A-roving I will go (New South Wales, Australia)
Peanut worms, a sea cucumber, and a blenny.

Outside My Window (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
Evidence of very stealthy rodents.

Rebecca in the Woods (northern Wisconsin)
Blue-spotted salamander and a shrew! But sadly, under logs. Boo!

Fertanish Chatter (Washington, DC area)
Termites actually look pretty cool close up. As do millipededes.

Bug Safari (southern California, I think)
Bitchin’ macro photo of the fossil-like white exoskeletons of sow bugs. Also, a black widow and a darkling bug.

Growing with Science Blog (eastern U.S.)
Very tiny snails, a beetle larva carrying a case, mites, spiders, springtails and Indian house cricket nymphs.

Wild About Ants (eastern U.S.)
Getting stung and bitten for science.

Powell River Books Blog (British Columbia)
A crushing experience.

Meandering Washington (Washington state)
Robert Browning, a wee spider, and warrior women jumping through fire, all in one blog post. Yep.

Cicero Sings (British Columbia)
Memory fails, but the ants, invasive slugs and a harvestman do not.

mainly mongoose (South Africa)
Fears and neuroses, rainbow skinks and flat lizards, and a giant plated lizard — some spectacular photos of creatures that obligingly emerge on their own from underneath rocks.

Chicken Spaghetti (Connecticut)
A frog and a possible banana slug.

Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia)
A whole lot of nothing, but then paydirt: spiders, flies, sowbug, snail and… rabbit pellets?!

Rock, Paper, Lizard (British Columbia)
The first piece of Rock-Flipping Day fiction, as far as I know.

_Cabin Girl (Northern Minnesota)
An African antelope with a beard and horns? No, but close.

Thanks to Susannah Anderson for collecting and distributing these IRFD 2011 links. Let’s do it again next year, shall we?

After 45 minutes or so I found a rock that really appealed to me. It was up off the ground by about six inches, capping a skirt of moss-clad soil on the side of a venerable old rock oak (Quercus prinus).

The rock itself was attractive, a chunk of interestingly pitted, hard sandstone. For you geology nerds, this is right on the boundary between the Ordovician (Juniata Formation) and the Silurian (Tuscarora Formation), and is therefore about 440 million years old. This rock has been here for a while.

It commanded a great view of the Allegheny Front to the west — or at least, it will when the leaves come down. (That’s our rock in the lower left corner of the picture.)

Before flipping the rock, I got my camera ready, and made the mistake of wriggling the rock to make sure I could lift it without tearing up the moss. This unfortunately had the effect of alerting the residents that I was about to barge in — kind of like an ATF agent knocking before entering a moonshiner’s cabin.

So the principle occupant was already half-way down the entrance hall by the time I raised the roof to peek in.

Here’s a close-up. (Please excuse my tragic lack of a macro lens — an IRFD necessity, one would have thought.) Clearly, this is some kind of cricket, I’m guessing in the Gryllus or field cricket genus, 11 species of which occur in the eastern United States. But I could be entirely mistaken. Without a good picture of the entire insect, it’s impossible to tell.

One thing that’s certain, though: crickets have some very cool names. There’s the two-toothed scaly cricket, the restless bush cricket, the different-horned tree cricket, the ambitious ground cricket, the two-clawed mole cricket, the taciturn wood cricket, and the complex-trilling trig.

The underside of the cricket’s rock gave evidence of other visitors. The yellowish blob was a gypsy moth egg case — kind of an odd place for one, I thought. They’re almost always on tree bark, at least a few feet off the ground. Perhaps this was an unusually fearful or unambitious gypsy moth. I’m not sure whose eggs those are.

There were also some kind of droppings under the rock. It’s tempting to say they belong to the cricket, and a Google image search for “cricket droppings” does seem to suggest they might be. But who knows?

I scrambled fifty feet downslope and a couple million years up the geologic column to the upper portion of a talus slope, a common feature of the aforementioned Tuscarora Formation. In past years, the talus has proved an attractive but unfruitful source of good flipping rocks. I was hoping it might be different this year due to all the rain.

This rock was helpfully situated in a patch of sunlight (good for photography) but still far from the hot, dry center of the boulder field. Underneath, though, all I found was a little bit of soil and lot more rock.

Clinging to the bottom of the quartzitic slab, though, was a very cool-looking thing. This time, a Google image search was more definitive: I’m pretty sure it’s the remains of a hickory tussock moth (Lophocampa caryae) cocoon. We have the bristly white caterpillars all over the mountain, and the cocoon looks very much like some of the pictures online. The hairs on the cocoon are evidently recycled from the caterpillar:

The tiny hairs are grown by caterpillars in their final stage of development, and are transferred by the pupating larva to the outside of its spherical silken cocoon where the hairs serve as a defense against predators. The cocoons are constructed under bark of trees or objects on the ground, and can be found throughout the late summer, fall, winter, and spring months.

While I was flipping rocks, a half-mile along the ridge to the southwest my mother was checking out the seasonal pools — we tend to call them “vernal ponds” because they vanish in June and usually don’t reappear until the following March, but clearly that term doesn’t quite fit what’s there now. While gazing at the overflowing pools, Mom noticed a hickory tussock moth caterpillar that had fallen from one of the trees and landed in the water. Far from drowning, however, it was swimming — and making pretty good progress, she said. It made it all the way across the small pond while she watched.

If you’re new around here, you may be wondering what this is all about. Please go read Susannah’s post and all should be made clear. (You can also browse past IRFD posts here at Via Negativa, where it all got started five years ago.) If you’re on Flickr (whence the cool badge in this post, courtesy of Jason at Cephalopodcast), please join the International Rock-Flipping Day group and add your photos and videos to the pool next Sunday (or Monday, if you have other things going on that day). We do allow schoolteachers only to adjust the date and participate on either the preceding Friday or the following Monday. Everyone else should do their rock-flipping on Sunday. If you are a religious Christian and are wondering if this kind of activity is permitted on the Lord’s day, Jesus assures me that it is.

*

In other blog carnival-related news, the latest Festival of the Trees is up at Slugyard. It’s a back-to-school edition: Slugyard University. As Dave Barry would say, I swear I’m not making any of this up. Here at Via Negativa, slugs, sowbugs, and other creatures that live under or around rocks are held in high esteem. As indeed they should be. Jesus said they are going to inherit the earth.

my first rock for IRFD 2010 (click all photos to see larger versions on Flickr)

So it was with mixed feelings that I slung the camera around my neck and set out to see what, if anything, I might find under some rocks. Due to the severity of the drought, I had a feeling that the answer would be “not much.” But I guess it all depends on what you’re looking for.

I started with a rock in the corner of the little herb/butterfly garden in front of my house, next to the concrete walk — a rock I placed there myself more than 15 years ago for decoration. If IRFD were held in the northern-hemisphere spring, I’m sure it would be good for an assortment of earthworms, sow bugs and ground beetles, but yesterday I saw nothing but shadows.

flipping the first rock

Still, they were interesting shadows, I thought.

I wandered up into the woods. The sunlight was still only intermittent, so I had to stand around and wait for it to emerge from a cloud to see what my next target would be. To my delight, it illuminated a large, charismatic rock at the edge of the trail.

rock #2

This rock must also be one I’ve moved fairly recently, since it sits on the downhill side of a drainage ditch I dug about ten years ago. It didn’t look as if it had been moved since, though. Despite its vague resemblance to a ship, it was firmly anchored in place, and required two hands to lift. Once balanced on end, I held it with one hand while I snapped pictures with the other. I felt like the worst sort of paparazzo,

ants under rock #2

the kind who doesn’t care if some of his photographic subjects end up crushed and killed, as long as he gets the shot. Lady Di comparisons might seem overblown, but if ant colonies have queens, surely her daughters can all be considered princesses? And royal families are alike in shunning the spotlight, are they not? The revelation of their ultimate powerlessness against our common enemy must panic them in a unique way. Think of the First Emperor of China and his increasingly grandiose schemes to cheat death. I eased the rock back into place as gently as I could and started up the Short-Circuit Trail toward the spruce grove at the top of Plummer’s Hollow.

wild turkey feather

I wasn’t sure how many more undersides of rocks I’d be able to photograph — the sun was in more than it was out — but it was a nice afternoon for a ramble. I couldn’t get enough of the odor of just-rained-upon woods. Acorns rained down all around me in the slightest breeze, though somehow I managed to avoid a direct hit. A mosquito buzzed my left ear, but one swipe of the hand was enough to discourage her, and I never heard another all afternoon.

The tail feather of a wild turkey lay across the trail like a dropped pen. Once when I was a teenager and heavily into calligraphy, I actually did fashion an ink pen from such a feather, so I’m not being entirely fanciful. These days, though, I think it’s better to leave them for the kids who go walking on our trails from time to time. I confess, I prefer the cheapest of disposable ballpoints. I’m not one of those writers who fetishizes his tools.

rock #3

I was on the lookout for rocks that seemed to have been in the same spot for a while — but not for so long that they were half-covered with moss that I’d make a mess of. (Yes, it’s true: I have a harder time killing moss than killing ants.) I found one above the trail that appeared to have all the right signs — splotches of lichen, leaf litter almost burying it — but when I flipped it, I found nothing but more leaves.

leafy ground under rock #3

Two thoughts crossed my mind in quick succession: “That’s really beautiful” and “This is bullshit.” Obviously I was mistaken about how long it had lain there. Bears are always flipping rocks in search of ant larvae, and whether for that reason or some other, the leaves under this rock didn’t look as if they could be more than two years old. I snapped several photos to make sure I had at least one good one, then rocked the rock back into place among this year’s leaves, which are already turning and beginning to fall, a month early, on account of the drought.

I crossed the trail and flipped the first rock I could find. It was neither especially charismatic, nor did it look as if it been in its current position for very long — it sat high and dry (here’s a photo for the curious). Yet when I tipped it up, I found a gorgeous red centipede.

centipede under rock #4

I mean, it was nothing uncommon, I don’t think, but it says something about my level of desperation that I was thrilled to see it, especially when it paused just long enough for me to snap a couple of unblurred shots. I have neither a macro lens nor quick reflexes, so shots like this one are very much hit-or-miss for me. I started thinking how lucky I was — and then how lucky I was to be foolish enough to consider this lucky. “I live like a hundred-legged king,” I said to myself, “in a palace with a stone roof and a dirt cellar.” Sometimes a metaphor is the only thing that stands between me and a black hole of self-reflexivity.

A few feet farther along, a small dragon was out for a stroll in the opposite direction. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it would’ve become if my five-year-old niece were along. The boring, grown-up name for this is a red eft (which makes almost as little sense, since it is clearly orange rather than red).

red eft

This is the terrestrial stage of the red-spotted newt, an otherwise aquatic amphibian which, as a teenager, sheds its gills and leaves the creek or pond to go on walkabout for a few years. They’re a fairly common sight here on the mountain after a rain. The highway-construction-cone color means roughly the same thing in the non-human world as it does to us: “Look out!” They’re poisonous. My mother once stroked the side of an eft’s head, something it seemed to enjoy — and her finger tingled for a while afterwards.

By the time I got to the spruce grove, there was a steady breeze and things were drying off. A spider web on one branch still held onto its hoard of raindrops, but only because it was in the shade.

spiderweb droplets on Norway spruce

Then my glance strayed upwards, and I saw a monarch butterfly soaring high overhead. Then another, and another. I turned to look northeast, down our goldenrod-yellow field, and more monarchs fluttered past. As I stood there with my mouth agape, I lost count of the dozens, probably hundreds of orange voyagers sailing up out of Plummer’s Hollow en route to Mexico. I struggled with a momentary urge to set off down-ridge after them.

I walked back along Sapsucker Ridge Trail, pausing to turn just one more rock in the bed of one of the dried-up ephemeral pools, on the off chance there might be a salamander under it. There wasn’t, of course. If I’d really wanted salamanders, I’d have gone exploring in the creek, but we’ve done that on past years.

rock #5 and its depression

The thing that impressed me about this last rock was simply the tight, perfect fit between its bumpy contour and the contours of its bed, which was a little hard to capture in a two-dimensional photo. The dirt had turned slightly reddish and bluish with the minerals from the rock, and was webbed with fungal mycelia — the forest’s version of the internet.

I was reminded too of an older technology: an open book. Especially the kind of book that pulls you in with some humdinger of a first line and doesn’t let you go for days, sleepless and shaking. “House made of twilight,” I muttered, thinking of the Navajo Nightway Ceremony text and its “house made of dawn.” I went home and wrote a poem with all the words I found under the rocks.

(Update) Here are the other of IRFD 2010 bloggers and photographers (thanks, Susannah!) :

Lynda at mainlymongoose
Kordite in the Flickr group
Bill Murphy at Fertanish Chatter
Malia at The Shell and Mantle
Rebecca In The Woods
Paul, The Obligate Scientist
Wanderin’ Weeta. Here and on Flickr. Plus one to be posted soon.
Kate St. John on Outside My Window
Ontario Wanderer on Flickr
JayLeigh in Pacific Northwest Nature for Families
Fred Schueler: a Google document, copied here.
Rikaja in Slovakia
Bev Wigney at Journey to the Centre
Hugh, at Rock, Paper, Lizard

That’s kind of what International Rock-Flipping Day is like. Now four years old, this timeless holiday — celebrated this year on Grandparents’ Day — is fun for the whole family. Remember to wear gloves, watch for scorpions and poisonous snakes, and replace all rocks exactly the way you found them. Bring a camera, sketch pad or notebook and record your findings, then post the results to your blog and/or the official Rock-Flipping Day Flickr group. Any and all forms of documentation are welcome: still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry. Email your blog link to the coordinator, Susanna at Wanderin’ Weeta: wanderinweeta [at] gmail [dot] com.

You can flip more than one rock, but you should flip them on Sunday, Sept. 12 — unless this is a classroom exercise, in which case we’ll accept rock-flipping results from Friday or Monday. If you don’t have a blog, you can set one up in a couple minutes using the dead-simple Posterous or Tumblr platforms.

Susanna will compile and post a list of links, which participants will be encouraged to re-blog for maximum international rock-flipping camaraderie and link-love. If you’re a Twitterite, the canonical hash-tag is #rockflip. We encourage the sharing of links on Facebook, but would prefer IRFD posts to be fully public on the open web. For more information, read the official announcement at Wanderin’ Weeta.

It’s International Rock-Flipping Day, so I thought I’d try making a poetry video with footage of the underside of rocks, shot this afternoon in the woods above my house. The poem is a couple of years old, and may be found at my online collection Shadow Cabinet.

UPDATE: Here’s the complete list of bloggers who participated in IRFD this year.

Wanderin’ Weeta
The Natural Capital
Fertanish Chatter
Roundrock Journal
Just Playin’ Around
What It’s like on the Inside
KrisAbel
BugSafari
Sofia_Alexandra
Growing with Science
ChickenSpaghetti
NaturalNotes
Yips and Howls
Rock, Paper, Lizard
Outside My Window
The dog geek
Dave Ingram’s Natural History Blog
Unplug Your Kids
ORCA: Observar, Recordar, Crecer y Aprender
Will Rees Fine Woodworking …
The Marvelous in Nature
Pohangina Pete
Ontario Wanderer
Bare Baby Feet
The Homefront Lines
Crazy Maize World
Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival

And don’t forget to check the Flickr group, too.

Please direct all rock-flipping correspondence this year to Susanna: wanderinweeta [at] gmail [dot] com (email spelled out to foil the evil robot servants of the spam lords). Bev and I had a great time being IRFD coordinators the first two years, and we’re sorry we can’t continue,* but I’m sure Susanna will do a terrific job. Please help spread the word about the new date. Happy flipping!
__________

*In case anyone is interested in our lame excuses: With all that’s going on these days at qarrtsiluni and the other sites I manage or attempt to contribute to, my online time is already pretty much spoken for. And Bev is in even worse shape time-wise, having just sold and moved out of her house and being on the verge of a new “journey to the center.” We both do plan to get out on the 20th, though, and flip some rocks!

For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.
Job 5:23

Dear Teju,

Rocks are the roofs of a city
we barely know. On a dry ridgetop
at the end of a dry month,
I find little under them but burrows
leading deeper into the earth,
a colony of ants frantic
at the sudden inversion,
and on the talus slope, more rocks:
a puzzle that was put together wrong
8,000 years ago, but over the millenia
has settled into its own kind
of rightness. I follow a bear’s trail
through the woods, marked by black
cherry-pitted cairns of bear shit,
& note the series of overturned rocks,
flipped by an expert claw.
Only a human, uneasy at the way
our grotesque bodies no longer
quite fit into the matrix,
would ever return a flipped rock
to its bed. Birds have nests,
foxes have holes; culture
is not a thing unique to humans.
The song that makes the songbird
must be taught. Instinct borrows
always from improvisation —
the true two-step. But watch
a human child, too young
to hunger for our made world’s
humdrum El Dorados, playing
in the creek with a stick —
how she projects her dreams
into the teeming, pulsing flow,
how she punctuates
& fabricates — & tell me
this is not more wondrous
than any gold, this human
being!

If you don’t have a blog (and even if you do), you can upload photos to Flickr (it’s free to join) and post them to the IRFD group there. I will also be glad to post photos and other material here for anyone who’d rather not bother with Flickr. (My co-conspirator Bev Wigney has been forced by circumstances beyond her control to step back from heavy involvement in the festivities this year.)

I will post about my own rock-flipping activities later today or tomorrow, but I will continue to add links at the bottom of this post to all the IRFD-related posts I can find — I’ll republish it multiple times a day for the next several days as more stuff comes in. And just like last year, we encourage everyone who blogs about Rock-Flipping Day to link to everyone else, as well. Let’s keep things as decentralized as possible, read and comment on each other’s posts, and share the link-love. If you email me with a link (bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, or use the Contact form on this site), I will include you in the list of folks to email daily for the next three days with all the links I can find. Alternately, you can simply plan on bookmarking and revisiting this post and copying and pasting from here; scroll down for the complete list.

Also, as I noted in this year’s guidelines, we’d like to award two prizes, one to whomever documents the greatest biodiversity under a single rock, and the other to whomever appears to have the most genuine epiphany as a result of flipping rocks. Bev and I haven’t had a chance to discuss how we will choose the winners, but it seems to me that the latter prizewinner in particular could be decided by popular acclamation. Leave comments here or email me with your nominations in one or both categories.

Here’s something you can sing while you’re out peering under rocks, from a Via Negativa reader and regular commenter who is tragically blogless.

The Rock-Flipper Song
by Joan Ryan

(with apologies to Fiddler on the Roof’s “Matchmaker”)

Rock-flipper, rock-flipper, flip me a rock.
Please do not knock
This game as “schlock.”
Rock flipper, rock flipper, look in the yard
And find me the perfect rock.

Rock flipping’s fun-dipping under a stone
Not far from home.
Hey, do not moan!
Day tripping, rock flipping yields so much fun
And even when you’re alone.

Chorus:

Our Johnny
Hopes for a lizard

Our Benny
Looks for some worms

Our Sara,
Just found a beetle

All kids like
Something that squirms.

Rock flipper, rock flipper
Find me a cache.
Careful! Don’t mash
Some of your stash.
Rock flipper, deep dipper
Into the loam,
Please find me a pet of my own.

* * *

Anticipatory posts (a selection)

Marcia Bonta — Rock-Flipping (summary of IRFD 2007)
fish without faces — the tanager and the scorpion (poem)
Fragments from Floyd — Today is Rock Flipping Day: Get Out There!
Going Like Sixty — International Rock Flipping Day: the First Sunday in September

* * *

Rock-Flipping Day Reports

Pohanginapete (Pohangina Valley, Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Blaugustine (London, England)
Nature Remains (Ohio, USA)
Pensacola Daily Photo (Florida, USA)
KatDoc’s World (Ohio, USA)
Notes from the Cloud Messenger (Ontario, Canada)
Brittle Road (Dallas, Texas)
Sherry Chandler (Kentucky, USA)
osage + orange (Illinois, USA)
Rock Paper Lizard (British Columbia, Canada)
The Crafty H (Virginia, USA)
Chicken Spaghetti (Connecticut, USA)
A Passion for Nature (New York, USA)
The Dog Geek (Virginia, USA)
Blue Ridge blog (North Carolina, USA)
Bug Girl’s Blog (Michigan, USA)
chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
Pines Above Snow(Maryland, USA)
Beth’s stories (Maine, USA)
A Honey of an Anklet (Virginia, USA)
Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
The Northwest Nature Nut (Oregon, USA)
Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
The New Dharma Bums (California, USA)
The Marvelous in Nature (Ontario, Canada)
Via Negativa (Pennsylvania, USA)
Mrs. Gray’s class, Beatty-Warren Middle School (Pennsylvania, USA)
Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
Pocahontas County Fair (West Virginia, USA)
Let’s Paint Nature (Illinois, USA)
Sleeping in the Heartland (Midwestern U.S.)
Three Oaks (Ohio, USA)

* * *

Photos

IRFD group on Flickr
IRFD gallery on Via Negativa

Please help spread the word. For more information, see the complete Rock-Flipping Day file.

*

Festival of the Trees #27 is up.

*

Postal Poetry shifts to a M-W-F posting schedule, starting today with a postcard from Tom Montag and Marja-Leena Rathje, “blue.”

*

After briefly alighting at WordPress.com, the dynamic group of female online poets calling themselves the Poetry Collaborative have settled into beautiful new digs at thepoetrycollaborative.org. This is an exciting, ground-breaking site: where else can you watch collaboratively written poems grow by the day and by the hour, and be privy to side discussions between the authors? Start following the PoCo now and you should have clear bragging rights in six months or so. Because it’s gonna be huge, the Huffington Post of the poetry blogosphere. You read it here first.