In Search of Silence

Telephone in the Hoh rainforest, by dfb on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence)

Ever since I read about Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence project, I’ve been more keenly aware of our noisy world.  Hempton, a sound ecologist, has been recording natural sounds for decades.  Nicknamed Sound Tracker for his recordings, he laments that every decade our world becomes noisier.  While city dwellers are acutely conscious of humanity’s din, even those of us who live in the country find it difficult to escape the sound of jet planes overhead, the whine of a chainsaw, the roar of an all-terrain vehicle, or the rumble of trucks and cars on nearby highways.

“Quiet is going extinct,” Hempton says. In 1998 he toured 15 states west of the Mississippi River and found only two places — remote parts of Colorado and Minnesota — that were free of human-induced noise for appreciable amounts of time. Even most of our national parks were and remain noisy.

There are no places left on earth completely free of human-created sounds, Hempton laments, and he estimates that only one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s land surface is silent for more than fifteen minutes. Traveling our country in search of one square inch where it was quiet most of the time, he found what he was listening for in the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington State’s Olympic National Park where 95 percent of the land is a protected wilderness. There, on Earth Day, 2005, he dedicated the red square stone that marks his One Square Inch of Silence, according to Kathleen Dean Moore, who accompanied him to the place and wrote “Silence like Scouring Sand,” in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine.

“It’s an open glade, like the nave of a cathedral, carpeted in deep green moss and deer ferns,” she writes.  Her description reminded me of the cross-country family camping trip we took back in 1981 and our visit to the Hoh Rain Forest on July 8.  The Visitor Center was crowded, but by choosing the longer of two trails — the mere one-and-a-quarter-mile Spruce Trail — we were alone.  As I wrote in my journal, “The rainforest was beautiful with enormous Sitka spruce trees, big leaf maples, and other tree species heavily draped with 70 species of epiphytes.  Thick layers of moss clung to the tree trunks, which contributed to the awe we felt in that hushed forest.”  Afterwards, we hiked a mile along the Hoh River in a fruitless search for harlequin ducks.

Along the Hoh River Trail, by Jeff Hutchison on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

Reporter Douglas Gantenbein also accompanied Hempton in to his One Square Inch of Silence.  They hiked three miles from the Hoh Visitor Center and reached their destination 100 yards off the Hoh River Trail.  We must have been very close to what has become almost a sacred place for the many people who also have hiked into the area and left their comments in a small metal canister called the Jar of Quiet Thoughts.

Hempton thinks his one square inch can have an impact over 1,000 square miles, because not only does noise travel but so too does silence, and by defending his square inch he is also quieting a much larger area from thundering jets and other intruding noise.  That is the theory, at least.  Every month he sits next to the red stone and listens, and if he hears any mechanized noise, he records the date, documents the volume, and launches a complaint.  Already, one airline has changed its route, but another has not.  So even there, the roar of jet engines powering over the 7,000-foot high peaks in the Brothers Wilderness of the park is inescapable.

“It’s physically impossible for a jet to fly high enough that its engines can’t be heard on Earth,” Hempton tells Moore.  I know we hear them constantly as they crisscross our sky.  Apparently, we are on a major east/west flight path because our son Steve, flying east at 30,000 feet, reported seeing our property below. But small, low-flying, propeller planes, while much less frequent than jets, are even noisier.

We also hear traffic from Interstate 99 below our mountain, especially on clear, beautiful days and nights.  Traffic is the largest noisemaker throughout the United States in cities as well as in the country.  And here in Pennsylvania, the Keystone State, major highways and roads of all sizes are so numerous that we can never get far from one.

A truck in the forest (Rickett's Glen State Park, PA)

Luckily, because we have no close neighbors, we don’t have to contend with the constant din of gas-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers, farm machinery, and other noisemakers that admittedly have made our lives physically easier, but often create havoc in our bodies. According to numerous studies, excessive noise damages the ears of 10 million people in our country, raises our stress levels, and can contribute to high blood pressure and even depression. While some humans try to cope by using ear plugs and protectors, soundproofing their homes, and switching to electric-powered lawn mowers or even manual ones, for many people noise equals excitement.  And they don’t mind sharing their music, loud machines, and even their shouting with the rest of us.

I never realized how noisy our world was until I spent several days in 1985 in the high Andes Mountains of Peru.  At 14,000 feet, the silence was amazing.  In places where there were people, they went quietly about their work of herding animals, spinning wool, and washing clothes.  No planes flew overhead; no cars or trucks roared past.  We heard every birdsong and the high-pitched whistles of the vicunas.

Bruce with his bulldozer. Sometimes, we are part of the problem, too.

In contrast to that, a couple years later, I accompanied a public television crew to several Pennsylvania natural places I had written about.  I remember the frustration of the sound cameraman because we had to wait many long minutes to film without the sound of traffic on nearby country roads or planes overhead.

No matter where we go in Pennsylvania, it is difficult to escape from human-induced noise.  Yet I’m convinced that is why many people take up such solitary quiet hobbies as fly fishing and archery hunting.  Others of us escape our noisy world by walking in the woods, canoeing or kayaking in quiet waters, or sitting in tree stands listening and watching for deer.  Hempton suggests that all of us who seek silence should practice hearing like a deer, something every good hunter already knows.

“Deer listen in 360 degrees,” he says and to imitate them he advises us to go into the woods alone, wear quiet clothing such as cotton or wool, place ourselves near a tree or other object that will reflect sound towards us, create an irregular shape with our bodies, so we will blend into the landscape, stick foam earplugs into our ears before we begin to listen and then take them out in order to hear softer natural sounds, and move our heads slightly every so often, like deer rotate their ears.  Moving even an inch may change how and what we hear, according to Hempton.  And so, as often as possible, when I go out in our forest, I try to find my own square inch of silence, if only for a few minutes, and listen like a deer.

Deer ears in Plummer's Hollow

On Sunday mornings, before the trains begin whistling our crossing at the base of our road, I can find perfect peace deep in our mature forest beside our stream. Listening carefully, I can hear the pitch of the stream changing as water flows over and around its rock-strewn bottom. Sitting on Turkey Bench above the stream one Indian summer day in early November it was so quiet that I could hear the crackling of leaves as they sifted down one by one in the still air.

On another fine November day, I sat in the black cherry woods with my back against a tree trunk.  A couple chipmunks discovered me and started their warning chipping call.  Another chipmunk ventured close and ducked into a nearby tree crevasse before emerging and running in the opposite direction.  Then, a ruffed grouse landed and quickly flew off again, but a few minutes later, a second grouse took off behind me. For a few minutes, I had become part of the natural landscape.

Often, I need the sounds of nature — a hard rain or thundering wind — to mask humanity’s noise.  I used to dislike the wind.  Now I embrace it, especially on early November days when it sends eastern golden eagles heading south above Sapsucker Ridge.

Fog often dampens sound, and I walk for miles through a specter-filled forest, billowing white around the black, uniquely shaped trees, and wait for the occasional deer to loom up on the trail in front of me.

A snow-covered landscape also absorbs sound.  Last November, on a cold day after a light snow, I encountered a buck 40 feet below me on the trail contemplatively chewing his cud.  He looked straight at me, but even when I slowly raised my binoculars to ascertain that he had only one tall, curved antler on either side of his head, he never moved.  We continued watching each other for several minutes before he roused himself, turned, and ran silently down the trail.  Perhaps, he too was enjoying the serenity and sunshine of the peaceful morning.

Sapsucker Ridge in a snow storm

***

For more about noise pollution, The Allegheny Front, an environmental public radio program out of Pittsburgh, had a special on it during the week of 8/19/2009 — you can listen online.  The page also has links to several groups interested in noise pollution including the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse and The Right to Quiet Society for Soundscape Awareness and Protection whose motto is “Hear Nature Again.”  The latter has a Noiseletter, as they whimsically call it, filled with articles on a variety of noise-related subjects, which you can read online.

Photos by Dave Bonta except where noted otherwise. Click on small photos to see larger versions.

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)

Hiking the Ghost Town Trail

Blacklick Creek from the Ghost Town Trail (click all photos to see larger versions)

No trace of December’s snow remained.

“It might as well be spring,” I thought as I hummed the lines of an old song. But it wasn’t spring.  It was January 7 and a balmy 60 degrees.  Seduced by the perfect day, my husband Bruce and I set out to hike portions of the Ghost Town Trail in Cambria and Indiana counties.

This 36-mile trail over a former railroad bed winds through the Blacklick Creek Valley and is named for several coal-mining towns that were abandoned in the 1930s.  Two separate sections, one near the western end of the trail in Indiana County and the other in Vintondale in Cambria County, go through gamelands.

First, we tackled the western section, leaving our car in the Heshbon parking area.  Water gushed over and around massive rocks in the river-sized Blacklick Creek below us on our left.  Across the creek, a mixed hemlock and deciduous forest stretched as far as we could see.

Spotted wintergreen along the Ghost Town Trail

After several hundred feet, we crossed into SGL#276. The only tracks in the packed limestone trail were those of white-tailed deer. Healthy-looking hemlock trees and rhododendron shrubs grew on the hillside to our right.  It seemed an idyllic setting until we reached Auld’s Run.

A small waterfall tumbled over layers of orange rock, was channeled beneath the trail, and flowed into Blacklick Creek.  We could see coal spilling from the hillside and beyond that an enormous flattened hill of coal waste striped orange, red, brown and black.  We looked a little closer at Blacklick Creek and its seemingly pristine water.  Orange and blood-red puddles pooled in the creek’s backwaters.  The “ghosts” of coal mining, in the form of acid mine drainage or AMD, still haunted the trail.

But we were soon past the area.  Once again, the hillside was wooded, although it had steepened and was strewn with boulders as big as shacks.  One was perfectly square and from a distance, I thought it was a shack.

Coal waste along Blacklick Creek

In another tangle of boulders, this one above the creek, where even white-tailed deer feared to tread, I found a lovely bed of spotted wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata). Their white-striped evergreen leaves adorned the winter forest floor where it was protected from deer browsing.  Green clubmosses, not a deer food, were abundant in the open stretches of woodland.

In open places beside the trail, the dried seed heads of goldenrod, asters, and meadowsweet reminded me of late summer’s colorful abundance.  Staghorn sumac still held aloft their pyramidal-shaped clusters of red seeds.  Tulip trees, growing tall and straight in a floodplain forest, offered their seeds to a pair of black-capped chickadees.  Along the creek oak trees still clung to clusters of dried, brown leaves. A belted kingfisher emitted its rattling call as it flew downstream.

Once we glimpsed a black gray squirrel, a melanistic color phase more common in the northern part of its range, scamper across the trail in front of us. Translucent water, sparkling in the sunlight, dripped from beneath thin layers of rock on the hillside and red sphagnum moss mopped up the moisture.  I heard the “peter-peter” of a tufted titmouse and the call of a hairy woodpecker emanating from the forest above.

Acid mine drainage in Auld's Run

After three-and-a-half relatively level miles, we turned around and chose a picturesque spot on one of the benches overlooking the creek to eat our trail lunch.  Afterwards, as we approached the parking lot, we encountered the first people we had seen all day on that section of the Ghost Town Trail.

One-half mile east of Dilltown, still in Indiana County, we took a shorter hike over a network of trails in the Blacklick Valley Natural Area, which is across Blacklick Creek from the Ghost Town Trail.  The Blacklick Trail beside the creek was particularly lovely, although in this area the water was flat.  Black-capped chickadees welcomed us and cedar waxwings keened in the treetops.

David and Penny Russell had donated this 713-acre plot of land to Indiana County back in 1995, and its varied habitats, including a series of mature evergreen tree plantations, are no doubt magnets for wildlife and songbirds.  But despite the unseasonable warmth, it was mid-afternoon on a winter day–the nadir of both the day and the year–and we mostly enjoyed the quiet ambience of the place.

Vintondale, Pennsylvania

By then we had walked more miles than I liked to think about, and Bruce promised me that our last stop would be brief but unusual. We drove into the old coal town of Vintondale in Cambria County.  Unlike the “ghost towns,” Vintondale is still very much alive.  But it has only a quarter of the population (528 in 2000) that it had back in 1910 (2,053) when the Vinton Colliery was at its height of production.  At that time, 32 languages and dialects were spoken in the town.

By the early 1980s, long after the long-wall coal mines had closed and the coal company absconded around 1956, leaving behind the usual acid mine drainage, the site where the Vinton Colliery buildings had stood had become a dump.  That’s when a Rural Abandoned Mineland Project had covered the site with waste coal four-to-eight feet thick.

Then, in 1994, T. Allan Comp, an historic preservationist working for the National Park Service’s National Heritage Areas Program, approached Vintondale with a plan that combined art and science to clean up the industrial site. He called it AMD&ART. He wanted a park for the people that would showcase their history and the natural beauty of the area. The citizens wanted a ball park.  Working with them and with a dedicated group of AmeriCorps and Vista volunteers as well as with a host of innovative designers and artists, the AMD&ART Park, beside the Ghost Town Trail, was dedicated in 2005.

Etched image of the Vinton Colliery, part of the Great Map installation

Winning numerous awards, this remarkable site was a joy to visit even on a winter day.  Young couples with children played in the four-acre recreation area while we wandered past the six keystone-shaped ponds that change the orange water pouring out of mine portal No. 3 from a ph of 2.8 to 6.1 before it flows through a wetland and into Blacklick Creek.  Lining the first treatment pond with limestone that pulls the iron out of the water, each successive pond filters pollutants from the water and turns them into solids that a seven-acre wetland, planted with 10,000 wetland plants and attracting wood ducks, killdeer and other birds in season, captures and retains.

Furthermore, citizens rallied to plant trees in what is dubbed the Litmus Garden back in 2001.  The idea was to choose native trees and shrubs that would turn the same color in autumn as the pool around which they were planted — from red to orange to yellow and finally to clean blue-green at the end of the treatment pools.  White ash, red maple, sweet gum, black cherry, shadbush, sassafras, sugar maple, tulip poplar, big tooth aspen, American hackberry, black willow and sycamore — one thousand trees in all were planted by 150 volunteers including former Vintondale natives who had returned to help.

Plaque explaining the AMD treatment process

Those folks who bike or walk this section of the Ghost Town Trail, which is surrounded by State Gameland #79 except for the town of Vintondale, can stop to read the excellent signs that explain the AMD process.  They can also view the ART part of the project.  One is a nine-by-fifteen foot mosaic modeled on a 1923 Sanborn Insurance map of the Vinton Colliery by artist Jessica Liddell. Framing the map are 131 granite tiles, 54 of which have been laser-etched with community images, newspaper headlines, and text in addition to the word “hope” inscribed in the 26 languages spoken in Vintondale at the time. The Great Map Project is so accurate that “folks that lived in the town and worked in the mine walked up and pointed out the homes that their families had lived in for generations,” artist Liddell told writer Erik Reece in his excellent article for Orion magazine about the project.   It was that article, published the month before, that persuaded us to visit Vintondale.

But the most affecting art piece is across the trail from the Great Map. In a perfect reconstructed six-by-twelve-foot Mine No. 6 Portal entrance, where miners entered the coal mine back in its heyday, are the ghostlike images of nine miners emerging from the portal during a shift-change in 1938.  Taken from home movie footage contributed by Vintondale resident Julius Morey, artist Anita Lucero diamond-etched in polished black granite the life-sized portrait of miners wearing head lanterns and carrying their lunch pails. From a distance, all we could see was what looked like a black hole framed by mine timbers.  As we walked closer, the images emerged like phantoms from another, lost world.

The Great Map mosaic at Vintondale

Finally, across the park from the Miner’s Memorial, is the Clean Slate, which was designed by University of Pennsylvania landscape architecture students Claire Fullman and Emily Nye who were the winners of a national student design competition.  Two long pieces of rough black slate, one beneath the culvert where the clean water flows into Blacklick Creek after passing through the wetland, and another higher up on drier land, which serves as a viewing platform and the beginning of a path of 10 slate steps leading visitors through what is planned to be a Carboniferous Garden when ferns were the trees of the earth.  On warmer days, visitors can stand on the wet slate and let the purified water wash over their bare feet before it flows into Blacklick Creek.

Even visiting in winter, we could appreciate the blending of art and science, human and natural landscapes.  What was once a blighted, neglected area is now enriching both the lives of Vintondale citizens and the many visitors to the Ghost Town Trail who pause to learn about this innovative approach to acid mine drainage. On those 35-acres of reclaimed mine land, Comp says on the AMD&ART website that … “we’ve established a model of holistic renewal that brings the perspective of history to mix with the discipline of science, the delight of innovative design, and the energy of community engagement.”

Mine No. 6 entrance, diamond-etched in black granite by Anita Lucero

All photos are by Bruce Bonta. For more information and maps of the Ghost Town Trail and the Blacklick Valley Natural Area: www.indianacountyparks.org or call 724-463-8636.  To learn more about AMD&ART: www.amdandart.org. See also “Reclaiming a Toxic Legacy Through Art and Science,” by Erik Reece, in the November/December 2007 issue of Orion magazine.

Golden Eagle Redux

After release, the golden eagle landed briefly in a white pine before resuming its journey south (photo by Dave Bonta)

In case you’ve been wondering about the photo of me in the sidebar, here’s the story, from my November column in Pennsylvania Game News.

The phone rang just as we were in the midst of eating dinner.

“I’ll bet that’s Trish and she’s got an eagle,” I said.

Bruce answered the phone.

“You’ve got an eagle,” he repeated.  “You’ve got a problem. What is it?  Steve and Dave are here too.  I’ll send them both up.”

So began an adventure that had eluded us the previous autumn (see Golden Eagle Days, Part 1 and Part 2).

It was the last day of daylight saving time, and at 6:15, the sun had already set.  Trish Miller, a golden eagle researcher working on her Ph.D. at Penn State, had arrived at the new trapping site on our mountain in the morning.  Luckily, she had come by herself, because I had often encountered her with her little daughter Phoebe on her back heading to the site.

Unlike the previous year’s site, this one was a steep climb up Sapsucker Ridge and then a precarious climb down into the middle of a rock slide where her husband, Mike Lanzone, assisted by interns from the Powdermill Nature Reserve, had designed and built a blind and live trap.

During their first trapping season here, they had discovered that the golden eagles, after crossing the Tyrone Gap in Bald Eagle Mountain, would drop below the ridge on the northwestern side and not soar above it until they reached the top of First Field.  On the rock slide, the eagles often flew past at eye level.

Golden eagles are capable of taking very large prey. Dr. Katzner shows us why (D. Bonta)

The day she called us, the northwest wind had picked up at noon, and Miller had watched nine golden eagles fly over.  Every eagle was escorted through his territory by the resident red-tailed hawk, which picked them up on the far side of the gap, near a cell phone tower, and accompanied them on along the ridge.

Then the tenth golden eagle struck the bait.  One of the lines to the bait broke, and the eagle hung on to it while flapping half off the trapping platform.  Afraid to spring the bow net, Miller waited, hoping the eagle would flap back on to the platform. When it did, she sprang the net and had a perfect catch.  She managed to get the eagle into a large carrying case she had brought along, but she couldn’t haul it up the rock slide and down the trail to our place, a good half-mile away, before dark.  That’s where our sons came in.

Bruce and I waited and waited.  It grew dark and still we waited.  Finally, in they came, our two sons and Miller, bearing the eagle in the carrying case.  After giving us a chance to look in and see the magnificent bird, they carried the case down to our cellar and covered it with a sheet for the night to keep the bird calm.

Phoebe seemed especially entranced by the big eagle (D. Bonta)

The following morning researchers and bystanders began assembling to work and watch by 8:00 a.m.  It was a cold, damp and overcast 37-degree Sunday morning.  Dr. Todd Katzner, Director of Conservation and Field Research at The National Aviary, arrived from Pittsburgh first.  The Scott family, who had been packing up from a day of hunting when they brought the eagle down off the ridge, was also here, as well as our sons.

Before the other researchers arrived, Katzner carried the case into our shed.  He carefully opened it and climbed halfway inside the case to grab the feet of the eagle and pull it out.

“I think this a first year female,” he said and gave us a lesson on golden eagle biology.  He spread her tail to show the white on it and her more than five-foot wingspan to display the white underneath.  Both were signs of her age.  But her massive golden head was already its golden adult color.  Although her beak looked dangerous, it was her taloned feet that were.  She had been hatched sometime last April or May in northern Quebec or Labrador, he thought.

Miller, Lanzone, their children Jeffrey, Ashley and Phoebe arrived at 8:30, followed by Dan Ombalski, another researcher, from State College.

Todd Katzner and Trish Miller take measurements (Bruce Bonta)

Once everyone was assembled on our veranda, the work began.  They put a cap over the eagle’s head so she wouldn’t be too stressed, although Katzner told us that her cortisone level was high.

They measured her wings and tail and brought out a chart to check sizes against what would determine the sex of the bird.  Her legs were thick; her bright yellow talons huge.  “Fresh, happy feet,” Miller called them.

She weighed 41.20 grams or 8.4 pounds, which definitely made her the bigger, heavier female–the first female eastern golden eagle ever radio tagged.

It took hours to fit the harness and radio transmitter over her abundant feathers and impressive breast, and they shook her several times so she would flap wildly.  Then they would once again adjust the harness.  They sewed a section on with thread so that the transmitter would fall off in a year or two.  All of this was part of a new kind of transmitter, and Lanzone had been up all night tweaking it, perfectionist that he is.  Instead of transmitting data once an hour, as the other transmitters did the previous year, this one was made to transmit every thirty seconds.

Finally, all the actors were ready. That was when the researchers decided that the eagle would be released on the rock slide where she had been trapped, so she would resume her migration with as little disruption as possible.

Mike and Trish make adjustments to the transmitter, with assistance from Steve (B. Bonta)

All of us hiked to the site except for Katzner who drove The National Aviary truck that held the golden eagle in the carrying case.  By then three Powdermill interns had joined us as well.  What a crowd to usher off an eagle.

I picked my way down the rock slide to the first open area where they planned the release.  Everyone had cameras and surrounded the eagle and Lanzone who was holding her.

At that moment, Miller came over to me and said that they would like me to release her.  It had never crossed my mind that they would honor me in such a way.  Looking at her talons, I gulped and agreed.  How could I turn down a chance to hold this incredible bird?

Miller showed me how to grasp her feet and then carefully transferred the eagle to me.  Her eight pounds seemed light despite her massive size.

I held her for what seemed many photos and videos.

“Just throw her lightly into the air,” they told me.  When I yelled “Ready,” Katzner responded “Go!” And just as we had rehearsed — off she flew.  I felt as if I was releasing air.

But instead of streaking away, she flew into a nearby pine tree.  Our son Dave and Lanzone ran through the underbrush to take more photos and watch her as she ruffled and smoothed her feathers, grooming off the feel of humans who had insulted her dignity.  Once she reached behind her back and pulled repeatedly at the transmitter. There were a few tense moments until she gave up trying to remove it and went back to grooming.

Then she rose into the air again, and instead of continuing down the ridge, she returned to circle above us twice, as if in farewell, before she headed south to our collective applause. We wished her a safe trip and hoped all would go well with the transmitter so we could watch “our” eagle’s journey.

But months dragged on and we didn’t hear anything.  I finally contacted the researchers and learned from Katzner that “the prototype transmitter had worked very well and provided initial data for a few days before it failed” and they had lost track of her.  What a disappointment!

Everybody wanted to touch this talisman of wilderness (D. Bonta)

But Miller told me that they had learned more, during that short time, about how she used the ridge during her flight, than they had from the other eagles they had tagged with transmitters the previous year.  Because their research project goal is, in Katzner’s words, “to provide informed science and generate key information so that raptor friendly wind farms can be built in Pennsylvania,” they must know how high eagles fly above the ridges.

Nothing in the evolutionary history of birds or bats has prepared them for industrial-sized wind mills, what some folks call “eggbeaters in the sky.”  Each 150 foot blade, 300 feet in diameter, weighs 9 tons and the blade tips move 200 feet per second, Katzner says.

The researchers also must identify primary migrating routes and wintering sites and identify the eagles’ behavior on migration and during the winter.  Eventually they plan to produce maps that show the relative risk to the birds from the development of industrial wind farms.

All of this scientific information was impressive, but we couldn’t help wondering about our own golden eagle.  What had happened to her?  Where had she gone?

Then, on Valentine’s Day, we received an e-mail from Lanzone.

“Got a call today from someone helping with a PGC study about an eagle that looked like the one in the Game News.  Turns out it was the golden eagle you released.  It looks very healthy from the pictures and has been visiting the deer [dump] for just over two weeks (they had thought it was a bald eagle until the other day)…it is visiting their study area on private land just north of Greensburg in Westmoreland County about 25 miles from my office.”

They hoped to re-trap her and put on a new transmitter, but she was having none of that.  Once trapped, twice shy. But what a relief it was to learn that she was fine and that she hadn’t even left Pennsylvania.  And she wasn’t the only golden eagle to winter in our state.  At other deer dumps in other parts of the state stationary cameras captured photos of golden eagles feeding on deer carcasses.

The white on the underside of the wings is one of the things that distinguishes a juvenile golden eagle from an adult (D. Bonta)

There is much more to learn about eastern golden eagles.  Katzner estimates that from 1000 to 1500 golden eagles pass through Pennsylvania during migration, which is 90 to 95% of the population.  So far, it seems as if in the autumn most pre-adults migrate through eastern Pennsylvania along Hawk Mountain (the easternmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province) and adults through western Pennsylvania, primarily along the Allegheny Front and our own Bald Eagle Ridge, the westernmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province.  Southern West Virginia appears to provide key wintering habitat.

In spring, adults migrate mostly from the Allegheny Front to about 60 miles east, although Tussey Mountain, the next ridge to the east of Bald Eagle, seems to be the major ridge.  There is also evidence that some pre-adults stay in Virginia for the summer.

With the help of Quebec collaborators, they now have radio transmitters on 15 eastern golden eagles.  Using GPS satellite telemetry, which is solar powered and should last one to three years, GPS data points at regular intervals are transmitted to a server by satellite. And those points should give them all the information they need about the eastern golden eagles’ flight speed, elevation, and timing during migration.

As Miller continues her “Wind Power and Eagle Migration” Ph.D. work, we hope she traps and radio tags many more golden eagles on our mountaintop and on the Allegheny Front so we can learn more about the life history of this distinct, poorly-known, small population of eastern golden eagles.

The eagle seconds after release, with the Allegheny Front in the distance (B. Bonta)