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.

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.

Some years are more fruitful than others.  Last year was one of those years.  From mid-June until mid-August I never set out for my morning walk without slipping a pint jar into my pocket.  I wanted to be prepared to pick first the low bush blueberries, then the huckleberries on the powerline right-of-way, and later, in August, the blackberries that overhung the Far Field Road.

But for nearly three weeks in July, most of my berry-picking centered on our home grounds where, for the first time in more than two decades, black raspberries escaped most of the ravages of deer and the attention of black bears and produced a crop that I could barely keep up with.

Video of Marcia picking raspberries in 2008. (Subscribers must click through to watch.)

Back in 1971, when we first saw our place on a Fourth of July weekend, I couldn’t believe the abundance of black raspberries growing in the backyard. Over the years, as the deer herd increased, the black raspberry canes decreased. Then, the bears appeared. Those canes that survived the browsing of the deer, namely those growing on the steep slope below the front porch, were trampled by bears overnight and stripped of their almost-ripe fruit.

The ubiquitous white-tailed deer

During the last several years, our hunters have trimmed the deer herd and the black raspberries have begun to recover.  Last summer we had a perfect storm of berries — patches outside the kitchen door, below the front porch, surrounding the springhouse, on a steep slope beside the guesthouse, and in the guesthouse backyard.  Secondary patches thrived beside the driveway and in our side yard.  Every hot, humid morning I was out early, picking several quarts.  Although some went into the freezer for winter fruit salads, we ate most at our meals, either alone or combined with blueberries and huckleberries, depending on whether I had the strength and will to pick both in one day.

The word “fruit” comes from the Latin fructus meaning “that which is used or enjoyed,” and we certainly did both with our wild berry crops.  I did most of the picking.  Occasionally, I was rewarded with more than berries.  Once in the patch outside the kitchen door I found a song sparrow nest that contained four greenish-white eggs heavily blotched with brown.  While picking blueberries on the powerline right-of-way, a tiny American toad hopped in front of me.  Hooded warblers serenaded me as I harvested blackberries on the Far Field Road.

With all the bears on our mountain, I was surprised that they left the black raspberries alone and that I never encountered them amidst the blueberry and huckleberry shrubs.  No doubt, the incredible abundance of wild berries everywhere on our mountain kept them busy.  I, after all, ranged only a mile or so in search of berries, but I knew of other patches on neighboring properties that had as much or more berries than our property and that were not picked by humans. And the bear scat on our trails certainly showed evidence that they were enjoying berries as much as we were.

Not only did the wild fruit crops palatable to humans thrive.  So too did those palatable to birds and animals, such as the red-berried elder, also called mountain elder. This beautiful, native shrub likes cool, moist, rocky woods and blooms in April.  On steep slopes, where deer cannot reach to browse its twigs and foliage, red-berried elder thrives, bearing pyramidal clusters of berry-like drupes here by the sixteenth of June.  Our son, Dave, photographed chipmunks eating them, and I have watched rose-breasted grosbeaks gobbling them up.

chipmunk with red elderberries

The naturalist-writer Henry David Thoreau once wrote in Faith in a Seed, “If you would study the habits of birds; go where their food is, for example, if it is about the first of September, to the wild black-cherry trees, elder bushes, pokeweed…” The “elder” he meant is the common elder, those shrubs with flat-topped, clusters of small, white flowers that  are even more popular wildlife food.  By early September, those shrubs inside our three acre deer exclosure hung heavy with the umbels of purplish-black, berry-like drupes, and I flushed two ruffed grouse feeding on them.

Because common elder blooms long after the last frost — in late June and early July — it always produces a bumper crop of fruit.  “Many species of wild birds are attracted to the ‘banquet table’ which the common elder spreads in the fall,” William Carey Grimm wrote in The Book of Shrubs, such as gray catbirds, American robins, eastern bluebirds, northern cardinals, rose-breasted grosbeaks, eastern towhees, red-bellied woodpeckers, brown thrashers, and wood and hermit thrushes.  But because white-tailed deer browse on its twigs and foliage, the “common” elder has become uncommon in many areas. What the deer don’t eat, the sprayers of roadsides, drainers of swamps, loggers of stream sides, and abolishers of fencerows destroy, because this is a shrub of fencerows and waysides that flourishes in rich, moist soils along streams and swamps.  Those in our exclosure grow along its moist border, reaching a height of seven feet, while those that grew along our stream at the edge of our First Field wetland are gone because of deer browsing.

Wild black cherry trees are not deer food so we have many in all stages of growth including large trees. As early as the second of July, I flushed a brown thrasher fledgling that was eating wild black cherries from a medium-sized tree at the edge of First Field.  But it was mid-August before most of the cherries in the forest began to ripen.  Then they were loaded with fruit, some of which were green, some red, and some black.  Common grackle flocks quickly discovered them, and during an evening walk, my husband Bruce and I watched hundred of blackbirds stream over First Field and land on Sapsucker Ridge, their black bodies silhouetted against a golden sky as they ate cherries.

Cedar Waxwing in an ornamental cherry tree (photo by m. heart, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license)

The following day, Tim Tyler, one of our hunter friends, was cutting out black locust trees on First Field when he discovered a cedar waxwing nest with four pale gray eggs spotted with brown in a locust tree.  He immediately stopped cutting there and left a small grove of six trees standing to protect the incipient waxwing family.

Thoreau wrote about finding a small black cherry tree in “full fruit” and hearing the “cherry-birds — their shrill and fine seringo — and robins… The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of any wild cherry tree in town…” “Cherry-birds” are cedar waxwings. Had the waxwings waited for the cherry crop, which was unusually late because of a cold spring, before starting their family?  They do, after all, feed fruit to their nestlings. On the other hand, it could have been a second nesting.  Successful cedar waxwing couples often have second families, especially during good fruit-bearing years.

I kept an eye on the nest from a distance and always saw the female sitting on it.  But on the fifteenth of September, a cedar waxwing keened from the bare branch atop one of the tall black locusts above the nest site.  It looked around alertly, as male cedar waxwings do when they are on guard for their family. I peered at the nest through my binoculars and saw the female on the nest as usual.  Then she flew up toward the male and both of them flew off.  I took the opportunity to check their nest and found four nestlings.  One looked more advanced than the others did, but this sometimes happens with waxwings because often the female starts incubating before she lays all her eggs.

That was the only time I went near the nest, but I continued to watch it from a distance.  Soon the nestlings’ little crested heads were visible above the rim of the nest.  At least one parent was on guard in the tall locust whenever I walked past. Based on my calculations, that the female sits 12 days on her eggs before they start to hatch—a process that can take form 48 to 96 hours—and another 16 days as nestlings, I expected them to fledge around September 24.

Sure enough, on the morning of September 24, the cedar waxwing nest was empty except for a broken egg still holding smelly liquid and two squished wild black cherries.  The nest had been woven of wild grape stems, lined with dried weeds and plastered on the outside with fluffy white material.

In addition to cedar waxwings, I saw red-eyed vireos, blue jays, and scarlet tanagers harvesting wild black cherries, but the list of songbirds and other wildlife that feast on them is legion.  Thoreau mentioned gray catbirds, brown thrashers, eastern kingbirds, blue jays, red-headed woodpeckers, eastern bluebirds and northern cardinals as the most common birds that eat wild black cherries, in addition to robins and cedar waxwings.  Huge piles of bear scat studded with cherry pits on our trails testified to their popularity with bears. And the smaller animals, such as foxes, squirrels, and chipmunks, also ate the fruit.

A bower of pokeweed above Coyote Bench ripened too in September.  Pokeweed, known by many alternative names, for instance, pokeberry, poke, redweed, inkberry, and pigeon berry—can grow up to 12 feet tall in rich, moist soil.  Its long clusters of dark purple berries and large shiny seeds are popular with many songbirds, especially mourning doves, hence its name “pigeon berry.”  Philadelphia-based bird artist, Alexander Wilson, wrote back in the early nineteenth century that “the juice of the berries is of a beautiful crimson and they are eaten in such quantities by these birds [robins] that their whole stomachs are strongly tinged with the same red color.” I’ve watched eastern bluebirds harvesting the berries from pokeweed growing beside our house.

Solomon's plume (AKA false Solomon's seal) in berry

Several of our spring wildflowers flaunted autumn fruit also.  In mid-September, I walked down our road and found twin orange berries hanging from the end of yellow mandarin stems.  A series of twin blue berries dangled beneath Solomon’s seal stems, bright red clumps of jack-in-the-pulpit berries bent over from their weight, and a string of pinkish-red berries hung from the stem ends of false Solomon’s seal.  Wild spikenard displayed upright clusters of wine-colored berries.  Even the small beginnings of maple-leaved viburnum shrubs had a few dark, bluish-black clumps of berries.

But the wild nut crops were thin or non-existent, probably due, in part, to a cold spell in late spring.  No wonder wildlife was busily harvesting the September fruit crops. Because nature often gives bounteously with one hand and takes with another, the more diversity we have in wildflowers, shrubs, and trees in our forests, the more likely the animals and birds are to find enough to eat even if a major food fails.
__________

All photos were taken by Dave in Plummer’s Hollow except where indicated otherwise.

Joe-pye-weed in Plummer's Hollow, 2008

Joe Pye is back.  Not the Native American herbalist for whom the wildflower is named, but the gorgeous wildflower itself that towers above a sea of goldenrod in our First Field.

Once we had dozens of joe-pye-weeds lifting their clusters of tiny, purple-colored blossoms above the lesser field flowers in August.  Then they disappeared.  We suspected deer were the culprits, and since our hunters have reduced deer numbers, joe-pye-weeds have returned.

Joe-pye-weed is named for a Native American herb doctor who is said to have wandered around rural New England in the late 1700s and offered “his” wildflower — known as “augue weed” — as a treatment for typhoid fever.  Another Native American tribe considered it an aphrodisiac.  The Chippewas made solutions of it for inflamed joints, and the Potawatomi used its toothed, ovate-shaped leaves as poultices for burns.  In the nineteenth century, Americans treated urinary and kidney infections with it, hence its alternate names, “kidney-root” and “gravel-root.”

There are four species of joe-pye-weeds in Pennsylvania. The tallest is hollow joe-pye-weed (Eupatorium fistulosum), which can grow as high as twelve feet.  Also known as “trumpet-weed,” its hollow, purple stem is covered with a whitish bloom, and its blossoms are pinkish-purple.  It grows commonly in meadows, moist thickets, along roadsides and in floodplains.

Sweet joe-pye-weed (Eupatorium purpureum) has a solid green stem that is purple only where the leaves meet the stem, and its flowers can be pale pink or purplish.  When bruised, the plant smells like vanilla.  It likes drier, more shaded habitats such as open woods and fields.  Both it and spotted joe-pye-weed (Eupatorium maculatum) grow up to eight feet tall.  The stem of the latter is purple and spotted, its clusters of flowers flat-topped and purplish, and it favors wet areas—swamps, wet thickets and floodplains.

Eastern joe-pye-weed is much shorter, its stem finely purple-spotted, and its flowers purple.  This is the rarest of the species in Pennsylvania, preferring sandy, acidic soil in swamps, bogs, marshes and swales.  All four species have leaves in whorls of three to seven on their stems.

The flowers of joe-pye-weed hum with bees and are butterfly-attractants.  Although the insects aid in pollinating the flowers, the plant is also self-pollinating because of its closely-packed flowers, some male and some female, the pollen-bearing stamens touching the pollen-catching stigmas.

A stand of hollow joe-pye along Black Moshannon Creek

Another August-blooming Eupatorium that my husband Bruce and I found growing in a sea of Queen Anne’s lace in First Field during our evening walk was a single stalk of Eupatorium perfoliatum or boneset.  It too has clusters of flowers growing atop a tall stem, but its flowers are white and its stem hairy.  Its most distinctive feature is its opposite, lance-shaped leaves that clasp and surround the stem.

Boneset is another native herbal and its name may have originated from its use in treating dengue or break-bone fever that once ravaged the southern United States.  The fever is so painful that sufferers feel as if their bones are broken.  Sipping boneset tea, made from the dried leaves, was said to relieve the pain.  Another theory was that because boneset leaves were joined together, a poultice of the plant would help to knit broken bones.  Or, most likely, boneset tea was a pain-reliever for those with broken bones.

Boneset tea seemed to be a cure-all and was sipped to treat rheumatism, pneumonia, constipation, influenza, ringworm, and expelling tapeworms.  It was even purported to cure snakebite.  At least one account, by A.D. Magner in The New System 1883, seemed to justify that belief.  A young woman who lived in Mahomeny Creek, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania was bitten by a rattlesnake one morning, Magner wrote.  After the fruitless ride of her father to a doctor, who could do nothing, 20 miles away in Red Bank, the discouraged father was returning home when he was met by a neighbor who offered to help.  The neighbor ran across his field gathering boneset, chewing some of the leaves as a poultice to put on the bite, and he planned to use the rest boiled down in milk as a drink for the afflicted woman.  By the time they reached her, it was night, her tongue was swollen and hanging out of her mouth, and she was bleeding from her moth and ears.  But the neighbor kept changing the poultices and giving her spoonfuls of the tea throughout the night, and by morning, she could close her mouth and had stopped bleeding.  The following evening she was “entirely restored,” Magner claimed.

Probably the oddest use of boneset was by the Chippewas who rubbed boneset root fibers on special whistles they made as charms for calling deer.

Dried white snakeroot stems persist throughout the winter

Not all the Eupatoriums are as useful.  The most notorious one is white snakeroot (E. rugosum).  Even the deer don’t touch it, which is why it thrives in the edges of our fields and woods in late August and early September.  Cows are not as discriminating as deer and before humans realized it poisonous properties, their cows ate it.  This tainted the milk with a poison that killed thousands of eastern North American pioneers, including Abraham Lincoln’s mother Nancy.  It took decades before people figured out the culprit.

Native Americans, on the other hand, made a tea from its roots to help cure diarrhea, painful urination, fevers and kidney stones.  They also burned it and used the smoke to revive unconscious patients.

White snakeroot, also called “richweed,” has stalked, toothed, sharply-pointed, opposite leaves below three flower stalks, each of which supports clusters of fringy, white flowers that resemble the cultivated ageratum.  It blooms from August until early October.

Still another interesting native August wildflower that is making a comeback is turtlehead.  Once it flowered abundantly in our woods beside our stream, but it too is a favorite of deer and gradually turtlehead disappeared.  Then, a couple years ago, our son Steve discovered a large planting of it, hidden by the field grasses, at the base of a wet seep above our driveway.  I was elated, especially when Baltimore checkerspot butterflies fluttered above the patch.

These gorgeous black, orange and white butterflies lay their reddish eggs in clusters as high as 700 on turtlehead, or, less commonly, on English plantain and yellow foxglove.  The eggs hatch in two weeks and the larvae construct a silken nest and feed on turtlehead leaves inside the nest.  Although the larvae stop feeding in August, they over winter in their tent.  The following spring the bristly, black and orange caterpillars leave the tent and wander off to feed not only on turtlehead leaves but also on those of English plantain, honeysuckle, lousewort, and viburnum.

A turtle head blossom, from the field above the barn

Looked at head on, the white or pinkish flowers of turtlehead resemble the head of a turtle, and its generic name Chelone is Greek for “tortoise.”  Its species name glabra means “smooth” and refers to its smooth stems and leaves.  Other names for turtlehead are “turtlebloom,” “snakehead,” “codhead,” “fishmouth,” “bitterherb,” “salt-rheum,” and “balmony.” It too was a popular herbal, and Native Americans used it as a tonic, laxative, and as a treatment for worms, jaundice, and tuberculosis.  One tribe, the Malecite Indians of the Canadian Maritime Provinces, employed it as a contraceptive.  Herbalist Charles Harris declared it good for “the removal of toxic sludge from the stomach and intestines.” I prefer its use as a Baltimore checkerspot food plant.

Orange jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) or touch-me-not grows along our mile-and-a-half long stream.  But it is a favorite deer food and is severely pruned by them as summer progresses.  But inside our three-acre deer exclosure in the bottom, wet area, it reached its full height and abundance last August.  Ruby-throated hummingbirds buzzed from blossom to blossom, their long bills pollinating the flowers by picking up their grains of white pollen from one flower and depositing them in another, all the while they were obtaining choice nectar.

Bumblebees, too, like jewelweed nectar, but they and other bees and wasps can’t reach it all inside the pendant-like blossom and often bite off the back of the flower to reach the nectar, which I’ve watched them do.  However, jewelweed doesn’t need to be pollinated by any creature because it has cleistogamous flowers (flowers than never open) that produce seeds, not enough, however, to cover the plant in flowers as the English discovered when they planted it in their gardens, where there are no hummingbirds, and called it “orange balsam” and “swing-boats,” the latter referring to its dangling flowers that also gave it the name “lady’s eardrops” and “jewelweed.”  “Snapweed” is a description of how the plant throws its seeds when you touch them, hence, “touch-me-not.”

Orange jewelweed

Native Americans used it as a skin salve for eczema, athlete’s foot, and especially, poison ivy rash.  Our son, Dave, who is highly susceptible to poison ivy, has often rubbed the fresh leaves of jewelweed on affected areas, but apparently a better solution is to stuff any part of the plant and as much as possible into a pot of water and boil it for half an hour or more until the water turns deep orange.  Bottle and refrigerate it or freeze it for longer term use and spread it on the rash.  This herbal remedy works.

Not all the native wildflowers of August have herbal properties.  Some of my latest discoveries are merely interesting and occasionally striking such as spikenard (Aralia racemosa), which I found growing on our road bank. A member of the Ginseng family, round umbels of greenish-white flowers grow on a smooth, black stem and later clusters of dark purple fruit catch my attention when walking up our road.

On that same road bank, panicled hawkweed (Hieracium paniculatum) supports a yellow, dandelion-like blossom or two on horizontal stems.  Unlike the nonnative orange and yellow hawkweeds that grow in fields, panicled hawkweed is a woodland wildflower.

So too is smooth false foxglove (Gerardia laevigata), which is said to be parasitic on the roots of oak trees.  Its bell-shaped, golden flowers blossom on our Laurel Ridge Trail but are often nipped off by deer.  Still, a few manage to bloom every August.

Smooth yellow false foxglove, photographed on Laurel Ridge

Wood nettles (Laportea canadensis) have made a terrific comeback since our deer numbers have decreased.  From none to hundreds, maybe thousands of plants, which have spread from stream bank to road bank, they have bristly stems with stinging hairs as I discovered when I first examined the unknown (to me) plant several years ago.  Their branched, greenish flowers and alternate, egg-shaped leaves are their identifying characteristics.

All of these native August wildflowers, in some way, reflect the white-tailed deer that roam our square mile.  White snakeroot thrives because deer don’t eat it.  All of the others have increased, made a comeback, or debuted because we tried and succeeded in reducing our deer herd by using skilled and dedicated hunters who take between 38 and 45 deer off our square mile of property every year.

All photos by Dave Bonta. Click on them to see larger versions.

learning a new grass

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

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

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

three-way sedge

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

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

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

Japanese stiltgrass in late September, Plummer's Hollow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Botanizing at the Beaver Dam in Rothrock State Forest

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

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

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

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

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

Then Miller showed us another grass.

“It’s a Panicum,” she said.

“What is the species?” I asked.

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

ebony jewelwing damselfly at the Beaver Dam

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

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

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

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

Lilium philadelphicum

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

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

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

The author's collection of mysterious "pots"

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

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

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

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

Cicada on the powerline right-of-way

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

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

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

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

Cicada on scrub oak

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

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

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

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

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

Empty cicada exuviae on the powerline

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

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

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

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

Video link.

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

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

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

A female cicada deposits eggs in a black locust branch

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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