Snowbirds

"Peekaboo," by Scott M Duncan in NE Ohio (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

It was a fine early December day — 18 degrees with partial sunshine and a howling wind.  A new half-inch of snow covered the ground.  I counted the birds at my feeders because it was a Project FeederWatch day.  For over 20 years, two days a week from November until early April, I’ve been counting birds for this Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology program.  On that day, I recorded a record 16 species of birds — 24 house finches, two American tree sparrows, a song sparrow, two white-throated sparrows, a swamp sparrow, 25 American goldfinches, 19 mourning doves, a pair of white-breasted nuthatches, a pine siskin, four tufted titmice, two black-capped chickadees, a male downy woodpecker, two red-bellied woodpeckers, a purple finch, and 50 dark-eyed juncos.

Fifty dark-eyed juncos!  It was a challenge to count them as they swarmed over the ground and back steps beneath the feeders, looking like giant black and white ants, and pushed the other ground feeders to the periphery.  I had hit an all time high junco count and the Project FeederWatch website questioned my number when I entered my results.  That’s because over half of FeederWatch participants report six juncos or less.  Last winter my average junco group was 40.2.  The other bird species averaged .5 to 3 except for pine siskins (17.8) and American goldfinches (17.2).  Furthermore, when we conducted our Christmas Bird Count on foot over our mountaintop property, we tallied 208 species.  And, by January, sixty juncos were visiting my feeders.

According to most sources, winter junco flocks consist of 15 to 30 birds and settle on 10-acre territories.  During the day, they go from food source to food source, looking for a variety of wild seed sources to sustain them through the winter. The millet, milo, and cracked corn they prefer at feeders merely supplement the 5000 seeds they must consume every day from wild sources such as lamb’s quarters, thistles, broom sedge, ragweed, foxtail, and chickweed.  Our unshorn First and Far fields and home grounds provide a wealth of such seeds.

Junco tracks in Plummer's Hollow (photo by Dave)

Then, as the day darkens, several juncos seek shelter in our juniper tree near the feeders, but most head for our three-acre Norway spruce grove at the top of First Field.  One of my winter pleasures is sitting at dusk on Alan’s Bench, which is enclosed by spruces, and watching the juncos stream in from all directions.  At first they “zeet, zeet” to protest my presence, but they soon settle down beneath the sheltering boughs.

We aren’t far from the nearest breeding area for dark-eyed juncos — the Allegheny High Plateau — so I suspect that’s where our juncos, at least the earliest arrivals in late September, come from.  But as their numbers increase, many may be migrating from as far north as the boreal forests of Canada.  Traveling from 30 to 200 miles a night, how far juncos migrate depends on the weather, the lateness of the season, and the amount of body fat they have stored.  In Pennsylvania female juncos move southward ahead of males and adult females before young females.  In fact, adult juncos winter farther south than youngsters and those young migrate later than the adults do.  But we have plenty of the spiffy, dark gray to black males as well as the duller gray females and young, all of which have snowy white bellies.

When I first studied birds, our juncos were called slate-colored juncos.  But in the 1970s, ornithologists lumped five species of juncos into one and renamed them dark-eyed juncos.  However, the ornithologists designated those former five species — slate-colored, white-winged, Oregon, gray-headed and Guadalupe — as groups.  Our slate-colored junco is by far the widest distributed of the groups, breeding from Alaska to Newfoundland, as far south as Texas and along the Appalachians to North Carolina and northern Georgia.  Within the slate-colored hyemalis group are three subspecies— Junco hyemalis hyemalis, J.h.carolinensis, and J.h.cismontanus.  Here in Pennsylvania we have both J.h.hyemalis and J.h.carolinensis, the former in the northern glaciated and high plateau areas, the latter in the more southern portions of the state, especially in the mountains of Westmoreland County at the Powdermill Nature Reserve, where they have carried out field and banding studies of juncos since 1983. Of course, for mere amateurs like me, telling these subspecies apart in the field is impossible.

Because our juncos reminded European taxonomists of their reed bunting, they named them Junco, which means “reeds” in Latin.  Hyemalis is Latin for “winter.” But many folks still know dark-eyed juncos as “snowbirds.”  Other popular names include “black snowbird,” “common snowbird,” and “eastern junco.”  Henry David Thoreau, writing his journals in the mid-nineteenth century, referred to them as “blue snowbirds,” “slate-colored snowbirds,” and “slate-colored sparrows.” John James Audubon wrote in 1831 that “there is not an individual in the Union who does not know the little Snow-bird.”  Probably they were called snowbirds because most people only saw them in winter when the birds left the forests for parks, rural roadsides, farms, and today for backyard birdfeeders.

Dark-eyed junco by Tom Davis in Wilmington, Delaware (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA)

Not only do juncos visit more feeders across the continent than any other species, but also they are incredibly abundant — an estimated 630 million strong.  Because they flock together during the winter, their winter social behavior has been a popular subject for researchers.  In these flocks, males dominate females, and within each sex, adults dominate youngsters.  You can observe this at feeders when birds lunge at other birds and flick their tails, exposing their white outer tail feathers.  Those males with the most white in their tails are the most dominant.  Usually, this behavior occurs in early morning or late afternoon when they are feeding more heavily, especially when it is very cold or snowy.  Those dominant birds feed in the middle of the food area, and it’s up to the subordinates to look out for predators.  They also get less to eat, which is a problem if food is scarce, but if food is abundant, both subordinates and dominants thrive.

By March, junco males have joined our spring bird chorus, their trills making a “lovely tinkling chorus… as if a myriad of woodland sprites were shaking little bells in an intensive competition” Canadian naturalist-writer Louise de Kiriline Lawrence once wrote.  The males leave ahead of the females and by late April, our last junco is gone. By the time the females arrive on their breeding grounds, the males have established a two to three- acre territory.  At first, they chase returning females.  But if one stays on a male’s territory, he begins courtship by fanning his wings and tail, continual hopping, and picking up nesting materials.

Those males with the most white in their tails are most attractive to females.  They also have the highest testosterone levels.  But do they make the best mates?  According to researchers Ellen Ketterson and Joe McGothlin, that depends.  Those males with the highest testosterone levels attract older, more experienced females because their songs are sweeter.  They also produce more offspring.  However, they are not very good fathers, and their offspring are smaller when they hatch and die at higher rates.  The fathers are too busy displaying and chasing after other females to feed their mates or offspring as often as the less testosterone-charged males.

The dominant males also die sooner. Often, they are too busy showing off to be wary of predators. In addition, their elevated testosterone increases their stress, which leads to the production of a hormone called “corticosterone,” That hormone gives them quick energy even while it breaks down protein, leaving them with atrophied feathers, muscles, and organs.

Junco nest in Vermont, by Kent McFarland (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

Despite this dominant male junco angst, most pairs practice social monogamy and raise two families a year.  The female chooses the nest site and builds the nest.  Most sites are constructed on or near the ground in a bank or rock face, especially if grass or other vegetation overhangs it.  The nest we found in Little Pine State Park along the Lake Shore Trail last May was in a road bank under a bower of dried leaves caught in several small branches.  My husband Bruce, 13-year-old granddaughter Eva, and I saw a bird fly out of the bank.  Eva quickly found and photographed the nest woven of dried pine needles, twigs, and grasses, which contained four pale blue eggs strongly marked with brown squiggles and a brown blotch at the large end.  We stood quietly, waiting for its owner to return, and soon heard and then saw a scolding junco nearby.  The park, a forested gem with a small dammed lake in Lycoming County, provides excellent habitat for nesting juncos.

Cordelia Stanwood, an amateur ornithologist and photographer who lived in coastal Maine during the early twentieth century, wrote that “the nest site varies according to its situation.  I have seen juncos brooding amongst the roots of a growing clump of gray birches, partially under stumps and rocks, below a tuft of leaves, in a brush heap shaded by small evergreens, beneath bracken, and many within the side of a bank or knoll, the wall of a knoll covered with bird-wheat moss, or the side of a steep bank just under the overhanging sod [which] seems to be the most typical site for a junco nest.  A depression is made or enlarged in the side of the bank or knoll, and the moss or overhanging sod form a natural roof.”  Exactly, except that juncos also build unusual nests such as on a ledge beneath a house gable in Nova Scotia, in a half-pound tobacco can lying on its side in Saskatchewan, in a wind-vane bird feeder mounted on an eight-foot iron pipe in Olean, New York, and, for two years, in a hanging planter in Trucksville, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.  The second year the female nested in April while Christmas greens were still in the planter and nested a second time, after the first nestlings fledged, in the planter when the greens were removed.

The female incubates the three to five eggs 12 to 13 days while the male warns of danger, keeps small birds from the nest, and tries to discourage eastern chipmunks, which are major nest predators.  Red and gray squirrels, deer mice, white-footed mice, jumping mice and weasels also threaten eggs and nestlings in some areas.

After the junco eggs hatch, usually within a few hours of each other, the nestlings quickly mature as both parents stuff them with mostly insects and spiders.  At 12 days of age, they leave the nest, although if they are disturbed, they can run off at nine days old.  Fourteen days later, they are able to fly well and feed themselves.

Then they are on their own and later join winter flocks.  It they are lucky they will evade a host of predators, including accipiters — especially sharp-shinned hawks — shrikes, owls, jays, feral and domestic cats particularly near bird feeders.  More than once in the winter I’ve watched a sharpie catch, kill, pluck, and eat a junco near our feeders.

But such occasional predation doesn’t seem to shrink our junco population.  Because they are such generalists in nesting habitat — breeding in coniferous or deciduous forests — and in winter habitat continent-wide, as well as in their food choices, dark-eyed juncos should remain a ubiquitous species for decades to come.

Dark-eyed Junco by Birdfreak.com, Rockford, Illinois (Creative Commons BY-SA license)

Charismatic Invertebrates

Daddy long-legs on spicebush leaf, mid-August

“Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

Isn’t it funny?  I started to write to you yesterday afternoon, but as far as I got was the heading, ‘Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,’ and then I remembered I’d promised to pick some blackberries for supper, so I went off and left the sheet lying on the table, and when I came back, what do you think I found sitting in the middle of the page?  A real true Daddy-Long-Legs!

I picked him up very gently by one leg, and dropped him out of the window.  I wouldn’t hurt one of them for the world.  They always remind me of you.”

That is what the orphan Judy writes to an anonymous benefactor who is sending her to college in the novel Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster.  Because Judy catches a glimpse of a long-legged man leaving the orphanage office just before she learns of her good fortune, she nicknames him Daddy-Long-legs.  His only request is that she writes him occasional letters, which reach him through a third person, about her college experience.

As a sentimental teenager, I greatly enjoyed this old-fashioned romance written in 1912.  That may be why I, like Judy, wouldn’t hurt a daddy long-legs either.  Whenever one crawls over me, I watch fascinated as it deftly uses its four pairs of long, thread-like legs to propel itself forward.

Usually, daddy long-legs appear on our veranda in late September and early October during harvest time, which is why another common name for one is “harvestman.”  Most visitors shudder and assume they are giant spiders.  They are not reassured when I tell them they are not.  Like spiders, they have their own Order in the animal class Arachnida.  Spiders are in the Order Aranae; daddy long-legs are in the Order Opiliones, so they are also known as “opilionids.”

“Opilio” in Latin means “shepherd,” and experts say taxonomists chose that name because daddy long-legs look as if they are walking on stilts just as European shepherds used to do so that they could more easily oversee their flocks. At least 6,400 species have been identified in the Order, but there may be more than 10,000.  Although there are four suborders, the slender, long-legged, delicate harvestmen in temperate regions are in the suborder Eupnoi.

Daddy long-legs on bergamot, late July

These are incredibly ancient creatures.  Well-preserved fossils have been found in 400 million-year-old rocks.  Those preserved in the Rhynie cherts of Scotland look modern despite their age.  Not only have they not changed much over the eons, but also species have been restricted to small regions because they don’t disperse farther than 50 miles.  These ancient arachnids are probably most closely related to scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and solifugeae, which include wind scorpions and camel spiders.

Their heads, thoraxes, and abdomens grow together to form compact, oblong bodies, usually no longer than 5/16^th of an inch, that come in hues of brown, if they are mostly nocturnal, or yellow, green, or reddish-brown if they are diurnal species.  They have a knob or black turret on top of their heads with a tiny eye on each side that can detect movement several feet away.  But they use their second pair of legs, which are longer than the others, as antennae to explore, search for food, and warn of danger. In front and to the sides of their eyes are two pores from which a chemical scent is emitted that deter large predators and ants.  Beneath their bodies, they have a pair of pedipalps or pincers with which they grasp, tear, and stuff food in their mouths, fight other harvestmen, and clean their legs.

They can easily discard a leg if it is caught and grow a new one.  The detached leg twitches in some species for a minute, in other species for as long as an hour.  In order to move, they have so-called “pacemakers” in the end of the first long section or femur of their seven-jointed legs that sends signals through nerves to the muscles in their legs to stretch.  Between signals the legs rest.  Some researchers believe that the twitching leg keeps a potential predator occupied while the daddy long-legs escapes.

Birds, mammals, amphibians and spiders, some of which are not deterred by their chemical defense, prey on them.  Thus, some species of daddy long-legs may defend themselves by gluing debris on their bodies or by playing dead.

Two daddy long-legs on horsebalm, early July

They, in turn, are omnivorous and eat small insects, plant material and fungi.  Some species are scavengers that specialize in dead creatures, bird dung and other feces.  Most ambush their prey and, unlike other arachnids, which must liquefy their prey before ingesting it, daddy long-legs can eat chunks of food.

In late summer and early autumn, after most daddy long-legs’ species have gone through six nymphal stages, they are ready to mate.  It is then that they emerge from their usual habitat under leaf litter, logs and rocks in damp forests to search for mates.  After mating, the female may lay her eggs immediately or wait for months.  The smaller male drives away rivals while she lays eggs a few at a time in soil or under rotten wood until nothing is left of her but an empty shell.  Only one known daddy long-legs’ species in eastern North America hibernates as an adult.  The rest die and leave their eggs to hatch into new daddy long-legs the following spring.

The other early autumn charismatic (to me) invertebrate is the walkingstick, distant cousin of crickets and (ugh!) cockroaches.  Walkingsticks belong to the Phasmatodea or Phasmida Order of insects, which includes European stick insects, walkingsticks, and leaf insects, among others.  “Phasma” comes from the Greek meaning “phantom” because their resemblance to sticks or leaves makes them difficult to see.  But when they appear on our white board house or on our screens, as they do in October, their stick-like bodies always impress me.

I’m not the only person who finds walkingsticks intriguing.  Some people keep them as pets, the most popular being the Indian stick insect — Carausius morosus — because it (or rather she) eats a wide variety of easily obtainable foods such as lettuce and privet and thrives at room temperature.  Also, that species consists only of females that reproduce by parthenogenesis and easily lay fertile eggs.

walking stick close-up, by poppy2323 on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

But most likely, the walkingsticks I see every year are northern walkingsticks Diapheromera femorata, also known as “stickbugs,” “specters,” “prairie alligators,” “devil’s horses,” “witches horses,” and “devil’s darning needles,” among other quaint names.

Although I’ve never noticed any harm from these insects, they are defoliators of deciduous trees in the eastern half of the United States and Canada.  As young nymphs, they eat a wide variety of low-growing shrubs such as rose, juneberry, sweet fern, blueberry and strawberry.  As older nymphs and adults, they prefer the leaves of black oak species, basswood and wild cherry but will also eat quaking aspen, paper birch, hickory, locust and apple tree leaves.  However, this species does not fly and so even a stream or road will stop their spread.  Two parasitic flies — Biomya genalis and Phasmophaga antennalis — destroy the nymphs.  The former lays its eggs on a walkingstick nymph that hatches and eats the nymph, but the latter lays its eggs on foliage that a nymph eats.

The northern walkingstick, like daddy long-legs, mates in late summer, and the female continues laying up to 150 black and white eggs that look like miniature beans, three every day, until cold weather arrives.  She drops them wherever she happens to be on a tree, and they fall to the ground.  The eggs overwinter in the leaf litter and stay unhatched through the following spring, summer, autumn, and winter, only hatching into pale green miniature adults the next year in May or early June.

Northern walkingsticks go through six larval instars before maturing in late July or early August.  The female is larger than the male — 2 ½ to 3 ½ inches long — and he is brown and she is greenish-brown.  Both have long antennae that are two thirds the length of their bodies.

walkingstick on sycamore at French Creek State Park, PA, by Colin Purrington on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

To defend themselves, the young nymphs drop to the ground or jerk back-and-forth, but the older ones and adults remain still, stretching their front legs beside their antennae so that they look even more like harmless twigs.  They sometimes release a bad-smelling liquid too. Birds, such as common grackles, blue jays, wild turkeys, American crows, American robins, white-breasted nuthatches and Carolina chickadees, often prey on them, especially during an infestation when they are more noticeable. Five-lined skinks, Chinese mantids, white-footed mice, eastern chipmunks, and eastern gray squirrels also find them tasty.

With more than 3000 species worldwide, most of which live in the tropics, walkingstick life histories are diverse.  For instance, Eurycantha horrida (its species’ name hints at its ferociousness), has large spines on its hind legs that it uses to defend itself and to compete with other males. Some species, like the southern United States species, the American or two-lined walkingstick (Anisomorpha buprestoides), have defensive glands and spray a noxious chemical that repels birds and other insects, not to mention curious entomologists like Thomas Eisner who describes the spray as a “fine mist”  that had a piercing stench.  “My eyes hurt, as did my lungs when I got a whiff.  This was evil stuff.  I started coughing,” he writes in his book For Love of Insects.  The species is nicknamed “musk mare” and “devil’s rider,” because the small male spends much of his time astride the much larger female.  “They are not necessarily mating when thus found,” Eisner writes, “although the pairing is sexual, and the two do eventually mate and produce eggs.”

walkingstick nymph, SW Ontario, by jclucier on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

Many stick insects that drop their eggs on the ground, including the northern walkingstick, have eggs with a large food body called a capitulum, which contains substances attractive to ants, similar to some plants that have food bodies called “eliasomes” on their seeds to entice ants to take them back to their nests so they will have a more fruitful place to germinate and grow.  In the case of stick-insects, the ants take the eggs back to their nests, cut off the capitulums, and feed them to their brood.  Then the ants discard the rest of the eggs in their garbage, where they will hatch and live in the ant nest, safe from predators.  Some species are even ant mimics.

Luckily, northern walkingsticks have never released a bad-smelling liquid when I pick them up, as I do with the daddy long-legs, and show them off to visitors.  Youngsters are particularly intrigued by both of them.  Then I place the northern walkingstick on a tree to demonstrate its excellent camouflage, and put the daddy long-legs back in the woods, knowing that both critters will soon be dying as the season of warmth ends.

All daddy long-legs photos taken on the mountain by Dave. Please click the walkingstick photos to see the larger originals on Flickr.

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.
__________

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.