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.

White Easter

Spicebush trunks, Easter 2008

Easter — March 23, 2008. It is a cold 17 degrees on this earliest Easter Sunday most of us will ever celebrate. And only the oldest folks now alive have seen it this early before, those who were around in 1913. The next time Easter will fall on this date, according to The Christian Century magazine, is in 2228.

But the earliest possible date for Easter is March 22. The last time that occurred was in 1818 and the next time will be in 2285. What will life on earth be like in the 23rd century? ill there still be birds singing, children laughing, flowers blooming?

On this momentous day, I awaken to the silence of a white Easter, courtesy of a Good Friday six-inch snowfall. Almost immediately, I recall the words from a song I used to sing in the children’s choir at our church many years ago.

One early Easter morning, I wakened with the birds.
And all around lay silence, too deep for idle words.

This morning the peace outside is deep and it is even quieter than most Sundays. But a crust on the snow makes it noisy when I walk, and I must stop often to listen to the singing and calling birds.  They, it seems, are not dismayed by the wintry cold and snow.

White-throated sparrows hymn my passage across First Field.  American crows rise from the field, black against white.

Detail from "The Great Piece of Turf" by Albrecht Dürer (watercolor, 1503)

The shadows of the dried grasses and wildflowers on the white earth remind me of the Albrecht Dürer painting “The Great Piece of Turf” on the cover of our friend, Todd Davis’s wonderful book of poetry Some Heaven. The painting of dandelions about to open, plantain, and a scattering of grasses is as spare, in its way, as the snow shadows, or as a poem that distills, in a few words, the beauty of the common plants we call “weeds.”

Davis writes in his poem “Once Again” that

Not long after the snows
are gone dandelions spring
up across the fields, green
only for a few weeks. In time
their heads turn white like old
women, hair blown by the wind
without any apparent purpose
or direction,

which reminds me of my own wild, white hair and advancing age.

Pondering this, as I sit on a fallen tree above the old garden of our deceased neighbor Margaret, I bask in the sunlight and hear the mourning doves’ singing as a sorrowful counterpoint to the strident cries of blue jays. Then, the ever ebullient song sparrows and “churring” red-bellied woodpeckers join the avian chorus, followed by the raucous crows.

I move on to Bird Count Trail, and again the predominant singer is the mourning dove cooing his welcome to spring. Next, after many silent minutes, a northern cardinal sings “cheer, cheer, cheer,” but another clicks its disapproval of my presence.

A tufted titmouse pauses on a tree limb to peer at me as I labor up the steep Haul Road, pausing frequently to rest, and a pileated woodpecker takes its noisy self off and over the treetops. Tufted titmice “peter-peter” in the distance, while train after train whistles each crossing in the valley.

I cross a ruffed grouse track and see its wing imprint in the snow where it has risen into the sky. I frequently encounter gray squirrel tracks and holes where they have dug through the snow and into the earth in search of a buried nut.

Ruffed grouse tracks

I reach the top of the mountain and head south along Sapsucker Ridge Trail. Once I stop to sit against the largest tree on our property — a black oak that is a lesson in overcoming adversity and old age. Despite broken boughs and dead branches, its core is solid and it continues stretching upward and outward each year. Below sits our aging house, built in 1871, and our guesthouse, built in 1865. They too are showing their ages, just as Bruce and I are, but we keep fixing up their worst blemishes inside and out instead of trading them in for new models. The same is true of our faulty selves.

This woods ring with titmice song and a single mourning dove holds forth. Once a titmouse “peters” high and another answers nearly an octave lower. Finally, the higher-pitched singer prevails just as sopranos overwhelm altos in the “Hallelujah” chorus. Then I hear the basso profundo croaks of a common raven as it flies overhead.

Black-capped chickadees quietly “dee-dee,” instead of singing their usual “fee-a-bee.” Perhaps, the snow has put them back into winter mode. In the distance, the trilling songs of dark-eyed juncos pierce the winter silence. They, in any case, still think it’s spring.

In this section of the forest, I frequently encounter fresh whitetail deer tracks, and once I catch the white flag of a deer fleeing over the mountaintop and down into the tangle of mountain laurel.

Hercules'-club debarked by deer, Easter 2008

The resident pair of ravens sails past. One calls and dives out of sight. The other circles silently above me several times before coasting onward in answer to its mate’s insistent calls. I wonder if they have already set up housekeeping on one of our talus slopes.

I gaze across at the snow-covered Allegheny Front, imagining what it will look like if a proposed industrial wind farm is built on it.  Even our mountains will be made low by our technology towering over them so that we can continue our power-hungry, wasteful habits, and some of the last unfragmented land in our state will be sacrificed to feed our insatiable appetites. The lungs of bats will blow up from the rapid pressure drop that occurs as air flows over the turbine blades, according to a study by Erin Baerwald of the University of Calgary in the journal of Current Biology.  And who knows how many migrating birds will be ground up in the blades.

The vernal ponds are frozen solid again — black glass shining in a white landscape. Cottontail rabbit tracks wind through the common milkweed patch bent and broken by the snows of winter. Porcupine tracks meander along the trail, into the Norway spruce grove, and up a Norway spruce tree where it has left barkless patches. The spruces themselves are still bowed low with snow.

First Field is silent until I near home. And then I hear the trill of juncos, the petering of titmice, the liquid notes of American tree sparrows, all issuing from our dense forsythia hedge. Water drips from the eaves of our house.  Hyacinth leaves poke up through the band of open soil on the south side of the house. Water gushes beside the driveway, heading for the beginnings of our stream below the guesthouse.

Wild grape tendril, Easter 2008

At the bird feeders, the American goldfinch males are shedding their dull winter feathers for the gold of spring and summer. Fox sparrows have been here for weeks, and today one sings its ethereal song. A woodchuck visits the base of the back steps at noon in search of birdseed, and a meadow vole that burrowed under the birdseeds below the back steps is also interested in eating.  March — the starvation month for animals — forces them to seek handouts.

Several days ago, before the snow, the American woodcocks displayed in First Field and provided us with several evenings of live entertainment. And on the first day of spring, two woodcocks took off from the wet area on First Field Trail.  The first flew into the underbrush inside the deer exclosure, its wings whistling. The other one scurried silently through the fence.   Slowly it paraded across the ground, pumping its ruddy breast as it walked.  I had a long look at its out-sized bill, its gray back pitted with black, and its reddish-brown breast gleaming in the sunlight. Its black right eye kept watching me as I watched it until it too disappeared in the underbrush.

The first eastern phoebe arrived in an earlier snow squall that quickly morphed into rain on the eighteenth of March, but he has remained silent, waiting for sunshine to sing his monotonous, but welcome “phee-be.” A female American kestrel, her tail twitching, keeps watch on the electric wire near the barn. She’s been back for nearly a week.

Right on schedule, March winds have shaken the mountain, sweeping our porch chairs over and breaking one of our son Dave’s stack chairs by blowing it off his elevated porch. Returning turkey vultures have rocked above the ridgetop, riding the wind in ways we can only dream of.

Despite what seems to be a brief return to winter, when the thermometer never rises above 38 degrees this early Easter day, the hot spring sun cuts through the snow, opening the south-facing slope on Sapsucker Ridge and melting each footprint down to the brown earth.

Snow "egg" in a Hercules'-club tree, Easter 2008

In the evening, as I settle down to read in bed, the window wide open as it is throughout the year, eastern screech-owls trill nearby. Already, they are preparing for their nesting season ahead.

Later, after I switch off the light, I hear heavy tramping through the snow beneath my window. It sounds like a human or maybe a bear. I kneel at the window, watching and listening, until the heavy tramping changes into running. Deer bound through the snow, passing from the springhouse wetland where they have been grazing, across the flat area, and on up snow-covered Laurel Ridge.

Slowly, slowly the natural world and its denizens are rising from the long, deathlike sleep of winter.

All photos taken on Brush Mountain by Dave Bonta. Dürer painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Narnia Interlude

In winter, it’s all about the weather, especially in February when we are liable to experience a confusing mixture of balmy, spring like days, sleet, freezing rain, and snow.  Last February 1 the predictions were so dire that all the public schools and colleges were closed.

The “tick-tick” of sleet against our windows began at 4:30 in the morning, and by dawn our brown earth was once again white — a hard, crusty white — that sent birds into the feeder area by the dozens — four common redpolls, 24 American goldfinches, a blue jay, a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers, another of northern cardinals, seven quarreling house finches, nine American tree sparrows, three white-throated sparrows, 12 dark-eyed juncos, three tufted titmice, a pair of black-capped chickadees, another of white-breasted nuthatches and 21 mourning doves, one of which dragged a shredded tail along behind it.

Once two white-tailed deer ran along the flat area below our back porch, paused to glance behind them, and then bounded on up Laurel Ridge.  I stood watching at the window for many minutes, hoping to see what had sent them off in a panic, but no other creature appeared.

From 27 degrees at dawn, the temperature gradually rose and the sleet changed to freezing rain, encasing every tree branch in ice. More and more gray squirrels were finding and invading the wooden feeder. I counted six that morning. I knew they were hungry too, but that day I was counting birds, not squirrels, for Project FeederWatch, a citizen science project of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, and the squirrels scared off the birds both intentionally and unintentionally. I, in turn, intentionally chased the squirrels.

Expecting the electric power to go at any minute, I worked in the kitchen all morning, baking coffee cake, making soup for lunch, and mixing and baking granola. But since our back kitchen door looks out at our bird feeders hanging from the back porch, I also was mesmerized by the birds at the feeders and on the ground, their comings and goings, the changing cast of characters, the alarm calls, the birds the others fled from, mostly blue jays and, to a lesser extent, the red-bellied woodpecker that swooped down like a bomber pilot and landed on the porch post, its rapier bill looking more threatening than it was. Common redpolls were more phlegmatic than the other finches, mourning doves more nervous, flying up at the least excuse in a sudden explosive rush that startled the rest of the birds. Tufted titmice and black-capped chickadees slipped into the feeders whenever the American goldfinches and house finches allowed them.  Although the northern cardinals arrived as a pair, the male pecked the female away from the food, a sure sign that he was in winter-survival mode and not ready to initiate courtship.

One of the red-bellied woodpeckers was actually orange-bellied as I noticed when it was on the ground, yet all the guides and articles I consulted, including the definitive Birds of North America, insist that their bellies are red.  The others I’ve seen are red, but this one was not.  Could it be the food it was eating?  After all, house finches can be orange and even yellow if they don’t eat red berries, because their diet determines their color.

By noontime rain splashed from the gutters and against the bow window.  Beads of water drops froze at the bottom edge of every branch as the thermometer stood at 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

Near sunset, the rain stopped, and Bruce and I crunched through the granular, snowy ice in the glittering forest with its tree branches dangling icy raindrops. And the feared electric outage?  Much ado about nothing.

The next morning, on Groundhog Day, Punxatawny Phil saw his shadow.  That seemed unlikely because at dawn it was 28 degrees and overcast.  In any case, we always have more than six weeks of winter still ahead of us on that date, regardless of what P.P. predicts.

By late afternoon, I stopped waiting for the promised sun and went out into an ice-shrouded world that glowed a faint pinkish-gray beneath a clearing sky.  A red-tailed hawk took off from the edge of First Field, and I followed it with my binoculars as it wove its way through the trees overhanging the field and finally settled on a tree branch halfway up Sapsucker Ridge.

Only tree branches had been pruned by the ice so I could appreciate the glassy, shining shell encasing every grass stem, sapling and tree branch.  The crust held the deer and me up as if it was a roughly-frozen lake.  Coyote Bench was white and overhung with saplings bowed by ice.  Fat tree trunks were hoary with ice, like scenes from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia in his book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the White Witch ensures that it is always winter. Unlike the four children in that tale, though, who were caught in endless winter without proper clothing, I was dressed warmly and embraced the beauty of the ice instead of fearing it.

A large tree branch that had broken and fallen under the ice load, stood upright in the icy-snow on the Far Field Road. Shards of ice littered the road and crunched beneath my feet.  The spruce grove was frozen and dark, the trees bowed and anchored to the earth by ice.  Dark-eyed juncos and northern cardinals that had sought shelter within the evergreens chipped at me in the gathering dusk.

The following day, I still found a Narnia-frozen world along Greenbrier Trail.  Clouds moved across patches of blue sky on that soft, silvery, silent, Sunday morning.  Once I stopped my crunching walk and heard the clarion call of a hairy woodpecker, the whooshing of a flushing ruffed grouse, the calls of tufted titmice and northern cardinals, and, of course, the inevitable traffic noise from Interstate 99 below because of a strong inversion layer due to the heavy fog in the valley. Despite the weather, there was much toing and froing along the highway, and I wished that I could share the “beauty of the earth” and “the glory of the sky” on the mountain with those folks enclosed in their machines.

A soft mist hung over Laurel Ridge.  Along Greenbrier Trail on Sapsucker Ridge, every branch and berry shone in its glassy cocoon.  But when I ascended to the top of the ridge, every icy twig and branch bristled with hoarfrost.  The valleys were still wrapped in fog even as the sun began to emerge from the floating cloud cover and sent shadows over the snowy, ice-covered mountaintop.

Looking across at the end of Laurel Ridge, I could see the hoarfrost line reaching down only a hundred feet or so.  The ice glittered and glowed as the sun winked in and out.  Hoarfrost clung to patches of rough bark that stood out on the trunks of oak trees.  Prickles of hoarfrost even stuck to smooth-barked striped maples. Droplets of ice that hung from the undersides of many branches shone in the sunlight. But other icicles hanging from branches were also encased in hoarfrost.  Striped maple keys, enclosed in ice and outlined with hoarfrost, dangled from red or gold, hoarfrost-covered branches like shiny, beige Christmas ornaments. Hoarfrost even whitened the needles of pitch pine trees that overhung the ridge.

Mine were the only human prints on the trail, the cloven hoofs of deer the only animal tracks that were heavy enough to make an imprint like mine, or even to break through the ice.

At 10:30, as the sun shone more and more determinedly, a gray squirrel crossed the trail in front of me. Ice creaked in the treetops and shards crashed down as the temperature rose.  Ice-covered large tree trunks, patched with green lichens, and fallen trees, glistened in the thawing warmth.

I found a red-eyed vireo nest filled with snow, it’s outside a sheen of ice, anchored on a low-hanging red maple tree limb.  As the sun shone fully, I looked across at Sinking Valley, but all I could see were the tops of distant mountains, blue above the billowing white fog.

A shard of ice hit me on the back of the head, and I realized that a hard hat would have been in order.  A blue jay called in the distance.  As I crossed the powerline right-of-way, a portion of fog momentarily lifted, kaleidoscopically revealing what looked like a toy town below. Ice shrouded every rock along this section of the heavily-wooded trail. Mountain laurel leaves were bent and ice-shiny.

Black-capped chickadees sang and called in the spruce grove.  An American crow flapped quietly overhead as I descended First Field to the accompaniment of melting, dripping ice.  All the black locust tree trunks glowed lime green under their ice cover, lending color to the beige edges of the field.

Fog rolled up from the valley, briefly enveloping the area where I had walked.  A northern cardinal glowed red in an ice-covered multiflora rosebush.  Tufted titmice, a red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatches, and black-capped chickadees called from the forest on either side of the field, invigorated by the melting warmth of a February thaw.

Within an hour, the glory was gone.  The sun shone warmly, and the temperature reached a brief 43 degrees before retreating to the thirties in late afternoon. And I was back to chasing squirrels from the feeders.

Sunday, Sweet Sunday

Sunday is my favorite day of the week.  That’s because traffic is light on Interstate 99 at the base of our mountain on the Logan Valley side and the industrial-sized limestone quarry on the Sinking Valley side is closed for the day.  Other businesses are also quiet, and I revel in the peace of “Sunday, Sweet Sunday” as the song goes in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song.”

Of course, the trains still whistle at every valley crossing, including our own, a sound that dates back to 1850 when the main line from New York City to Chicago was built through the gap at the bottom of our mountain. Once folks lived in a small, iron forge village next to the rail line where we have built a parking lot for our hunters.

When we moved here back in 1971, the cellar holes of four dwellings were popular bottle-collecting areas.  Even today, a few of the people who lived in those homes as children, nostalgic for the sights and sounds of their youth, sometimes visit and set up lawn chairs to watch and listen to the trains.  It’s a sound they have adapted to and enjoy.

Despite my 37 years here, I have not adapted to the clamor from the valleys.  Increasing noise pollution, especially in midsummer when all our windows are open, has forced me to wear ear plugs at night.  I wonder, along with nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch, who wrote in the mid-twentieth century, “How long will it be before… there is no quietness anywhere, no escape from the rumble and the crash, the clank and the screech which seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of technology?”

But this sweet Sunday in late July is almost silent as we sit on our elevated front porch among the trees, warmed by the rising sun, and enjoy my husband Bruce’s cornmeal/whole wheat waffles.  Serenaded by song sparrows and a tufted titmouse, we are entertained by the antics of a family of red-bellied woodpeckers that recently fledged from a nearby black locust tree.

On this day, I choose to walk beneath the filtered, green light of Black Gum Trail.  Already the spined micrathena spiders are spinning their orb webs across the trail, and I stop frequently to carefully pull aside a couple anchoring strands of silk so I can avoid their entangling webs.  Fresh coyote scat and not so fresh bear scat provide ample evidence that I am not the sole user of this deep woods’ trail.  The only persistent singers this late in the summer are the low-keyed, monotonous red-eyed vireos and eastern wood pewees.

Scarlet tanagers have replaced their hoarse, robin-like songs with their “chit-bang” warning call, and I hear several during my walk.  Once I sit and watch a male scarlet tanager foraging for caterpillars on the top of black gum leaves, flying from tree to tree and flashing his black and red colors like some exotic tropical bird.  Insect damage riddles many of late spring’s perfect leaves and a handful of black gum leaves have turned red and pink, which reminds me that autumn isn’t far off.

I see a few gypsy moth egg masses on chestnut oaks and am also reminded of a new term I learned the other day — throughfall — which is defined as all the stuff that rain washes down on the forest floor from the foliage above such as insect frass, bodies, and leaves.  Although the term was applied to the rainforest, such a concept is also important in our forest.

At the end of Black Gum Trail, I pick up Rhododendron Trail where white-breasted nuthatches “yank” and chipmunks “chip” and “cuck.”  In the distance a black-throated green warblers sings while a slow, propeller plane drones noisily overhead, momentarily disturbing Sunday’s peace. Unfortunately, even deep in our hollow, I cannot escape the technological sounds from above, such as frequent helicopters, jet fighter planes, and private airplanes that fly over or along our mountaintop.

As I wend my way past the many tall rhododendron shrubs for which the trail is named, black-capped chickadees scold.  I notice that most of the shrubs’ flower heads have set seed.  Because of our vacation in Newfoundland, I missed their blossoming, but it must have been glorious.  The trail edges its way past a steep, mossy hill covered with three-year-old rhododendrons.  They are shooting up fast–a result of our deer management program that encourages our hunters to harvest more deer to improve the health of our forest.

I descend Laurel Ridge on Rhododendron Trail and near the stream, Acadian flycatchers call “pit-see.” On our gravel road, five deer snort and bound up Sapsucker Ridge.  Beds of wood nettle (Laportea canadensis) bloom beside the stream, a species that has only recently appeared on our property and one that botanists claim is a favorite of deer despite its numerous stinging hairs.

On the other hand, the deer I disturbed have been dining on wild hydrangea, especially the young shrubs growing on the road bank.  They have also been snacking on jewelweed and Virginia creeper.

But other wildflowers are untouched such as the clump of Indian pipes and sprays of black cohosh.  Common enchanter’s-nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) has sent up racemes of tiny white flowers that have already turned into green stick tights at their bases.  Named for the enchantress Circe, I assume the name honors the delicate flowers and not the bur-like, bristly fruit that clings to animal fur and pant legs.

The road is a highway of deep woods’ butterflies this cool, clear, summer morning.  Red-spotted purples flutter past.  These blue-black butterflies flash an iridescent blue on their hind wings and are named for red-orange spots on their undersides.

Spicebush swallowtails bask on the road.  They are the same blue-black with iridescent blue on their hind wings as red-spotted purples, but they sport elegant tails and the edge of their wings has a line of large white dots.

Spicebush swallowtail caterpillars, as their name implies, feed on spicebush leaves and also on sassafras tree leaves, whereas red-spotted purple caterpillars prefer the leaves of black oak, black cherry, poplar and aspen. Both have caterpillars that resemble bird droppings.  Those of the red-spotted purples are grotesquely horned; those of the spicebush swallowtail only look like bird droppings in their first three instars.  Then they turn bright green with large yellow and black eyespots that mimic snakes.

I am surprised to see a great-spangled fritillary basking on a sunlit leaf because usually I see these showy, orange and brown butterflies in the fields.  On the other hand, their larvae dine on violets.  Sometimes the female butterflies, which lay as many as 2000 eggs per butterfly in the fall, manage to lay at least a few of those eggs on violet leaves.  Their orange-spotted black caterpillars, bristling with black spines, hatch two or three weeks later, drink water, but don’t eat until the following spring when violet leaves appear.

My best winged discovery of the day, though, is a regal or royal walnut moth (Citheronia regalis) lying on the road.  It is alive but unable to fly.  This large, spectacular moth has a fat, orange body horizontally striped in yellow, yellow-spotted, orange-veined gray front wings and orange hind wings patched in yellow. But it is better known in its caterpillar form as a hickory horned devil, armed with outsized, orange and black horns on a knobby, brown body that turns lime-green shortly before it pupates.

Once common as far north as Massachusetts, it is now primarily a southern species ranging from New Jersey to Missouri and south to Florida and eastern Texas.  Its caterpillar consumes a wide range of food plants such as ash, butternut, cherry, cotton, hickory, lilac, pecan, persimmon, sumac, sweet gum, sycamore, and walnut leaves.  Because this is a new species for our mountain, I carefully pick it up, place it on a leaf, and carry it home so our son Dave can photograph it.

My sweet Sunday ends as peacefully as it began.  As we sit on the veranda in the evening, I watch the mulch heap near the barn through my binoculars.  Bruce has trampled down the field grasses in front of it to give us a ringside view of our pugilist woodchuck and its chief rival.  The evening before I had heard growling and squealing and had gone down to the mulch heap to see what was making the commotion.  A woodchuck emerged from the weeds with a pawful of something and sat on its rear end to eat it, giving me what could only be described as a baleful, defiant look.  That woodchuck was a fighter even though it was smaller than its portly opponent who feeds every afternoon on the barn bank grass.

This evening the small pugilist appears first, sitting on its bottom and beginning with a moldy, whole wheat tortilla that it holds in its front paws as a child would.  But soon the corn cobs are too much for it to resist even though we thought we had cleaned them thoroughly.  Picking the first cob up, it holds it horizontally in its front paws and systematically gleans what bits of kernels are left.  All the while, it is on high alert.

As it starts on its second cob, the fat woodchuck emerges from its den under the barn to eat grass on the barn bank.  Then it lifts its head, sniffs in the direction of the mulch heap, and barrels toward the tasty leftovers.  The pugilist, still gripping its second cob, disappears in the opposite direction.  Its protagonist hunkers down on all fours to chow down, unlike its rival.

But unlike the previous night, the woodchucks preserve the Sunday peace.
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All photos were taken on the mountain by Dave Bonta (move cursor over them to read the titles, and click on them to see at larger sizes). The last two show the very moth described here.