Unexpected Encounters

To encounter the unexpected is why I go out day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, walking the same mountain trails. But I rarely have a Discovery Channel moment. At most, I might find a new wildflower, an unusual butterfly, or a rare bird.

Still, I’ve had my moments. Take the day in mid-April when I heard a turkey gobbling near the Far Field Road. Immediately, I lay down against the road bank, clad in my usual jeans and navy blue jacket and, grasping my Lynch’s Foolproof Turkey Call, I rendered my poor imitation of a clucking hen turkey.

A tom turkey strode into view and walked past my outstretched legs as he peered around for the clucking hen. Although he passed a mere 15 inches from my feet, he didn’t seem to notice me. I found that surprising since turkeys are supposed to have superb eyesight.

Pausing about 20 feet beyond my left side, he spread his tail feathers and puffed his side feathers in and out like the inflating and deflating of a balloon. Then he thrust his neck forward and gobbled loudly. I had the turkey call resting on my chest and using my right hand, which he couldn’t see from his vantage point, I was able to whine and cluck with it.

For nearly half an hour he gobbled and displayed, all the while looking up the bank, below the road, and directly at me. I answered his every gobble with whines and clucks, most of which were poorly executed, because the rotten rubber band holding the scraper to the box had snapped after my first cluck. But the sometimes odd sounds I made did not seem to matter to that turkey.

Finally, he walked within five feet of me to gobble and display and I had a superb view of his six-inch-long beard, his bright eyes, and his magnificent tail feathers. He often appeared to be looking directly at me, but I never moved. Several times, he also emitted a rattling sound like castanets, which is described by researchers as a threat call before turkeys begin to fight. Was he seeing me as a male rival or, more likely, a female that he hoped to vanquish and then court? Apparently, he was more interested in what I sounded like than what I looked like.

At last, he strutted past me again and climbed the bank above my head. Still gobbling, he tramped around in the woods, sounding like a heavy-footed human. I answered him with the call for several more minutes until he drifted away, his gobbles receding in the distance.

Only then did I move, because mindful of the upcoming spring gobbler season, I didn’t want him to associate a human with the noise he had heard. On the other hand, I doubt that any self-respecting turkey hunter would make the noise I had made. And I did wonder if I had called up the proverbial “dumb turkey.” Still, he had given me a never-to-be-forgotten encounter with a wild creature on his own turf with no blind or camouflage between him and me.

Despite being surprised by the turkey’s reaction to me, I had, to some extent, set him up by using a turkey call. That was not true of my next encounter.

On a late spring day, I was showing my husband Bruce invasive and native shrubs I wanted him to photograph for a talk I was scheduled to give. After photographing invasives such as Japanese barberry, multiflora rose, and privet on the former clearcut, I headed for a place where I knew the native red elderberry shrubs were already bearing fruit. Bruce was in a hurry to get back to his work at the computer, so I rushed heedlessly along our trails intent on finding the shrubs.

As I descended a steep section of the trail slightly ahead of Bruce, suddenly I spotted little coyotes ahead of us. I froze and so did Bruce. Instead of running away, they proceeded to silently wrestle with one another a mere 40 feet from us. Occasionally they looked up, and once a pup sniffed the air, advanced toward us, and then retreated. Altogether, I counted five little ones.

We inched closer, Bruce clicking his camera, as they continued wrestling and tumbling about, sometimes paired, sometimes threesomes, and sometimes all five piling on. They had reddish-brown coats and black-tipped tails. Their legs seemed too long for their bodies and their pointed ears too large for their faces. Although they were as cute as any puppies, their bodies were rangy rather than puppy-plump.

Eventually they ran up an old creek bed and played a few rounds of “king of the mountain” on fallen trees before they slipped beneath two large, old tree trunks in a sea of hay-scented ferns, which effectively hid their den entrance. I waited, but they didn’t emerge again. Still, I had had the longest, closest look ever of young, playing coyotes.

And those red elderberry shrubs I’d been searching for? Once the coyotes disappeared, I found the shrubs along the same stretch of trail where we had been watching the pups. As I neared the largest of the shrubs, a male rose-breasted grosbeak landed on it and ate all the berries, a sight that would have ordinarily made my day but had been upstaged by the coyote pup sighting.

Looking for one thing and finding another is also the theme of my third unexpected encounter. Early on a warm August day I was watching female spined micrathenas spinning their daily webs. Because there are so many of these webs across our trails in August, I had been studying them. The spiders were said to bite their prey first and then wrap it in silk, something I had previously observed them doing. I had also been listening for their low-pitched buzz, which is supposed to be audible to humans two feet away. While the females are large and showy with spiny abdomens, the males are tiny and have flattened elongated, whitish abdomens.

Hoping to spot a male courting a female in a web, I instead found what looked like an egg sac, hanging from a single silk thread and spinning in mid-air. I fumbled for my hand lens in my fanny pack and went down on one knee, like a petitioner, to try to catch the swaying white sac, which was about a quarter the size of my littlest fingernail, in the lens.

It looked like the egg sac of a spined micrathena, especially through the lens, but I wasn’t certain. I was focusing intently on trying to keep the swinging sac in view when I heard a slight noise behind me. Assuming it was my son Dave out taking photos and trying to startle me, I paid no attention to the sound.

Then something nudged me in my rear end.

In the same instant I dismissed Dave as the culprit, I spun around, still on one knee, and came face to face with a large porcupine. I stumbled and fell forward as I half turned around and tried to scramble out of its way at the same time, all the while hoping it wouldn’t fill my posterior with quills. My second attempt to get to my feet was successful and I quickly moved down the trail.

But the porcupine seemed to be as startled by the encounter as I was. After all, porcupines don’t see very well and this one had clearly blundered into me.

It turned and shinnied 25 feet up into a fork of a large chestnut oak tree. Its nostrils flared out as it sniffed my scent, and it bared its orange front teeth, full of bravado now that it was out of harm’s way.

These and other adventures in nature I have had over the years keep me out in all kinds of weather like hunters stalking their prey. Only I’m stalking stories that I can tell. Before there was civilization, preliterate humans sat in small family groups around campfires and told stories of what they had seen while hunting and gathering and living out among the wild creatures. Some still do in remote areas of the world. And, as I’ve discovered, some of our hunters are also superb story tellers, not only telling stories of their hunts but of the other wildlife they have watched while sitting in their tree stands.

I admit that many hunters have called in turkeys and may have had similar experiences to mine with the tom turkey. And I’m certain there have been folks who have seen frolicking coyote pups.

But is there anyone out there who has ever been poked in the rear by a porcupine?
__________

All photos were taken by Dave in Plummer’s Hollow, except for the photo of the coyote pup, which Bruce took. The first turkey photo is of a hen in the field, that had small chicks with her; the second is a close-up of a jake (two-year-old male) shot by one of our hunter friends during Spring Gobbler Season in April 2008. The spider is a female spined micrathena.

As a bonus, here’s a video Dave shot with his digital camera last July in the spruce grove.

From the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo.

Earth Day

I was out this perfect day by 6:30 because Bruce was still sleeping, and it was Sunday–his day to make breakfast. I brewed my coffee, slipped on my walking shoes, left a note for Bruce and was off, coffee mug clutched in one hand.

Bluebirds sang in the yard and field sparrow song reverberated in First Field. But I chose the woods and the moss-covered Dump Trail, even though it seemed disappointedly quiet and empty and no birds sang. Before I reached Laurel Ridge Trail, I stopped and sat on a fallen log to watch a couple white-breasted nuthatches foraging on nearby trees.

Then a deer snorted over and over in the woods beyond Laurel Ridge Trail. I couldn’t see it, but I assumed it had caught my scent. I remained motionless and it finally stopped snorting. Still I sat, and suddenly an animal loped past on Laurel Ridge Trail.

“Coyote,” I thought and after it passed I jumped up and ran to the trail, looking up to where I could see its drooping, long, black-tipped tail and backside disappearing over the top of the steep hill. Judging by its size, I figured it was a male, and realized that it was on April 14, 1999 that a big male coyote had walked silently up to me as I had sat on the Far Field Road Bench, worried about my aging father who had fallen and broken his hip. At the time the long look I exchanged with the coyote had seemed almost like a revelation, and I had renamed the bench Coyote Bench. But it has been several years since I have seen a coyote and again it seemed like a revelation.

I walked on to the spruce grove, and as I started up through the trees, a female sharp-shinned hawk flew out of the treetops protesting in her mild way. She joined the male who was perched on a tree branch at the edge of the woods. So once again, for the fourth year in a row, they are nesting in the spruce grove.

Two wonderful sightings before 7:00. “Sunday, sweet Sunday,” I sang to myself, and then I remembered–It’s Earth Day!

Coyote Birthday

Two summers ago I reached one of those milestone birthdays that I didn’t want to think about.

“Don’t bother celebrating my birthday,” I told my family.

“But Mom,” our son Dave protested, “I’m going to give you coyotes for your birthday.”

I was skeptical that he could do so even though our adventure with coyotes had begun the previous week on the Fourth of July. As the fireworks reached their climax at a nearby amusement park in the valley, Dave reported hearing coyotes howling on Sapsucker Ridge.

Three days later Dave again heard coyotes howling, this time in the early morning.

In the meantime, I was getting more and more frustrated. Although I had had several glimpses of single coyotes over the last four years, I had never heard them howl. Dave, who tends to be wandering the mountain at night and very early in the morning when coyotes are most likely to be abroad, had heard coyotes howl a few times.

Then, while sitting on the veranda the following afternoon, my husband Bruce and I heard the start of a fire siren down in the valley which was abruptly drowned out by coyote howls again coming from Sapsucker Ridge. We wondered if they were protesting the noise or trying to compete, but we later learned that a siren, a clap of thunder, or even the barking of a dog may encourage howling. But later, at 7:15 p.m., stimulated by no other human-made sound, the coyotes howled even closer as we sat finishing our dinner on the front porch.

Both times Bruce and I were thrilled to hear those wondrously wild cries that sent chills of delight down our spines. Hearing the “song dogs” on our mountain, just as we had many years before while camping in the West, was a wish come true.

The day before my birthday, I was out shortly after 8:00 a.m., picking blueberries on Laurel Ridge, when the coyotes howled again on Sapsucker Ridge–wild, ululating music that ebbed and flowed and then died as suddenly as it had started.

That afternoon Dave climbed up Sapsucker Ridge and poked around in the thick vegetation below the ridgetop. There he practically stumbled on two coyote pups. One stood only 15 feet away from him. Neither showed any fear and studied him calmly before moving casually off into the underbrush.

Dave was certain they had a den in the area but, according to Gerry Parker’s EASTERN COYOTE; THE STORY OF ITS SUCCESS, by July pups are no longer in their natal dens. Instead, they are at rendezvous sites where they are left by their parents to rest, play, and take short, exploratory excursions on their own while the adults are either resting nearby or hunting for food for their youngsters.

Whenever an adult returns, Parker says, they announce their arrival with a brief howl which sends the pups into a frenzy of howls, yips, yaps, and barks. No doubt that was what we had been hearing, although coyote pups also practice their howling at this time according to other researchers.

Dave was confident that he could show me coyotes on my birthday, but I was not so sure. I knew that coyotes constantly move their pups, especially when they are discovered by humans. Surely the adults would have scented Dave, realized that a human had found the rendezvous site, and moved on.

Nevertheless, early the next morning I followed Dave silently up Big Tree Trail and down Sapsucker Ridge Trail. Just as he was ready to head downslope into the thick vegetation where he had seen the pups, I gasped. There ahead of us on the trail were three pups trotting purposefully along.

I whispered the news to Dave who had been moving with his eyes on where he placed his feet. Through my binoculars I had beautiful views of them before they ranged out of sight.

“Happy birthday,” Dave whispered. He had promised me coyote pups and he had delivered.

I sat down on a rock to take notes while Dave returned home. Then, ten minutes later, a fourth pup emerged from the underbrush and followed the same trajectory its siblings had taken. All of them were beige-colored and lanky and reminded me of teenagers in search of adventure.

I sat listening to a singing black-billed cuckoo, red-eyed vireo, and scarlet tanager against the steady drone of traffic from Interstate 99 below the ridge before continuing along the trail. Although I was constantly on the lookout for the pups, all I saw was an overpopulation of chipmunks running throughout the forest.

I even went down off the ridge into the forest from which they had emerged, but I found no sign of them. Finally, I checked out the string of small vernal ponds that often provide water for animals as large as black bears, but most were almost dried up and there were no coyote tracks, only deer tracks, in their muddy margins.

The Far Field held the usual singing birds–indigo buntings, field sparrows, eastern towhees, American goldfinches–but no coyotes. Still, I was content with what I had seen and ambled back along the Far Field Road.

Suddenly, I spotted another coyote ahead of me on the road. Judging from its size, it was probably the mother of the pups because she was not much bigger than them, but she had adult coloration–a black and reddish-brown coat and a black-tipped tail. She looked and sniffed and investigated along the road in search of food for her pups before she veered off into the underbrush below the road and disappeared.

What a treat! Not only had I seen four coyote pups, but I had watched their mother hunting for food. Surely I could ask for no more.

Near the top of First Field, I stood, as I always do, and looked up and down the mown path through the field. There, just below the spruce grove, sat a beige pup on its haunches, scratching its plump, white belly with its front paws. Then it slowly stood up and wandered off over the hill.

That was the last we heard or saw the family. Even though none of the coyotes I saw seemed to notice me, they probably did and moved on that night. Coyotes, after all, are wanderers, usually spending their days sleeping on the ground in a dense thicket or woods and their nights hunting for food.

Here in the East they live mostly in mated pairs. Courtship often stretches from late December until mid-February and the male and female may howl in a duet before mating. During the 58 to 63-day gestation period, the female, assisted by the male, digs several dens in steep banks, mounds, gullies, brushy slopes, or thickets or renovates and enlarges fox or woodchuck dens. The den sites are usually south-facing, easy to defend, and near water. They are difficult for humans to find and are frequently passed on from generation to generation.

In the main den, the five to seven pups are born blind and helpless sometime in mid-April to mid-May. Their eyes open at two weeks of age and they venture out of the den a week later. Then the female, who has been nursing the pups and fed by the male, joins her mate in hunting food that is later regurgitated, partly digested, for their offspring. When the pups are weaned at eight to nine weeks old, the family abandons den life for the year.

Gradually the pups learn to hunt under their parents’ instruction and most leave the family unit in late autumn, dispersing an average of 30 miles in search of their own territory.

The coyote’s scientific name is Canis latrans which means “barking dog.” Although their howling is distinctive and includes at least 11 different vocalizations, the eastern coyote adults I have seen look like German shepherds. DNA studies of the eastern coyote found that it is a new animal, but these studies could not find a genetic marker that distinguished coyotes from wolves or dogs. As one researcher put it, “There is more difference between different breeds of dogs than between dogs and wolves.”

Most researchers agree that our coyotes moved East from Minnesota across Wisconsin, northern Michigan and southern Ontario. There they probably mated with Algonquin timber wolves, tentatively explaining why eastern coyotes are larger than their western counterparts. Eastern coyote pups are also more sociable than western coyote pups–more playful, less agressive and less dominant in their behavior–all wolf-like traits.

Other researchers hypothesize that their larger size could be attributed to habitat. As Penn State’s Richard Yahner writes in his new book FASCINATING MAMMALS: CONSERVATION AND ECOLOGY IN THE MID-EASTERN STATES, “Mid-eastern and northeastern states typically have diverse and abundant food resources, such as high deer populations, a variety of smaller forest and farmland prey, and food associated with humans (e.g. farm animals, garbage) compared to the drier, less productive areas of midwestern or western states…” These “enhanced nutritional opportunities…” result “in an eventual gradual increase in body size of eastern coyotes over successive generations.”

Coyotes are omnivorous opportunists. A two-year study in Pennsylvania from April until August 1991-92 found that over half the prey of 310 coyotes consisted of live or carrion white-tailed deer, followed by mice and voles, cottontail rabbits and woodchucks. They also ate some insects and birds. Plant materials, especially wild fruits, were as abundant as deer in their diet.

Other studies have shown that when coyotes are present, smaller predators such as opossums, raccoons, foxes and even bobcats decrease. Biologists in Michigan found that the success of ground-nesting song sparrows increased when coyotes moved in and hypothesized that the coyotes were killing the raccoons that preyed on ground-nesting birds.

Whatever the studies may show, I have found no reduction in either prey or predator species on our mountain. Neither have I heard nor seen another coyote since that birthday two years ago. Maybe they are waiting until I reach another milestone birthday!

Naming the Benches

Getting older is not a condition I like to admit to. Putting benches beside our trails, as my husband Bruce wanted to do, struck me as an acknowledgment that time, for us, was marching on. I preferred to sit on a hot seat at the base of a tree at one with Nature.

“Well, I am getting older,” Bruce said. “And I want benches to sit on.”

So late in the winter of 1999 Bruce consulted with two hunter friends, Jeff and Bob, who are also talented amateur carpenters. Jeff’s garage is not only a display area for all the racks from bucks he, his family, and friends have killed over the years, but a fully equipped workshop. The deal was that we would purchase the pressure-treated lumber and they would build the benches, assisted by Bruce and our son Dave. Those benches would be available for us and for visitors and hunters to use throughout the year. As it turned out, Bruce and Dave mostly kibitzed while Bob and Jeff turned out four handsome benches, complete with slanted backs and armrests, in record time.

By the first week in April, after much discussion of where we should put them, Bruce had installed three of the four benches. Despite my initial objections to them, I quickly found myself arranging my walks around them, arriving at one just in time for my morning coffee and bagel, which I carried in my backpack. Although such indulgence seemed faintly sybaritic, I had no trouble adjusting to it.

At first the benches were named according to their locations–Far Field Road Bench, Ten Springs Trail Bench, and Hollow Road Bench–but within a week they had new names.

The first to be renamed was the Ten Springs Trail Bench, which Bruce had installed at the edge of the 1991 clearcut. It overlooks the mature, uncut deciduous forest of Laurel Ridge.

On a sunny, warm, April morning, I walked through Margaret’s Woods to the eight-year-old clearcut along Greenbrier Trail, following the sound of a gobbling tom turkey. Using my old Lynch’s Foolproof Turkey Call, I tried to entice him into view. Finally, I glimpsed him ahead of me on the trail, slowly fanning his tail feathers. Even though I stood absolutely still, he spotted me after several minutes, stared as if in disbelief, and then ran off up the slope.

From Greenbrier Trail, I hiked down Dogwood Knoll to Ten Springs Trail and the bench. As I sat there, I again heard a turkey gobbling and answered him with what I thought were enticing hen calls. We called back and forth as he moved unseen up Laurel Ridge. I never did catch a glimpse of him, but it was marvelous just to be outside on such a glittering day with the red maple trees in full orange, gold, and red flower and the songs and calls of Carolina wrens, white-breasted nuthatches, cardinals, goldfinches and the newly-arrived ruby-crowned kinglets blessing the morning. And that’s how Ten Springs Trail Bench became Turkey Bench.

Two days later, on another sparkling spring morning, I walked down the road to Hollow Road Bench which overlooks our Plummer’s Hollow stream and the forest beyond. I was just in time to watch and listen to two male Louisiana waterthrushes singing over prime Louisiana waterthrush territory. These wood warblers are some of the earliest returning migrants and, with their brown backs, white breasts streaked with brown, and long, pink legs, they look more like thrushes than warblers. Since they favor streambanks in wooded ravines for nesting, our hollow usually hosts three or four pairs.

At one point they stood on two fallen trees, a couple feet from where I was sitting, and chipped, swayed and wagged their tails up and down. The tail-wagging is a definitive feature of the Louisiana waterthrush along with its white eyebrow stripe, and both its genus and species name mean “tail-wagger.”

As I sat still, they continued their performance, flying up and down above the stream, singing their melodious, ringing song, giving their sharp, metallic chip calls, and chasing one another, but I saw no real fighting. One waterthrush waded through the rushing water, feeding and singing, looking very much like a dipper I had once watched in a Wyoming stream.

Later, I consulted W. Douglas Robinson’s account of the Louisiana waterthrush in The Birds of North America for an explanation of what I had observed. According to him, “Neighboring territorial males often engage in vigorous chases and countersinging soon after arrival on breeding grounds. Countersinging males move toward territory boundary. Then one male often flies into neighboring territory, provoking a vigorous chase of swerving males through woodland and along stream corridors. Males sing while in pursuit, extending the complex ending of their territorial songs to last several seconds…In some cases, males may land near each other…and face off in a threat display.” That described exactly what I had seen.

Needless to say, Hollow Road Rench was renamed Louisiana Waterthrush Bench and continued to give me a front seat view of Louisiana waterthrush behavior throughout the month.

It took another four days, until April 14, before the Far Field Road Bench received its new name. The previous evening the phone had rung at 7:30 p.m. My 85-year-old father’s neighbor, 87-year-old John Stine, had been on the line. My father had fallen outside his country home while working in his garden and had laid for hours on the cold April ground, calling for help. Luckily, Mr. Stine had glanced out of his window after the evening news and had seen my father lying there several hundred feet away. We had spent much of that night at the hospital, learning, finally, that Dad had broken his hip.

The following morning I had a difficult time taking my usual morning walk because I was worried about Dad and wondering why he had broken his hip less than a year after he had fallen and broken his leg. But I forced myself outside that windy, cold day and headed for the Far Field Road Bench. Set along my favorite refuge on the property, it had already become my most-used bench.

I sat drinking my coffee and listening to a singing blue-headed vireo. Looking downslope into Roseberry Hollow, my mind was so busy with questions that I paid little attention to the scene around me.

What if Dad’s neighbor had not gone to the window? How much longer could Dad live alone in his beloved country home? Would he survive his hip operation?

A slight movement to my right aroused me from my reverie. Coyote sensed me at the same moment that I sensed him. He was less than ten feet from the bench and had evidently been moseying along the old woods road as inattentive to his surroundings as I had been to mine.

He was a magnificent, full-grown male who looked me fully in the face for several seconds before turning around and loping slowly away. I don’t have a mystic bone in my body. Yet when Coyote appeared so unexpectedly, I felt as if I had been blessed by an unseen hand. I remembered that many Native American tribes had venerated Coyote. The Crows called him “First Worker,” creator of the earth and all living creatures, and the desert southwest tribes referred to him as “God’s dog.”

Did Coyote know I needed a revelation? Or was his appearance, the first ever I had had of an adult coyote on our mountain, merely a coincidence? Surely the latter, my rational, scientific mind told me. But Dad did come through his hip operation beautifully, and the prognosis for a complete recovery was excellent. Immediately, I christened the Far Field Road Bench “Coyote Bench” in honor of God’s dog.

It could have easily been named Snake Bench too. On the sixth of June, a day of rising temperatures and humidity, I trekked to Coyote Bench. The woods were filled with the rustles of gray squirrels and chipmunks, and I speculated that the predators, such as coyotes, would be eating well.

Sitting on Coyote Bench, I heard a crackling in the leaves behind me and turned to watch a large black rat snake sliding sinuously over the ground. It stopped frequently to raise its head as if seeking its way. Then it slithered down into a hollow log where, I assumed, a chipmunk had its den. Since it did not come out again, I could only speculate on its intent.

The thirteenth of July was beautiful, filled with the usual deep woods’ singers–wood thrushes, scarlet tanagers, Acadian flycatchers, and red-eyed-vireos. My friend Colette and I walked along the Far Field Road and as we neared Coyote Bench, we found not one, but two black rat snakes, less than five feet apart, basking in the sun. We sat on the bench and watched as one slowly crawled away, while the other one moved slowly from one small patch of sunlight to another. Had one of those snakes been the one I had seen a month and a half before sliding into the hollow log? As usual, I was left with questions about my observations.

The fourth bench remained in the barn until mid-June. A twinge in my back reminded me that sometimes, when my back gives me trouble, I can’t walk as far as I usually do. So I suggested that we put the bench in the Magic Place a short distance from our house. Nestled amid several nearly 200-year-old red and black oaks, it is the only bench that is not on a trail.

For less than a month we called it the Magic Place Bench. But on that same day in July, my friend Colette and I sat there and watched a female box turtle watching us. Several weeks later Bruce was eyed by the same box turtle.

“Let’s call it Turtle Bench,” he suggested. And we did.

I was surprised at how quickly and easily the wild creatures named the benches. Now I look forward to the next set of benches Bruce is planning to have made. Who knows what creatures they will be named for?