Just back from the Carolinas (with a horrible 3-hour detour in PA: 17 miles! What is it about roads and your state?) and had an instant of vertigo looking at the overhang. It looks like a magical staircase for an instant, before the regular old seeing kicks in. The feather is lovely.

I once again had a howling, grieving reaction to what’s happening in the mountains at home. Have to write about that soon.

That cathedral post struck a nerve, I guess: what a lot of warnings…

I mentioned on bev’s porcupine post that I’ve only seen a porcupine once, and that was over 30 years ago. I was living up in the “pot-growing capitol” of California. Lots of hippie farmers and their dogs in the hills. Porcupines and dogs don’t mix very well at all. A dog with a mouth full of quills is not a happy thing.

Laura – Porcupines are fairly recent arrivals in central PA, though we’ve had them here in Plummer’s Hollow since I was a kid. Places south of us, near the Mason-Dixon Line, are just beginning to see them. The other newcomer is the fisher, which was reintroduced to the state about ten years ago – one of the few natural predators of porcupines. We’ve had at least one fisher here in the hollow, last winter, but probably had them even before that, judging by the number of dead porcupines we found. You’d know better than me whether northern NJ has fishers or porcupines, though I suspect the latter, at least.

I’ve only seen a porcupine once, in the Adirondacks, and it was resting or feeding on the thinnest of branches – quite a surprise.
I wonder if they’re at all common here in NJ and I’ve just missed seeing them.

Must be nice to live in a place where you can drive up into the winter and back into spring again. The West is cool that way.