Plummer’s Hollow – Page 58

May 17, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Here there be Squirrels

Monday, 4:40 a.m. I should know better than to try and get started on laundry before daybreak. As I carry the clothesbasket out through the breezeway, I hear a fluttering of wings, and when I open the laundry room door and snap on the light, suddenly something is trying to perch in my hair, which is still wet from the shower, and beating its little wings against the back of my head. Something else is madly circling the tiny room. Carolina wren fledglings! I watched them take their first, do-or-die flights from their natal nest in the eaves just last week. They’ve made it about as far from home as I have.

While the one manages to extract its feet from my hair and flutter over to the window, the other bird falls down behind the dryer. And I no sooner set the basket down than the first one is clinging to the back of my head again. I haven’t had a haircut in about six months, and I guess it makes sense that a terrified and disoriented young wren would seek refuge in the only brown thing in the room. I reach back and shoo it off, and it flies over to the hot water heater and gets tangled up with the pipes.

Neither bird seems likely to go back outside until dawn. The dumber of the two is still fluttering madly in the corner behind the dryer. I could go ahead and start the wash, but the noise and rocking of the machine would probably scare the crap out of them – what crap remains. This has been a real shit storm, did I mention that? I back slowly out of the room, leaving the door open, and snap off the light.

I examine myself in the bathroom mirror. My quilted shirt seems to have taken most of the damage. There’s bird shit on my sleeve and bird shit down my back, but my hair looks O.K. Did St. Francis have days like this? Did he ever just tell the birds to bugger off?

Tuesday, 5:45 a.m. While I drink my coffee and listen to the dawn chorus, I’m watching the smaller of the two porcupines that lives in the crawlspace under the house eat my elm tree. The poor thing looks sparser every year, but what the hell – if the porkies don’t get it, Dutch elm disease will.

By the way, did you ever notice how many weird things we blame on the Dutch? Dutch oven. Dutch courage. Double Dutch. Dutch uncle. What is it with the fucking Dutch? I could go on, but I’d better stop out of respect for my ancestors – who were, I’m sure, quite normal, albeit Dutch.

The porcupine waddles out along a small branch and stands on its hind legs, freeing its forepaws to grab and stuff nearby twigs into its mouth. This reminds of the way the Baltimore oriole that I photographed two weeks ago used one foot to pull leaves in range of its bill. Unlike the porcupine, though, it was interested only in what was on the leaves, not the leaves themselves.

As I watch the porcupine, I find myself imagining in great detail what might happen if it fell. This is not unheard of, and evolutionary biologists hypothesize that the danger of impaling itself is high enough to account for the presence of an antiseptic chemical in the porcupine’s quills. There’s a lesson there, I think: if you write with a poison pen, make sure you have the antidote. There’s nothing that bothers me more than someone who can’t take what they dish out.

Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. Here there be Squirrels. One of them keeps looking in the kitchen window at me while I write; it has to hang upside-down off the drainpipe in order to do so. Every time I hear it rattling against the screen, I whirl around and stare back. Call me paranoid, but I can’t help thinking it’s looking for nesting material. I feel its beady little eyes boring into the back of my head.

May 16, 2006 by Dave Bonta

After the rain

The sky clears toward sunset, and the wood thrushes, which have been singing all day long in the dim light, fall silent. The raincrow peers at the sun-flooded world with red-rimmed eyes,

the trees steam,

and raindrops glisten on the matted locks of a dandelion gone to seed,

while up in the woods, pink lady’s slipper orchids stand like strippers in a spotlight,

more forlorn than seductive,

and the wings of a tiger swallowtail lie scattered among the forest litter, as if left behind in some final metamorphosis beyond the reach of sunlight or imagination.

May 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Dogwood

Though flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is a New World tree, a widespread Appalachian legend links it with the crucifixion. The dogwood was once as tall as the oak, they say, but its wood was used to make the cross that Jesus was crucified on, and forever after it has grown small and crooked, and each of the four, white bracts surrounding the flower is stained with a drop of blood. Farther south, its blooming usually coincides with Easter.

The wood is uncommonly hard, and is still harvested to make spindles for weaving. In the past, it was favored for bearings and wagon wheels, and some people with the time to make things right still like to fashion tool handles from dogwood. One can see how the crucifixion legend got started: nothing but the best for our Lord and Savior! It didn’t hurt that the “flowers” were white and cross-shaped, and that the cluster of true flowers vaguely resembles a crown of thorns.

According to the new (and excellent) Trees of Pennsylvania: A Complete Reference Guide, by Ann Fowler Rhoads and Timothy A. Black (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), flowering dogwood

was used by Native Americans to treat children for worms and diarrhea, to counteract poisons, and as an antiseptic and astringent. The roots were also used as a tonic and the twigs were chewed as a sort of early toothbrush. The bark of dogwood roots was sold in apothecary shops in Philadelphia in the mid-1700s as a substitute for quinine for treating ague (malaria). […] Native Americans are reported to have relied on the appearance of the flowers of dogwood to signal the time to plant corn.

I think I like that last piece of folklore much better than crucifixion legend – for one thing, it’s much more likely to be true. Blooming times of native trees and wildflowers are excellent indicators of when to plant.

Besides, dogwood anthracnose is the real curse afflicting this species. I hear that flowering dogwoods have been virtually eliminated from many more southern forests as a result of this disease, which first appeared in North America in the early 1970s. Its origins are unknown, but chances are good that humans–not a vengeful deity–were responsible for its introduction.

Dogwood berries are sought out by many species of birds and mammals, which inadvertently spread the seeds throughout the woods. Rhoads and Black say that spring azure and red-spotted purple butterflies use dogwood as a source of nectar, but those are just two of many species one can fine on the flowers. But when I took my camera for a walk the other day, I found various species of bees, several small flower scarabs, and some kind of hemipteran (true bug), a pale-green creature that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been intent on photographing the bower of joined bracts surrounding it.

This has been the best year for dogwood blossoms in many years. Someday, if and when the anthracnose has reduced our population to a few, widely scattered individuals as botanists predict, I’ll try and remember the spring of 2006, when clouds of dogwood blossoms dotted the hillsides, and each blossom was a revelation, distinct and irreducible.

May 9, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

New Enterprise Stone & Lime

The Tyrone Forge quarry, owned by New Enterprise Stone & Lime, Inc., supplies blacktop, concrete, lime and crushed stone. For us, the quarry is a bit of mixed blessing. Since it’s only a little over a mile away from our houses as the crow flies, we get noise and light pollution from it – though nothing like the folks living right next to it in the villages of Nealmont, Ironville and Tyrone Forge.

But it’s damned convenient having a source of 2RC gravel so close to the bottom of our lane. “Lane” perhaps fails to convey the reality of a mile-and-a-half-long, one-lane road up a northeast-facing, steep mountain ravine. Road maintenance has been a constant preoccupation for us in the 35 years we’ve lived here. There are always trees to be cleared, rocks to be pitched off, ditches to be dug out, cross-grates to be cleaned (picture half-culvert pipes topped with narrow versions of cattle guards), ruts to be raked out, and potholes to be filled. So they know us pretty well at the quarry. It’s a fairly friendly place, and the state Department of Economic and Community Development has listed New Enterprise as one of the 50 best companies of its size class to work for.

Up through the 1970s, the quarry was a small, family-owned operation. But when it was bought up by New Enterprise, it began to expand almost overnight, gobbling up hundreds of acres of valuable farmland. Though limestone quarries don’t produce anywhere near the kind of pollution that other forms of mining do, they can still produce a lot of silt runoff, which can have a devastating effect on aquatic life. And the Tyrone Forge quarry sits right on the banks of the Little Juniata River, a high-quality trout stream. According to FlyFishingConnection.com,

Little Juniata River, located in the Southern region of Central Pennsylvania, is a river that’s making a comeback with help from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and environmental awareness. Throughout the 1960s, raw sewage and pollutants from local mills ran into the Little Juniata from towns above. Cleanup started in the early ’70s and today, the Little Juniata is a large river with large deep pools, moderate water, and prolific hatches supporting the thousands of fingerlings stocked by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission each year. This river is one of the finest in the State of Pennsylvania, running through two counties (Blair and Huntington).

In March, New Enterprise applied for a permit to expand further–

to deepen the quarry, add additional mining and support area, add an additional sediment pond, add a NPDES discharge point, and change the postmining land use on New Enterprise Stone & Lime Company’s property from forest and cropland to unmanaged natural habitat (251.4 acres) and permanent water impoundment (137.4 acres).

So if this is approved, they will become stewards of a small lake and over 250 acres of “natural” habitat.

Meanwhile, the parent company continues its active involvement in the permanent destruction and fragmentation of habitat through highway construction. In 2000, New Enterprise was the successful bidder for the construction of a ten-mile stretch of the newly christened Interstate 99 just north of here. Thus, it became the official executioner of a once-beautiful section of Bald Eagle Mountain – the very same ridge we live on – tearing a gash out of its wooded flank that in some places reaches all the way to the ridge crest. The quarry roars through the night to supply the stone and concrete for former Congressman Elmer Greinert “Bud” Shuster’s “Highway to Nowhere.” By sheer coincidence, New Enterprise was always a heavy contributor to Shuster’s campaign chest. (It has continued that pattern with Bud’s son and dynastic successor, Bill Shuster. In the current election cycle, Son of Bud is the second-largest recipient of campaign donations from the building materials industry in the U.S. Congress.)

Bud Shuster was no stranger to such amazing coincidences during his tenure in power. His highway-building zeal found its fullest expression in his chairmanship of the powerful Congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, during which time he aided and abetted the most expensive road construction boondoggle in U.S. history, Boston’s Big Dig. If you live in Boston and have learned to appreciate the convenience and fine workmanship of this engineering marvel, you can thank his stalwart supporters at New Enterprise Stone & Lime – and you can thank us, the residents of Plummer’s Hollow, for helping to keep them in business. Have a nice day.

May 3, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Stalking the horned fungus beast

Last Thursday, after I re-found the blister beetles for my brother Steve, we walked back through the flowering oak woods. It was a sunny day, and the woods were filled with butterflies.

Juvenal’s duskywing (Erynnis juvenalis) – not to be confused with the very similar Horace’s duskywing, which emerges later on in the summer – almost disappears when it lands on the forest floor. It’s strongly associated with dry, upland oak habitat, emerging from the chrysalis just as the oaks are bursting their buds. We were probably seeing males patrolling for females; each seemed to circle a fairly small area.

After mating, the female duskywing will lay her eggs singly on scattered oak leaves. The caterpillar will munch away on its oak leaf in splendid isolation – unlike, say, tent caterpillars – and will roll the leaf around itself like a sleeping bag whenever it rests. To each his own method of camping out, I guess. The adults feed on nectar from a number of species, including blueberry, which is the main ground cover here. They are said to sleep “with wings folded rooflike over the back, in the manner of a moth.”

A brilliant green six-spotted tiger beetle lands on the trail in front of me, and I go into the photographer’s crouch (see the photo in Friday’s post). This is quite possibly the most-photographed beetle species in the world, Steve says. He adds that when he was a kid, he used to have to go to the Scotia Barrens near State College to find any tiger beetles, but thirty years later, Cicindela sexguttata has become a common resident here on the mountain. I wonder if that might not be due to an increase in available prey. As a forest matures, it becomes structurally more diverse, with more forest openings and fallen woody debris, and insect numbers and diversity increase correspondingly.

Tiger beetles are famous for their ferocity, but there’s more to them than that. After six-spotted tiger beetles mate, the male rides around on the female’s back for a while to make sure nobody else gets a chance at her. Or at least, that’s how the scientists explain it. I suppose it might just be a prolonged afterglow.

We pass a fallen scarlet oak log, and Steve gets his knife out. “Oak logs like this are a gold mine – you never know what you’re going to find,” he says happily as he begins ripping off pieces of bark. Grubs and spiders go scurrying.

Daylight crashes rudely in on a scarab beetle larva, which squirms and burrows deeper into the rot as I snap its picture. It somehow manages to be both beautiful and repulsive at the same time.

A brilliant green halictid bee pauses in front of a slug. Perhaps we’ve just interrupted something important; we’ll never know. “Halictid” means “salt-loving,” Steve informs me. “There are a huge number of species, including those little sweat bees that like to sting after they’re finished drinking your sweat. But most of them are harmless, like this one.”

We spot two tiny snails, barely a millimeter across. Snails were one of the earliest animals to colonize land, and they’ve been doing quite well in the 350 million years since. By some estimates, one acre of moist temperate woods might harbor 1.5 million snails; a montane forest in Panama was estimated to hold 7.5 million snails. I guess if you know what you’re doing, you’d never have to go hungry. But one can only eat so much escargot.

Our most spectacular find was an orange-red larva of an elaterid, or click beetle. Some click beetle larvae – smaller than this one – are known as wireworms, and arouse fear and loathing in many gardeners. But adult click beetles are every kid’s favorite insect, especially the huge eyed elators with false eye spots on the back of the thorax. Click beetles are so called because of their unique, two-step defensive strategy. First, they roll over on their backs and play possum, without the grin. If that doesn’t work and the predator – or a finger – actually makes contact, they flex the head and thorax backward, then suddenly straighten out with an audible click that fires their bodies several inches into the air.

“Not too much is known about beetle larvae in general – they’ve hardly been studied at all,” Steve notes. Most of what we think we know is based on what we can most easily see, so even for relatively charismatic insect species like tiger beetles and click beetles, we have few notions about their behavior during the 90-some percent of their lives spent in the juvenile form.

The limitations of our current method of investigation – rapid roof removal – for learning anything about insect behavior are obvious. In one crevasse, we surprise a pair of cave crickets, side by side but not mating. They sweep their amazingly long and sensitive antennae back and forth like a blind person feeling for the curb. I can’t resist quoting from a Japanese website:

Many of cave crickets have the round back, it has the form of having been the thickset, and there is no wing. Hind legs and an antenna are very long and detect existence of a surrounding situation and a foreign enemy in darkness by shaking and moving this antenna from back to a front. In the color of the body, it is brown, an eye degenerates, and, as for gray or the thing which was adapted for the cave, the body is soft. It lives by preference under the damp places in a cave etc., and a stone and the fallen tree.

Cave crickets are omnivorous, and can go for a long time without food. To stave off starvation, they will eat their own legs, one by one.

“Oak logs are the best,” Steve says as we make our way down to the stream. “You won’t find anywhere near the same level of biodiversity under the bark of a pine log, for example.” I feel another piece of the ecological puzzle snapping into place. I knew that oaks were keystone species in the Appalachian forest, but I had always thought in terms of acorns and den trees – the scale I’m familiar with. From what Steve is saying, it sounds as if, prior to the death of an oak, its contribution to the food web has barely begun. And doubtless a wood so prized by invertebrates must furnish more than its fair share of nutrients for soil microorganisms, as well.

We pass a beech log, and Steve pulls back a strip of bark to show me a smooth, unpopulated surface. But then he spots an old bracket fungus, A.K.A. artist’s conk. “This is where you find stuff on a beech log,” he says. He pulls it off and shows me the underside, which is pocked with small craters.

“These are the exit holes of Bolitotherus cornutus, whose name translates as ‘horned fungus beast’! Here, let’s find one so you can get a picture of it.” He starts digging into the rotten conk with his fingers. “A-ha!”

“That’s an insect?”

“Yup. I’ll put it on my hand so you can get a better look.”

“It’s a type of tenebrionid, or darkling beetle,” Steve explains. Most tenebrionids are desert dwellers, but this species has adapted to life inside rotten shelf fungi. It isn’t so much camouflaged as thoroughly imbued with its environment, which is caked between the ridges of blunt, tuber-shaped projections on its back. A much better picture of a clean female fungus beast can be seen here. The accompanying photo of a male shows the horns for which it was named. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature Triceratops.

According an abstract of a paper I found online, B. cornutus has well-developed wings, but has never been observed to actually use them, preferring, apparently, to walk. In a mark-and-recapture study, a few individuals were found at distances greater than those predicted from observations of its regular style of locomotion. Perhaps they did short sprints when no one was watching.

April 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The way things are

It’s right there in front of you, that Shangri-La, that eternal spring.

I mean, how else would it keep finding its way into your camera? You click the shutter thinking that you’re taking a picture of one thing, and hours later when you look at the results, you see something more, like those double-exposed pictures that the Victorians tried to pass off as photographs of ghosts.

“I have a similar train of thought at peak of each season,” says the sylph, “a desire to stop the world for a geologic minute, a general sadness that it will pass.” Me too.

But the passage itself is so beautiful: that way-making, that semi-conscious inscription of memories in nerve-map and neural net, in slowly fraying muscle, in thinning bone. Heraclitus’ river, the one you can’t step into twice? Why not say that it is reborn each moment, like any stream or spring? The Indians of La Florida – the flowering land – didn’t lie when they told Ponce de Leon about a fountain of eternal youth. They couldn’t know that he would put a self-centered spin on it.

six-spotted tiger beetle

In my camera’s Shangri-La, green tigers stalk the numerous descendents of those wasps who long ago fell to earth and lost their wings. Birth alternates with death and joy with suffering, as in any divine comedy; only those for whom all distinction between individual and tribal existence is meaningless can escape death. And these immortals – too small to be glimpsed except through the finest optics – are running the show.

Welcome to planet Earth.

April 27, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Anti-spring

black-and-white warbler

“The descent beckons,” wrote Dr. Williams in his great poem about the Paterson Falls. Why do I think of this now, in spring – the very name of which conjures up such images of upwelling and resurrection? Persephone has returned from the underworld, and in spring the young man’s fancy turns lightly, they say, to thoughts of love. But then why do we hear about so many boys with guns and bombs, their resentments turned to rage? As the earth thaws, it gaps open, and many find their gaze drawn downward.

Solomon’s seal

Many of the most emblematic wildflowers open toward the ground, a posture presumably intended to attract insect pollinators. Solomon’s seal is famous for its dangling row of blossoms, but even the first sprouts have a certain air of ascetic contemplation – a kind of inwardness. One of my favorite wildflowers – which unfortunately doesn’t grow here in the hollow – is wild ginger, which buries its reddish-brown flower in the leaf duff. I’ve come to prize the spicy flavor of its dried roots even more than Asian ginger for flavoring homebrewed ale and mead.

wild oats

With the onset of summer, rayed and umbeliferous flowers will abound. But in the light-drenched woods of spring, flowers nod sleepily. If – as the botanical term campanulate suggests – they resemble bells, they are bells without clappers. Others hide their sexual faces inside tubes, under hoods, or in mute trumpets.

Sit near a patch of blossoming lowbush blueberries, and you’ll soon see the attraction they have for wasps and bees, which swarm in to drink from their over-turned cups. These bells may not ring, but they certainly can buzz!

The blueberries grow in a small powerline right-of-way that’s almost a hundred years old. The human-maintained scrub oak barren there is a unique habitat for our end of the mountain, and we often wonder whether it harbors any rare species. I was busy snapping pictures of the rasta-like flowers of scrub oak the other day when I spotted this meloid, or blister beetle. I showed the picture to my brother Steve, and he immediately got excited. In over thirty years of collecting beetles on the mountain, he said, he’d never seen this species.

Of course, that may simply be because he doesn’t tend to do a lot of collecting this time of year; the real insect biodiversity bonanza doesn’t begin for at least another month. It may also be that these beetles are common in the canopies of other oaks also flowering now, 80-100 feet off the ground. But this morning, we combed the scrub oaks on the powerline and only found two individuals from this species. Even more surprising, Steve couldn’t find it in his favorite beetle guide. Sure, beetle species are much too numerous to include more than a representative sample in any given book, but it seems odd that something so large and showy wouldn’t have made the cut.

As I watched, this one eventually turned head-down to match the inflorescence. Steve told me that many meloids are naturally uncommon, and some are quite interesting. As is often the case with brightly colored critters, blister beetles can be quite toxic. They secrete an oily substance from their joints called catharidin, which does cause blisters for some people. Nevertheless, when disturbed, this beetle’s reaction was to drop like a stone and disappear into the leaf litter. “That’s not an uncommon reaction among pollinating beetles,” Steve said.

So clearly, there are all kinds of practical reasons to be geotropic. The danger with spring, as I mentioned the day before yesterday, is that the real heart of it will be overlooked in our feverish anticipation of more sun. “The descent / made up of despairs / and without accomplishment / realizes a new awakening : / which is a reversal / of despair,” wrote Williams. “For what we cannot accomplish, what / is denied to love, / what we have lost in the anticipation – / a descent follows, endless and indestructible .”

April 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

High spring

New growth sprouts from an old nest, signaling as well as anything can that we’ve entered that magic time I call high spring. The daffodils are fading, the banks of forsythia are in the last throes of blooming, and the first cohort of wild blossoms – shadbush, spicebush, coltsfoot, hepatica – are shedding their petals. The leaves of birches and black cherries are just beginning to open, turning the ridge to the west a pale green, while the oaks are in blossom all up and down the ridge above my house, giving it a yellow-green wash. Red maples, sugar maples and tulip poplars provide pastel splashes of red and green.

Wild sweet cherry trees – legacy of a long-gone orchard – glow white along the edge of the field in the early morning sun. Down in the hollow, purple trillium (A.K.A. wake robin) is in bloom, and Solomon’s seal and yellow mandarin are just at the point of flowering. Black cohosh, wild sarsaparilla, and a host of ferns unclench their insurrectionary green fists.

wild sarsaparilla

Almost every day brings a new birdsong: last Thursday, the black-throated green warblers were back in force. Friday afternoon, I heard weeza-weeza-weeza from inside at my writing desk and bounded out the door with my camera, but was too slow with the focus to get a shot of the first black-and-white warbler calling among the last blossoms of the ornamental cherry next to my porch. Yesterday morning, at around quarter to six, I heard a whippoorwill sing a few phrases of its namesake song from about a quarter-mile away (which is just about the distance and duration I prefer, actually). Later in the day, I watched a pair of Louisiana waterthrushes courting in the branches of a black birch above the now-roaring Plummer’s Hollow Run.

rue anemone

A weekend of hard rain has eased the fire danger I alluded to last week. Water streams from the mountain’s every pore, and it’s a real pleasure to sit outside at first light and listen to the birds tune up against a background of running water. This morning, one of those songs made my heart leap: wood thrush! But not, I’m sorry to say, an especially gifted member of the tribe. I don’t know if he grew up next to a busy highway, and thus was unable to learn the full nuances of his species’ song (a documented phenomenon, by the way), or was simply too tired from the migration to give it his all, but this was a bare-bones version of that famous thrush call.

But I’m sure there will be more thrushes – possibly as early as this evening. And it served as a reminder to me to get out more often and listen for the other thrush species, which sometimes sing on migration. In past years, I’ve been lucky enough to hear both veerys and hermit thrushes, and once, about five years ago, a Swainson’s thrush – far outside its normal breeding range – sang through most of June at one spot down in the hollow.

rattlesnake fern

I was happy when temperatures got cooler over the weekend. To my mind, spring is best when it is long and slow, though I know a lot of people who seem to regard the season primarily as foreplay to summer. Some years, it stays cold through late April, and then an early heat wave makes the flowers leap into bloom, the trees leaf out and the songbirds return from the tropics all in a rush – a southern spring. My parents traveled to Arkansas last month, and were confounded to see hepaticas blooming alongside wild geraniums. I’m sure it’s all in what you’re used to, but to them, it just didn’t seem right. Spring should come gradually, almost imperceptibly at first. Not for nothing did Aaron Copland set his ballet Appalachian Spring in Western Pennsylvania; there’s a kind of choreography to spring arrivals and blooming dates here in the north, a certain order and cadence that’s practically synonymous with spring in the minds of most northeasterners. As in any dance composition, there are many high points along the way, as buds burst in mid-air and flowers relax into nascent fruit. High spring, as I conceive of it, climaxes in mid to late May, when the pink and yellow lady’s-slippers bloom. By then, all the trees except for walnuts and locusts have fully leafed out, but insects and air pollution have yet to diminish that first, fresh, startling green.

April 19, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Hepaticas for Beth

“Hepatica,” said Beth: “probably my favorite flower of all.” I’m beginning to see what she means.

I don’t have time to write today, so these pictures will have to suffice.

April 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

First hike

All actual life is encounter.
– Martin Buber

A Sunday morning in early spring, not a cloud in the sky and very quiet. The thick moss on the trail muffles my footsteps, so that I am able to sneak up on the same small herd of deer three times. But I am not stalking them; each time they catch a whiff of me and spook, I’m surprised anew.

The second time this happens, I’m right at the intersection of trails at the bottom of the hill where, two Sundays ago, my 14-month-old niece Elanor took her first-ever hike. It occurs to me that this stretch of trail has been permanently altered for me by that milestone event. The trail I walk on now is both the same and not the same as the one in my imagination, and my impression of stillness now is made more vivid by contrast with the excitement and commotion preserved in my memory like stills from a movie.

For weeks, Elanor had been fiercely resisting the imposition of shoes. For her first birthday back in February, her cousin Eva in Mississippi had mailed her a pair of baby shoes that she felt would be sure to get her walking, because they were designed to squeak in an amusing fashion with every step. At first, we weren’t sure whether this was a good idea. Sitting out on the lawn in front of the house, her daddy and grandpa got the shoes on her feet without too much trouble, but she began to fuss as soon as they cajoled her into taking a few steps. The loud squeaks seemed to add insult to injury – “What in the world have you done to my feet!?” – and we were only able to distract her from the misery of this new form of confinement by showing her the crocuses up at the edge of the lawn. She seemed a little disappointed that those brightly colored objects came apart so easily, however.

If we wanted to save any crocuses for another day, we thought we’d better relocate to the woods. Steve put his daughter on his shoulders, and we headed up toward the top of the watershed, where four, wide trails come together right below the spruce grove. It’s a big, mossy clearing where little kids always love to hang out and play. As we headed up through the laurel woods, we marveled at the way the mid-afternoon sun illuminated Elanor’s frizz of unshorn, blond hair, giving her a halo of sorts – a very misleading impression! She had been sick for much of the previous week, and her mood was still a bit uncertain, though she was clearly enjoying her ride.

We all sat down on the moss, and sure enough, Elanor was soon distracted by the plethora of twigs, acorn caps, and other small objects that needed to be tasted. She took the few steps over to my lap and was rudely reminded of the shoes still on her feet. Soon she began to fuss about the prospect of toddling back to her grandparents, who held their arms out and made encouraging noises. Steve took pity on her, got up, took her hand, and started to lead her down Laurel Ridge Trail, speaking soft words of encouragement while Elanor glared at her squeaking feet. After less than a dozen steps, he let go of her hand and followed as she continued walking on her own.

Realizing they weren’t coming back, we all got up and joined the parade, expecting it to end after one or two hundred feet. It didn’t. I raced ahead to get pictures as Elanor toddled along the 200-year-old woods road, following the wide stripe of moss. The pictures show a look of intense concentration as she rounded the big curve and picked up speed heading down the long, steep hill toward the intersection with the Dump Trail.

All this flashes through my mind as I stand at that same intersection two weeks later. In our neighbor’s recently cut-over woods to my left, the deer have just spooked for the second time. In the woods to my right, a blue-headed vireo is calling not far from where I found the nest last year. Might it be the very same male, I wonder? A pair of downy woodpeckers taps somewhere up ahead, joined suddenly by the loud and very resonant drumming of a pileated woodpecker.

There’s often a pileated hanging around this spot, but I have yet to get close enough for a picture. In this morning’s strong sunlight, he should make a brilliant spectacle, I think. He sounds as if he’s right up at the top of the hill.

A tall laurel bush standing alone beside the trail catches my eye and I go down on one knee, admiring the way the light pours through its sundress of leaves. When at length I stand up again, there’s a sudden explosion of wings as a well-camouflaged ruffed grouse flushes from a few feet away. It arcs toward our neighbor’s new hunting platform, wings clipping the skinny trunks of black birch saplings. The pileated drums.

I am walking so slowly now I’m almost going backwards. Really, though, why hurry? I’ve walked this trail thousands of times – tens of thousands. I know what’s around the next bend. Or do I?

I pause to snap some pictures of interesting swirls in the grain of a fallen oak log that spans the trail. Ordinarily, we clear such obstructions, but in this case, we thought it best just to cut out a little notch that one can walk though, leaving the rest of it in place in order to discourage possible trespassers on all-terrain vehicles. Two Sundays ago, I remember, Steve had had to lift his daughter over it; she isn’t very good at stepping over things yet. As soon as she had started down the hill, her daddy and grandpa had come and held her hands to keep her from falling face-down on the rocks that poke through the moss. She seemed a little frustrated that they wouldn’t let her run as she likes to do at home, careening around from room to room of their apartment. But it wasn’t clear to us that she quite understood what a hill was: not all inclines come with stairs!

Just as I lift my head from photographing the log, I hear a wft, wft, wft overhead: the pileated! I watch in frustration as he arrows up the trail and veers off to the left, his great, black wings rising and falling with a woodpecker’s deliberate beat. Where did he come from? How could my ears have so deceived me about the distance between us?

I hear a distant, laughing croak – that all-purpose ark, ark, ark that ravens have been saying to each other since long before Noah. It’s a sound I associate especially with fine mornings and clear weather. I look off to the left, through a 30-year-old stand of pole timber, and spot the pair of them turning in a slow circle over the valley about a half-mile away. Ark, ark, ark! A few more circles, and then one of them turns and soars off to the northeast, followed by its mate. Half a minute later, a crow caws overhead in vain pursuit, incensed as always by the presence of its larger, more graceful cousins.

Elanor’s first hike in the woods (or anywhere, for that matter) only ended because her daddy picked her up and put her back on his shoulders. She had begun to sound a little fussy, and we figured that we better make her quit while she was ahead. In all, she walked at least a thousand feet over terrain that even some sedentary adults might find a little challenging. Two days later, they went to a store that specializes in baby shoes and got her a couple different kinds of non-squeaking footwear, and she’s been walking happily ever since.

That wasn’t a day for wildlife watching, of course, though arguably there’s little to distinguish a pre-lingual human child from any other natural being, aside from its much more protracted dependence on adults. In fact, watching the way otherwise reserved people, strangers, can go gaga over small children makes me a little sad, sometimes, realizing that this might well be one of the very few avenues they have for encountering something truly wild. But then again, isn’t this preference for cuteness and cuddliness part of what separates us from wild nature, ever since the original sin of domestication? How many self-described nature lovers would actually prefer the harsh cry of a raven to the lamb-like bleat of a fawn?

As I reach the top of the hill, the pileated is just visible on a tree a few hundred feet off the trail. His call, which I tend to think of as maniacal, is no doubt perfectly sane, simply intended for other ears than mine. I hear the deer moving through the laurel, nervous footsteps following their own network of trails. It must be right about the time the churches are letting out. I picture the congregants emerging from their well-lit caves, blinking and smiling at each other in the warm sunlight. May they, too, find inspiration in whatever lies just beyond their grasp.

Prompted by the meditations on stillness at pohanginapete and Laughing Knees.