learned that on their breeding grounds territorial male cerulean warblers are “vigorous and persistent singers, usually singing from the highest available forage,” according to Jon Dunn and Kimball Garrett in Warblers.

Other researchers reported that ceruleans often have favorite song perches in trees that leaf out late such as bitternut hickories, black walnuts and black locusts.  They hypothesize that the leafless trees allow the birds to broadcast their songs with little “acoustic hindrance” until late in the breeding season. And, in the case of our yard trees — black locusts and black walnuts — when they do leaf out their foliage is relatively thin.

Despite their glorious blue heads and backs, their white wing bars and bluish-black chest bands that stand out against their white throats, breasts, and bellies, male cerulean warblers can be difficult to spot high in the treetops.  And I can’t ever remember seeing the greenish-blue females with pale yellow underparts, which is why I thought the singing cerulean was an unrequited lover.

“A bird more difficult to observe I have rarely ever met with,” wrote a frustrated observer in 1919.  “Had it not been for the almost incessant singing, being heard almost constantly from daybreak until nearly dark, the task of identification would have seemed hopeless.”

Yet, in my case, seeing was believing, because for years I didn’t think we had breeding cerulean warblers.  In the 1970s and 80s cerulean breeding habitat was thought to be exclusively lowland open forests near streams or in old growth bottomland forests. Then one June day I saw a cerulean warbler in a tree beside the Far Field Road, and I wondered if they could be breeding on our dry mountaintop.

Cerulean warbler at nest (photo by US Forest Service - public domain)

As if in answer to my question, during the first Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas Project, my son Mark confirmed breeding ceruleans on our dry mountaintop in 1986 despite the Project’s Handbook, which described cerulean habitat as “mature moist or riverside forests.”

Even since, I have found singing ceruleans somewhere on our mountain every spring and summer.  So far, the earliest return date I have recorded for them is April 30 and the latest singing date July 21.  They have sung above Greenbrier and Ten Springs trails in this century, a decade after a previous owner poorly logged that portion of the property.  But he did leave bitternut hickories, a few large oaks, and several tulip trees, which may have lured ceruleans.

Other ceruleans have sung at the upper edges of both the First and Far Fields, along the powerline right-of-way, in the Far Field thicket, beside the deer exclosure, in tall trees behind our old garden site, in the black cherry forest near the spruce grove, and along Laurel Ridge Trail — all dry ridgetop sites and all in edge habitat. I have not found them along our stream in our 100-year-old deciduous forest.

Luckily, Paul B. Hamel published an updated account of cerulean warblers, based on more recent research, in The Birds of North America in 2000.  In it, he wrote that ceruleans also breed in upland deciduous second-growth as well as mature forests at elevations up to 3,000 feet. But his 19-page article had many life history gaps, and he admitted that the cerulean warbler “has been little studied.”

Because they nest high in large trees such as oaks, they are difficult to observe.  What researchers do know is that despite expanding their breeding range into the Northeast from the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and Cumberland Plateau of eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and southern West Virginia, they are one of the fastest declining songbirds (70% in 40 years) in North America.

Cerulean Warbler in Rondeau Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada (photo by Mdf, Wikimedia Commons - GFDL license)

In the same year that Hamel’s account was published, ornithologists Kenneth V. Rosenberg, Sara E. Barker, and Ronald W. Rohrbaugh of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology submitted An Atlas of Cerulean Warbler Populations: Final Report to USFWS: 1997-2000 Breeding Seasons [PDF]. Two hundred field persons, both volunteers and professionals, collected information on breeding ceruleans and the habitats and dominant tree species they preferred.  They canoed navigable waterways, drove along rural roads, hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail, and drove and hiked through forests and isolated woodlots from Illinois to Missouri, New Jersey to New England, eastern Tennessee to Ontario, Canada.

They located 7,669 cerulean warblers at 1,923 sites in 28 states and Ontario.  Not surprisingly, almost all the ceruleans were singing males.  They also searched 355 likely sites where they didn’t find any ceruleans.  Some states had many more volunteers than others. Unfortunately, Kentucky, which is thought to be a major breeding site in its eastern section, had very few volunteers.  But Tennessee, another important breeding area, reported the most ceruleans (1210), followed by West Virginia (1124), New York (1068), Illinois (1000), and Pennsylvania (548).

I was particularly interested in the Pennsylvania findings.  After all, Philadelphia-based bird artist, Alexander Wilson, first named and then painted the male cerulean warbler (Dendroica cerulea) after it was discovered in eastern Pennsylvania, and Titian Peale, another Philadelphia artist, painted the first female cerulean, which had been taken along the banks of the Schuylkill River in 1825.

Alexander Wilson's cerulean warbler

It turns out that eastern Pennsylvania is still a hotbed of ceruleans in the Delaware River Valley on both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey riverbanks with 90 birds. This was followed by the Jennings Environmental Center and Moraine State Park in western Pennsylvania (69), the Juniata River and vicinity (42) and Peter’s Mountain and State Game Lands #211 (29), both in central Pennsylvania.  The habitats included dry slopes, riparian and lake margins.

Despite the 90 in the Delaware River Valley and the 71 in central Pennsylvania, ceruleans have historically been most numerous in southwestern Pennsylvania. Intensive surveys in that area and adjacent West Virginia found 1,400 ceruleans in what the report called “the heart of the species’ range.”  Almost as many ceruleans were found on dry slopes or ridgetop sites as in riparian or other bottomland habitats.

I was especially intrigued by the Juniata River and vicinity number in Huntington and Blair counties, since our Little Juniata River that we cross at the bottom of our mountain whenever we go out is a tributary of the Juniata River and our home is in northern Blair County. I also noted that the favorite nesting trees in dry upland sites were white and red oaks, black cherry, and maples, all of which we have as 100-year-old or older trees on our property.

In addition, ceruleans seem to prefer a tall, but broken tree canopy and large wooded tracts of at least 50 to 75 acres, but 1,300 acres is considered optimal.  Still, while those ceruleans in the Southeast use large forest tracts, those in the Northeast often breed in much smaller forests.  And in eastern Ontario maple forests of 25 acres are adequate.  So cerulean warblers may be more adaptable than previously thought.

On the other hand, their numbers keep falling at the rate of 4% a year.  Habitat loss, both on their breeding and wintering grounds, seems to be the major reason for their steady decline. Here in North America on their breeding grounds in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, mountaintop removal to mine for coal is permanently destroying mountaintop forests where ceruleans breed.

Forestry practices, as they relate to cerulean warbler habitat, have also been studied in southern Indiana by Sarah M. Register and Kamal Islam, and they concluded that “cerulean warbler habitat needs appear to be supported by 20-30 year cutting cycles combined with uneven-age management and timber stand improvement practices.”  Furthermore, clear-cutting results “in immediate habitat loss for cerulean warblers and other interior forest dwelling birds that may take years to regenerate.”

John James Audubon's Cerulean Warbler plate

On their wintering grounds in the subtropical forests of the Andean valleys in Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, shade coffee plantations that provide excellent habitat for ceruleans are being replaced by sun coffee farms which are more profitable.  Deforestation in those countries is also due to cacao and tea plantations as well as to the illegal coca trade.

In summary, Hamel says that “Land-use changes brought about by increasing populations in the breeding, migratory, and winter ranges of this species appear to be the underlying cause of the population decline of the bird…”

Here in Pennsylvania the current move to put industrial wind farms on our dry, forested mountaintops will lead to fragmentation of many of our best remaining wild areas, especially in the ridge-and-valley province.  This will not only affect cerulean warblers but many other forest-interior nesting birds.  What a pity it would be to lose what researchers in eastern Ontario call the “enigmatic Cerulean Warbler.”

Those same researchers managed to find and observe 201 cerulean nests in a second growth, 80 to 90-year-old deciduous forest of mostly sugar maple, bitternut hickory, and ash trees from 1996 to 2001.  They discovered that cerulean nest-building, by the females, takes four to seven days, egg-laying seven days, and incubation 10 to 12 days.  While the females do all the incubating and brooding, the males and females feed the three to four nestlings.  Their major predator was the blue jay.  Other studies mention cowbird parasitism as a threat, but in Ontario, despite high cowbird numbers, the researchers never observed ceruleans feeding cowbird nestlings or fledglings.  The couple of nests that had cowbird eggs were abandoned by ceruleans.

Cerulean nests are usually constructed of bark fiber, fine grass stems, weed stalks, and fine hairs.  They decorate the outside of their nests with gray or white material, such as gray shreds of bark or spider webs.  Cerulean females anchor their nests on horizontal deciduous tree limbs 30 feet or higher from the ground beneath clumps of leaves.  Researchers both in Ontario and the Mississippi Alluvial Valley have banded ceruleans and have had banded birds return to the same breeding area at least two years in a row.

That convinces me that the particularly vocal cerulean warbler who sang in our yard in 2002 and 2003 was the same bird.

Cerulean Warbler, Shawnee State Forest, April 26, 2008 (by semillama on Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND license)

What About Bears?

Black bears below the guesthouse, April 18, 2008

Next to poisonous snakes, people fear encountering bears in the outdoors.  Even some of our hunter friends are bear-shy. But ever since black bears returned to our mountain, back in the 1980s, I’ve relished every experience I’ve had with them.  So far, they’ve been exciting but harmless.

Last spring and summer, I saw more bears than ever before.  And it all began on April 18.  On that day, the temperature reached the mid-eighties, which finally brought out our hundreds of daffodils.  Because Bruce and I were away for the day, we missed the advent of our resident female bear and her four cubs from the previous year.  They drank from the stream below the guesthouse, and our son Dave, who lives in the guesthouse, had wonderful views of them from his front porch.  One of the cubs was cinnamon-colored, and all of them looked healthy.

I was upset that I had missed this close encounter.  But the following evening, our family was sitting out on the veranda after dinner.

“What’s that up in the field?” our daughter-in-law Karylee asked.

I grabbed my binoculars and immediately ascertained that the sow and her cubs were back.

“Get the scope,” son Steve said quietly to Bruce.  In the meantime, I trained my binoculars on the family foraging up in the corner of First Field.

Bruce set up the scope and we all took turns watching the little family.  Despite our granddaughter Elanor’s high-pitched talking, playing, and banging in and out of the front door, the bears continued feeding, seemingly oblivious or at least unconcerned by us.

No doubt, this was the same calm sow that I have encountered in other years with her family.  Never once has she acted threateningly toward me when I have accidentally run into her.   She and the cubs have always run off together.

On this evening, they not only ate but they played.  First one cub, then two, and then three cubs climbed high up in a black locust tree and out on branches that looked too slender to hold them, perhaps playing their version of “king of the mountain.”  Even the fourth cub joined them off-and-on, but it usually stuck close to the sow instead.  Once a pair of them faced each other, all four of their legs curled around the trunk, and alternately nuzzled each other and batted back and forth, like prize fighters in training.

Sometimes one or two of the cubs would move close to the sow as if trying to see what she was eating.  As she dug in the ground, they all crowded near, but I couldn’t tell if she was giving them food.

I was particularly interested in observing the uncommon cinnamon bear, and I noticed that another cub had a slight cinnamon cast too.  I couldn’t remember seeing a cinnamon cub here before, but Dave claimed that there had been one several years ago.

We watched them for more than an hour until it was too dark to see them.  I was elated, because that was the longest observation time I had ever had of a black bear family.

The next day we found muddy bear paw prints on our back porch door.  Then Bruce discovered more, five feet from the ground, on the window over the kitchen sink. The bears had been giving our kitchen, at least, a thorough examination, and we worried that they might get even more familiar. But I was no longer feeding the birds from feeders hanging on the back porch, believing that winter feeding is the wisest course when living close to bears.  Even so, I always bring the feeders inside every evening during November, December, March, and early April, when some bears are liable to be around. And, as it turned out, that was the only interest bears showed in our home even during the summer when only a screen door separated the kitchen from the outdoors.

It rained hard the morning after we watched the bear family. I waited until there was a break in the weather and hurried up to the corner of First Field to look for bear sign. I paced back and forth where I knew they had been and could find no sign, not even of the digging the sow had been doing.  If we hadn’t seen them with our own eyes, we wouldn’t have believed they had been up there.

But we found fresh bear scat on all our trails over the next several weeks.  Often I followed in the footsteps of bears because I would find many large and small rocks wrenched out of the ground and overturned on our trails as the black bears searched for ants.

Then, near the end of May, I wandered through the spruce grove and sat down at the edge under a spruce tree, hoping to locate what I thought was a crow’s nest. The crows flew in and scolded, but still I couldn’t see that nest in the dense tops of the spruces.

Then I heard a crashing below the grove and thought, “Uh, oh. A bear.”

Bear in the milkweed patch near the spruce grove, July 22, 2007

I remained seated, but as the bear lumbered up the field trail, I grew increasingly uneasy, especially when he turned and headed toward my spruce tree.  I inched my way around it and the bear heard me.  He followed behind me around the tree about 20 feet away. Knowing that bears don’t see very well and that I shouldn’t run from him, I turned around, faced him, and yelled, “Go away, get out of here, buddy.”  He paused for a second and then ran off through the grove.

He was a large male and probably on the prowl for a female.  I suspected that our resident sow was in heat and the youngsters on their own.

The next day I walked Greenbrier Trail, listening to birdsong.  As I rounded one corner, I spotted a black bear on the trail ahead with its head down as it plodded along.  This one too appeared to be a big male bear, maybe the same one as the day before.  Luckily, he hadn’t seen me.

I backpedaled fast because the trail was too steep on both sides for me to get off it. After a couple hundred feet, I reached a flatter area, left the trail and plunged into the underbrush. Breathlessly, I waited and waited for the bear to pass on the trail above me, but he didn’t appear.  I heard no sound either.  I reasoned that he must have heard me crashing down slope through the dry leaves and retreated.  Still, the waiting and indecision were worse than the previous day’s encounter.

Should I return to the trail and continue on my way or retreat down the mountain through thick underbrush to Ten Springs Trail?  I sat on a log trying to decide as birds sang and flies buzzed around me.  Finally, I opted for the open trail where I wouldn’t be surprised by a sudden appearance as I (and he) would be in the impenetrable brush. I picked up a big stick to hold above my head so that I would present a tall silhouette to the bear should I encounter him again.

The trail was clear.  Apparently, the bear had heard me and gone the opposite direction.  When I reached a muddy area on the trail, I spotted large, fresh bear tracks bigger by a couple inches than my hand span, thumb to little finger.

After that, I began to see more of the young bears than I had bargained for.  In mid-June, I sat on a log at the top of Pennyroyal Trail at the Far Field.  After awhile I walked on and, in the thick underbrush to my right, at least two bears ran off — one went left, the other right — still in the thick underbrush.  I guess they were resting in the deep shade as I was.

As I continued walking, I kept peering into the underbrush.  Was that black mass a bear?  Indeed, it was, and again it ran off as I said loudly, “It’s okay.”

Power pole near the house used as a message board by bears

Three days later, during an evening walk, Bruce and I surprised a young black bear as we descended Laurel Ridge Trail.  It was ripping apart a log and looked up at us in obvious confusion.  Finally, it decided we were not its friends.  It turned around, ran down the trail, and disappeared in the underbrush.

Near the end of June Dave saw two of the cubs on Laurel Ridge Trail. One was cinnamon, the other one was black.  He had been trying to photograph a black-throated blue warbler when the cubs appeared.  He was so excited that he didn’t know which creature to photograph, and, in the end, he didn’t capture any of them on film.

Throughout the summer, we continued to see bears and bear sign nearly every day.  Several of the power poles had fresh scratches on them where the bears had left their messages for other bears. Massive piles of bear scat, first filled with huckleberry seeds and later with cherry pits, were deposited on our trails on a daily basis.  All of this kept me on high alert, especially along the narrow trails that wound through thick underbrush that had grown up because of the January 2005 ice storm.

On July 24, I found an enormous, fresh bear scat on Laurel Ridge Trail. I continued on to the Far Field Road and then turned back home.  I practically stumbled on a bear rubbing itself all over a small red maple tree at the confluence of Laurel Ridge, First Field, and Far Field trails.

The bear saw me seconds after I saw it and stood up to peer nearsightedly in my direction before starting toward me.

“It’s okay,” I said to it, and it turned around and ran down Laurel Ridge Trail. Then it paused and looked back at me.

“It’s okay,” I repeated. “I won’t hurt you.”

Finally, it bounded on down the trail.  Undoubtedly, it was one of the cubs that was growing up fast.

Two days later, I was wandering back along Laurel Ridge Trail picking huckleberries.  Suddenly a strong smell wafted past that caused me to pause and look carefully around, but I didn’t see anything. I knew that the bears had been eating the berries and had read that you could often smell a bear before seeing it.   Then, as I walked on, humming “The Hills of Home,” a bear loomed up ahead of me on the trail.  It spun around and ran off.

So I had smelled a bear.  Now I knew what bears smell like or at least that bear.  Probably if I hadn’t been humming, I would have had a closer look at it.

The bear sightings continued. In mid-August, during an evening walk, as Bruce and I crossed the powerline right-of-way on the Short Circuit Trail on Laurel Ridge, I caught a movement at the top of the Sapsucker Ridge portion of the right-of-way.  Through my binoculars, I watched a black bear slowly amble down the slope.  Just before it reached the base, it disappeared into a small ravine.

Bear cubs on a tree near Asheville, NC (photo by ashe-villain)

Five days later, as I neared the Far Field, a crashing off to my left alerted me to a black bear.  At the same time, blue jays spotted it or me or both and set up a terrible ruckus.  The bear kept trudging along until I lost sight of it in the underbrush.  And that was my final view of a bear last summer.  But the sign continued throughout the late summer and into late autumn before the bears went into hibernation.

“What about bears?” people continue to ask me when they learn that I go off by myself on our trails every day. Now you know. So far, I have enjoyed my peaceful coexistence with them.  And I look forward this April to our resident sow appearing with her new batch of cubs.
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All photos and video were taken on Brush Mountain by Dave Bonta except the last, which is by ashe-villain and licenced for free non-commercial use with attribution.