Category: Nature/Ecology

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Christmas bird count: the wild and the quiet

Saturday, December 17, 2005: Christmas Bird Count. For my mother and my brother Steve, this is, I think, a bigger deal than Christmas itself. For me – a non-birder despite my involvement with the Audubon chapter that sponsors our local count – it affords a rare opportunity to follow my mother around on her morning walk. Since this is her main source for the natural history observations that fuel her writing, she almost always goes out alone. But on the CBC, it’s always a good idea to have a second set of eyes and ears. And this year, with an unprecedented fifteen inches of snow on the ground, I figured she’d appreciate having someone to break a snowshoe trail for her.

So strictly speaking, I wouldn’t be following her; she’d follow me. But it didn’t seem to matter, since neither of us were in any hurry. We knew Steve had gotten up at the crack of dawn and driven the short distance from his house in town to the bottom of the mountain. Together with our friend Todd – a beginning birder – he’d take care of the more bird-rich half of the property, down in the hollow, as well as along the Little Juniata River, which flows through the gap.

I had meant to get up early and listen for owls, but wouldn’t you know it: for the first time in ages, I slept in past daybreak and didn’t rise until 6:30. The first bird I saw or heard as I sat out on the porch drinking my coffee was a mourning dove, fluttering up from the stream on musical wings.

“Mourning dove!” I announced by way of a greeting when I walked in the door of my parents’ house. “Oh boy, do we have doves!” Mom said. A flock of fifty swarmed the birdseed below the feeders, scarfing up the cracked corn. We watched them for a moment in silence. “Well, if anything happens,” Mom said – meaning, I guess, if the world economy suddenly collapses, triggering another Great Depression – “we’ll have plenty to eat!”

But barring that, we’d only be bagging birds in the most figurative sense. Come to think of it, the hundred-year-old tradition of the CBC is based on a conscious rejection of an older, more sanguinary tradition: the Side Hunt. Those four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree? They were for supper.

*

It’s 7:45 when we finally leave the house. At 20 degrees Fahrenheit, there are few early birds and even fewer worms. The gibbous moon hangs low over the ridge. At 7:50, we stop a stone’s throw beyond the barn for our first “pish break.” Pursing her lips, Mom lets loose with a series of urgent vowel-less syllables – pshh pshh pshh – which in avian Esperanto must mean something like, “Free beer! Free beer!” Some species respond to it more readily than others, but generally speaking, pishing is a good way to see if any dickey birds might be lurking in the weeds. Right now, though, nothing stirs. “They’re all at the feeders,” Mom says.

7:55. American crow, a distant cawing. The faint yank yank yank of a nuthatch. I look back. Mom has her pocket notebook out and is scribbling away, taking notes for next year’s December column in Pennsylvania Game News, no doubt. I take note of this in my own pocket notebook.

“What are you writing about me?”

“What are you writing about me?”

8:05. Juncos, and maybe a white-throated sparrow or two, flitting around in a nest of fallen trees overgrown with dried grasses at the edge of Margaret’s Woods. I circle the thicket, trying to drive them out so Mom can count them.

“They hide too well, Memsahib!”

At 8:17, at the top edge of the field, we hit our first small clot of avian activity. The weak sunlight is just starting to warm the southeast-facing, wooded slope of what we call Sapsucker Ridge. I tally them by ear: black-capped chickadee, titmouse, downy woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch. Mom scans the grape thickets, looking mainly for those birds that don’t come to the feeders: the lonely and the rum, I think, remembering the song chanted at the great winter bonfire in the children’s classic Moominland Midwinter.

Here come the dumb,
The lonely and the rum,
The wild and the quiet.
Thud goes the drum.

Mom takes note of the downies, since they rarely come into the feeder. They are, however, neither lonely nor particularly rum, as woodpeckers go.

“Oh look, they’re courting! Oh, isn’t that cute!” It is.

8:33. A pileated woodpecker flies silently overhead, following the edge of the woods. We pause to admire its characteristic undulating flight. Pileateds are definitely rum.

A couple hundred feet farther along, we run across our first set of coyote tracks. There’s a scant quarter-inch of fresh snow on top of the crust – perfect tracking conditions. And this morning we’ll get a pretty good idea of just how many coyotes are roaming the mountain: lots! This is one of the biggest ironies of winter, I think. Though life is at its lowest ebb, what life still stirs is much more in evidence now than during the warmer months, when a thick green veil lies over the land.

I follow the coyote tracks a short distance into the woods, ignoring my mother’s mild complaints at the extra walking. While the crust is strong enough to support the coyotes, we break through with each step, and where the snow has fallen on top of a thick thatch of weeds, my snowshoes sink down well over a foot. But the reward isn’t long in coming: a sudden blur of loud wingbeats erupts from the snow at the base of a wild grape tangle. “Ruffed grouse!”

So there’s our partridge, as some folks insist on calling grouse. Now where’s that pear tree?

*

8:50. We’ve been birding for one hour now. We’ve made it at least 300 yards from the house.

The sun slowly grows brighter as the clouds in the east thin out. My mother scans the grape thickets on the far side of the small powerline right-of-way that bisects our property at right angles to the ridges. “There’s a red-bellied,” she calls out. “And a pair of pileateds.” I’m taking pictures of a fresh deer bed with a coyote track running through the middle of it. We’re standing at the base of a huge black cherry tree, wondering if maybe we ought to pick up the pace a little, when the pileateds launch themselves into the air one after the other, cross the powerline, and land on the trunk of the cherry tree right above our heads. We stand open-mouthed as they hitch themselves briefly up the trunk, their great heads pivoting on their straight, sleek bodies like African gods, red crests brilliant in the sun.

8:57. A distant, nasal ark ark ark. “Raven!” we call out in unison.

We take another short loop through the woods, right beyond the powerline. There’s just enough snow to bury most of the fallen logs that are directly on the ground; this is where having snowshoes really pays off.

9:05. Teakettle, teakettle! Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle! Chirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp! “Ah, there he is!” Mom says happily. But who wouldn’t feel happy after hearing a Carolina wren? You could have the gun in your mouth with your finger on the trigger, ready to end it all, and the song of a Carolina wren would still make you smile. If then the bird himself hopped into view, bobbing up and down and pointing his inquisitive bill in every direction, your heart would melt, I swear. Even in the darkest, coldest days of the year, depression can never linger long in a home haunted, as ours is, by Carolina wrens.

9:10. Just as we emerge from the woods, I notice a pair of large, rainbow-colored spots in the cirrus clouds on either side of the sun. “Look – sun dogs!” It seems like a very good omen.

Still heading along the edge of Sapsucker Ridge, we’re on the alert for its namesake the yellow-bellied sapsucker, which Mom spotted here just yesterday. She logs a cardinal, then a small flock of goldfinches. Something raps on a tree, a little louder and slower than a downy woodpecker. “Now that one sounds like a hairy, wouldn’t you say?” Yes, I would.

9:32. We’ve just begun moving after perhaps our hundredth pause, disappointed that the sapsucker still hasn’t shown. I glance over at the ridge and see a large black shape laboring up the hillside. “Look! Look!” Mom finally glances up from her notebook. “Bears!”

A second, smaller bear emerges from behind the rootball of a fallen tree fifty feet away – legacy of last January’s icestorm, which felled two-thirds of the trees in this section of the woods – and follows the first bear up the side of the ridge.

My camera is in my hand, but I decide to keep watching rather than to squander this sighting with one eye shut and the other pressed to the viewfinder. The best picture I could get with this camera probably wouldn’t be worth sharing, anyway.

After the second bear disappears we wait for a few seconds to see if any more will emerge. There seem to have been two mother bears with cubs roaming our end of the mountain this year, and oddly enough – judging by the numerous reports from our deer-hunting friends over the past few weeks – neither have gone into hibernation yet. One mother has three cubs, but we decide this must be other one, who has but a single cub. I climb cautiously up to the rootball, following a line of bear tracks probably from the day before, dusted over by last night’s snow.

“You gotta come see this,” I tell my mother. “It’s a regular den!” I help her up over the couple of rough spots and she joins me at the edge of the cluster of logs, peering down into a bear-shaped hole. In all her years of tramping through the woods, this is a first.

We worry a little about whether we’ve disturbed them just as they were finally getting settled down for the winter, but knowing what resilient creatures bears can be, and how many similar configurations of logs and rootballs dot the mountain now, we figure this probably won’t set them back too much.

The woods had been quiet for at least five minutes before we saw the bears. Now, a minute later, the trees and grapevines are once again alive with small fluttering forms. Poor Sam, sings a white-throated sparrow – and stops, as if thinking better of it. It’s too glorious a morning for such a mournful tune.

*

It’s the end of our second hour, and we’ve made it as far as the thirty-year-old grove of Norway spruce at the top of First Field, a quarter mile from the house. Once again, I persuade my mother to go off-trail. “Let’s just cut through the corner of the grove,” I say. “Might be a long-eared owl in there, you never know!” Perhaps it takes a non-birder to trust in such far-fetched scenarios, but several years before, Mom had indeed found one of those rare winter visitors in the grove, though not in time for the CBC.

I hear an odd chirp I don’t recognize. “That sounds like a kinglet!” I hear Mom say, and she suddenly starts breaking her own trail into the grove. But as luck would have it, it’s me, without binoculars, who gets the visual confirmation. One of the two chirpers flits into the tree right in front of me. She pauses for a few seconds on an open bough, and the bright, angelic glow at the top of her head leaves no doubt at the identification. “That’s a golden-crowned kinglet, all right.”

“Oh, wonderful! That’s my favorite winter bird! But I haven’t been able to find a one in this grove,” Mom says.

That’s par for the course. No matter how ardently one scouts things out in advance, Christmas Bird Count always brings surprises, I don’t know why. That’s the magic of it, I guess. Even people like me, with a natural aversion to counting and listing, can’t avoid sharing in that to some extent, just as the presence of children can make one see Christmas as something more than an empty celebration of greed.

10:05. We’re halfway along the Road to the Far Field, following a snowshoe trail I’d broken the day before. It feels like a superhighway compared to where we’ve been. Suddenly Mom stops and raises her binoculars. “There’s a bluebird up ahead! Ohmigosh. I haven’t seen one in weeks.” As we stand there marveling, the whole little flock of bluebirds flies right toward us and passes overhead, six of them in all. So far, I’m doing just fine without binoculars.

We pause to admire a small mammal track: an intestine-like knot of narrow tunnels pushed up right in the most recent quarter-inch of snow. “Was this a vole?” I ask. Mom looks at it carefully. “No, I’d say that’s a shrew – probably a least shrew, by the size of it.”

10:25. We reach Coyote Bench, as Mom calls it, and brush off the snow with our gloves. We each have insulated cushions strapped to our belts, and this seems like a good time to use them. With all the leaves down, the bench affords a good view of Sinking Valley, and Mom soon has her binoculars trained on the homes of our mostly unknown neighbors below.

“Look at that castle! I wonder who lives there?”

“Wasn’t that the place that X built, after clearcutting and selling off his land on the mountain?” X’s property bordered ours for a short distance at the end of the Far Field; he owned a several-hundred-acre piece of mountain asset and raped it twice in the space of thirty years. Not much grows over there now but hayscented fern and striped maple.

“Oh yeah, maybe you’re right. Why in the world would anyone want to live in a place like that, though? You’d spend all your time cleaning! And then he died a year or two after he built it.”

“Must’ve been all the cleaning.”

This leads us into a half-hour, rambling discussion of environmental issues and the possibilities for social change, about which my mother tends to take an even gloomier view than I do. Still, we’re cheered by the sight of Amish haystacks right on the other side of the road from the “castle.” Sinking Valley is still quite rural, and the Amish are managing to buy up many of the farms as they go on the market, keeping the subdivisions at bay – at least for now.

*

The hoped-for winter wren never puts in an appearance, so we resume our walk, shortly emerging into the Far Field and breaking fresh trail once again. The next hour doesn’t turn up any new species, though we are able to count all the common feeder birds out here, a mile from the house. Down at the end of the field, we scare up our second grouse for the day, and a little later I find its meandering tracks. Where it hopped over a fallen tree, it left a pair of neat wing prints on the far side.

A strenuous loop through the woods at the back corner of the field turns up nothing, and I feel bad for having put my mother through it, though she’s a pretty good sport about it. But on the way back through the field, the masses of dried goldenrod are full of foraging sparrows and chickadees. A raven sails past for the third time this morning, and a moment later we hear a slightly higher-pitched answer to his croaking cry. Since many years the ravens don’t make an appearance on the CBC at all, we feel quite fortunate in being able to log them both.

11:55. Just as we’re heading into the woods toward home, a large flock of starlings swirls up out of the valley and lands in the treetops on the far side of the field, where we’d just been. This is, believe it or not, a species we don’t get for the bird count every year, here on the mountain. Mom trains her glasses on the noisy birds, and makes a ballpark estimate of 150. After three or four minutes, the flock lifts off and heads down-ridge.

Very little is stirring now; this is what birders call the mid-day lull. We make it back to the house in just half an hour. Steve has arrived before us, and he and Dad – who spent the morning on feeder duty – point out our resident sharp-shinned hawk perched on a log a little ways up in the woods, ripping at a junco. They both got to see her swoop in and chase her prey around the cedar tree right next to the house – an almost daily drama, now. The red-breasted nuthatch has been in and out all morning, too, Dad says.

Steve and Mom compare notes. As we figured, the golden-crowned kinglets, bluebirds and ruffed grouse were our only unique species contributions. Steve got all the others we did, plus flicker, brown creeper, winter wren, and two rare winter visitors that Mom had scouted out for him in the days leading up to the count: a towhee and a hermit thrush. He was no luckier than we were with sapsuckers, and confirmed our sense that, for the first time ever, cedar waxwings seem to be absent from the mountain for the CBC. (In fact, as we’d learn that evening at the bird count covered dish supper, no one saw waxwings anywhere in the count circle.)

But Steve and Todd were amply rewarded for their strenuous hike (neither wore snowshoes) by the fresh fisher tracks they found all over the northwest side of the hollow. After the couple of sightings this past fall, there seems little doubt now that Plummer’s Hollow boasts at least one resident fisher – one of the rarest mammals in Pennsylvania.

Steve waits until we finish enthusing about our black bears, then oh-so-casually mentions his best sighting of the day: a late migrating golden eagle. He and Mark got one for the CBC once before, several years ago, but this one was much lower, and it soared right overhead. “You wouldn’t have needed binoculars at all,” he says. It was that kind of day.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Batty

I don’t believe it: 39 years old, and I am still having back-to-school dreams. It was my last dream before waking, though it takes me a few minutes to register the absurdity of the situation. I’m standing in the shower thinking, Jesus, do ex-convicts still have nightmares about prison twenty-two years after their release?

Actually, the dream was fairly innocuous. I was my present, more-or-less confident, wise-cracking self, and even flirted a bit with the homeroom teacher when I arrived a minute late and had to submit to some extra paperwork. She responded with amusement. Neither of us had to clarify the situation, so familiar in the funhouse mirror world of my dream life: the System had finally caught up with me, and as penance for all the tests I’d taken without studying, the homework I’d refused to take home and the hundreds of hours of class time I’d spent daydreaming, I had to go back and take twelfth grade over.

Almost everybody has these dreams, I guess. I wonder whether they qualify as symptoms of mild post-traumatic stress disorder? If so, that might explain a lot. Certainly, our society-wide acceptance of the therapeutic effects of punishment, sensory deprivation and imprisonment can be attributed in part to the fact that we’ve almost all gone through this system and internalized its lessons. But what do psychiatric professionals say about back-to-school dreams? I’m not sure what the consensus would be, but I suspect “the Dream Doctor” is fairly typical when he assures Cheryl in NYC that

[B]ack to school dreams do not reflect a desire to return to school, nor do they reflect emotional trauma from our school years. Instead, the dreams reflect challenges in our current life–usually in a career or social context–about whether or not we will “graduate to the next level.” What’s the connection? The pressure we feel today reminds us of how we used to feel back in high school or college before we took an exam: nervous, and wondering if we will “make the grade.”

Back to school dreams occur when we are stressed about completing a project at work, for example, or if we are switching careers, experiencing money problems, or are trying to “graduate” to a new position in our romantic lives.

Hmmm. Yes, that’s me.

Come to think of it, though, I was involved in one highly stressful situation right before bed, though I wasn’t the one having a bad night. My parents buzzed me on the intercom around 9:30 and asked if I’d mind coming up and helping them get a bat out of the house. I grabbed my coat and raced up the hill.

It was on the floor of the sitting room, down among the boots and slippers, doing a pretty good job of resembling some kind of bizarre winter garment – a thumb warmer, perhaps, or a toddler’s fuzzy boot. Due to its size, appearance and evident cold-hardiness, we decided it must be a big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus). Based on past experience trying to evict other, more fearful species of bats in the summer months, we expected an ordeal, but it turned out to be no trouble to slip a plastic basin over it and slide a piece of cardboard underneath. It emitted a single, high-pitched squeal. We carried it outside and lifted the basin. I held the cardboard in one hand – mindful of the species’ reputation for ferocity – and my camera in the other. FLASH. It bared its teeth – good! Hold that pose! FLASH. Then it spun around and launched itself into the night. I went to review my pictures and found I’d left the lens cap on.

So you’d think I would’ve dreamt about small, fierce creatures of the night… or at least my anxiety concerning my inability to photograph wildlife. But all I remember is an earlier dream, sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning, which also concerned education. It seemed that I was a high-paid tutor of would-be poets. (Don’t laugh!) One of them mentioned that she was a high school administrator, and asked me if I had a theory of teaching. “Give me a moment,” I said – and woke up. A theory of teaching? Hmm. I lay there thinking about it. Yes, maybe I would have to have one. But it would need to be flexible, changing from pupil to pupil, even from hour to hour.

Dialogue, I thought. Apart from the give and take of conversation – including the internal dialogues we have with our favorite authors – it’s all just technical training or indoctrination, isn’t it?

I guess it makes sense that, when I finally drifted back to sleep, the roles would be reversed and I would find myself a student once again. In my waking life, too, I honestly feel that I haven’t learned anything of value in my nearly forty years on the planet, and perhaps this provokes a mild state of anxiety. Shouldn’t I really know something by now?

The other students all appeared to be of high school age, though the only one I focused on – because he happened to be talking to the teacher when I walked in – was one of my old classmates. That’s one of the things that struck me later on, standing in the shower. Why the heck would this guy be in my dream? True, he was the state heavyweight wrestling champ, and one of the most popular kids in the school. But he wasn’t in any of my classes, and he and I didn’t cross paths from one year to the next. A couple times since graduation I’d heard about what he’d done in life: attended a state university on an athletic scholarship, gotten an education degree, and gone into – what else? – public school teaching. He even won some teaching awards, I think. Then a couple months ago I heard that he’d died suddenly, of what exactly I’m not sure. As I said, we were never close. But here he was standing next to the teacher’s desk, giving me a friendly but uncomprehending look, seventeen years old again. I bared my teeth.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The drive

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This past Saturday was the last day of regular rifle deer season in Pennsylvania – kind of like the twelfth day of Christmas to those for whom hunting season is a bigger deal than Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s put together. Oddly, though, there didn’t seem to be too many hunters out. And the light was perfect, so around 2:30 I put on my blaze-orange hat and vest, grabbed my camera and headed into the woods.

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I was wrong: the hunters were out. Those who weren’t sitting in trees on down the hollow had spent the morning on the other side of the ridge, in the woods above I-99 – an unsuccessful drive. I learned this from Carl, who stood a little ways up in the woods and motioned for me to come over.

I barely recognized him. Normally clean-shaven except for a mustache, he now sported a full beard. “Damn, you’re getting shaggy!” I said. “So are you,” he observed. “Yeah, well, I thought I’d grow my hair long for the winter,” I said. “Well, there you go,” he said. “This is my hunting beard.”

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They were about to start a drive up toward the spruce grove at the very top of the watershed – right in the direction of the setting sun, which was also the direction in which I wanted to walk. Carl’s wife Carolyn was one of the two hunters lying in ambush. I quickly offered to go walk somewhere else. But they could use an extra driver, Carl said, and let the others know via walkie-talkie. He moved on up the ridgeside and told me to walk slowly forward through the laurel along the contour, pausing at the powerline right-of-way until the fellow on the other ridge – who bore the walkie-talkie handle “Iceman” – came even with us.

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I was grateful for the excuse to bushwhack. My trajectory led me on a route about fifty feet above, and parallel to, one of our main trails: precisely that part of the property which is least familiar to me, because how often does one go bushwhacking so close to a trail? And the slow-but-steady pace forced me to stay attentive, make decisions quickly about what to photograph, and move on. The recent snow was still dry and easy to move through.

At the powerline, we had about a ten-minute wait, since Iceman’s route took him right through the areas hardest hit by last January’s devastating ice storm. Evidently this whole drive was his idea, though, so I didn’t feel too sorry for him. I watched anxiously as the sun sank lower and lower through the trees.

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At the far edge of the powerline, I found a clump of sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina), a huckleberry-sized shrub related to bayberry. Due to its wonderful aroma, it’s one of those plants I always stop to sniff and admire during the warmer months of the year. It’s just a very charismatic plant. According to the Wikipedia article, “Comptonia is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Grey Pug and Setaceous Hebrew Character.” Setaceous means “bristle-shaped; slender and gradually attenuated to the tip.” The Hebrew character in question is nun, the one that looks a bit like a backward C. I’d never stopped to look at sweetferns in winter – a calligraphy replete with ornate, bristly Cs. Their dried leaves would probably still make a decent cup of tea, but that would seem like a desecration now.

You can probably begin to sense why I am content to leave the deer-slaying to others, much as I admire the Pennsylvania hunting tradition and recognize its ecological value.

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My more tender-hearted readers will be happy to hear that the deer were elsewhere that afternoon. I found one, day-old track – that was it. When the drive was over, the hunters stood around glumly contemplating their next move. “You should carry a camera, ” I teased them. “That way, you may not shoot what you set out for, but you always bag something.” For once, Carl didn’t have a snappy comeback. I probably should’ve kept my mouth shut.

I left them to their hunting and walked back down through the field, following my shadow.

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You can live on the earth a long time and not get tired of that “certain slant of light,” as Dickinson called it.

When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Quest for the Lord God Peckerwood (Part 2)

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Part 1 was here. Two additional photos here.

One of the two most surprising things about the area where Gene Sparling, Bobby Harrison and Tim Gallagher had their first sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker is how close it is to two major highways, Arkansas Rt. 70 and U.S. Interstate 40. “This is about as remote as our mountain in Pennsylvania,” my brother points out as he parks the car at the end of a gravel road at the edge of Bayou DeView in the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area. Yeah, except our road isn’t this nice.

The other surprising thing is how enthusiastically local folks have embraced their source of newfound fame. Yes, Virginia, there is a Lord God Peckerwood. He lives in the hearts and on the shade trees and lampposts of half the inhabitants of Brinkley, Arkansas (see maps here). Since the town’s restaurants and motels have depended on revenue from hunters and fishermen for so long, I guess it didn’t require too great a leap of faith for them to roll out the welcome mat for birders, too.

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Brinkley was good to us, and we were good to Brinkley. We spent the night in a cheap-but-decent, unaffiliated motel, after a big supper of fried catfish and barbecued ribs at Gene’s Bar-B-Que, where “the bird is the word.” And we’d return after lunch on Saturday to buy ivorybill merchandise at a local gift shop, including t-shirts, a ball cap, a pair of earrings, a pin and a hand-painted ivorybill Christmas tree ornament. I bought the most tasteful of the hats, which features an embroidered likeness of the bird and the message “another chance.” I could’ve bought a hat that wondered, “Where’s dat der peckerwood?” or another that simply asked, “Got Pecker?”

I wish we’d had more time there. I see that our positive first impressions of the area were shared by Pat Leonard from the Cornell Lab, who posted an engaging travelogue of her own visit to Brinkley in September. I’m envious of her canoe tour of Bayou DeView with local guide and life-long resident Chuck Volner.

Heading back, Chuck sums up some of his philosophy: “Everything in nature is beautiful. God didn’t make nothin’ ugly. You look closely enough, you’ll see everything is beautiful.�? Oh look, another beautiful cottonmouth. This one is swimming with its head above the water and glides right next to the canoe.

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But we’re on our own, and being somewhat disorganized, we fail to take advantage of either of the two foot-trails or three water trails that have been set up for birders by the good folks at Dagmar. Instead, we park at a likely looking spot near where, as best I can tell, Sparling et. al. had their sightings, and proceed to do some bushwacking (otherwise known as walking in circles).

That’s when Mark spots it. No, not the bird; the tree. In a swamp full of huge baldcypresses, this tree is enormous. I am beside myself. I’ve visited my share of eastern old-growth, but I’ve never seen trees this big east of the Cascades.

Fortunately, as I mentioned in yesterday’s installment, the water level is low: the high-water mark was about five feet off the ground. So when Mark rolled up his pants to wade across to a nearby island for a better picture, I followed suit, continuing on across a wider channel to reach the island of the giant itself. The water was freezing cold, which gave me some confidence that I might not encounter a cottonmouth, though I’m not sure I would’ve desisted had there been snakes on every log.

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I’m six foot one, at least on rare occasions when I stand up straight. This is an undoctored photo. The tree appears to be close to fifteen feet DBH (diameter at breast height – the standard forester’s measurement). Even if you measure it at the point where it stops tapering, it’s still almost as wide as I am tall. Lord God, what a tree!

The sun shines weakly through a scrim of clouds, which creates a pleasing symmetry: murky sky, murky water. A scattering of red maples and other understorey trees gives a splash of late autumn color, but what most attracts the eye is the great diversity of forms – a hallmark of true old growth. Trees get weird when they get old – check out the photo of “the yelling tree” in Pat Leonard’s essay. My brother marvels at a massive tupelo growing adjacent to an even wider rim of rotten wood: a several-hundred-year-old root sprout off a tree that may have begun life half a millennium before that. I know how old black gums can get from reading studies of Pennsylvania old growth. Only the baldcypresses get older here, I imagine. After a certain point, when the so-called heartwood rots out, it’s impossible to date them accurately, but some dendrochronologists feel that baldcypresses can get to be 2000 years old or more.

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I’m happy – I’ve come for the trees – but Mark isn’t so easily satisfied. I struggle to keep up as he strides off along the edge of the bayou. He scares up a few white-tailed deer, but otherwise wildlife seems scarce. As we head back to the car, a pileated woodpecker lets out a peal of its usual insane clown laughter – kind of like howling for wolves and getting barked at by a coyote instead.

We explore Dagmar a little more by car, passing several other stands of impressive old growth on our way to a quiet picnic lunch. Mark subsequently discovers that field trips to Bayou DeView are the featured attraction of this year’s Eastern Old-Growth Conference, scheduled for Little Rock, Arkansas on March 24-25. Check out the aerial photo on its webpage.

The rediscovery of the critically endangered ivory-billed woodpecker in the cypress-tupelo woodlands along Bayou DeView in eastern Arkansas, which still retains remnants of centuries-old baldcypress and tupelo forest in a heavily developed agricultural landscape, confirms the significance of our remaining old-growth forests and justifies the federal, state, and private efforts to conserve and restore the Big Woods ecosystem of the lower Mississippi Valley.

Other draws for this conference include the old-growth post oak woodlands of the Ozarks, which are apparently as underwhelming as the swamp forests of Bayou DeView are overwhelming. Thanks to the pioneering work of the tree-ring lab at the University of Arkansas, we now know that there are many more remnants of ancient forests in the eastern U.S. than previously imagined.

Why have these remnants of ancient forest escaped public notice? Because they don’t look like what we think an ancient forest ought to look like. I’ll bet a dollar against a doughnut that when somebody says “virgin forest,” you conjure up a park-like place with trunks as big around as Volkswagens.

That’s from an article profiling the head of the tree-ring lab, Dave Stahle, who is also my authority for the probable age of the trees we’ve just encountered.

Stahle and [Malcom] Cleaveland have also done extensive tree-ring work with baldcypress, a species especially valuable to dendrochronology because of its ability to live a long time. Stahle has sampled baldcypress stands in North Carolina that are more than 1,600 years old, and he’s found numerous sites in east Arkansas with trees over 500 years old. One site, on Bayou DeView, has more than a few 1,000-year-old trees.”And that’s just their provable age,” Stahle said. “Most of them are hollow.” Judging from the average thickness of the rings and the diameter of the center rot, Stahle is confident some of these graybeards are 1,300 years old.

Think about that–some of the trees growing right now in east Arkansas were already mature before the Crusades began in medieval Europe. By the time DeSoto tramped through them on his way to fame, glory, and an early death, they were already 750 years old.

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We take the scenic route that afternoon on our way back to Mississippi. Mark has heard that the Pine City Natural Area, an isolated, genetically distinct population of loblolly pine, supports “the last remaining colony of the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain of eastern Arkansas.” The presence of the site so close to the ivorybill area, on top of all the more common woodpeckers that occur here, means that the Arkansas Delta has the highest peckerwood biodiversity in North America.

Navigating with the help of a woefully inadequate map – a page torn out of the National Geographic Road Atlas of the United States – Mark manages to find the right road, and soon enough we spot the dark smudge of a pine woods among the plowed fields. Signs on the trees identify it as a state natural area. Had we driven a little farther, we would have seen the official roadside sign, and two larger tracts, but we pull over by the first, narrow fragment of forest and set off on foot.

Mark is in the lead as usual, scanning the treetops for the holes and sap marks that indicate the presence of red-cockadeds. We notice that many of the trees other than pines have been girdled, no doubt by land managers anxious to have the pines out-compete other species. We don’t see any evidence of recent fires, but I’m sure that prescribed burns are or soon will be an important part of the management strategy here. Natural fire regimes in the southern pinelands featured a fire return interval as brief as ten years. And while the South is one of the few parts of the country where whites carried on the pyrophilic practices of the Indians, many forest ecologists feel that the tendency to set fires in the winter, rather than during the growing season, hasn’t helped the southern pinelands, which have of course also been decimated by agriculture (as is the case here) and sprawl. Their value as timber means that few commercially managed pine forests ever get old enough to provide habitat for red-cockadeds, who excavate nest holes only in trees where the heartwood has begun to rot.

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After a quarter mile, we find the main nesting area, easily identifiable by the collars of sheet metal that have been put up to keep nest predators such as raccoons at bay. “Let’s sit down here and be quiet for a little while,” Mark says. “These are very shy birds.” His daughter temporarily lowers her voice by a few decibels.

A couple minutes later, Luz catches up to us. “Didn’t you see me waving back there?” she asks. “I saw one. It just glided silently from the top of a tree, right after you went through.”

Mark seems to accept this. They’ve visited other red-cockaded sites together farther south, so she knows what the birds look like. Earlier in the day, though, he hadn’t been nearly so accepting when she claimed to have seen an ivorybill, right after we went wading off into the swamp at Bayou DeView. Her description was too vague – she’s not a birder – and after all, what are the chances? “Well, it was big,” she had said lamely, holding her hands about eighteen inches apart. “It flew right overhead… I saw some white on its wings.”

I’m sure it was just a duck.

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All photos here are by Mark Bonta except the first, second and last, which are mine.

UPDATE (Nov. 11): Reuters has a new story on this season’s official search.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Quest for the Lord God Peckerwood (Part 1)

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It’s a sunny afternoon on the day after Thanksgiving, and we’re driving deep into the Arkansas Big Woods on a quest for the largest and most elusive woodpecker north of the Rio Grande, known to locals as the Lord God Bird, and no doubt to the few birders who have spotted it here as the Holy F***ing Shit Bird: the ivory-billed woodpecker. In other words, we are combing the puckerbrush for peckerwoods.

At the wheel is my brother Mark, who teaches geography across the river in Mississippi and thus can sometimes be counted upon to get us where we want to go. Also with us are my sister-in-law Luz, an artist with a sharp eye and an imagination to match, and my nine-year-old niece Eva, whose enthusiasm for nature is infectious albeit occasionally deafening. We got off to a late start this morning, due to the lingering effects of the previous day’s over-indulgence. And we’ve just spent a couple hours at the very educational and family-friendly visitor center of the White River National Wildlife Refuge, which includes a display on the ivorybill courtesy of the Big Woods Partnership.

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We followed a new trail still under construction below the visitor center through an impressive stand of very large oaks and tupelos down to the banks of the White River. I was especially struck by the thick understorey vegetation, which included many white oak saplings. In Pennsylvania, white oak regeneration has declined drastically over the last century, apparently as a result of fire suppression as well as from overbrowsing by deer. According to the signboards along another nearby trail, the area hasn’t been wildlife refuge land for too many decades, and I wondered if the forest composition doesn’t reflect a culture of burning among the much-maligned peckerwoods – the people, not the birds. According to the Wikipedia, peckerwood

is used as a pejorative term and was coined in the 19th century by southern blacks to describe poor whites (white trash). Blacks saw blackbirds as a symbol of themselves and the contrasting redheaded woodpecker as a representation of whites. They considered them loud and troublesome like the bird, and often with red hair like the woodpecker’s head plumes. This word is still widely used by southern blacks to refer to southern whites.

In 1979, the USDA’s Southern Forest Experiment Station in New Orleans published Southern Woods-Burners: A Descriptive Analysis, which characterized “veteran woods burners” as a “disadvantaged culture group with antisocial tendencies.” The authors found that some 40 percent of the 60,000 wildfires that occur throughout the South every year are intentionally set. But regardless of what Smokey the Bear would have you believe, frequent, low-intensity ground fires can help perpetuate the more fire-resistant oaks (or, farther south, longleaf pine savannas) while helping to provide the standing dead trees that are so essential to a balanced forest ecology – especially one that includes large woodpeckers. In the wet forests along the fringes of the swamps, I imagine that flooding, whether by beavers or otherwise, is the major killer of trees. But on Saturday we would see some undeniable evidence of the importance of burning to local woodpecker biodiversity.

The afternoon sun is already sinking into the treetops as we wind our way south through a maze of gravel roads. Mark spots the flaming red crest of a woodpecker in the trees off to our left and slams on the brakes, but it turns out to be a pileated – a bird we are both quite familiar with because it’s common on the family farm back in Pennsylvania. “That’s O.K., I can still use a good pileated photo for the blog,” I say, but it takes off before he can even roll his window down. We stop instead at one of the numerous camping areas that line the road and spend a few minutes admiring the bald cypress trees before resuming our journey.

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When we reach the end of the road, we feel as if we are indeed deep in the wilderness. There’s one other vehicle in the parking lot, an old pickup. It’s still hunting season here, and the trails are open to hunters with ATVs. But by the middle of December, those trails will be closed to all motor vehicles, and then the ivorybill searchers will have the 160,000 acres of the refuge pretty much to themselves.

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It’s very quiet. I am reminded of a line from the Delta bluesman Big Joe Williams – “a thousand miles from nowhere.” In fact, this area on the west side of the main stem of the Mississippi is culturally and geographically part of the inland delta – locals refer to it equally as the Delta on both sides – with the difference that a much larger proportion of it is still wooded. The timber crews came through early in the last century, but much of the area was never clearcut, simply high-graded, and some stands of cypress in the deepest part of the swamps were ignored altogether. As readers of my earlier post “Learning from the ivorybill” will understand, it’s these big trees that I am mostly here to see; I have few illusions that I will be lucky enough to actually see an ivorybill. This also constitutes a logical extension of my Delta Blues pilgrimage. Like levee camps, lumber camps were important as places where musicians from all over met and mingled, trading songs and techniques and helping to spread the blues across the South in the decades before the “race record” industry got underway.

The White River Refuge was established to protect migratory waterfowl at the point of their greatest concentration in North America, so perhaps it isn’t too surprising that a presumably small population of resident ivory-billed woodpeckers were overlooked. As the decades went by, the impact of hunting- and fishing-related tourism became more and more important to the local economy. In the 1980s, the wealthy planters of Mississippi wanted to build a bridge across the river to carry their cotton west into Texas, but they were stopped by popular opposition, which focused on the need to protect wildlife habitat and the wilderness character of the White River refuge. And it was Governor Bill Clinton himself – a peckerwood if there ever was one – who pushed for the reinvention of Arkansas as “the natural state,” Mark tells me. Last year, when ornithologists announced the rediscovery of the ivorybill here, it was a vindication of that vision. Though the best sightings have been a little farther north, in the more accessible area we’ll be visiting tomorrow, the White River refuge and adjacent woodlands have yielded the best sound recordings of ivorybill calls from the autonomous recording units (ARUs) that have been posted here.

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It’s been very dry for the last few months; we find it easy walking along the fringes of the bayou. In contrast to last season, when the water was high, this year, the ivorybill searchers are probably having a hard time finding a place to put in a canoe. The cold is keeping mosquitoes and cottonmouths at bay, though I had kind of hoped to see the latter. Mark wants to leave time to drive out before dark, a concern which is also a limiting factor on how well the refuge can be canvassed for ivorybills, who are most active in the hour or two before dusk, according to Tim Gallagher (see my review of his book The Grail Bird here).

So we only have time for a brief walk, but in that time we find several hollow logs and trees and a wonderfully grotesque snag – more evidence of why this is such great wildlife habitat. Black bears, who like nothing better than to den in hollow trees, are common here, whereas they only show up in Mississippi on rare occasions when one swims across the river. There are also persistent reports of mountain lion sightings. Luz looks on a little apprehensively as her daughter pushes her way into every homey-looking cavity she can find. We listen in vain for a double knock or the tooting of a child’s tin horn.

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To be continued. The second, fourth and sixth photos are by my brother Mark.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Viscera for breakfast

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Meanwhile, back on the mountain, the first snows of the season make the blues come down. I don’t want to say that these are my blues, necessarily, but there are always plenty to go around. I am thankful for the cold in which sound does not travel so fast or far; it’s quiet enough that you can hear the beech leaves whistling through their teeth.

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Wounds are harder to hide now. But those who cause the wounds are just as vulnerable, easy targets against the snow. If you need somewhere to take shelter & to sharpen your claws, baby, look no further.

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Here in the mountains, the sun can take a long time to reach down into every cove & hollow. Some places don’t see the morning sun until well past noon. We can sleep in late.

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But some days, you know if you lie down you might not get back up. The comforter is heavy with the breast feathers of geese that never got to fly south.

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I saw seven crows in an oak tree, silent, waiting for the hunter of images to go on past & for the sun to thaw their breakfast of viscera. Dense red muscle of the heart, stomach like a deflated balloon, the liver’s sour purple disc: everything about a deer is beautiful. Even the footprints of these eaters are thinner & more delicate than I would have expected.

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Look, here’s an empty seat. You could well say it’s nothing looking at nothing, & you might be right. On the other hand, the sun’s not as lonely as he looks: for those in the know, this is by far the best time of year to go sunbathing. You can sit fully clothed in the midst of all this nakedness & feel rich & lucky & happy to be alive.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Crow wars

I think I just witnessed a gang war between crows. It was a little before ten in the morning, on a day with intermittent flurries. At first I thought the crows were mobbing a predator – that’s what it sounded like – but then I realized they were diving at each other in the sky over Sapsucker Ridge to the west. More birds kept streaming overhead from the east all the while I stood watching, about ten minutes. Most of them landed in the treetops and added their voices to the raucous cheering section for the aerial battles, which included at least a couple dozen combats at a time; the ridge blocked my view of a lot of the action. Brisk winds aloft made for an exciting display of maneuvers: diving, chasing, feinting – Top Gun stuff, for sure.

As is usual with crows, it’s difficult to know how to interpret what I was watching. Maybe it was all just play behavior, occasioned by the wind conditions. Ten minutes later, when I stick my head out the door, there’s no sign of a crow anywhere.

Most non-specialists would probably tend to assume that scientists know a lot about the behavior and life histories of the commoner birds and mammals, especially here in the northeastern U.S., but such is rarely the case. A recent study of white-tailed deer, for example, made a couple surprising discoveries simply by fastening digital cameras to bucks’ antlers: deer touch muzzles constantly, they found. And one deer kept returning to the same spot to drink, despite the availability of closer water sources. What’s surprising about this is that white-tailed deer are probably one of the most-studied animals in the world, apart from human beings, laboratory rats, and fruit flies. How could previous researchers have failed to notice such apparently common behaviors?

So I wasn’t sanguine about throwing much light on what I’d just seen by a quick glance through the literature on the American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos). The Stokes Guide to Bird Behavior, Volume 1, confirms that “There has been amazingly little study of Crows by researchers, so most of the best questions about the birds still cannot be answered.” Its summary of research to date (1979) included this:

Outside of the few months of the breeding season, Crows are extremely gregarious. After the last young have fledged, the family group usually joins other groups of Crows, and these begin to form a large flock that divides up for feeding during the day, but gathers again each night to roost. The roost becomes an important focal point in the birds’ life outside the breeding season. Each morning the roost breaks up into smaller flocks that disperse across the countryside to feed. Some flocks may fly up to fifty miles from the roost each day. In midafternoon these smaller flocks start back toward the communal roost. They fly along flight lines used each day and are joined by other flocks as they go. Often there are preroosting sites, where flight lines coincide and Crows stop to feed before making the final trip to the roost. At these spots there may be much chasing and other spectacular dives as the returning Crows join the others at the preroosting spot. Then just before dusk all the Crows in the area enter the roost site together.

What I saw would seem to have occurred at the wrong time of day for preroosting behavior. But this description does make it clear that not all chasing and diving is antagonistic.

In The American Crow and the Common Raven, Lawrence Kilham describes territorial antagonism across a boundary between two large groups of crows in Lyme, New Hampshire.

I watched forty-five territorial encounters beween 1981 and 1983. While no two were alike, certain behaviors were observed repeatedly. Cawing, heard in thirty-eight of the territorial encounters consisted of sharp caws corresponding to what Good (1957) refers to as warning calls and Camberlain and Cornwell (1971) as simple scolding calls. The crows of both groups cawed when flying toward each other at a distance. This was especially so on early mornings when most encounters took place. If one group alighted in the fields and another in trees, the latter did the most cawing….Other forms of behavior [aside from walking and bluffing displays] included aerial melees (n = 17), bunching (n = 5), and pursuits (n = 5). The melees were spectacular when all members of both groups swirled into the air for three or four seconds, with some swooping on others….

Territorial behaviors also included circular flights (n = 11), which carried the crows of one group a short distance over the boundary into their neighbors’ territory as if to demonstrate where the boundary lay, and treetop sitting (n = 17). The latter was particularly striking on November 26 [1983] when the crows of both groups, after a series of melees, perched on the very tops of their dead elms in full view of each other.

Kilham found that groups facing off over common boundaries tended to be “of the same or about the same size.” None of the conflicts he observed seem to have resulted in serious injury, let alone death. And he speculates that most of the actual combats are left to the dominant or nuclear males, based on his observations of American crows in Florida, and on another scientist’s observations of white-winged choughs, which have similar social patterns.

A more recent source of information is the American Crow monograph for the authoritative Birds of North America series: No. 647, by N. A. M. Verbeek and C. Caffrey, 2002. Over twenty years after Stokes, not much has changed: “Although much has been published about this [species of] crow, we still know relatively little about it.” They add that observations made in one locale may not describe the behavior of crows from somewhere else in the species’ range.

One of the things that appears to vary from place to place is whether territories are maintained throughout the year. Crows on Cape Cod and in New Jersey, California, Oklahoma, Florida and New York do maintain year-round territories, but crows in Ohio and in the northern part of their range in Canada do not. So goodness knows where central Pennsylvania fits. On the topic of aerial melees, Verbeek and Caffrey simply quote Kilham. If there haven’t been many other observations in the literature, that may be because few observers are as patient as he was (me, I went inside when my hands began to freeze). Also, given that American crows favor mixed and open habitat, territorial boundaries might tend to pass through forested areas or follow wooded ridgetops, making interactions along them harder to observe.

As habitat generalists and omnivores with well-developed learning abilities and complex social structures, crows offer many parallels to the behavior of humans and other primates. To a non-scientist like me, it seems natural to characterize group antagonistic behavior as a gang war, but I have to be careful not to let my judgements be too colored by prejudices which are not merely anthropocentric, but ethnocentric as well. For example, we Westerners tend to associate wars with struggles for dominance, leading ideally to the conquest of one group by another. But among the crows that Kilham observed, territorial conflicts seemed to work more to maintain a balance of power – not unlike the low-intensity conflicts that are thought to have been the norm for warfare in much of native North America before 1492. Kilham watched wandering flocks numbering as many as forty crows trespass into group territories without much conflict beyond a lot of cawing. These flocks apparently consisted of nonbreeders – juveniles with no interest in setting up a territory of their own.

It’s also important to remember that territories are maintained cooperatively, for the shared benefit of the crows that use it: “Territories provide improved protection through greater familiarity with safe areas; reduced interference with nest building and copulations; greater protection of stored food; and increased assurance of a good food supply,” Kilham notes. Nor does cooperative behavior end when the breeding season is over. Fall and winter roost sites can only get to be as large as they are by bringing together crows from diverse, non-overlapping daytime feeding territories, and mixing local birds with migrants – foreigners from the north. I wonder if the diving and chasing behavior commonly observed at preroosting sites doesn’t represent a playful, ritualistic form of inter-group conflict? After all, even among humans, the line between play and warfare can get awfully fuzzy – think of the World Cup. In any case, whether we choose to focus on the relatively rare, spectacular outbreaks of crow-to-crow combat, or on the cooperative nature of crow sociability as a whole, probably says a lot more about us than it does about the crows.
__________

The most promising research on American crows since Kilham comes from Kevin McGowan of Cornell University, who has been banding crows and following their progress from year to year since 1988. His crow website includes helpful information on roosting behavior in the F.A.Q. page, and an overview of his own crow study, with links to publications. He writes, “I frequently see crows locked together tumbling out of trees in the spring. Although I have never witnessed an actual killing, I would not be at all surprised to see crows kill another crow from outside the family group that was trespassing.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Letting go

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The first frost came on Friday night as we sat around drinking. At a certain point, we had to bring the beer in from the porch to keep it from freezing. While I slept the dreamless sleep of inebriation, the air was crystallizing around every leaf and blade of grass, like frozen foam from the season’s drained cup.

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I love the way a beer with good head retention leaves a record of its passing in the white, lacy rings on the side of the glass. It’s a good argument for sipping rather than chugging. But that’s the funny thing about consumption, isn’t it? The more attached you become to the act of consuming, the less you enjoy it. To get the most out of a beer – or anything, really – you have to take it one sip at a time.

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The bark of pignut hickories forms rings, too, healing over the lines of holes drilled by yellow-bellied sapsuckers. They are slow-growing, long-lived trees, seemingly unaffected by the intensive tapping of their sap. Their nuts aren’t as sweet as those of shagbark hickories, but the squirrels still seem to catch most of them before they hit the ground.

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The red, black and scarlet oaks are the last trees on the mountain to turn color, long after the understorey black gums, sassafras, witch hazel and spicebush have shed their leaves. By holding onto their leaves so long, they risk damage from early snows or ice storms, but oaks are very good at sealing off wounds to prevent infection from spreading to the rest of the tree. And shedding leaves, it turns out, is about more than just letting go; new research suggests that trees attempt to poison the ground against competitors with the chemicals that form in their leaves as they turn color.

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Within the space of a few days last week, high winds stripped the ridges mostly bare, and now suddenly one can see for hundreds of yards through the woods. The rising sun hits my front porch an hour earlier, even as the dawn comes later. I don’t think of winter as a dark time, but a time of clearer light and more interesting shadows. While vistas are opening up, life is turning in upon itself, rediscovering the rewards of contemplation and of altered states.

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Who can blame shamans for trying to become bears, those champion sleepers and masters of retention? Right now, they’re living quite literally off the fat of the land, but when a bear enters hibernation, its large intestine forms what is called a fecal plug. Winter, in other words, is the one time of the year when a bear does not shit in the woods. You can walk along enjoying the dawn or sunset sky without a thought for where you put your feet.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Of ants and seeds

I finally got around to reading the September issue of Natural History – possibly my favorite magazine – which features a marvelous article on how ants disperse seeds: “Jaws of Life,” by Robert R. Dunn. I knew this was an important topic for Appalachian forest ecology, because many of our spring wildflowers, such as bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches and stinking Benjamin, depend on ants as the sole or primary agent of seed dispersal. This means, among other things, that once such wildflowers are eliminated from an area by several decades of overbrowsing by deer, or through large-scale clearcutting or other landscape alterations, they may take centuries to return on their own. As Dunn puts it, “Getting dispersed by ants… is like trying to get out of town on the local city bus. As often as not, you circle back to where you started. Seeds carried by ants are rarely taken more than a few feet from where they fall.”

So this obviously raises the question of why plants rely on ant dispersal in the first place: what advantage does it confer? Suggestions include protection from predators or from fire, or taking advantage of the rich nutrients available for the seeds’ growth in an ant nest’s midden. This last suggestion seems especially likely for the thin, acid soils of the Appalachians.

The plants go to the trouble of manufacturing a special ant lure, “a small, fatty appendage known as an elaiosome, from the Greek elaios, ‘oil,’ and soma, ‘body.'” The ants seem to find it more economical to carry the entire seed back to their nests so their larvae can eat the elaiosome, following which the seed gets chucked into their compost heap. “Elaiosomes… have evolved at least eighty-six and perhaps several hundred times around the globe…. In the Liliales (the group that includes the lilies) alone, ant dispersal may have evolved independently at least eight times.”

So it’s obvious that ants are highly valued partners for plants, even if we can’t determine the exact reasons yet. Nor is this rather extreme example of convergent evolution restricted to the plant kingdom, as a sidebar explains. This is worth quoting in full, I think. It accompanies an arresting photo of green and yellow, seed-like things with brown knobs on their ends.

The eggs of some stick insects, like the seeds of many plants, have nourishing appendages that encourage ants to pick them up and carry them away. The appendage of an insect egg is called a capitulum, and ants can remove it without damaging the egg. In the photograph above, for instance, eggs from the Central American stick-insect genus Bacteria are shown, magnified roughly fifteen diameters; the brown, knobby protuberances are the capitula.

The parallels between the elaiosomes of plant seeds and the capitula of insect eggs were first highlighted in 1992 by Mark Westoby and Lesley Hughes, both ecologists at MacQuarie University in Sydney, Australia. They gave seeds with elaiosomes and stick-insect eggs with capitula, along with several control items, to various ant species in southeastern Australia. The ants removed the seeds and eggs at a similar rate, treated them similarly, and threw them together into their garbage piles. The apparent advantage for the eggs is that, buried in the debris, they are less likely to be parasitized by wasps.

Perhaps it is appropriate that stick insects, which as adults mimic sticks, start out by living the lives of seeds.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Window pictures

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I want to say that the invention of window glass has led to the domestication of vision. This may seem like so much hyperbole, but in fact, windows have proven just as lethal as most other efforts to make the great outdoors less threatening or more easily accessible. It’s estimated that at least 100 million wild birds are killed by collisions with windows and other human structures in North America every year. According to the Bird Conservation Network,

During daytime, birds often fly head-on into windows, confused by the reflection of trees or sky. This is a common occurrence even in suburbia at homes and glassy office campuses. All of these birds suffer head trauma and over half die.

There are various ways to try and combat this effect.

Recent research by ornithologists at the Field Museum of Natural History confirmed that simply turning off bright lights, closing blinds or pulling the drapes reduces bird deaths by 83%. Even not washing the windows during the migration months helps keep the reflective qualities low and, thus, can help reduce bird injury and death.

I haven’t washed my windows in years, and I feel damn good about that. I can look up from my computer in the late afternoon and enjoy the play of sun and shadows through the spicebush in my garden: shadows of clustered berries, shadows of wings.

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The lone window on the northwest side of the barn is missing half its panes. I remember as a kid taking advantage of that fact more than once in my never-ending war against the woodchucks, resting the barrel of the .22 on the empty frame.

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Here’s a view into the ground floor of the old chicken coop, where our chickens spent much of their time when the weather wasn’t conducive to foraging outside. The mixture of hay and chicken manure that remains can make a rich mulch, but I always have to sift it to remove the numerous shards of glass, all, I presume, the remains of previous windows.

I’m wondering whether the ability of windows to keep things in might confer certain environmental benefits to offset their hazards – for example, by making confinement more tolerable to otherwise rapacious domestic cats, not to mention by retaining heat. Maybe the shadow within the shadow knows. Or maybe I should just Ask Umbra.

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One of the largest employers in the Tyrone area is a PPG (formerly known as Pittsburgh Plate Glass) factory specializing in the manufacture of the large back windows of automobiles. It’s amazing to me that engineers have figured out how to make curved glass that doesn’t distort one’s view out; a little over a hundred years ago, even flat window glass came out full of flaws and waviness. The glass castle that houses the PPG corporate headquarters – the most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh skyline – symbolizes the dominance of glass in the Era of the Automobile. I look at the way the car window warps the house, the trees, the sky, and I think: this is what the angels must see of us – cocooned in our glass bubbles – if they exist.

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The car is gone, the garage is empty. On days like this, one can envision what the end of cheap oil might mean: great societal upheavals and the loss of a dream of freedom based on personal mobility, yes, but also cleaner lungs and much clearer views. Forced to go about on foot, we might once again come to believe in the soul as the infinity that remains outside,* instead of some house-bound, transparent ghost.

All around me, as I snap this shot, white-throated sparrows are foraging and singing: Poor Sam Peabody, such a sweet and mournful tune. Play it again, Sam, I want to say. All those weeks of rain were easier than this painful blue.
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*From a translation of a poem by the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez entitled “Yes, If I Could Only Smash.”