Wild Ideas in the Blue Ridge

Signs of Spring

2012-02-22T20:08:00.002-05:00

Red-spotted Newts return to the water as
adults to breed.

Photo by Pam Owen.

After days of working on client projects and, even more exhausting, marketing my own writing, I decided I needed a break today. Although I couldn't tell it from inside my tight and at this point rather stuffy little house, the temperature had climbed into the low 60s. My dog and I had been suffering from cabin fever, and I was curious about whether signs of spring were popping up outside, so I roused myself out of my lethargy, grabbed the hiking pole, called the dog, and walked down to the ponds.

Although I'd been down there just a few days ago, a close examination now revealed harbingers of spring that I hadn't noticed before. Spring was obviously underway already—not surprising considering how warm the winter has been generally.

At the upper pond, while my dog sampled some delicacies left by passing wildlife, I examined the water for any signs of amphibian life. Although on warm days for the last couple of weeks, I'd seen some Water Striders that had been roused from their winter slumbers, that and a few small flying insects had been all I'd seen that maybe winter was on its way out.

The Red-spotted newt lives
part of its life on land. Its bright
red coloring at this stage led to
its being known as a Red Eft.
Photo by Pam Owen.

Now, walking slowly around the pond, I noticed a flurry of activity—Red-spotted Newts (Notophthalmus viridescens viridescens) were starting off their spring breeding, although there was no sign yet of the jellylike clusters of eggs (resembling frog eggs) they'll soon produce.

This species has long been a favorite herp of mine, because of its interesting life cycles—"one of the most complex and variable life cycles of any North American salamander," as the Virginia Dept. of Game and Inland Fisheries' Fish and Wildlife Information Service website puts it. That's because it has three life stages after hatching, rather than the usual two of most salamanders. It starts as a tadpole (aquatic larva), as most salamanders and frogs do, then emerges to live on land in upland forests. In this terrestrial stage, it takes on a bright red hue and is known as a Red Eft. The interesting part is that the salamander then returns to the water as an adult to mate and reproduce.

Two Water Striders appear to be mating while
a Red-spotted newt, a predator, lurks below.
I took this photo last August.
Photo by Pam Owen.

Continuing my walk past the lower pond, which also had a lot of newt activity near the edge, I decided to explore the wetland beyond to see if Skunk Cabbage was finally coming up. I hadn't ventured over there since I moved onto the property last June, since I didn't realize the wetland was part of the property until I asked my landlords. I was glad to finally check out the boggy area, although it's drier than it should be this time of year. With little snow and not much rain either this winter, everything was drier down there than it should have been.

Nevertheless, I found plenty of Skunk Cabbage already starting to bloom, which comes before the leaves appear.

First blooms of Skunk Cabbage (top and middle) on Feb. 23. By later March, the leaves should create a green carpet (bottom, from last year in a different location).
Photos by Pam Owen.

Coming back up the mountain, I found a black, woolly caterpillar in the yard (below). Looks like it belongs in the tiger-moth (Arctiidae) family, as the Woolly Bear (Isabella Tiger Moth) does, but without the orange banding that every school kid in Virginia would recognize. In fact, other than barely discernible lightening at the tips of the longer set of bristles, this guy is totally black. Looks like I need to whip on my deerstalker hat, for the game is afoot. First stop: BugGuide. I've already posted the photos there to see if I can get some help from fellow creepy-crawly lovers. Look for more on this in future posts.

Black, woolly caterpillar, likely in the tiger moth family, like the Woolly Bear caterpillar (Isabella Tiger Moth).
Photos by Pam Owen.

Beep and Whir: The American Woodcock Looks for Romance

2012-02-16T22:28:00.001-05:00

Illustration of an American Woodcock
(Scolopax minor)

A few days ago, I had just finished my latest "Wild Ideas" newspaper column, about animals that breed in winter, in which I'd mentioned the American Woodcock (Scolopax minor). As if on cue, that evening I heard its characteristic slow courtship beeps outside my window, at the forest's edge.

This species arrives here in the Blue Ridge to start courting as soon as the ground thaws enough that they can find their favorite food, earthworms. While this can be as early as January, they more typically show up in late February.

Belonging to the taxonomic order of shorebirds, S. minor evolved to live in upland forests and is the only woodcock native to North America. It ranges from Tex as east to Florida and north to southern Canada. Overwintering to the east of the Appalachians and south of Pennsylvania, it migrates west and north to breed.

While the American Woodcock spends most of its life in young upland forest and brushy woods near rivers and streams, it prefers brushy clearings and meadow bogs scattered with woody plants one ot two feet high for breeding. Up around my house, it's mostly lawn and forest, with only a shallow edge, so I figured this guy was just checking out the neighborhood and would move on.

This evening when I was walking the dog, I heard beeping down by the pond, a much more promising habitat for Woodcock romance. It's not exactly a meadow down there, but there are some scrubby areas that are broader than further up the mountain, and it's wet, with streams and ponds.

In the dying light, I tried to remain quiet and make out the bizarre courtship display that should follow, but the bird must have figured out my dog and I were there, because he went silent. I'd just gotten home, it was time for my dog's dinner, and we still had to walk back up the mountain to the house, so I decided to try again some other night when I didn't have Mai Coh in tow.

Woodcocks are famous for their courtship displays. Along with beeping, the males “spiral up high on twittering wings with melodius chirping and then circle back sharply to the ground to resume their unique peenting display,” as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “Birds of North America” website describes it.
Henry Marion Hall, in his 1946 book Woodcock Ways, describes the male’s descent a bit more poetically: “Descending, at first gradually but then plunging dizzily, the little musician eventually flickers into the brush….” The downward vertical spiral reminds me of a helicopter landing. Courtship displays also include bobbing, fanning the tail, raising the wings, and fluttering the wings in a short flight with legs dangling.

Trying to discern all this in the growing dark is frustrating at best. The bird’s brown, black, and gray feathers, which makes it virtually impossible distinguish from its surroundings, doesn't help. Every time I try to see the show, I yearn for infrared binoculars.

Living on the border of Shenandoah National Park, I discovered long ago that a great place to try to view this show is Big Meadows, a huge, boggy meadow that is a prime Woodcock mating area. Mostly, this has involved waiting patiently in what always seems to be a damp, chilly evening.

While the displays have been carefully studied, they are not well understood. What is understood is that, after mating, the female is on her own in raising her young.

The coloring of the American Woodcock provides good camouflage for both adult(above) and juvenile (below). (Top photo by guizmo_68; bottom photo by Jacob Enos. Both licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Woodcocks feed in damp, muddy areas mostly on invertebrates, particularly earthworms, and on some vegetation, particularly seeds. On summer and winter evenings, they can flock together on their feeding grounds. With so little open area other than lawn on this property, it's unlikely I'll see flocks, but it would be nice to make out, in the dim light, at least one Woodcock giving it a try.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All about Birds” website has recordings of the vocalizations of the American Woodcock, along with descriptions of its courtship behavior. Henry Marion Hall’s Woodcock Ways and the third volume of the Stokes Guide to Bird Behavior also detail the Woodcock’s courtship display and other behavior.

The Romance of Cloudspotting

2012-02-14T12:40:00.001-05:00

Clouds are Nature's poetry spoken in a whisper in the rarefied air between crest and crag….Nothing in nature rivals their variety and drama; nothing matches their sublime, ephemeral beauty.

—Gavin Pretor-Pinney,
The Cloudspotter’s Guide

Cumulus clouds hang low over the Blue Ridge Mountains
on a fall day in Rappahannock County, Virginia
Photo by Pam Owen

Mare’s tail, mammatus, thundercloud—evocative names for clouds, actors playing out a drama over our heads we often ignore while going about our lives down here on earth.

As defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a cloud is “a visible mass of particles of condensed vapor (as water or ice) suspended in the atmosphere of a planet…or moon.” Clouds can inspire a range of emotions, from peace, awe, excitement, and pleasure to fear and sadness. A deep blue sky is beautiful, but the contrast of a fluffy white cloud moving across it makes it exponentially more so.

In a moment of leisure, we might ponder whether a cloud looks like a bunny or George Washington. When a summer thunderstorm or winter blizzard is heading our way, we peruse the sky more anxiously, wondering what hardship its clouds may portend.

Enormously attracted to the endless variety and beauty of clouds, I spent many a summer afternoon outside as a kid lying on my back to watch the show above, trying to determine who the lead characters were and the story they were trying to tell. As a teen, I once emerged from an arroyo on a horseback ride with an uncle in Utah to see narrow white funnel clouds eerily reaching down from a bright blue sky. It took a minute to realize they were tornadoes, which did millions of dollars of damage to Salt Lake City. Camping in Kansas as an adult, I took the clue from an ominous welling up of black clouds, throwing my gear into my car and leaving a campground just ahead of a tornado.

While living on the Northern Plains, I thrilled to the enormous canvas of sky on which clouds played out their lives, often serving as a dark backdrop for complete rainbows formed by light gloriously refracted by water molecules. In the Pacific Northwest, I lived under the pall of dark, wet, brooding skies that contributed to the lush green landscape but also to the high incidence of depression in local residents.

I’m hardly alone in my love of clouds. Thinking they were not adequately recognized for their important role in the water cycle on which all life depends, British author Gavin Pretor-Pinney formed The Cloud Appreciation Society. The society’s website includes a magnificent photo gallery of clouds.

Although a proud, badge-carrying member of the society, I’m still struggling with the nuances of the taxonomic system for classifying clouds, which is modeled on the one for living things, with species grouped into genera. In 2006, Pretor-Pinney wrote The Cloudspotter’s Guide as “a celebration of the carefree, aimless and endlessly life-affirming pastime of cloudspotting.” I’ve found the book not only really useful in sorting out clouds but also an enjoyable, quirky read.

To me, cumulus is the loveliest and most peaceful genus. These are the fluffy clouds we most associate with warm days. However, they can grow into more ominous cumulonimbus, or thunderclouds, that can release pounding downpours accompanied by lightning and thunder. As the rain passes, the sky breaks into stratocumulus clouds, which “gather into snow-covered mountains and melt into winding rivers of blue,” in the words of Pretor-Pinney. Altocumulus clouds appear clumped in layers that form between the ground and the top of the troposphere.

Stratus is the flat gray sheet of cloud that may produce light rain. Nimbostratus, darker than stratus but slower moving than cumulonimbus, releases steady rain over many hours.

Wispy cirrusclouds fly high over the
Rappahannock Farmer’s Co-op
(now CFC Farm & Home)on a winter day
Photo by Pam Owen

Cirrus clouds are the highest. Made of ice crystals, they are wispy, feathery creatures we see most often on winter days. Cirrocumulus, another high-flying cloud that typically appears en masse, is so tiny that it can be hard to separate out individuals. These clouds sometimes look like “no more than ripples in a high, smooth layer,” as Pretor-Pinney puts it.

Each genera is further organized into several species and varieties. Cirrus uncinus (meaning "curly hooks" in Latin) is one of my favorites species. This comma-shaped cirrus cloud has wisps flying out below a thicker top and is commonly known as “mare’s tail.”

If you’re a serious cloudspotter, you can attempt to sort out clouds’ taxonomy—or you can just enjoy them. And you needn’t leave the house to do either.

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, about connecting children with nature, also wrote an article on the same theme, “Cloudspotting, Wildcrafting, and Wildwatching,” for the Barnes & Noble website. In the article, he tells of meeting a boy who loved nature but suffered from a condition that “caused him to be overwhelmed when he went outside” and therefore spent most of his life in his room.

Louv later stumbled onto The Cloudspotter’s Guide in an airport shop and sent it to the boy, who was a friend of his son. “He might not be able to step outside the front door comfortably,” Louv wrote, “but he and his family could still exercise his curiosity about nature—they could still see the sky from his bedroom window.”

Pretor-Pinney, in his manifesto for The Cloud Appreciation Society, encourages us to “Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds.”

[First published in January 2012 as a "Wild Ideas" column in subscribing Virginia newspapers.]

Where Is Sherlock Holmes When You Need Him?

2012-01-18T15:24:00.000-05:00

The natural world is wonderfully, albeit also frustratingly, complex. Sometimes I think it would be great to just know everything there is to know about the relationships among species, not that that's ever likely to happen. Mostly, I find nature's mysteries challenging. Trying to figure them out is more fun than playing the word games I was addicted to as a child.

With no degree in ecology, biology, or any of the sciences that might help, but with some college courses in these subjects, a spotty body of knowledge gained from a life-long interest in nature, and 40+ hours of training as a Virginia master naturalist, tackling even species identification can be difficult for me. Animals, not so much, but sorting out plant species can be beyond challenging. I feel a huge victory if I can sort out one sunflower or tree from another. Get down into the weeds, literally, to try to ID forbs, sedges, grasses, mosses, and other plant divisions with myriad species and subtle distinctions, and I often have to tap more knowledgeable sources.

What's left of a dead tree, or snag, has apparently
provided a banquet for predators seeking the insects
within, but which predators?
Photo by Pam Owen

Species identification is only one of the mysteries naturalists, professional or citizen scientists, face in learning about nature. Often in my ramblings through nature, I really wished I had the genius, phenomenal memory, scope of knowledge, and deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes—one of my all-time favorite literary characters—to sort out nature's intriguing puzzles. Take two I stumbled onto during walks in the woods in the past week: a shredded snag (right) and a pile of feathers (below). Who was responsible?

The snag (another name for a dead tree) was on the northeast face of the mountain behind my house, a few feet from the boundary of Shenandoah National Park. I put my limited knowledge of nature and power of deductions to bear in trying to figure out how the damage had occurred.

The snag was only about 5 feet high and showed no claw marks above the shredded area, which ended about 4 feet up, so a bear was probably not involved in what was undoubtedly a search for insects in the dead wood. Even in January, Black Bears don't truly hibernate and den up for long except during long spells of severe cold (less and less common here) or if they're female and pregnant.

No scat or tracks were apparent around the base, so while this doesn't rule out small mammals, such as raccoons and opossums, joining in the feast, I deduced that woodpeckers were probably the excavators. With round holes, Pileateds were probably not involved, so that meant one or more of the smaller native species had done all the shredding.

A pile of feathers mark the demise of a bird, but which species?
Photo by Pam Owen

Woodpeckers were featured in the other mystery, the pile if feathers my dog found on the Thornton River Trail, also in the park but at the other end of my hollow. While my elderly dog is half deaf and blind these days, her nose still works pretty well, and she about dragged me off the trail (dogs must be leashed in the park) following the scent of something. Carrion is the most likely thing to attract her interest, so I assumed something had met its doom just off the trail. Following the dog, I found a pile of feathers. The feathers' markings looked like those of a woodpecker, but what species?

A pile of feathers and the head are all that are left of a
Red-bellied Woodpecker on the forest floor along the
Thornton River Trail, in Shenandoah National Park.
Photo by Pam Owen

I photographed the feathers and started back toward the trail, figuring I'd check my bird field guides when I got back, when the dog pulled once more. This time she led me to conclusive evidence—the head of a Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus). The mystery of the victim's identity was now solved, but what had eaten it?

Woodpeckers are tree-hugging cavity dwellers and are rarely, if ever, on the ground. With their short legs, they're adapted to navigating tree trunks high in the forest, not hopping around on the earth below. So, unless this woodpecker died naturally and just fell to the ground, it likely was picked off from one of the trees above the kill site.

An live, intact Red-bellied Woodpecker
Photo by Ken Thomas (KenThomas.us)

Most mammals would just eat the whole bird, head and all, and there was a considerable bird excrement around the kill site, which indicated that the predator was likely a large bird—a raptor. Woodpeckers are diurnal and usually spend the night in a tree cavity, so likely the predator was also diurnal (not an owl). So, which of the raptors who hunts during the day was the likely predator?

At that point, I could really only guess. The Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) is forest dwelling and, having rebounded from the raptor die-off in the 1960s due to pesticides, is pretty common up here in the Blue Ridge now. The noisiest raptor in the area, I used to hear a pair of them loudly and persistently calling every day at my last house, on a lower but also forested ridge. While globally considered common (of "least concern," according to IUCN), they are considered less common in Virginia but "apparently secure," according to the NatureServe database that tracks the status of species.

A Red-shouldered Hawk Photo by Jo Anna Barber, licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution–Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Red-shouldereds are big (17–24 inches) and also eat birds, along with pretty much anything else they can catch, including small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and crayfish, according to Cornell Lab's AllAboutBirds website. The website points out another "cool fact": "By the time they are five days old, nestling Red-shouldered Hawks can shoot their feces over the edge of their nest. Bird poop on the ground is a sign of an active nest." While this doesn't mean the copious poop I found around the kill site belongs to this species, I agree that it is indeed a cool fact.

So, two mysteries whittled down, but far from solved, in my mind. However, tackling nature's puzzles is one of the best games around, and every time I take one on, I get closer to understanding the web of life and my place in it.

Identifying the Fungus among Us

2011-11-28T13:13:00.001-05:00

[From my"Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, October 23, 2011]

I knew as a kid that toads didn’t actually sit on toadstools(hookah-smoking caterpillars did that), although I did seem to find an awfullot of toadlets sitting under the umbrella tops of some mushrooms. Maybe they werefeeding on insects that were eating the mushrooms, or maybe they were seeking shelterfrom weather or predators. That was a mystery I never solved.

This large mushroom, most likely a Parasol Mushroom,
kicked off a journey in learning to identify fungi.
This underside view shows the gills under
the cap and the partial veil (ring) on the stalk,
two characteristics that help in identification.Photos by Pam Owen

Although other things about mushrooms also intrigued and, tosome extent, repelled me—their funky look and smell, and their habit of growingin dark, damp places—I never got addicted to the taste of edible ones and becamea true ‘shroomer. My interest in fungi got kick-started again when someimpressive mushrooms started growing in my driveway during the deluge of rainwe got late this summer and early in the fall.

Mushrooms are in the fungus kingdomof living things, separate from plants, animals, and bacteria.We usually think of them as having umbrella-shaped tops, but mushrooms come ina large variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. In my rambles during the wetspell, I came upon white, brown, beige, blue, purple, yellow, orange, green, andred mushrooms with various markings. Shelf mushrooms growing in layers out oftrees, club mushrooms that look like coral, puffballs from small orbs tofootballs, and delicate “fairy rings” of tiny mushrooms with umbrella tops filledthe landscape everywhere I went—from hill to hollow.

One of the amazing things about mushrooms is that much ofwhat we see above ground are merely blooms of a much larger fungus underneath. Theseblooms are spore carriers, much like flowers that carry a plant’s pollen. Thelargest living thing in the world is actually a common Honey Mushroom (Armillariaostoyae). Although its blooms are clustered in small groups that are spreadout, they all belong to one underground behemoth extending its rhizomorphs (shoestringfilaments) over about 2,384 acres of soil in northeast Oregon's Blue Mountains.It weighs more than 200 tons and is estimated to be about 2,400 years old. Now,that’s a ‘shroom!

The flaky top of the mushroom is a characteristic of
the Parasol Mushroom but of other poisonous species.

Many underground fungi are key to healthy forests in thatthey break down nutrients that can be absorbed by the tree roots they entwine. Humans,some invertebrates, and voles are among the few consumers of mushrooms. Thelast, in excreting the spores, enable fungi that live below ground to be dispersedto other areas.

Poisonous mushrooms are commonly referred to as toadstools,and some species have been used for centuries as hallucinogens. Even somemushrooms that are considered edible are dangerous if eaten uncooked.

I’ve always considered all mushrooms to be poisonous untilproven otherwise by an expert. Even then, I’d want that expert to take a bite first,then wait a few days for any reaction, before I thought about eating it myself.One genus, Amanita, is responsible 95 percent of the fatalitiesresulting from mushroom poisoning. According to Wikipedia, the Death Cap (A.phalloides) alone accounts for about 50 percent of these. National PublicRadio, in its story “On the Trail of the Death Cap Mushroom,” reported thatthis species, which has recently been determined through DNA testing to be aninvader from Europe, is rapidly spreading along the coast of NorthernCalifornia, although it also occurs in the East from New York to Virginia.

The mystery mushroom emerged as a button,
as many mushrooms do.

Avoiding the entire Amanita genus is not easy,considering it comprises more than 600 species with a wide variety of shapesand colors. A few are edible, and many resemble edible mushrooms in othergenera. Most experts recommend avoiding coming into contact with any Amanita.My brother says a mycologist (mushroom scientist) he knows will not eat anywild mushrooms that grow outside of his geographic area because identificationcan be so difficult.

To identify the species in my driveway, I checked with othermaster naturalists and some local ‘shroomers, went a-Googling, and perused myfew field guides, including Peterson’s. After my guides proved useful butultimately inadequate, I ended up ordering a really good one I found for localmushrooms, Mushrooms of Virginia and Central Appalachia, by William C.Roody. From all these, I learned about the major identification points forfungi, including shape, size, color, location, and growing habit.

My mushrooms were white, except for beige-colored flakes on thetop of the cap. They emerged from the ground as a ball (button) on a stalk, andthen spread out their caps into an umbrella shape that reached 9 inches. The undersideof the cap had feathery, spore-carrying ribs that fanned out from the stalk,which put them in the order of gill mushrooms (Agaricales). They also hada ring around the stalk, which was what was left of the cap when it expanded.The base of the stalk, the volva (or veil) was straight, so that ruled out Amanita, whose volva widens at the base.

I never got to the ultimate ID technique—examining the size,color, and shape of the spores—because my subjects kept getting run over byvehicles coming up the drive before I got around to it. I’ll check that nextyear, if the blooms come up again.

Ultimately, I concluded that my impressive funguswas probably a common, edible Parasol Mushroom (Macrolepiota procera),in the parasol genus. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to eat it.

Spring Is Marked by a Comma, Not a Question Mark

2011-05-01T21:03:00.073-04:00

["Wild Ideas" column, March 14, 2011]

Spring Peepers are one of the first frogs to
emerge in the spring, when their chorus
of mating calls can be heard throughout Virginia.
Photo by Svdmolen.

I don’t care what the calendar says, here in the western Piedmont, spring begins March 1. This year, however, the winter was cold, dry, and windy, and seemed like endless.

Then, miraculously, substantial rains and lingering warm spells came as February turned into March. Up here on a dry mountain ridge, however, I’d seen and heard few signs of spring—no wildflowers, no Spring Peepers, no Eastern Phoebes, or even American Woodcocks. A couple of Titmice did carry off some of my dog’s hair that I’d left on the deck for the birds to line their nests with, nonnative bulbs that were planted on the property were coming up, and I’d even heard reports of woodcocks finally starting their courtship beeping up in Shenandoah National Park, but not a peeper or a beeper here.

The first real sign of spring at my house was around the first of March when I was working on my computer late one night and caught movement out of the corner of my eye. A dozen small moths were beating against the glass of the sliding-glass door next to me, trying to get to the light coming from the lamp on the inside. I was thrilled to see these insects so late at night that early in the month, signaling a break in the plunging temps that had come all winter as the sun went down. As much as I enjoyed seeing them, however, I quickly drew the blinds and turned off the lamp to keep them from wearing themselves out beating futilely against the glass.

Reports of hearing Wood Frogs and Spring Peepers had started to come in from other nature observers at the end of February, but I didn’t hear these early-emerging frogs myself until the second week of March. I was driving a quiet gravel road through a low, wet area on a warmish, damp night when the a Peeper chorus crept in over the sound of the radio. I immediately turned off the radio, rolled down the windows, and stopped the car. I’d longed to hear that sound for so many cold, silent nights that I wanted to savor it.

By that weekend I was itching to really experience spring, so I set out to find it where it was most likely to be—in low wet areas in the county.

Skunk Cabbage, one of the earliest
native plants to bloom in the Piedmont
and Blue Ridge in early spring.
Photo by Pam Owen.

I started along the Rappahannock River on that beautiful springlike Saturday but didn’t see much other than swarms of midges and other insects. I was disappointed in not even finding skunk cabbage, which normally blooms in February or March. I’d heard of some sightings of its flowering but couldn’t find the distinctive but subtly colored (some would say ugly) blooms in the damper areas along the river. Lots of Autumn Olive, that pernicious foreign invader, was leafing out faster than any of our native shrubs all along the trail, but no flowers of any sort in sight.

It was still a gorgeous day, and later as I sat on a high hill in the still-bare forest with a friend and my dog, notes from Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” were running through my head. Green or not, spring was in the air in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills.

On the drive home at dusk, insects kept appearing in my headlights and then two bats appeared against the darkening sky, taking advantage of the buffet. Now that was more what I was looking for. When I got home, Spring Peepers were finally chorusing from a wetland on the other side of the road, a happy end to a fine day.

A battered Eastern Comma emerges
on a warm day in early spring, after
making it through a cold, hard winter.
Photo by Pam Owen.

On Sunday—still warm and sunny—a walk along the Thornton River was not very productive in terms of spotting signs of spring, so I went to the Hazel River. There I felt like I hit the spring jackpot: one Eastern Comma butterfly, then another, on the gravel road leading along the river. The two briefly chased each other, but both seemed more interested in ingesting the minerals on the gravel road. I finally got close enough to take a few quick photos of one, which was so battered that I had to look closely to make sure it was indeed an Eastern Comma (Polygonia comma) and not the similar Question Mark (Polygonia interrogationis).

I hadn’t seen any migratory songbirds in my weekend rambles. Then again, I started in the afternoon and was more focused on trying to find flowering plants that might respond to the warmth at that hour and show off their blooms. Reports of migratory-bird sightings have been filtering in since early March from over in Shenandoah Valley by a birding group there: Tree Swallows, Pine Siskins, Yellow-Rumped Warblers, Golden-Crowned Kinglets, Pine Warblers, and Cedar Waxwings. Although I haven’t seen or heard my pair of Eastern Phoebes, that species had also been spotted.

Bloodroot, also an early spring bloomer.
Photo by Pam Owen.

By the time this column is printed, early-flowering native wildflowers should be well along with their displays. A walk in natural areas should yield sights of Bloodroot, Toothwort, Liverwort, Dog-tooth Violet, Coltsfoot, Dandelion, Spring Beauty, Storksbill, Common Blue Violet, Rue Anemone, Trailing Arbutus, Star Chickweed, Plantain-leaved Pussytoes, Trout Lily, Round-lobed Hepatica, and Pink Azalea in bloom.

Quacking Frogs Get a Jump on Spring

2011-02-28T20:56:00.012-05:00

I've always been an avid frog watcher. Even before the Spring Peepers’ chorus heralded the arrival of spring, I’d pull on my boots and go to still-icy pools to listen for the sound of Lithobates sylvaticus, the Wood Frog, kicking off the annual frog-breeding cycle.

Back then, this frog's scientific name was Rana sylvatica, but scientists recently decided figured out that it really belonged to the Lithobates genus. Of course, I had no clue about scientific names back then, so they were just Wood Frogs to me.

A young Wood Frog (Lithobates sylvaticus)

Photo by MichaelZahniser

L. sylvaticus, a forest dweller, is the widest-ranging frog species in North America and appears the farthest north—all the way to the Alaskan arctic. Further south, it prefers higher, cooler elevations. In Virginia, it ranges from the upper Piedmont throughout the Mountain region, but also occurs in the northern part of the Coastal Plain.

During most of the winter, Wood Frogs hibernate under rocks, logs, or detritus in wooded areas. Their emergence from hibernation is triggered by warm spells that, in Virginia, can occur as early as January. At that time theys mass in shallow, short-lived pools for a frenzy of breeding that lasts only a few days. These vernal pools are formed from rains and thaws in winter and spring and dry up as temperatures rise and rains disappear.

How does the Wood Frog manage to survive breeding in the cold of winter? As author Elizabeth Colburn explains in Vernal Pool: Natural History and Conservation, “Within five minutes of the start of freezing, Wood Frogs accumulate high levels of glucose in the liver and leg muscles, subsequently releasing the glucose into the blood and other tissues, where it functions as an antifreeze.”

While other frog species can pull off the antifreeze trick in anticipation of winter, only L. sylvaticus can adjust to changes in the immediate temperature conditions. It can survive freezing for up for four weeks and is back to normal within hours of thawing out.

Medium-sized (1.5 to 3.25 inches), the Wood Frog is easy to distinguish from other Virgina frogs because of its black mask, which runs from each eye to above the foreleg. The rest of its body color ranges from pink to black.

The Wood Frog’s distinctive clacking call—likened to the “feeding call of the mallard” on the Minnesota Herpetological Society’s website—has earned it the nickname of “quacking frog.” The Handbook of Frogs and Toads of the United States and Canada notes that Wood Frogs give two, four, or six short notes in rapid succession that are “high and grating in character.” (Click here to hear the call.)

A pair of Wood Frogs mating

(pulled out of the water for the photo)

Photo by Cephas

Male Wood Frogs are so frenzied in their breeding that they actually have a secondary call to let males who have trapped them in a lusty embrace know that the object of their desire isn’t a female. The clacking can go on day and night when temperatures are right but doesn’t carry far.

In northeastern forests, wood frogs are numerous, with almost 5,000 recorded at just one vernal pool in Massachusetts, according to Colburn. During mating sessions, they can turn breeding pools black in an orgy of procreation.

Each Wood Frog is extremely loyal to its natal pool (where it was born), with up to 85 percent returning to their natal pool to breed, bypassing other pools along the way. The remaining percentage disperses to nonnatal pools, ensuring genetic diversity. While the dispersing males may plop down in any shallow pool they find, females are pickier, refusing to breed in any pool with fish, the main predator of frog eggs.

A Wood Frog tadpole morphing into an adult

Photo by Brian Gratwicke

Each female produces 1,000 to 3,000 eggs. Barring water that is overly acidic, dries up. or refreezes, or predation, the eggs’ rate of success in hatching out is high—80 to 96 percent, according to Colburn. Tadpoles don’t fare so well, with less than 4 percent usually surviving to adulthood. Wood Frogs prefer to breed in pools that appear very early and disappear fast, so they have to grow fast, becoming adults within 50 days.

Once the breeding is over, the frogs go silent and return to their small terrestrial home ranges (500 to 700 square feet) on the moist forest floor 1,000 or more feet uphill from their breeding areas. The breeding migration can be dangerous, especially across areas that have been cleared of forest—roads in particular.

Wood Frogs are voracious eaters, especially in the far north, where insects are around only briefly in the short summer. They chow down on ground beetles, crickets, bugs, caterpillars, other small insects, earthworms, snails, and spiders, and in turn are eaten by hawks, wading birds, snakes, and turtles, among other predators.

On a recent warm day after a rain and thaw, I donned my boots and headed for the wetlands along the Rappahannock River. I was disappointed by the silence there, but the winter has been unusually dry and cold, and no one else in my conservation network had reported hearing the distinctive clacking yet this year, either. However, with the recent warm spell and rain, I'm now hearing from my contacts that the quacking frog is back. With the late start and the short time they breed, there has to be a real frenzy of the little guys getting their groove on now.

Want to Help Our Frogs?

Amphibians of all kinds are under siege from changing climate and environmental degradation. A fun way to help monitor their health is to volunteer for FrogWatch USA. You just need an area with frogs that you can visit at least a couple of times a week from now through August. It only takes a few minutes to do the monitoring by ear and then enter the results into the Frogwatch online database. With only a few species in the Piedmont and western Virginia, it’s easy to learn all the calls.

The Virginia Herpetological Society’s website has sound recordings of native frog calls and lots of other good information, and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries website has a breeding chart showing where and when each species breeds. VDGIF also offers a CD, Calls of Virginia Frogs and Toads, for $5.

Daddy Longlegs—Crawly but maybe not so creepy

2011-02-22T23:44:00.003-05:00

[From my"Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, January 2011]

Some people fear spiders in general — or are just sure that venomous Brown Recluse or Black Widow spiders are lurking in the dark corners of our houses waiting to pounce on us. The truth is that neither of these species is common in our houses and the arachnids that are more likely to be our housemates are innocuous ones commonly known as “daddy longlegs” because of their long, spindly legs.

The problem with the common name is that it is often used to refer to two different families of arachnids and even to an insect, the crane fly. Crane flies have wings and are insects, so that leaves us with the arachnids, cellar spiders and harvestmen.

A cellar spider

(Pholcus phalangioides).

hanging around in a house

Photo by Sven Siegmund.

Cellar spiders, also known as “skull spiders” because of the markings on their bodies, are in the family Pholcidae of the spider order, Araneae. The most common of these species in Virginia homes is a European immigrant, Pholcus phalangioides.

Harvestmen, like cellar spiders, are arachnids but belong to the order Opiliones. Harvestmen are well represented on the planet, with more than 6,400 species having been discovered worldwide out of a total that probably exceeds 10,000, according to Wikipedia. Determining which kind of harvestman is in your house is a task best left up to entomologists, since the variations among species can be extremely subtle.

Harvestmen can be differentiated easily from spiders in that their multi-sectioned bodies appear to have only one oval segment instead of the two of spiders. The eyes differ as well: harvestmen have a single pair of eyes in the middle of their heads, oriented sideways, while Pholcidae have the eight eyes indicative of their order.

Cellar spiders, like harvestmen, have long legs, but they appear more spindly and frail and are often askew, which makes these ethereal spiders appear drunk or dying. Like cobweb spiders, their webs are messy.

Cellar spiders are effective predators, preying on mosquitoes, small moths, flies, gnats and other insects that often end up in our houses, as well as other spiders, even those much larger than themselves. They’re also fond of woodlice, a tiny terrestrial crustacean commonly called a “pill bug.” When food is scarce, cellar spiders can turn cannibalistic.

I recently saw a cellar spider with a Marmorated Stink Bug trapped in its web. The spider kept touching the bug with its back two legs. I couldn’t figure out if the spider was trying to determine what it had trapped, was intrigued by the scent of this other exotic invader, or was trying to figure out how to get through the bug’s hard carapace to the feast inside. In any case, by the next day the stink bug was gone — probably having escaped rather than ending up spider food. When disturbed, cellar spiders often shake their webs violently to ward off predators.

A harvestman (Opilio canestrinii), probably a female.

Photo by Pudding4brains.

Harvestmen do not spin silk, so don’t have webs. While they will occasionally eat small live insects, they mostly live off decomposing animal and vegetative matter.

Humans tend to have an uneasy relationship with spiders and their kin and can even be phobic about them. Maybe it’s because spiders are quick little predators that appear strange to us, are not exactly cuddly, can be aggressive and are in some cases quite venomous. We know so little about them, and there are so many of them, that we have a habit of spinning myths about them.

Take cellar spiders. Urban legend has it that they are the most venomous spiders on the planet, but that their jaws are too short or weak to bite through human skin. The television show “MythBusters” tested this myth by getting a spider to bite one of their onscreen reporters. The spider’s teeth did indeed manage to break through the skin, but the victim reported “nothing more than a very mild, short-lived burning sensation.” Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, back this up: “There is no reference to any pholcid spider biting a human and causing any detrimental reaction.” Some research shows that cellar spider venom is so weak it doesn’t even kill the tiny prey they normally use it on.

I used to freak out my friends when I was a little kid by letting wolf spiders crawl on my hands and bite me. I had the same sensation as that described in “MythBusters,” although the wolf spider’s bite was quite itchy after the fact. Harvestmen have no venom at all, but they do produce a harmless, albeit smelly, fluid when disturbed.

Harvestmen and cellar spiders are also decidedly nonaggressive. I’ve poked quite a few cellar spiders to see if they were alive, since they often look remarkably dead. Their only response was to shrink back a bit. And I’ve carried many a harvestman out of the house without them getting excited at all.

What isn’t a myth is that spider silk has antimicrobials in it, which makes sense, since spiders often catch prey that takes them a long time to consume, and antimicrobials preserve the nutrients. It is also hypoallergenic and so strong that the military is testing it for use in bulletproof vests.

Video on Burrowing Owls

2011-02-18T15:09:00.002-05:00

Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia)

Photo by Pete Wallace

What a hoot! Check out this video, just featured on NPR's Science Friday. Burrowing owls are ground-dwelling and diurnal. Not native to Virginia, occurring in open areas in the West and Florida, but I wish they were. Great eyes, and a lot easier to observe than their nocturnal cousins.

False Spring

2011-02-17T22:24:00.000-05:00

Today was the kind of day that made me want to come back to Virginia after years in on the Northern Plains, where winters were so brutally cold that the brief Chinook in January was not enough to dissuade me of the thought that the winter would never end. When the Chinook came, there usually was so much snow on the ground that it hardly brought thoughts of spring.

In Virginia, on the other hand, we're usually treated in February to springlike weather that can actually bring out the Wood Frogs, if an even earlier brief stretch in January hasn't already done the trick, and give more than a hint of the spring to come. Sure, we can still get pounded by three feet of snow in March,but by then we know we're over the hump, that spring will surely follow.

Today was the second day into this year's false spring. Temps in the 70s, and bugs flying through the air. In walking through a stretch of forest that is normally filled with vernal pools, which in turn should have been full of Wood Frogs making their frenzied attempts to breed in the brief warm stretches that pop up this time of year. But it's just too dry - no vernal pools. The last snow, less than six inches, has quickly disappeared into the parched winter ground or run off to join the Rappahannock River somewhere downhill.

Barred Owl (Strix Varia)
Photo by Sterren

That doesn't mean the woods was without life. A Barred Owl flew past me, and settled high in a tree down the trail aways. I got out my binoculars to make sure of the ID, and we stared at each other for quite a while until it decided it was better to find another stretch of that forest to rest in before going on its nightly hunt. It's passage stirred up a variety of woodpeckers, who sounded the alarm throughout the forest.

A few wasps were also out enjoying the weather and a pile of feathers that used to be a Titmouse, but that was about all.

The day was so warm that I'd left my windows open at home to air out the house and ended up keeping them open until well into the evening. As the full moon came up, it drew me to the deck to a perfect night—a few clouds slowly drifting by the moon, a gentle breeze, and temps still hanging in the sixties. If I hadn't had a deadline, I might still be out there.

Feeding Wild Birds in Winter—What's best for them and you

2011-02-17T10:50:00.003-05:00

[From my"Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, December 2010]

An evening grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus)

at a tube feeder filled with sunflower seeds

Photo by George Gentry/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

You like birds. You want to see them up close. You’d like to help them survive through the winter. For any or all of these reasons, you’ve decided to feed your wild feathered neighbors, but doing it so that you and the birds get the most out of it can be complicated.

You can just buy a bag of mixed bird food from wherever and stick it in any old feeder, but you’re unlikely to attract all the native species overwintering in your area and could even endanger the ones that do come. Think first about which species you want to attract, how many feeding stations fit within your budget and your willingness to maintain them, and where they will be located.

Every bird species has its food preferences, and some commercial mixes have seeds in them that they may not eat and that may even discourage wanted birds and attract unwanted ones. Corn will more likely attract unwanted nonnative species, such as weaver finches (a.k.a English sparrows) or cowbirds, and can get wet easily and become dangerous for the birds that do eat it.

Milo (sorghum), the little brown seeds in many mixes, is not preferred by any species in our area, according to National Bird-Feeding Society (NBFS) director Dr. David Horn. White proso millet, also often in mixes, will attract birds who feed close to or on the ground—such as quail, doves, juncos, sparrows, and towhees—but will likely go untouched if it’s in a tube feeder higher up.

If you’re only going to use one kind of feed, black-oil sunflower is best because of its high fat and protein content. According to the National Audubon Society’s website, hulled sunflower seeds are consumed by the widest variety of bird species, including jays, red-bellied woodpeckers, finches, goldfinches, northern cardinals, grosbeaks, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and grackles.

Finches, redpolls, juncos, doves and pine siskin love Nyjer® (Guizotia abyssinica) seed. Often mistakenly thought of as thistle, it’s actually cultivated in Asia and Africa and belongs to another plant family.

A pair of Northern Cardinals

(Cardinalis cardinalis) at a feeder

Photo by Ken Thomas

If you want to use a seed mix to attract more species to one feeder, how about making your own? Use seeds that suit the birds you want to attract and the location and type of feeder you want to use. Shelled sunflower seeds, peanut hearts, and safflower seeds make a good mix that leaves less mess and is easier for softer-beaked birds to eat. (However, “hit-and-run” birds with tougher beaks, such as chickadees, enjoy hauling off larger or unshelled seeds to feast on in private.) You can use the various types of seeds separately to attract specific species.

Not all birds are seed eaters. Mockingbirds prefer raisins and berries, and bluebirds may come calling if you put out meal worms. For many birds, especially woodpeckers, suet is hugely popular because of the high fat content.

To get a variety of bird species, have feeders at different levels, with food matched to birds who feed in those zones. The ground, or a flat feeder not more than about five feet off the ground, is more likely to attract doves, northern cardinals, juncos, and sparrows. Doves won’t visit tube or hopper feeders—those that release seed when birds hop on them, but cardinals may visit both feeders they’re large enough. Chickadees, titmice, woodpeckers, and finches will feed higher up and do fine with most types of feeders.

Many species don’t like to be crowded or will gang up and take over, so spreading out feeders horizontally keeps everybody happy and also helps prevent spread of disease. Salmonella and other diseases, along with seed that has gone rancid or moldy, can be a problem, so it’s really important to dump out old seed and keep feeders clean. A mild bleach solution is recommended by most bird organizations.

Water is often more important than food for birds, so have that available, too. And you’ll need to protect the feeders from bears, squirrels, dogs, cats, and other nonbird marauders.

The quality of the seed processing can vary, according to Horn. How do you know which brands are best? Horn says the Wild Bird Feed Industry, a trade association, has set quality standards based on purity, test weight, maximum moisture, mold, odor, insect infestation and damage and heat damage.

“Not all seed producers who belong to the organization meet the standards, and not all producers who meet the standards belong to the organization,” Horn says, but he still suggests looking for WBFI’s logo on bird-feed packages.

What about the use of pesticides or herbicides in the growing process? I haven’t found any information on that and neither has Horn. However, he did point out that, since most of what ends up going to the bird-feed market is initially aimed at human consumption, the type and amount of chemicals (if any) used in the growing process should be the same wherever the feed ends up.

If all this doesn’t seem worth the rewards of seeing lots of different birds in your yard, you can just keep it simple and scatter a small amount of bird food around on the ground early in the day so that it’s gone before nocturnal nonbird foragers come calling. Change the locations regularly to avoid the spread of disease. To learn more about wild birds and feeding them, check out the following websites: Audubon, NBFS, and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All About Birds” website.

World's Rarest Bird Pictures

2011-01-29T19:44:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure "rarest" is the right word, but these photos are definitely worth checking out.

California Town Considers Broadcasting Bird Sounds on Public Streets to Add Ambiance

2011-01-28T20:14:00.004-05:00

I love Two-Fisted Birdwatcher. This particular post brings to mind standup comic Brian Regan's bit about the irate birder who called up NBC Sports when he heard, in the background of a golf tournament, the call of a bird that distinctly was not indigenous to where the tournament was being played.

While Regan apparently thought this guy was whack job, or at least a total nature nerd, I totally get the birder's point. I can be enjoying an otherwise well-written TV show when a bogus comment or storyline about nature suddenly brings a halt to my willing suspension of disbelief. I mean, how hard is it to Google the local conservation (or game, wildlife, or natural-resources) department of any state and find out what wildlife actually live in the location where the story is set?

Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos)
Photo by Petra Karstedt

TV producers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on police procedure, getting at least some of it accurate, but nature invariably takes an accuracy hit in most TV shows and many movies. Regan didn't bother to do any research either, coming up with totally bogus bird names and calls for his bit, but that's easier to forgive with a comic. Of course, the bit would have rung more true—especially for those of us who are not nature impaired—if he'd used the name of a real species.

Back to the town in California considering adding bird noises to its streets' ambiance: Citizens could soon think they're surrounded by Northern Cardinals, a species whose range has yet to reach that far west. Or they could be regaled with the song of the nightingale, a species not found in North America. Speaking of nature impaired.... Does it matter that they would be barraged by misinformation at a time when nature deficit disorder is one of the reasons we're heading for ecosystem collapse? Guess not, considering how misinformed most of our citizenry are about nature.

Still, the parallel to 1984, or at least an elevator or dentist's office, is scary enough. Personally, I prefer actual sounds, no matter what they are, in the background when I walk down a street, not some Orwellian idea of what should make me happy. What really makes me happy is not living anywhere near this town. What makes me really happy is living in Rappahannock County, where I only have to open a window to hear all the bird sounds I want.

Deer Foraging in the New Snow

2011-01-27T15:12:00.002-05:00

Sunrise out back after yesterday's snowfall

Just had a herd of nine deer foraging in the forest behind the house. I rarely see them this time of day, so I'm sure it's the 5.5" of snow we got yesterday that has brought them here. I welcome them back there, since it's a mature deciduous forest and pretty much all the browse that's low enough is nonnative invasives—honeysuckle, multiflora rose, with a bit of native greenbriar and young pines. The pines don't have much of a chance because of the mature hickory, oak, locust, and tulip trees back there that crowd out the light during the growing season, so the deer are welcome to whatever they find.

It's interesting that, with a huge mast crop of acorns and hickory nuts just a few inches below their feet, they still are looking for browse.

There's one mature buck with a good rack, two younger bucks with little racks, a mature doe, and what looks like this year's crop of fawns to round out the herd. After munching on some honeysuckle and greenbriar, they've wandered on down to a pine forest, where they're more likely to find chow.

Wish my old digital camera was up to the task of documenting the passage of the deer. I'm really looking forward to investing in something better next month, so I can add more photos to this blog and my column.

It's been a cold winter, but not a particularly snowy one, and the snow we got last night is slowing melting in today's sun. More snow is on the way tomorrow and Saturday, but not much accumulation is expected.

I'm working on my next "Wild Ideas" column, on wood frogs. Most years, by this time we're hearing their mating call by now, during a brief warm spell when, within a few days they frantically produce the next generation in ponds and vernal pools that are often still partly covered with ice.

This year, it's been silent here in the Blue Ridge. Too cold. I'm missing the chinooks of January that gave a brief respite from the longer, colder winter in the Northern Plains. Spring can't come soon enough here in Virginia this year.

Things that Go Screech in the Night

2011-01-25T11:45:00.003-05:00

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

—Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

I’m really not a winter person. As the days get shorter, the nights longer, and the temperature drops, all I want to do is hibernate. I like to be lulled to sleep by a full chorus of cicadas, crickets, tree frogs, and the occasional whip-poor-will, so I find the winter nocturnal silence, with the occasional burst of bizarre and even blood-curdling noises, to be a lot less restful than the sounds of a summer’s night.

As a sight-oriented human, I find it’s harder to describe the sounds of animals than their appearance, but I’ll give it a try with the help of some good references. The first sound that woke me up since the summer chorus went silent was a Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), making what is often referred to as “strange” sounds. While this native of Virginia may bark when threatened, its vocalizations can run the gamut of something out of Jurassic Park to a hawk’s scream or a hoarse cough—sometimes a medley of all these.

The sometimes strange vocalizations of the
nonnative Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) can be
heard all over Virginia, particularly at night.
Photo by John Sarvis/U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), which is not native to Virginia but is now threatening to crowd out its gray cousin, also has a hawklike scream and doglike bark, adding yips and some more exotic sounds—chattering monkeys, gobbling turkeys and a haunting, loonlike cry come to mind.

If you hear a “bark” that is breathier and more consistent in pitch than a fox, it’s probably a White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus).

The vocalizations of the native Bobcat (Lynx rufus) and nonnative Coyote (Canis latrans) can add other dimensions to a winter’s night, none of them likely to lull you to sleep. The Bobcat’s range from piglike grunts to the yowl of a cat on steroids, to a scream similar to its larger cousins, the cougar and lion. The Coyote’s vocalizations are similar to that of a small dog yipping, barking and howling, with some sounds closer to those of a wolf. While I used to hear choruses of coyotes outside my door in the Northern Plains, I’ve yet to hear that here in the East.

The sound of the Eastern Screech
Owl (Megascops asio) can be more
like a pony's whinny than a screech.
Photo by Wolfgang Wander

Then there are the owls, the earliest of the bird species to mate in Virginia. The small Eastern Screech Owl (Megascops asio), a woodland species common in Virginia and abundant here in Rappahannock County, makes less of a screech than a ponylike whinny that descends in pitch. Its repertoire also includes cooing similar to that of a Rock Dove (pigeon).

At the other end of the owl spectrum in the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), the largest native owl in the Americas. At home in diverse habitats and also known as the Tiger Owl, its “HOO...HOO…HOO” is what most of us think of as the owl sound.

The emphatic hoots of the native
Barred Owl (Strix varia) can be
heard in woodlands throughout
Virginia on winter nights.
Photo by BoxknightJace at en.wikipedia

The Barred Owl (Strix varia), popularly known as the “hoot owl,” has a call similar but “more emphatic” than the Great Horned Owl, and is likely to close with an “aw,” according to Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds. Another woodland owl, it can also make doglike barks.

The Barn Owl (Tyto alba) has what the Peterson guide characterizes as “a shrill rasping hiss or snore.” It also can make a chirping sound somewhat like a loud cricket. As its name implies, this bird is fond of roosting in barns or similar rural structures, since it prefers hunting in open country—farmland or grassland—along the edges of woods.

The Northern Saw-whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus), the tiniest (2.6 to 3.5 ounces) and most elusive of owls in Virginia, is also the only one that migrates—leaving for more southern climes by early December and showing back up in February. As an article in West Virginia Wildlife Magazine aptly put it, its call is “an incessant, monotonous TOOT…TOOT…TOOT…TOOT…TOOT…TOOT…TOOT...much like the back-up alarm on a garbage truck!” This woodland owl’s migration flyway goes through the Shenandoah Valley, and it occurs elsewhere in Virginia, too.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re hearing the “normal” call of a nocturnal predator or the last scream of its prey. The Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) is not prone to vocalizing but ill squeal or shriek, especially in distress, and is a favorite prey of several nocturnal predators.

Since hearing these sounds is the best way to learn to recognize them, I often head online to find recorded versions. While there are myriad CDs and special audio devices that provide bird vocalizations, recordings of other animals are not as plentiful. The best site I’ve found is Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library (macaulaylibrary.org), which also has video.

Animal-vocalization expert Lang Elliott has several wonderful nature-sound books that come with CDs, including A Guide to Night Sounds: The Nighttime Sounds of 60 Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, and Insects. His websites, Music of Nature (www.musicofnature.org) and Nature Sounds (www.naturesound.com), also have these sounds, plus videos.

As thrilling as the animal cries on a winter night can be, I yearn for the return of the soothing hum of cicadas in the long, steamy nights of summer.

[From my"Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, December 2010]

Enjoy Webcam of Allen's Hummingbird on Nest

2011-01-19T15:24:00.000-05:00

Photo of Allen's Humming bird feeding her chick.
From Phoebe Allens website

This is a great webcam-view of a female Allen's Hummingbird (Selaphorus sasin) on her nest in California. Looks like she has one only one chick. The Allen's has extended its range from the West Coast into Virginia in the last few decades and are sometimes confused with the most common eastern species, the Ruby-throated (Archiochus colubris) and another West Coast species that has also expanded into Virginia, the Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), which is more common than the Allen's here. Both the Rufous and the Allen's will overwinter here when food is available. The fact that people are increasingly feeding hummingbirds is the reason why these western species are successfully expanding their range all along the East Coast, and even to some areas in between. See my post on the Rufous for more info on that species and its successful expansion of its range.

Good Birding Blog

2011-01-16T21:36:00.001-05:00

Here's another blog for nature lovers. The blogger does a nice job of blending humor with nature anecdotes. Well worth a visit.

Virginia's Quail Recovery Initiative

2011-01-13T13:05:00.000-05:00

Good video about trying to increase quail populations in Virginia, and restore them in some areas where they've disappeared. Heavy on the hunting aspects, but you have to consider the source. The shots of quail taking advantage of reestablished habitat are the best.

Green Treasure on the Winter Forest Floor

2011-01-04T17:44:00.002-05:00

[From my "Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, 11/26/10]

Christmas Fern (Polystichum acrostichoides)
growing along the Rappahannock River
Photo by Pam Owen

As the leaves have fallen off, the green wall of oak–hickory forest behind my house has given way to glimpses of mountains and valleys to the south and west. With the lush green of summer and the brilliant fall colors now a memory, any spot of green left tends to beckon me when I walk back there.

The slope is dry, and the soil poor. Other than a few spunky baby pines waiting for the deciduous trees around them to keel over and let in more light, there is little relief from the sea of browns and grays of this bare oak–hickory forest this time of year. Most water drains off so fast that moisture is retained only in few spots where underlying rock has tumbled or worn in such a way as to slow the downhill progress of water and organic detritus, creating pockets of richer, moister soil than on the rest of the slope.

In one of those spots, an understory evergreen common to the region—Polystichum acrostichoides, known commonly as the Christmas fern—has sprouted here and there. According to some sources, its name came from the early colonists’ using it as a Christmas decoration.

Also known as the dagger fern because of the knife-like shape of its sturdy pinna (the leafy parts) and hilt on the stem end, this is no delicate plant. If it were, it wouldn’t stay green through winter.

The Christmas fern is “one of the most characteristic and abundant herbs of mesic [moderately moist] mixed hardwood forests,” according to the Va. Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). While it prefers rich, moist soil and shade, it is less picky than other ferns and is quite tolerant of direct sunlight. It will even grow on dry slopes if its roots are kept moist. These characteristics, and the fact that is not invasive, make it a popular landscaping plant. As the Virginia Native Plant Society notes, the Christmas fern also “serves as a wonderful host for butterfly larvae.”

In walking recently on a friend’s property along the Rappahannock River, where the soil is much richer and wetter than in my woods, I enjoyed the lush abundance of Christmas ferns there. With the recent cold snap, some of these had hunkered down, appearing more prostrate than their usual perky selves but still showing remarkable resilience compared with the mostly brown understory around them. Despite its daggerlike pinna, it leant a soft, lush look to the landscape.

Although I’ve never thought of using this fern as a holiday decoration, I do have fond memories of going out with my brother into the “wilderness” near our house in the Town of Fairfax when I was six or seven to collect other greenery for that purpose. This included “crow’s foot” (Lycopodium digitatum), a vining, ground-hugging evergreen whose foliage resembles the foot of a crow, although with more and softer digits. It’s also known as fan clubmoss, ground cedar or running cedar. I loved that plant and its association with Christmas, looking for it in vain on my hikes around Virginia in later years.

Crow’s foot (Lycopodium digitatum) growing with
spotted wintergreen (Chimaphila maculate, center).
The vertical spikes at left are the strobili of the
crow’s foot, which carry the plant’s spores.
Touching the strobili will release a cloud
of the spores. Photo by Pam Owen

As kids, we considered all land not turned into subdivision as ours to roam and plunder, not thinking that anyone would care. As an adult I realize that, not only were we trespassing and stealing, we were also loving nature to death by bringing it home—from animals to plants to stones. Even then, collectors had admired crow’s foot and other clubmosses almost to extinction—to the point where they had to be protected by law.

Clubmosses, plants in the genus Lycopodium (Greek for “wolf’s foot”) are delicate-looking, low-growing evergreens that carpet forests, especially those with rich soil. They are considered fern “allies” in that they share a sexual reproductive strategy that involves shedding spores to initiate metagenesis—alternating generations that have different growth phases that are actually two distinct organisms. Fortunately, because of conservation efforts, many plants in the Lycopodium genus are now rebounding, and I’ve had the joy of seeing crow’s foot, along with two cousins, Lycopodium clavatum (princess pine) and Lycopodium obscurum (ground pine), growing in Rappahannock County since I moved here eleven years ago.

No Lycopodium is currently on DCR’s lists of vascular plants of concern. However, some similar-looking plants that are also called clubmosses but that have been reclassified as belonging to other genera are on those lists. In general, if you are interested in collecting a wild plant on your property, it’s a good idea to find out whether it’s protected before you whip out your shears or trowel. Contact DCR if you’re not sure, but it’s always best to stick to plants that are abundant if you do want to use some for holiday decorations.

If you really want to do our native plants a favor, whack away at oriental bittersweet (not the native). It has lovely berries; just don’t put them back out where they can take root.

eBird Occurrence Maps

2010-12-17T11:10:00.002-05:00

It's one thing to look at data in a table about where birds live and their migration patterns, but it's a whole lot more fun to see animated representations of these data - and easier to picture the range of birds in our minds. eBird, a bird project supported by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, has animated maps showing occurrences of selected species throughout the year and other great information about bird monitoring in the United States.

Here's how the maps are described on the eBird website:

"These maps, which are called STEM (Spatio-Temporal Exploratory Model) maps, use eBird stationary and traveling count checklists that report all species. The location of each checklist is associated with remotely-sensed information on habitat, climate, human population, and demographics generating a suite of approximately 60 variables describing the environment where eBird searches take place. By relating these environmental variables to observed occurrences, STEM is used to make predictions at unsampled locations and times. Models are trained one species at a time. Following model training, the expected occurrence for that species is predicted on each of 52 days, one per week throughout 2009, at some 130,000 locations sampled throughout the conterminous US. This massive volume of information is then summarized on maps, which in many cases reveal novel information about the annual cycles of North American birds. These maps showcase the power of eBird – year-round, continental-scale monitoring of all species.

"Each species map is displayed with a text overview of the broad-scale migration patterns, along with an interesting biological story to consider. "

Visit the website, eBird.org, to see these maps, results of Christmas and other national bird counts, and more interesting information on wild birds.

A Rafter of Turkeys

2010-12-16T21:08:00.005-05:00

[From my"Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, December 2010]

Two wild turkey toms walking
through woodland in autumn.
Photo courtesy of Steve Maslowski/
US Fish & Wildlife Service

A rafter of wild turkeys regularly forages through the woods around my house. Nope, I don’t mean I have a large wooden beam in the woods with turkeys perched on it. “Rafter” is one of those words for a group of animals that has drifted out of modern usage, like an “Exaltation of Larks,” which is also the title of a marvelous book on the subject by James Lipton. According to Lipton, these terms were mainly used by the upper classes to separate themselves from the riffraff—another word that came out of the common root, “raft,” meaning “a large and often motley collection of people and things.”

Between the etymology of “rafter” and our propensity to refer to the clueless among us as “turkeys,” it’s easy to have a low opinion of this bird–unless you’re a hunter. As turkey researcher R. W. Bailey once observed, “Under normal conditions, the ability of hunters to harvest turkeys is equaled, or exceeded, by the eternal elusiveness of the latter.”

Ben Franklin, who wanted to make the turkey our national mascot instead of the bald eagle, also spoke to the character of the bird: "For a truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America . . . a bird of courage….”

Meleagris gallopavo is the wild turkey species native to North America, while the ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata) hails from Mexico. Turkeys got their name because the first Europeans to land in the New World thought the birds were related to guineafowl, which had been imported into Europe from Turkey and so were also known as “Turkey fowl.” Our native turkeys are actually in another bird family that also includes pheasants. Both families belong to the order Galliformes, which includes other large ground-dwelling birds, such as chickens and grouse.

The start of turkey domestication is in some dispute but apparently dates back about 2000 years to the Mayans or Aztecs. The Muscovy duck is the only other domesticated bird species originating in the New World. European explorers took wild turkeys to Europe from Mexico in the early 1500s, then the domestic version was brought back with English colonists when they settled on the Atlantic Coast.

According to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF), wild turkeys mate in the spring, laying their eggs in dead leaves or vegetation in a depression on the ground, with the young generally emerging from their shells in early June. Hens raise the chicks on their own, although the young soon learn to forage for themselves.

A rafter of turkeys walking through a forest always reminds me of a royal procession, with the participants moving slowly and gracefully, casting their gaze from side to side. Hens and their broods may join together into bands of more than 30 birds, with some winter groups exceeding 200.

Turkeys have black, brown and white feathers and fan-shaped tails, which males proudly display when courting. The brown tips of the tail feathers distinguish the wild turkey from the domestic variety, whose tail feathers are tipped in white.

Male turkeys, and some females, have beards. Those of the males, referred to as “Toms” or “gobblers,” can grow up to a foot long. With heads normally a subdued gray, in spring the toms change to their courtship colors—white foreheads, deep scarlet necks, and bright blue faces. In Virginia, grown males average 17–19 pounds in the spring, according VDGIF.

While the turkey’s gobble is a familiar and often imitated sound, these birds can also be remarkably quiet. While walking in a forest I’ve been startled several times to turn my head and find a turkey sitting quietly at eye level in a tree just a few feet from me. Once they know they’ve been spotted, any grace they have on the ground is belied by their noisy and awkward flight to the nearest treetop.

Turkeys make a variety of habitats their home, with a combination of forest and open land being preferred. An omnivore that will eat nuts, seeds, fruits, insects, buds, fern fronds, and salamanders, according to VDGIF, they are especially fond of acorns. They pick these on the basis of their size and shape, since turkeys do not have an acute sense of smell. As with deer, in a good acorn year like this one, turkeys are more likely to stick to the forest where the seeds are abundant and hunters are hindered. Other predators—especially of the eggs and young—include snakes, skunks, crows, ravens, opossums, raccoons, rodents, dogs and coyotes.

Conversion of forest to other uses and overhunting (mostly for the market) led to the disappearance of wild turkey in two-thirds of Virginia and its becoming rare in other sections, with populations hitting their nadir by around 1880 to 1910. Reforestation and other conservation efforts have brought populations up to an estimated 180,000 statewide, according to VDGIF. In the 1940s wild turkey were caught and reestablished throughout all the states except Alaska.

The precise historical origins of the observance of Thanksgiving on this continent are disputed by historians, we do know that the wily wild turkey played an important part in the lives of this country’s founders and of the native peoples who preceded them. Keep that in mind the next time you call some idiot a “turkey.”

Birds in the Snow

2010-12-16T11:12:00.000-05:00

This is just a quick post, since I have deadlines out the wazoo. I just wanted to share what I'm seeing from my kitchen, where I often work in the morning so I can see the activity at my bird feeders on the deck. Right now, in our first "real" snow (although it probably won't amount to much), they're being mobbed by Goldfinches, the bird mafia. I know they're cute, and gorgeous when they change to their yellow breeding colors in the summer, but they show up in such numbers - at least a dozen right now - that other birds have a hard time finding a spot to feed.

I not only put up two feeders with a high-protein mix of seeds and nuts but also a Nyjer feeder and a suet feeder. These are all hung from the roof over the deck, so they're sheltered. To give the ground-feeding birds, and all the other nonfinch guys, a shot I also spread out seed along the deck railing and floor.

Right now, other than the finches, there are Northern Cardinals, White-Breasted Nuthatches, a white-throated sparrow, Titmice, and Carolina Chickadees. A few feet from the deck is an ancient tree that is a favorite of woodpeckers and bluebirds this time of year, since it's undoubtedly loaded with insects. The king of Virginia woodpeckers, the Pileated, worked that tree for quite a while before moving on to others. Out front, in a hanging tray feeder, more cardinals, sparrows, and a Blue Jay.

I don't try to feed the overwintering hummingbirds, the Rufous and Allen's. It's just too much work, but I know others all over Virginia are benefiting from going that extra step. (See my column on this, also posted here.)

I was happy to hear that our local farmers' co-op had switched to high-quality, certified bird feed, so I feel better about what I'm feeding the mob, even though they're likely to run me into the poor house.

I recently wrote my "Wild Ideas" newspaper column on feeding birds. Look for that to be posted here soon. More on the bird mobs later. Now it's off to get groceries for my dog and me, if there's any money left....

A Mouse in the House

2010-12-10T21:40:00.017-05:00

[From my "Wild Ideas" syndicated newspaper column, November 2010]

Mus Musculus, the house mousePhoto by George Shuklin

It’s that time of year. The days are getting shorter and colder, and in the face of oncoming winter, most of us start thinking about being warm in our abodes with plenty of food at hand.

We’re not alone in our thinking—or in our houses. That pitter patter of little feet and gnawing at night could be a native white-footed mouse, meadow vole or meadow jumping mouse, but more likely it is Mus musculus, the common house mouse.

The house mouse is usually happy on its own outside in warm weather, but it starts looking for better shelter and food as the winter approaches. As its name implies, the species long ago figured out that we humans offer comfy digs.

Being mouse free since I moved into my new house in February, I was dismayed when a family of mice apparently took advantage of my being gone on vacation over Labor Day week to set up winter housekeeping early. I bought a couple of live traps, caught nine of the little critters in one week, and thought I was done—until mouse poop started to show up in the kitchen again. It seems as if mice sit around thinking about the most offensive place they can leave their poop and strategically place it there—on the kitchen counter, in the silverware drawer….

The average house mouse is 6 inches long (the tail making up a little more than half of the total) and weighs up to one ounce. It is superbly designed to get into almost any opening, needing only about one-quarter inch of clearance. Dryer vents and spaces around pipes and wiring can be entry points if not sufficiently blocked.

The house mouse will consume anything organic, although they prefer cereal grains and vegetables. It has a lifespan in the wild of about two years, and the females can give birth to several litters of 3–10 young each year. They tend to colonize, especially in the winter to conserve heat, and are nocturnal when enough food is available. Although we learned as kids that mice go “squeak,” the house mouse actually has a wide range of vocalizations.

Mus musculus is not native to Virginia but came over from Europe in ships with the colonists. Except for humans, it is the most widely distributed mammal on the planet. Highly adaptive, it’s been nominated as “among 100 of the ‘World’s Worst’ invaders” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

While the house mouse is host to a range of diseases and parasites that can infect humans, including bubonic plague and salmonella, IUCN describes them as “relatively unimportant” as vectors for transmitting these diseases to humans. Unlike deer mice, they do not carry hantavirus. Mice can damage crops and even prey on the young of other animals, sometimes endangering native species, but they also provide some benefit by eating pest insects and are also widely used in laboratory research.

Predators include owls, hawks, fox, coyotes, weasels, raccoons and cats, although I the best mouser I ever came across was a dog named Rhubarb on the ranch where I worked in Wyoming. She could clean out a feed room in a matter of minutes.

I seem to be dealing with just one mouse in my house at this point—one apparently immune to the lure of peanut butter in a live trap. I’ve considered and rejected most other removal strategies, including using snap traps (invented in the nineteenth century) and poisons, and repellents ranging from noise to chemicals. Although some people even risk serious health issues by using mothballs, the chemicals in them can cause all kinds of respiratory and other health issues. I hate to kill anything, find sticky traps to be cruel, and avoid poisons and other chemicals because of health risks to other living things. So I use live traps.

I release my prisoners far from any house. Despite what some may say, mice are quick and brave. I’ve had them try to use me as cover when other options were not available, so I make sure I let them loose somewhere they can easily get under cover. Predators may get them, they may freeze or starve, but at least they’re back in the food chain and out of my kitchen.

Like most house pests, the best way to handle an infestation of mice is to keep them from getting into your house in the first place. Use caulking around outside entry points and caulking, steel wool or insulation for inside points. If you can’t keep them out, store food in containers or pantries that are mouse proof.

Although I raised mice as pets when I was a kid, using them for a science-fair project on genetics, their propensity for chewing up anything they can and spreading their excretions around make them unwelcome guests in my house these days. I haven’t figured out that entry point yet, but I will.

In the meantime, I’m wondering if I should switch peanut butter brands. Nine out of ten mice seemed to like what I’m using, so what’s with this guy?

Is that a Rufous Hummingbird at Your Feeder?

2010-12-04T21:42:00.007-05:00

[The following is an updated version of the original syndicated column, "Wild Ideas," first published in newspapers the week of November 8, 2010. ]

This rufuous hummingbird was spotted at
a feeder on the Northern Neck.

(Photo © Fawn Palmer/Virginia Master Naturalist,
Northern Neck chapter)

A lot of us in Virginia enjoy feeding hummingbirds, putting our nectar feeders out in the spring at the first sign of their arrival, and taking them in after the last hummer disappears for its long trek south in the fall.

While at my brothers' in Southeast Alaska this fall, we were watching rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) at his feeders, swapping stories about his hummers and mine here in Virginia, the ruby-throated (Archiochus colubris). I bemoaned the fact that each of us only got to see one species of hummer where we lived.

While species have a habit of adapting as conditions change, I was still surprised last week to see a posting on a conservation e-mail list from a Master Naturalist on the Northern Neck, Fawn Palmer, describing what she thought was a rufous hummer at her feeder. So I started doing research.

I found out that the range of the rufous had expanded into the Virginia in the 1980s and now extends all the way up the East Coast into the Canadian Maritimes, according to Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the Banding Laboratory of the the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Palmer had contacted Peterjohn to come confirm the identity of the hummer at her feeder, which he did.

According to Hummingbirds.net, the rufous is “the most widely distributed hummingbird in North America” and have even been spotted in Siberia. I found a map, at Learners.org that animated the number of sightings along the East Coast as the year progressed.

This male rufous was spotted at a

feeder in Loudoun County.

Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy)

So why hadn't I heard about this? The number of rufous in Virginia has “soared” since the late 1980s, according to the Virginia Society of Ornithology's 2007 Virginia's Birdlife: An Annotated Checklist, but that means from one in 1987 to 13 in 2001. Although its populations continue to increase, the book describes the species as a “rare but increasingly fall transient and winter visitor” throughout Virginia.

I also did a quick poll of some birders I know in the Piedmont and got several reports of the rufous showing up at feeders this year or in past years and one being recorded in a Central Loudoun [County] Christmas Bird Count.

An individual Selasphorus rufus can also fly an incredible distance annually. The Checklist cites an immature female that was captured and banded in Chesterfield, Virginia (a few miles south of Richmond) on November 29, 2001. This bird was recaptured near Red Lodge, Montana, in August 2002, and then recaptured again at the same feeder in Chesterfield on December 1, 2002. That's almost 6,000 miles of traveling in a year—maybe more, since migration of hummingbirds tend to be “U” shaped, dipping to the south.

The expansion in its range is not the only interesting thing about the rufous. Measuring in at a whopping maximum 3.5 inches and 0.12 ounces for the females (who are larger than the males), this tiny bird is often described as being “tough,” “feisty,” and agile enough to outmaneuver other hummers at feeders.

It could be that even more rufous have made Virginia part of their range, as identifying this species can be tricky. The males, mostly garbed in iridescent rufous (the color of oxidized iron), are pretty easy to identify during much of the year. However, during molt, when they swap out old feathers for new, they lose this bright coloration.

Females and especially the young are hard to identify at any time of the year. They can be confused with ruby-throated, and for another bird, the Allen's hummingbird (Selaphorus sasin). The Allen's shares the rufous' breeding ground in Mexico and has also expanded its range into Virginia.

The females and young are so similar between the rufous and Allen's, says Peterjohn, that he has to use a caliper to measure the outer tail feathers, which are millimeters wider on the rufous, to tell the two species apart. The ratio of rufous to Allen's in Virginia is about 15:1, according to Peterjohn, so sightings are more likely to be of the former.

Another interesting thing about rufous hummers is that, although they usually arrive here in August, most sightings are in October through December, and even through the winter. How do they survive when the nectar-producing flowers are gone for the year?

While it's true that hummers generally prefer nectar when available, when that''s not available, they rely on insects for food, especially to feed their young. Insects will also appear throughout the fall and winter here whenever temperatures get above 40 degrees.

What about when it's colder? That's where we humans come in. The rufous can overwinter here only if we feed them. The increase in the number of people feeding this them is why their range has expanded, says Peterjohn.

For banding and collection, Peterjohn encourages those who are feeding rufous hummers to continue through Christmas. However, he says, keeping feeders up after that may mean “you're stuck feeding them for the winter” if you want the hummers to survive. People are often inclined to do so, he says, making the rufous “a member of their family.”

Wild Times on the Deck

2010-11-17T22:38:00.003-05:00

[From my syndicated nature column "Wild Ideas," originally published the week of November 1, 2010]

When you live in a rural county in Virginia, you don't have to go far to see wildlife. The numerous critters on my back deck and within view in the forest beyond have offered me endless hours of wildlife viewing this year.

When I moved to the house on Aaron Mountain in February, I could see the Blue Ridge and outlying mountains from the deck in the back through the then-leafless acres of forest stretching out below. Birds were the most prevalent wildlife within sight, and I could watch their activities all the way up to the canopy of the forest as it receded down the mountain.

I put out a couple of bird feeders, and the usual overwintering native birds showed up—goldfinches in their dull winter plumage, chickadees, titmice, cardinals, downy woodpeckers and nuthatches. Up in the trees I could see a variety of other birds, mostly in the woodpecker family—hairy woodpeckers, sapsuckers, northern flickers and the large, raucous pileated woodpecker.

I was slow to start my usual routine of bringing the feeders in at night to avoid ursine visitors. Living in Rappahannock County, which has the highest concentration of black bears in Virginia, it was no surprise that one showed up one night in early spring. I became more careful about removing the feeder each night after that.

As spring arrived in earnest, the mating songs of bird, frogs and spring crickets filled the air. Insects started to appear on warmer days, and woodpeckers spent less time at the feeder. The male goldfinches changed to their bright-yellow breeding plumage, although they wouldn't be ready to breed until late summer—later than other songbirds.

The days got warmer, and tiger swallowtail and spring azure butterflies started drifting through the trees. I regularly woke up to the slow, flutelike song of the wood thrush, one of my favorites.

In April, when I saw my first ruby-throated hummingbird, I put out a nectar feeder. First one hummer showed up, then another, until two pairs were visiting regularly. By early summer their young joined them and territorial battles that had mostly been between the males increased.

A bald-faced hornet—with a black body and fierce white, warlike mask—joined the fray, launching itself like a missile at any hummer approaching the feeder. I put a saucer of nectar out for the hornet, which helped with the immediate situation but signaled the start of a long, but not lethal, war between and among species, including huge, yellow-and-black European hornets, assorted other wasps and bee, and large black ants.

When two male hummers clashed a couple of feet from my face, sending one sprawling to the deck as I was meditating over my morning coffee, I decided I'd had enough. I moved the food to the other end of the deck, letting the various species duke it out down there.

As the summer progressed, I often was thrilled to hear the evening song of a whip-poor-will—sometimes echoed by another further away. The same sound frequently woke me up in the middle of the night when all else was still. It took me back to my childhood, when that sound was common even in the Northern Virginia suburbs where I grew up. By the middle of summer, the whip-poor-will and wood thrush were singing less regularly and finally stopped.

As the weather grew hotter, I took down the seed feeders, knowing that plenty of other food was now available. The hum of cicadas took over the nightly chorus. The occasional luna moth, huge and elegant in it spectacular green attire, visited the deck, as did a massive female eastern Hercules beetle, (Virginia's largest), in drabber olive-green accented with black spots.

Day and night an array of arachnids hunted the myriad insects on the deck. Spindly legged harvestmen, an arachnid cousin of spiders that is commonly called “daddy longlegs,” were everywhere. A large fishing spider with a leg span of almost three inches worked the area under the eaves. In the middle of summer she had a bunch of tiny, ghostlike babies and then, to my dismay, died.

As autumn came and the days shortened and cooled, the hummingbirds started heading south for the winter, the last leaving in early October. The hornets disappeared, although on warm days many thin-wasted paper and mud wasps still drifted gracefully on the deck, intermingling with smaller bees and wasps. Marmorated stink bugs, a foreign invader that had briefly swarmed in before the last cold snap, also vanished—not to be missed.

Wild turkeys move noisily through the forest more regularly now, enjoying this year's abundant crop of acorns and nuts. The squirrels are also burying these seeds or storing them in high tree crannies.

The fall crickets have been in full chorus, about the only sound at night now. With killing frosts on the way, the insects will soon go quiet. The only wild sounds at night will be the occasional blood-curdling cry of a predator making a kill, or a lone owl or fox calling for a mate.

While I'll soon be able to see the mountains again through the trees, I'll long to hear that full chorus of a summer night again.

Rufous Hummingbirds Have Expanded into Virginia

2010-11-16T16:16:00.002-05:00

A male rufous hummingbird spotted at a
feeder in the Piedmont
Photo by Joe Coleman, Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy

The subject of my last "Wild Ideas" newspaper column, on rufous hummingbirds' expansion of their range into Virginia, is online at the Rappahannock News website. If you have any more information to add about hummingbirds sighted in the Piedmont or further west in Virginia, please leave a comment here or on the newspaper's website. Since the column was published, I've gotten reports of more rufuous hummingbirds being sighted in the Shenandoah Valley from birders over there. I hope to do followups on the columns when warranted. Look for this week's column, on the house mouse, at the Rappahannock News website on Thursday.

The Sky Is Falling

2010-11-11T20:05:00.005-05:00

[This is the first article in my new syndicated nature column "Wild Ideas," published in October 2010. One way to see the articles earlier is to go to the online edition of my local paper, Rappahannock News. Just search on my name. —Pam Owen]

Except for poison ivy, thorny vines, and the occasional venomous rattlesnake, the Virginia Piedmont forest is usually not too hazardous. This autumn, however, danger has been raining down from above.

The instigators are trees, releasing acorns and nuts—a bumper “hard mast” crop, by early estimates. Mast is the fruit (with seed inside) produced by trees and shrubs that is eaten by wildlife. Because of their hard shells, acorns and nuts are considered “hard mast,” while berries, cherries and other soft fruit make up “soft mast.”

After a lean year in 2009, Virginia has a bumper mast crop.

All but a small area of the 11-acre property where I live on Aaron Mountain, in Castleton, is covered by an oak–hickory forest “community.” Growing conditions (for example, soil, water, and elevation) mostly dictate which trees make up a particular community. As the name implies, this one is dominated by various species of oaks and hickories. The most abundant on this dry ridge are chestnut oak (Quercus prinus), which has long leaves with serrated edges similar to our native chestnut, and pignut hickory (Carya glabra), so named because its nuts are a favorite with pigs.

Like much in nature, mast crop production is cyclical, with some years better than others, and varying from place to place and among species. Last year the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF), which tracks data on mast because of its importance to wildlife, reported a “generally poor” crop.

This was not true just in Virginia. The online conservation community was a-buzz with similar reports, with even a "No Acorns this Year" discussion group popping up. Low yields were reported as far north as Nova Scotia and out to the Midwest, although some areas were reporting good crops of some oak species.

This fall, it’s a different story. While official estimates are not yet in, anecdotal evidence abounds. VDGIF develops its mast estimates mostly from reports from the Virginia Department of Forestry, whose foresters are out in the woods regularly and take note of the crop to factor it into forest management. Those foresters are reporting seeing abundant mast, according to VDOF Conservation Specialist Mike Santucci. Although the crop varies from region to region, he says, overall “this is the largest mast crop I’ve seen.”

During my walks in the forest behind my house during the last few weeks, I sometimes have felt under siege, even considered taking an umbrella along for protection. I’ve also done a few awkward dances when treading on the carpet of little round tree spawn that covers the forest floor.

Why was mast so scarce last year and so abundant this year? Noting the early rains this year, Santucci suggests that “conditions were absolutely perfect for producing a bumper crop. Everything has mast on it.” This includes soft-mast crops, he says.

VDGIF Watchable Wildlife Biologist Louis Verner suggests there could be an additional factor at play, referring to the “predator satiation hypothesis.” The idea is that mast-eating wildlife—including Virginia’s native bears, turkeys, roughed grouse, squirrels and deer—get used to eating a certain amount of it each year, and their reproductive strategies are geared to this. To keep these predators from devouring all their seeds and leaving none to sprout, every few years trees “fake out the seedeaters,” as Verner puts it, by producing a really big crop—more than wildlife will consume. Plants and animals that evolve together often develop such survival strategies.

Deer hunters may not be happy with the bounty. With so much good chow scattered throughout the forest, deer are less likely to congregate in search of food, especially in open areas.

Fueled by high-protein food, deer are also likely to produce more offspring. This in turn means more destruction of our native and cultivated plants in future years—and more of us playing “Dodge the Deer” on the roads.

The upside is that the other, less abundant mast eaters are also likely to have a boost in reproduction. For the first time since I moved onto the property last February, a flock of turkeys has been foraging regularly in the woods behind the house. Bears will also benefit, likely waiting longer to den up this year because of the abundant food.

And then there are the squirrels. From the back deck, where I like to start the day’s challenges quietly over a cup of coffee while enjoying a bird’s-eye view of the forest, I can hear the squirrels noisily burying acorns. Since squirrels don’t eat a lot of what they bury, they’re basically little foresters, planting the seeds that will become future mast producers.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow...

When the shower of mast began in early September, many acorns were green or beige, and pignuts were securely wrapped in their shells. This week, walking through the forest, the acorns have mostly turned to a mosaic of brown or black. Many have sprouted and are on their way to becoming oaks. The pignut shells have opened up to release the nuts inside.

The footing out back will be tricky for some time, but it’s worth it to see wildlife enjoying the bounty. Next year, who knows?

Fall Light

2010-10-07T11:07:00.002-04:00

[A version of this piece was published in 2002 in my Rappahanock News nature column, "Backyard Happenings," after another long, dry summer.]

After the long, hot, dry summer, many of us in Rappahannock County wondered if our normally spectacular fall would have any color at all, or if the leaves would merely turn brown and drop to the ground unceremoniously. Then, with its usual unpredictability, nature turned around and dumped a load of rain on us, accompanied finally by seasonably cool weather. Instead of brown, we got to enjoy one of the more spectacular fall leaf-turnings.

In Rappahannock, fall color means more than local folks being able to enjoy aesthetic appeal. Our economy depends on tourism as well as agriculture, and both would have suffered tremendously if the drought had continued into fall. Not to say that it’s over, but the recent rains have put a pleasing dent in the water deficit and given us the fall color that we’re famous for.

The incredible shifting in light in the last week, as fronts and rain came and went, made me stop what I was doing more than once to admire the show. It reminded me of of the rain that finally came in fall after a drought in 2002. One image sticks out in my mind particularly. The clouds were racing across the mountains early one morning, they suddenly opened up to create what in Southeast Alaska (where it can rain 365 days a year) is called a "glory hole" – a break in the clouds that lets the sun shine through and light up a small area of the ground below. The term came from mining, referring to an open-pit mine, alluding to the treasures that lay beyond it. This glory hole opened up over Thornton Gap down to Sperryville. With all the moisture in the air, the light had a soft, glowing luminosity that reminded me of the nineteenth-century painters of the Hudson River School of art.

“In the Mountains,” by Alfred Bierstadt,
one of the best-known Luminist painters

These painters used light effects to dramatically portray such atmospheric elements as mist and sunsets. This technique became known as “Luminism.” (For more on Luminism, including examples of Luminist paintings, check out the online Art Encyclopedia.) The National Gallery of Art has some of these paintings in its permanent collection, but several years ago it featured a show of just Luminist paintings. As someone who gets spine tingly anytime light breaks through the clouds during a storm, or when mists diffuse light to create a soft, magical glow, this show was heaven (no pun intended) for me. Today the style would be considered overly romantic, but the real show in nature can be as spectacular – as it often is after a rain in Blue Ridge country.
While I’ve seen glory holes open up over Alaska, the Rocky Mountains, and myriad other magnificent natural settings, the quality of light when they occur in the Blue Ridge is somehow different. The light manages to be intense yet soft, more of a caress of the landscape than a sudden shock of light. In the fall, the combination of this soft light and the glowing fall colors can be an unbeatable combination.

In Alaska, when hikers meet on a trail, they often acknowledge their shared love of that natural wonderland they’re hiking through by saying “another day in paradise.” When a glory hole breaks open during a fall rain in Rappahannock, we could easily say the same.

End of the Little War

2010-10-06T19:03:00.000-04:00

The war is over…for this year. Although the skirmishes were big, the combatants were small. It started in the spring, when the first ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) showed up around the deck in back of the house I rent.

Living in Rappahannock County, at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I bring in any bird feeders every night to avoid attracting the neighborhood bears, who are particularly hungry in the spring. To make it easier, I put putting out the hummingbird feeders until I hear that first hum of wings or catch the first glimpse of these little hovering dynamos.

While some parts of the United States, particularly in the south, enjoy having several species of hummingbirds migrate in to breed in the summer, only the ruby throated comes to the Mid-Atlantic and further north in the east. It measures about 3.5 inches in length. The males have a bright, iridescent red patch on their throats that gives them their name. It actually only appears red when the sun catches the feathers.

The pattern at the feeder is pretty much the same every year once I put it out. At first I see one or two hummingbirds. Eventually usually at least two pairs show up. The males start the war by trying to keep each other away from the feeder, but the females are pretty much left alone to feed and do just that. After all, they need all the nutrition they can get to make baby hummers.

By early summer, the wars begin in earnest, with the babies now grown enough to come to the feeder, and the adults of both genders becoming more aggressive about defending the food source as they start layering on fat for the long flight back to Central America for the winter. Once the wars start in earnest, I put out a second feeder, so that I have two about twenty feet from each other on my long, south-facing deck.

While this year putting out a second feeder dialed down the skirmishes a bit, I found my morning coffee often interrupted with an aerial battle in front of my face that sometimes ended with one bird knocked to the deck. Beyond that, the birds don’t really do much damage to each other, although they are arguably fiercer, ounce for ounce (weighing an average of 1/8 ounce), than any other species of bird in our native ecosystem.

Since I take the feeders in at night, I’m also often approached when I go out in the morning by one of the tiny combatants, who seems to be urging me to get the food out, darn it. I keep both feeders where they are—relatively close to each other–because they’re sheltered by the deck roof, which runs about half the length of the deck, and because it’s easier to get the feeders in each night to avoid ursine visitors.

A lone bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculate) is lured
from a hummingbird feeder with a dish of nectar

At other houses I’ve rented in the county, this scenario has been played out over and over. However, this year, at the new house, the war was stepped up a notch. A couple of weeks after I put the second feeder out, a bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculate) showed up at it. This is a beautiful, tough little (three-quarters of an inch) hornet in the yellowjacket genus, black with a bright white face. It’s called a hornet in the United States because it builds a hanging paper nest, but it is not considered the “true” hornet (of the Vespa genus) native to Europe and Asia.

I watched as the bald-faced hornet worked the area around the little plastic blossoms through which the hummingbirds can insert their beaks to get the nectar. He also checked underneath for any drips that might serve as a meal. This one insect probably wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if he’d been content to scavenge the hummers’ leftovers quietly and leave the birds alone. However, he was a bald-faced hornet, and the bright mask on his face telegraphed his personality.

Hummingbirds, as tough as they are with each other, generally avoid any insects—ants, bees, wasps, or hornets—that are also attracted to nectar feeders. They’ll still try to get at the nectar while carefully keeping away from the smaller critters. However, the white-faced hornet is no shy, retiring bug. Its fierce mask gives fair warning, as war masks do on humans. It’s ready, willing, and able to defend treasure that it finds. Females are known to sting repeatedly if their nest is disturbed.

I watched as, over and over, a hummingbird would approach the feeder. As it did, the little hornet would turn around to face the bird, then launch itself like a rocket at the feathered intruder, driving it off. Of course, at this point there were at least eight hummers, including their offspring, vying for a turn at the feeder, so as one would be driven off another would attempt to sneak in to get a slurp of the nectar before it, too, was driven off—either by the hornet or by one of the bird’s feathered cohorts.

More bald-faced hornets arrive

From one lone white-faced sentry, the skirmishes expanded to inter- and intraspecies ongoing combat as more white-faced hornets were attracted to the feeder. At this point, I decided to use a carrot-and-stick approach to try to at least separate insect and bird competitors. I put a shallow dish with the nectar a few feet from the feeder, on the railing of the fence inclosing the deck, while spraying the feeder with Naturapel, a pepper-based, ecofriendly insect repellent made by Cutter.

The ploy worked. The hornet, while occasionally cruising the feeder first, quickly figured out that accessing the nectar was much easier on the dish. The war settled back into a relative peace at the feeder, broken up occasionally by competition among the hummers.

This more-or-less calm in which I could sit in my comfy deck chair a few feet from the feeder and have my coffee in the morning didn’t last. The little bald-faced hornet I was seeing pretty regularly was not the only one in the area, and others soon started to arrive at the nectar-filled dish, along with a few smaller, less-aggressive wasps. Even then, the relative peace reigned as long as each of these pollinators kept a decent distance from the others.

European hornets compete for nectar
with much smaller native ant and wasp species

Soon the dynamic at the nectar dish was further thrown off by an even more aggressive intruder–the European, or “giant” hornet (Vespa crabro). This large (about an inch long), yellow-and-brown beast is an invasive competitor to our native wasps.

Skirmishes once again broke out at the dish and the feeder as all the nectar eaters jockeyed for control of the food. With birds and hornets, small and large, duking it out so near where I was trying to enjoy the calm of the morning, I’d had it.

I moved the dish way down the deck railing, beyond the two hummingbird feeders. The insects followed, thankfully, and for the most part kept away from the feeders, as long as I kept dousing the feeders with repellent. I could once more sip my coffee in peace and enjoy the view of the forest unfolding down the slope behind the house. Butterflies, woodpeckers, the song of the wood thrush—it was great.

As the summer stretched on, and it got drier and drier, more insects came to the deck to seek nectar and their predators followed them. Spiders, small and extremely large, were omnipresent. A couple of species of nonagressive paper wasps built nests under the deck roof and carefully visited the dish of nectar, avoiding their more aggressive cousins. Harvestmen (an arachnid of the Opiliones order, commonly called "daddy longlegs," along with many other species) were everywhere. All the predators, combined with the effect of the dry ridge on which my house was built, made the deck relatively mosquito free, so evenings on the deck were also a joy. I sometimes took my laptop out there to watch a ballgame while enjoying the animal activity between pitches.

The hummingbird males still seemed to spend most of their time trying to drive off other hummers instead of feeding. Eventually, I found these little battles, with the constant humming and dive-bombing, still too disruptive and removed the feeder closest to my chair, letting the birds duke it out at the other feeder. As long as I kept the feeder and the dish full of nectar, the feeding frenzies at the other end of the deck were low in intensity. Every day there was at least a brief detente where all four feeding stations on the feeder were occupied by hummers—albeit usually by females.

Then another insect showed up to disrupt this relative calm—large black ants. I’m not sure which of the many species of ant these were, but they were big and plentiful, ate night and day, and didn’t seem to mind the repellent much. Being a big fan of E. O. Wilson, who coined the word “biodiversity” and focused his studies as a biologist on ants, I have a huge respect for this insect family, Formicidae. Their social behavior and skills, including “farming” other insects, are fascinating to observe. However, the numbers and size of this particular species were too daunting for the hummers. The only strategy I could figure out was to move the feeder, which I did. Every few days, when the ants had found its new location, I’d move it a few feet up or down the deck.

This went on until last week. The hummers had slowly been disappearing, dwindling from at least eight to just a couple who occasionally visited the feeder. The rest had undoubtedly left for their long flight south for the winter. Now they’re all gone, and I’ve brought the remaining feeder in. The insects, which don’t migrate, are still enjoying the dish full of nectar and, so I’ll continue to put refill the dish for a while.

Having coffee on the deck is a more peaceful experience now. I can watch the leaves slowly turning from green to various warmer shades and dropping to the ground. The quiet is somewhat disrupted by the steady drop of acorns and hickory nuts from the bumper crop the trees are producing this year (good for our mast-crop eaters, such as turkeys and bears). The sun is shifting more to the south but staying lower, and the mornings are definitely cooling off. It won’t be long before I won’t want to keep the door into the kitchen open to listen to the morning programs on NPR for fear of letting too much cold air in.

Soon the view will open up on the deck to reveal the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west and the small outlier hills and low mountains to the south. I’ll start watching admiring the view over coffee from inside the kitchen, where it will be cozier on the deck. The songs of insects will disappear and those of birds will become less diverse and more intermittent, dying into the quiet of winter. At that point, I’ll miss the frenzied little war on my deck and look forward to putting the hummingbird feeder out again next spring.

A New Beginning

2010-07-14T14:46:00.000-04:00

After being distracted for more than a year, I've decided to jump-start this blog again by mixing some of my writings that have already been published elsewhere, but edited to make more sense for the blog, as well as begin writing new entries. I think it's good to start with a slight reworking of the first piece I wrote for a nature column I had in a local newspaper a few years ago. Here goes...

As a child, when the suburbs got too hot, my parents had put my brother and me in the station wagon, loaded up a picnic lunch, and headed from the suburbs to Shenandoah National Park. Dogwoods in bloom, Bambi around every turn, the air fresh and clean, and creepy crawlies everywhere. I was in heaven. Rambling through forests, creeks, and fields was where I was most at home.

In fact, some of the fiercest battles I had with my mother when I was a kid was over nightly baths. Over each day, and particularly in summer, I had carefully acquired a fine patina of dirt from catching crayfish in the local creeks, chasing rabbits in the fields, and climbing up trees to look in birds’ nests. It wasn’t that I was dirty by nature but that I reveled in the smell and feel of all things natural. My dog and I would come back reeking of nature—him more than I because he had an obsession for all things dead and wonderful.

Fortunately, by the time I entered puberty I had discovered that boys could be more than my frog-catching companions, academia could occasionally answer some of the questions I had about nature, and cleanliness did have a value. (The last was more in conjunction with the discovery of boys as dating material than with discovering the challenges of academia.)

As I moved from budding naturalist to budding journalist, my intimacy with nature seemed to fall away. What was once my natural habitat and my obsession became an academic interest and no longer involved having creek muck in my ears and pine pitch on my pants.

However, I rediscovered my passion when, as a young journalist, I headed to the Rocky Mountain West. As an extension to my love of nature came an interest in its domestication—farming and ranching. I was also pursuing a passion for a mythical species I had experienced mostly through television and movies—cowboys.

After working on a small but prestigious paper on Montana, where I was given the city/county beat instead of the agricultural beat I longed for, I decided to learn about ranching first hand and went to work on a cattle ranch at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. There I was mayordomo for the owner and did a little cow and horse work and irrigation.

On the ranch, I got to know about things that go bump really loudly in the night—well, actually, where things scream like someone being murdered (cougars) or howl in cacophony outside your cabin door for hours (coyotes). I was amazed by the masses of box-elder beetles that showed up on my walls in May and then disappeared by July; and by the flies that blackened my windows in August and were gone by October.

After further ramblings around the country, I found my way back to the hills of my first love—the Blue Ridge Mountains—and all its natural splendor. Living within sight of Shenandoah National Park, I now get to wonder why nothing seems to eat Asian ladybugs that cover our walls sporadically, why the Asian Tree of Heaven can seem to proliferate anywhere here but our native chestnuts can’t survive into maturity, why some bears are perfectly content eating the apples from the trees next to my yard while others insist on smashing hummingbird feeders for the nectar inside, and so many other things.

Although I'm a certified Master Naturalist, I will admit freely to being a rank amateur as a naturalist — but one with a passionate, lifelong interest in everything that walks, talks, creeps, swims, crawls, flies, or grows. While I studied advanced biology in school, and even pursued a degree in communications and environmental management, I’ve learned more about nature from rambling through it, carefully observing it, and then pursuing answers to the questions its complexity and diversity invokes. That’s what I hope to do in this blog.

I’ll also stray off onto other topics. I’m ADD. That’s what I do. Oh look! A spider! I wonder why some spiders have hexagonal webs, some have round webs, some seem to have been drunk when making their webs, and some have no webs at all; and why some tiger swallowtail butterflies are yellow and others are black; why….

Frog Monitoring

2009-03-25T15:42:00.000-04:00

North American Green Frog (Rana clamitans)
Photo by Dustykid

I've always loved frogs, but now that I'm monitoring at the same site each year through FrogWatch, the frogs that are living in the 12' x 2' "vernal pool" (which is actually manmade and permanent except in really dry years) have become special to me. It's not just frogs calling in the spring, but my frogs calling, and I worry about the lack of rain we've had so far this year. No vernal pools, no frogs, so let's hope this weather system that's moving in can get the little guys cranked up on creating more little hoppers! If we all take a personal interest in the decline in amphibians, we're more likely to help stop the process.

And while we're on the subject of hoppers, from now on this year, on a warm (and especially a wet) night, you'll see them on the roads. I wouldn't suggest driving erratically to avoid these guys on the faster roads, but on roads with little traffic where you can go more slowly (like your driveway or farm lane), please be aware of frogs and toads that are likely to be in the road and see if you can avoid them. Driving really slowly helps.

Rain

2009-03-15T16:55:00.000-04:00

Rain is falling in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. This bodes well for all our amphibians who lay their eggs in vernal (spring) pools, which depend on spring runoff and rain. With so little snow this year, the latter is more important.

When I hear weather forecasters say what a great day it will be because there will be no rain, I think of my hoppers, and all the other plants and animals (not to mention the farmers) who depend on rain. I think I'm willing to sacrifice my ballgame, or picnic, or whatever other activity depends on dry weather, to support all the hoppers, creepers, swimmer, and others who need that rain.

I could also just be selfish and say that I need it to keep the spring going that feeds water to the house I rent at the edge of Shenandoah National Park. We all need seasonal rains—not deluges, but the gentle, persistent rains that fill up vernal pools, recharge springs, clean out our streams, and soaks into the ground—to survive.

So, it's a great day out there—a soft rain is falling.