mayapple leaves carpeting ground by Martin LaBar (Creative Commons BY-NC)

After twelve years, the first mayapples bloomed inside our three-acre deer exclosure. Almost as soon as we put the fence up in March 2001, mayapple leaves popped up in the lower, wet, wooded section of the exclosure. But they were single leaves, not the double leaves with a notch in the middle from which a single, six-petaled, waxy, white flower would emerge.

Last spring on our mountain the first umbrella-shaped mayapple leaves unfurled on March 30, by far the earliest date ever for this wildflower that often doesn’t flower until the second week in May. The frosts of April didn’t wilt the leaves, and on the 18^th of April, I found three double-leaved mayapples in the exclosure, each bearing a large flower bud.

The exclosure isn’t the only place mayapples bloom. These clonal plants have formed large colonies beside our road, along Sapsucker Ridge Trail, and beside the Far Field Road. But the largest colony of all covers more than an acre at the Far Field thicket. One leaf even appeared in the middle of the Far Field last spring, but I doubt it will make much headway against the goldenrod and asters.

As usual the first mayapples bloomed along the Far Field Road on April 27, the earliest blooming date ever during our 40 years here, but those mayapples beside our access road didn’t flower until May 1, right in time for May Day.

While the first part of its common name refers to the month it usually flowers in, the “apple” refers to the yellow-green, egg-shaped fruit that is purported to appear in August or September after the plant has fallen down. I say purported because I’ve never actually found a fruit on any of our mayapples. Although the deer allow our mayapples to leaf and flower, they never allow them to fruit. Or maybe the culprit is the occasional eastern box turtle that finds and devours the odd fruit. Apparently, the seeds inside the fruit must go through the gut of a box turtle in order to germinate.

I had always hoped to find enough mayapples to make Euell Gibbons’s mayapple marmalade, which he describes as “ambrosia” in his delightful book on wild foods Stalking the Wild Asparagus. (He also says that “the woods are full of ripe Mayapples.”) Despite having a laxative effect on some people, many have found the taste of mayapple fruit worth the risk. Back in 1612 Captain John Smith described it as “a fruit that the Inhabitants call Maracocks, which is a pleasant wholesome fruit much like a lemond (sic).” The Huron Indians gave it to the French explorer Samuel Champlain in 1619, and he thought it tasted like a fig. Early Rhode Island settlers called it “a pleasant fruite (sic).” Gibbons claims that the flavor “is not easily described…When I eat a thoroughly ripe May apple, I am reminded of several tropical fruits, the guava, the passion fruit and the soursop, but I can’t honestly say that it tastes like any of them.”

Girl balancing mayapple blossom on her nose, by talkingplant (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND)

Even its odor was debated, and Charles F. Saunders, in his book Edible and Useful Wild Plants of the United States and Canada, describes the strong scent of the ripe fruit as a composite of cantaloupe, summer apples, and fox grapes. Gibbons writes that “I love the sweet scent of the ripe fruit with its hint of mysterious muskiness.” But all of this is hearsay as far as I’m concerned.

Despite the appeal of its ripe fruit, its raw leaves and roots are poisonous. Native Americans used the plant to commit suicide and made an insecticide from it to kill corn worms. Today it is an ingredient in laxatives and is useful for the treatment of intestinal worms.

But its most important use derives from its ability to produce podophyllotoxin, which is “the starting material for the semi-synthesis of the anti-cancer drugs etoposide, teniposide and etopophus,” according to Rita M. Moraes, Hemant Lata, Ebru Bedir, Muhammad Maqbool, and Kent Cushman in their paper “The American Mayapple and its Potential for Podophyllotoxin Production.” These compounds have been used to treat lung, testicular, stomach and pancreatic cancers, and some leukemias. It’s also a precursor to a new derivative called CPH 82, which may be useful for treating rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and even malaria.

It’s expensive for pharmaceutical companies to synthesize podophyllotoxin and originally, back in the 1970s, when its anti-cancer properties were discovered, the pharmaceutical companies used the rhizomes of our mayapple—Podophyllum peltatum—to produce podophyllotoxin. In one year they harvested more than 130 tons of American mayapple rhizomes.

Then the scientists found that P. emodi, a perennial rhizomatous herb growing in the understory of Himalayan subalpine forests, contained more podophyllotoxin than P. peltatum, so during the next three decades, they switched to the roots and rhizomes of the Himalayan species. The demand by the international market for this plant quickly turned it into an endangered species.

Mayapple with fruit and leaves spotted with rust by OakleyOriginals (Creative Commons BY)

For this reason Moraes, Lata, Bedir, Maqbool, and Cushman used a different extractive method on the leaf blades of our mayapple to produce podophyllotoxin. Unlike ripping up the roots and rhizomes, which destroys the plants, leaf blades are a continually renewable resource. Then, too, our mayapple is common and grows in large colonies from northern Quebec and Minnesota to Florida and Texas and west to Nebraska. It also thrives under wide-ranging growing conditions from the low winter temperatures of the north to the high summer temperatures of the south.

Like many spring wildflowers, mayapples reproduce both sexually and asexually. Sexually, bumblebees and other long-tongued bees cross-pollinate the flowers from one clonal colony to another, while asexually the rhizomes continually expand in dense circular clones, usually crowding out any competing vegetation. The plants are one to one and a half feet tall and consist of sterile, immature, palmate-shaped, single leaves or two to three, palmately-lobed, reproductive leaves.

Both its genus name—Podophyllum—which means “foot leaf,” and its species name peltatum meaning “shield-shaped” refers to its leaves. So too do three of its common names—”umbrella leaf,” “duck’s foot,” and “Puck’s foot” (the forest fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Its fruit has also inspired several alternative names—”Indian apple,” “hog apple,” (wild pigs love it), “wild lemon,” “ground lemon,” and “raccoon berry.”

Its medicinal uses have given it still more nicknames that need more explanation for modern readers. “American mandrake,” the most popular alternative name for mayapple, referred to one of the most powerful of Old World medicinal herbs, mandrake—Mandragora officinarum—that grows in the Mediterranean countries. Its brown root, which penetrates deep into the ground, often branches and resembles a human figure. While neither the plant nor its flower looks like our mayapple, its fruit is a large, fleshy, yellow to orange-colored berry. It was used as a sleeping pill when the sufferer was in pain or being operated on, as a remedy for depression, and as a purgative. Like mayapple, the plant is poisonous.

Mayapple flower by M.W. Fisher Jr. (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND)

“Devil’s apple” may refer to its fruit or, more likely, to its medicinal use, because mandrake is also known as “Satan’s apple.” “Vegetable mercury” probably refers to its similar uses to dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) a poisonous plant that is taken as a purgative or laxative. “Vegetable calomel,” comes from the fact that calomel was used as a purgative and as a fungicide and is also called mercurous chloride, which brings me back to the “vegetable mercury” nickname. “Wild jalop” is similarly confusing. Jalop is a Mexican morning glory used as a purgative, but wild jalop (Ipomoea pandurata), the hated bindweed, is used to treat skin diseases and as a laxative by some herbalists although again it is dangerous to overdose on.

A member of the Barberry family, the mayapple genus has only four species worldwide, our own mayapple and three Asian species. It also has its own fungus—Podophyllum podophylli or the mayapple rust, which only lives and reproduces on mayapple leaves. I find some of the angular, yellow spots on some mayapple leaves every spring.

According to Joan Maloof in her book Among the Ancients: Adventures in the Eastern Old-Growth Forests, the life cycle of the mayapple rust is more complex than that of the mayapple itself. When the mayapple germinates, she writes, a “dark, spiky, club-shaped thing smaller than a grain of sand” also germinates in the forest soil and produces tiny spores. All are in search of mayapple shoots.

When one spore finds a mayapple, it produces a “microscopic, threadlike filament” called a hypha, which is in search of another hypha thread made by a second hypha spore. If they find and merge successfully, they create a hypha with two nuclei in every cell instead of one. They then produce more dark, club-shaped spores which germinate and create a second generation of spores just as the mayapple leaves unfurl. Using wind and/or water, those spores are carried on to the stems and leaves of mayapples. Again the spores germinate and their hyphae look for nutrition and each other.

Under the mayapple parasols by Dave Bonta

If the spores land on a mayapple stem or vein with sufficient nutrition, they will create more dark, club-shaped structures that will overwinter on dead leaves on the forest floor, but if they “fuse on leaf blades, they will form pockets filled with rust-colored spores,” Maloof writes, that cannot live through the winter. However, she adds that they “can reinfect the plant, germinate, and eventually form the dark overwintering clubs.” The yellow spots on the leaves are a signal that the fungus has used up the food in the leaf cells and infected the leaves. But Maloof calls this “Mother Nature’s yellow and green abstract art work,” rejecting the negative connotation of the word “infect.”

Maloof reminds us, after her discussion of mayapple rust, that a forest is more than its trees. “And in ways we do not yet fully understand, these small things may determine the lives and deaths of trees.” And not only those of trees, but of humans too, in the case of our amazing medicinal American mayapple.

The largest of our vernal ponds in early April.

Once again I’m sitting beside our mountaintop vernal pond and wondering if this will be the year the wood frogs will make it out of the pond before the water disappears. A wood frog’s life span is about seven years, and for six years the pond has dried up before the wood frogs’ have fully developed. Some years their eggs are left high and dry; other years their tadpoles are.

A vernal pond is a temporary, fish-free wetland that fills in late winter or early spring and dries out by early summer in a good year. This pond is only several yards across and several yards long, depending on rainfall, and, unlike the tiny, 6-foot-wide pond at the base of First Field, I can’t get close enough to watch the courtship and mating of the frogs. I can hear their quacking calls, though, and I enjoy watching a wide variety of wild creatures that visit it even when I’m sitting quietly beside it, my back against an oak tree.

I find it incredibly peaceful to watch the pond as it reflects the trees in its still water. But this early March day a skim of ice over it glitters in the sunlight. Its surface has a medley of half circles and triangles artistically rendered by the ice-maker overnight.

On the thirteenth of March, as I near the vernal pond, circles appear in the water. I wonder if they can be disappearing wood frogs. I study the still, dark water and spot one small mass that I look at through my binoculars. A golden eye returns my gaze. I move closer and see a male wood frog stretched out in the water. Next to him is a stick with two clumps of wood frog eggs clinging to it. This unusually bold wood frog dives into the water but quickly resurfaces. Since I am still standing there, he sinks back under the water.

The vernal pond has already contracted, and I hope that the dark clouds rushing across the Allegheny Front will drop some rain on us and fill up the pond. But it doesn’t happen. Nevertheless, two days later, I find two wood frog egg masses in different areas. The gelatinous, fist-sized blobs contain several hundred eggs with black embryos.

By the 22^nd of March, I count four separate egg masses, but the vernal pond is still shrinking. If the rain comes soon enough, the eggs may survive. And come it does, raining hard from 1:00 a.m. until mid-morning on March 24, filling up the vernal pond again.

The vernal pond in mid-March.

It’s almost a month before I return to the pond. At the beginning of April, while hiking on Sapsucker Ridge with my sixteen-year-old granddaughter Eva, she steps on a branch and I trip over it, my left leg landing hard on a pointed rock. Nothing is broken or fractured the doctors tell me, but my leg and foot swell up and turn black and blue. I have, after all, injured my tibia, the bone just below my knee. After days of being veranda-bound and more days of slow, short walks, I finally make it back to a vernal pond seething with insect life, most notably water striders walking atop the water and looking for mosquitoes resting on the water just after they have emerged from their “wriggler” larval stage.

Various species of diving beetles also swim in the water on the hunt for invertebrate and vertebrate creatures, including the wood frog tadpoles. I have always marveled at how these insects find a vernal pond, especially this one, isolated on a mountaintop half a mile from the nearest stream and that one intermittent near its source. Apparently, they are able to fly to it from such water. But some species of diving beetles actually overwinter in the basin formed by a dried up vernal pond.

The wood frog eggs have long since disappeared from sight, colonized by the symbiotic algae Oophila amblystomatis, which turns them green. It’s been cold most of the month, delaying the hatching of the eggs. But near the pond I stop to admire the patch of spreading spring beauties, the only place they grow on our property. This is an open, mixed-oak forest close to our neighbor’s logging operation that took place several years ago. Not much has regenerated and the vernal pond is not as shaded as it used to be.

It’s now the fourth of May and torrid summer weather has returned. I practically stumble over a porcupine as I approach the vernal pond and send the creature scrambling up a large red oak tree. The vernal pond is a veritable tadpole soup—tadpoles by the dozens wherever I look, floating near the surface to warm themselves up now that the trees have leafed out and are shading the pond. They need the solar heat to develop quickly into frogs before the pond dries up. First they graze on the symbiotic algae still clinging to their gelatinous cradle, and then they feed on algae and leaf material on the pond’s bottom. They also may feed on each other, those that hatched first preying on the latecomers.

Three days of hard, cold rain follow, and once again the vernal pond is overflowing and seeping over into a series of wallow-sized pools. My pond-watching becomes an almost daily discipline as I sit and watch the tadpoles eating, swimming, and basking in patches of sunlight. In mid-May I hear clucking as a hen turkey circles behind me. Maybe she is hoping to catch some tadpoles for brunch.

Water striders

Often the tadpoles join in aggregations of ten on a submerged stick. Then there is a sudden flurry and they separate, but in a few seconds they gather together again, performing their own watery tadpole ballet. In addition to basking in the sun, perhaps they are finding refuge from predators in a crowd like flocks of birds do.

By the twentieth of May a few of the larger tadpoles are developing back legs. I sit close to the water and watch as the tadpoles continually surface to feed on the detritus floating on the water, then submerge, each tadpole swirling the water into a circle. I try counting the circles to figure out how many tadpoles still inhabit the pond, but the confusion of circles quickly confuses me. Instead, I settle back and enjoy the ambiance of the pond and surrounding woodland having long ago learned to tune out the occasional train whistle and the constant traffic noise on Interstate 99 at the base of the ridge.

A mourning dove sings without ceasing. Red-eyed vireos, eastern wood pewees and a scarlet tanager frequently add their songs to that of the doves. Water striders skate along the water. A common green darner dragonfly buzzes over the pond. Then an American crow flies in like a kamikaze fighter plane, veers when it sees me, and silently retreats.

There are more days of rain and again the pond overflows. The pond water is so dark that I can’t glimpse the tadpoles, but dozens of circles that gradually subside as I sit in front of the pond indicate their presence. Sitting beside the pond, a sudden nearby gunshot startles the tadpoles as much as it startles me. Not only do they have sharp eyes but sharp ears too.

Near the end of May, I’m serenaded by a robin and scolded by a hairy woodpecker while I sit beside the pond. I also see a dark-eyed junco, which should have been breeding farther north on the Allegheny Front or beyond by now. A mourning dove flies in to catch insects from the pond and goes off in a flurry when it realizes I am there. A black-and-white warbler sings. Chipmunks scold. Mosquitoes that probably have hatched in the pond circle me and force me to move on after I catch a glimpse of a few more tadpoles with back legs.

My vigil continues in June. By then, I wonder if those tadpoles will ever change into bandit-masked wood frogs. On June 8 many heads pop up from the water and stay up even though most tadpoles still have tails. Two male robins hold a song fest while a female chases all comers to the pond as her spotted youngster bathes. Later a tufted titmouse takes a bath. Chipmunks chase around the pond and one scampers up to me, pauses at my feet to look, and then continue its race with its rival. A pileated woodpecker pounds on a nearby tree trunk.

Wood frog in mating season (in the tiny, spring-fed pool at the bottom of First Field)

All the while a pleasant breeze blows, keeping biting insects away. The pond is slowly shrinking, but it is still a bathing and watering hole for birds and mammals alike.

The following day I spend another session at the vernal pond serenaded by the same two robins. Little mouths surface to catch detritus spread atop the pond, and once I see a tiny froglet hopping over a small section almost as if it could walk on water. Froglets are supposed to be between a half and 7/8^th of an inch when they metamorphose. Their watery life is ending and none too soon.

A chipmunk approaches me with much trepidation, and when I don’t move, it goes to the pond and drinks. Then it scampers off.

Suddenly, the robins begin high octane scolding as if, after half an hour, they finally notice me. On and on they scold, but at last they subside.

When I am too stiff to sit any longer, I get up and walk back to the field path. There I find an enormous pile of fresh bear scat that wasn’t there before. It looks as if the robins were scolding a bear.

A couple days later, as I’m sitting by the pond, I hear crashing in the woods that sounds like a bear. Sure enough, one approaches the pond, and I ponder my position. It’s obviously hoping for a drink and doesn’t see or scent me. At last I stand up, and the bear looks up, sees me, and flees.

The vernal pond continues to fill every time it rains, and slowly the froglets depart, although I don’t see them. But there are fewer circles in the water, less little heads surfacing, every time I visit. How wonderful that after so many springs when the pond dried up too soon, our aging population of wood frogs will finally get some newcomers. The young frogs will spread out, traveling up to several hundred meters in all directions, making new homes in the leaf litter, and preying on a variety of arthropods.

But even as the pond shrinks and the froglets leave, I still seek quiet time beside it. One day, late in June, I encounter an eastern box turtle, floating in a couple inches of water, its eyes closed. At first I think it is dead, but when I touch it, it opens its eyes. Later, I learn that eastern box turtles like to soak and feed in vernal ponds.

Wood frog found under a rock in Plummer’s Hollow Run in September

On another day, two doe wander past me and water at the pond while I sit a few feet away. Then they continue on their way. They never do detect my presence.

I can only wonder how many other wild lives are impacted by this small pond. Even though knowledgeable foresters will steer logging operations away from such places, most loggers either don’t know or don’t care about such refuges. Or they begin their logging operations in the fall when the ponds are dried up and they don’t recognize them for what they are.

My own life has been enriched by our vernal pond this water-full spring. Even after it is completely dried up, in broiling hot, droughty July, I wander back to sit under the oak shade. Where have all the wood frogs gone?

One day, on my daily walk, an adult wood frog hops across my path.

“There you are,” I say out loud as it hops quickly out of sight.

eastern phoebe on lilac branch

Ah March! How eagerly we await it as we look for signs of spring between blasts of freezing winds and occasional warm days. On one windy day in mid-March, the first returning turkey vulture flies along Sapsucker Ridge. A calm, warm day brings back a singing field sparrow or eastern phoebe. As the earth thaws, American woodcocks perform their sky dance over First Field. By the end of the month, the first wildflower, a coltsfoot, lifts its golden disk sunward.

But last March wasn’t March as I have known it for the 40 years we have lived here on our west central Pennsylvania mountaintop. While the songbirds returned on schedule, the plants responded to the early, almost continual, May-like temperatures, by breaking all our previous blooming records. Instead of the steady spring progression of wildflowers, from late March to mid-May, most were blooming by the end of March.

It began on a balmy, warm March 11 with coltsfoot, which flowered four days ahead of its earliest date back in 2000. As the month progressed, the gap between the previous earliest date for many wildflowers, shrubs, and even trees, such as shadbush, widened.

I couldn’t keep up with all the changes. Because of that, some of my dates were probably a day or two behind where they should have been. For instance, round-leaved violets are usually out a few days before hepaticas and trailing arbutus, but by the time I checked on the violets, the hepaticas and trailing arbutus had been blooming for at least five days, beginning on March 18. Rue anemone flowered on March 24, a full month ahead of the previous year, and at least two weeks ahead of any other year. The following day swamp buttercups, long-spurred violets, and purple trillium appeared also a month before any previous year. Red maples, spicebush, and shadbush blossomed by the third week in March and red-berried elder, wild black cherry, blackberry, and striped maple leafed out.

All of the previously mentioned plants, except coltsfoot, are natives. But the non-natives and invasives were also way ahead of schedule. Our crocuses were a week early. Forsythia, daffodils, and hyacinths bloomed in our yard by mid-March and privet, multiflora rose, Japanese barberry, and garlic mustard burst into leaf.

The incredible warmth lasted until March 26. Then we had what we had feared—a killing frost. Our several hundred daffodils flopped to the ground and the forsythia flowers wilted and never recovered. The leaves of privet and multiflora rose similarly went limp but not those of Japanese barberry. However, all of them eventually rallied except for some of the daffodils and the forsythia blossoms.

bee-fly on an early coltsfoot blossom

The natives stood up to the 22 degree Fahrenheit temperature and continued to open. Lowbush blueberries dangled their pink and white, bell-shaped flowers on the powerline right-of-way, common blue violets blanketed the path through Margaret’s Woods, and early saxifrage blossomed on the Far Field road bank. Not one early wildflower drooped.

But on March 29, when the temperature shot back up to 70 degrees, our pear trees bloomed. That’s when I began to seriously worry about our warm March. I knew a frost would kill the blossoms and the possibility of fruit in late summer. And that’s what happened on the thirtieth of March.

Throughout April, the temperature waxed and waned but the plants, once started, seemed unable to stop despite the colder days, and I continued to record record-breaking dates for all of them. In early summer the lowbush blueberry crop failed. In late summer there were no wild apples, pears, or wild black cherries for the wild creatures on our mountain, and in the fall there were few wild grapes or acorns. Our black walnut trees did produce a bumper crop probably because they are the latest of trees to leaf out and flower, but the hickory trees in the woods did not have any nuts.

Our local orchard in the valley didn’t fare well either. Although cooler April temperatures did slow down the blossoming of some trees, hard frosts near the end of April froze the cells of the new leaves and blossoms. Because of that, they had no apricots, sweet cherries, or pears, very few sour cherries and plums and half the usual crop of apples and peaches to sell. But they do grow several varieties of peaches and apples so the trees didn’t blossom all at once. Diversity, both in wild and domestic crops, was the key to withstanding, to some extent, the unusually warm March and cold April.

Apparently, keeping records of blooming dates for plants and the emergence or migration dates for insects and birds makes me an amateur phenologist or someone who studies phenology, which is defined as the study of the effects of seasons on plants and animals.

Phenology was studied as early as 974 B.C. by the Chinese, but it was the Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus, who lived from 1707 to 1778 and recorded flowering times for 18 locations in Sweden over many years, who shared the title “Father of Phenology” with Englishman Robert Marsham (1708-1797). Marsham kept systematic records of what he called “Indications of Spring.” From 1736 until 1796 on his country estate Stratton Strawless in Norfolk, England, Marsham recorded 27 signs of spring including the flowering dates of four species, the leafing dates for 13 tree species, the arrival and first songs of migrant birds, and signs of the breeding activity of rooks, frogs, and toads. His descendants kept up the tradition until 1958 when his last descendant, Mary Marsham, died.

Robert Marsham portrait by Johann Zoffany (courtesy Wikimedia Commons – public domain)

Marsham was especially enamored of trees and planted thousands, most of which were cut down during the two world wars, but a giant cedar remains that he planted in 1747 as well as an avenue of ancient oaks.

He also corresponded with fellow Englishman, the Reverend Gilbert White, who kept similar records on which he based his seminal nature book The Natural History of Selbourne, published in 1789, which was accompanied by his The Naturalist’s Calendar. Thus began in England a tradition among amateur naturalists to keep phenological records that naturalists in other European countries imitated.

Here in the United States, naturalists, both amateur and professional, have kept such records, but most are buried in herbaria, museums, archives, and family papers. One researcher, Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie, is studying such information in the herbaria and archives of Acadia National Park in Maine. She hopes her research will track the ecological effects of climate change on plant communities over time.

More formally, The Lilac Network, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, began in the late 1950s in the western United States. Using the non-native common purple lilac plant (Syringa vulgaris), volunteers recorded “first bloom,” “full bloom,” and “end of bloom” in an attempt to use phenology “to characterize seasonal weather patterns and improve predictions of crop yield,” according to their website.

In 1961 the central United States and in 1965 the northeastern United States joined in, and volunteers observed the cloned plants of the lilac cultivar Syringa chinensis “Red Rothomagensis” and added dates also for “first leaf” and “95% full leaf.”

Today, as climate change accelerates at an unprecedented rate, phenology is more important than ever. That’s why the National Ecological Observatory Network launched Project BudBurst in 2007. According to their website, “We are a network of people across the United States who monitor plants as the seasons change by timing the leafing, flowering, and fruiting of plants.” Thousands of folks from all 50 states—school groups, backyard naturalists, gardeners, seniors in retirement communities, scout groups, college professors and their students, hikers, botanists and ecologists, and visitors to botanic gardens, national parks and wildlife refuges—are producing data that scientists can use “to learn more about the responsiveness of individual plant species to changes in climate locally, regionally, and nationally.”

Mayapple blossoms where the coltsfoot bloomed a month earlier

Their website has a list of targeted plants by state that volunteers can use. The plant groups include wildflowers and herbs, grasses, deciduous trees and shrubs, and conifers for Pennsylvania. Both natives and non-natives, even invasives like Japanese knotweed, are included. Under wildflowers and herbs are such plants as jack-in-the-pulpit, large-flowered trillium, mayapple, and Japanese knotweed. Deciduous includes forsythia, common lilac, shadbush, red maple and flowering dogwood, and conifers are eastern red cedar and eastern white pine. Volunteers can choose one or many plants to monitor using either the Project’s suggestions or plants of their own choice.

While I have been contributing to a variety of citizen science bird-related studies over the years, I have never been involved in submitting plant-related data. I have always hoped that my nature journals and records will be of value to researchers in the future, especially as our climate continues to change, so Project BudBurst looks like a program I can sign on to, and mayapple will probably be my chosen plant. We have several huge patches on our property. Last spring the first flowers opened on April 27 but the first bud appeared on April 18. The cold of April did hold back that wildflower more than most, but still it bloomed a full week ahead of time.

Project BudBurst sums up their mission statement in haiku form that they hope will inspire more people to volunteer:

People watching plants
Contributing to research
Join BudBurst

For more information on Project BudBurst, you can consult their excellent, informative website.

Photos by Dave Bonta (click for larger versions)

Trail cam photos of the golden eagle at the spruce grove bait pile (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through to view the slideshow)

“Can you identify this bird?”

The question came to me via email last Valentine’s Day from our caretaker wife, Paula Scott. Accompanying her email was a photo from one of her trail cams of a large golden eagle. It was sitting on snowy ground beside the carcass of a dead cow on our talus slope.

Trish Miller, along with her husband Mike Lanzone, under the direction of Dr. Todd Katzner, at West Virginia University, had recruited numerous state forest employees and private landowners in Pennsylvania to be part of a larger study of winter eastern golden eagles in the Appalachians. Knowing Paula’s expertise with trail cams and also that golden eagles migrate along our ridge top, she had contacted Paula early in the autumn.

In her email to Paula and my husband and me as the landowners, Miller explained that this Golden Eagle Project had over 100 trail cam sites in several states but were lacking sites in Pennsylvania.

“We simply don’t have enough data on Pennsylvania wintering birds and it is especially important given your proximity to Sandy Ridge,” she wrote.

By Sandy Ridge she meant the section of the Allegheny Front across from our mountain and above the town of Tyrone where a couple dozen industrial wind mills had been erected despite Miller’s discovery, while studying for her Ph.D., that golden eagles use that area for foraging during the winter.

When Paula agreed to participate, Miller sent her a copy of the protocol for the study which she shared with me. The goal of the project was to estimate the population size of wintering golden eagles in the Appalachians. To accomplish this goal, they wanted many photographs of individual golden eagles. Then they planned to use a specially designed software package to identify individuals. Once they had identified individual eagles, they could treat the photographs as “captures’ and use them to estimate golden eagle numbers.

Trail cameras had to be set to take a picture every minute and visited every two to five days. They also had to be on a stake or small tree six feet from the carcass and the lens itself 18 to 24 inches above the ground.

The study was scheduled for two to four weeks between January 1 and February 15. Bait sites needed to be on remote mountaintop areas with small clearings and large trees nearby so that an eagle could perch in one and watch the bait for a time before actually landing on it.

The protocol also suggested that the carcasses be road-killed deer for which the biologists had permits from the Game Commission.

“Do not use hunter-killed deer for bait,” the protocol warned. “Such carcasses almost always contain lead fragments which are toxic to eagles.”

skinning a dead cow

Several weeks later, Miller came out to look at possible trail cam sites. She finally decided on a site behind our spruce grove and another at our Far Field. She also hoped, if a golden eagle came to the spruce grove bait area, to set up a blind and try to live trap and telemeter it so the biologists could find out where the individual nested.

The protocol warned participants to make sure they had enough bait to feed eagles because a small deer could disappear in a day. Knowing how many other creatures would use the bait, Troy and Paula decided to ask their farmer friends in the nearby valleys for cows that had died giving birth. As long as those cows had no antibiotics in their bodies and their heads were removed where the farmers had shot them, they received permission to use them as well as road-killed deer and, in one case, a dead calf.

On the seventh of January, Troy, Paula, and our son Dave drove a 700lb. dead cow in the back of their truck to the Far Field, staked it down, and set up a camera. That same day they took two deer and a dead calf, chained them together, and staked them down 40 feet into the top of First Field behind the spruce grove.

And then they waited. Paula faithfully checked her cameras and sent photos to me of a barred and great horned owl, crows, a bobcat, coyotes, a fisher, a red-tailed hawk, and raccoons at the bait both night and day but no golden eagles. As the weeks passed, she grew more and more frustrated.

Finally, on the seventh of February, she persuaded Troy to haul another dead cow up to the talus slope where, several years earlier, Miller had live-trapped a female golden eagle during fall migration. The rocks were icy, and they almost lost the frozen carcass off the deer sled on the steep hill.

landscape with dead cow (Far Field)

Paula was elated when she retrieved her photos and saw the talus slope golden eagle. But then she went up after 2:00 p.m. on Valentine’s Day to retrieve the most recent spruce grove photos. A big bird took off as she emerged from the spruces and approached the carcass. It was a golden eagle that had been on the bait from 12:00 p.m. until 2:00 when she disturbed it. The photos were much better than the one from the talus slope, and we wondered if it was the same bird. Even though the official study ended the next day, Paula decided to keep all the carcasses out with her cameras as long as possible. She also notified Miller, but she was unable to come and try to live trap the eagle until the following week.

Would the eagle stay around that long? On February 18 there were 198 more golden eagle photos on the spruce grove camera, but the last photos had been taken on February 17 and there were no more.

A week later, on February 27, I saw a large bird flap off the Far Field bait. I thought it was a golden eagle, and Paula later verified that it was and that it had been coming into the bait for four days. My last sighting of a golden eagle there was March 2, but by then golden eagle migration was in full swing. In fact, because it was such a warm winter, our golden eagles may have all been migrants and not wintering birds.

In the meantime, Miller and Lanzone had been rushing all over the state telemetering birds at other bait sites. They managed to capture three males and three females. In Forbes State Forest, with the help of state forester Cory Wentzel, they captured the largest known bird in eastern North America, a second winter female and the only young bird they caught. The other five were adults, one each in Tuscarora and Rothrock state forests, the Allegheny National Forest, and two private sites near Emporium. The male they caught in Rothrock was a recovery that had been originally caught in 2000 by other researchers as a first year bird during fall migration.

Miller and Katzner also exchange information with colleagues in Quebec province where most of our golden eagles go to nest. Most of the birds they telemetered in 2012 headed straight north toward northern Quebec and Labrador, one adult female took a trip around Quebec’s more southerly Gaspe Peninsula, and one male ended up on the south shore of the Hudson Bay in Ontario after a look around Manitoba. He was the first bird in their project to go west to the Ontario breeding range.

golden eagle on bait at the Far Field (trail cam photo)

Late last summer my husband Bruce and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary trip by spending 15 days exploring the Gaspe Peninsula. We mostly followed the coast and saw numerous gray seals, fin whales, and, best of all, hundred of thousands of common gannets at their nesting site on Bonaventure Island. But we didn’t see a golden eagle, not one, not even when we followed Dr. Katzner’s directions to a nest site above a mountain road. High up on a heavily-forested ridge we spotted the nest site with our scope. Unfortunately, their nesting was over for the year. Still, we wondered how the Gaspe researchers had been able to find that site and others in the rugged Gaspe interior. Miller admitted that even though they had been there during the nesting season, they never saw a golden eagle either. Junior Tremblay, one of the Gaspe researchers, told me that “some of our nests were found with helicopter survey but most of them were found with the participation of local ornithologists who do huge work to scan many potential cliffs for the breeding eagles.”

In a recent paper published by members of the recently-formed Eastern Golden Eagle Working Group, the researchers have discovered that Quebec has the largest number of breeding eastern golden eagles at 300 to 500 breeding pairs, most of which nest above 50 degrees North. Those nests in the far north of Quebec are built on cliffs, on the edge of but avoiding heavily forested areas. Those on the Gaspe are mostly in trees in forested habitats. However, golden eagles on the Gaspe do forage in open landscapes created by disturbances and wetlands and feed extensively on birds, particularly waterfowl and wading birds.

Birds that summer on the Gaspe mainly migrate through New England, which, before the age of DDT, also had a breeding population as did New York. Those individuals winter mainly in New York and Pennsylvania and may not be counted at raptor migration watching sites farther south. Apparently, eastern golden eagles begin migrating as early as mid-August, although most migrate from mid-October to mid-December.

So far, their telemetry and camera-trapping data suggest that golden eagles winter in greatest numbers in the north-central Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia, and on those mountains they use large blocks of forested habitat. They feed on carrion, most notably white-tailed deer.

another shot of the eagle (see slideshow above for many more photos)

Eastern golden eagles face threats throughout their lives from a variety of sources. One is incidental captures in leg-hold traps and snares set for mammals, for instance, from 2007 to 2010 Quebec, West Virginia and Virginia reported many incidental captures and Quebec researchers suspected that many more were not reported.

Shootings, accidental or intentional, collisions with towers, power lines, buildings, and now probably with the array of industrial wind farms on their migrating mountaintop routes and in their breeding and wintering ranges, as well as poisoning are also common. Habitat loss—especially on their migration, wintering, and southern Gaspe breeding grounds—because of wind energy and natural gas extraction—is another threat, although the province of Quebec has recently banned natural gas drilling. Still, we saw numerous industrial wind farms on top of the high, rugged mountains on the Gaspe along the St. Lawrence River. And more and more such facilities have been and are continuing to be built on mountaintops in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.

But that’s why the Eastern Golden Eagle Working Group—an international collaborative effort among scientists and managers from across eastern North America—has been formed. They hope, as they state in their paper in The Auk entitled “Status, Biology, and Conservation Priorities for North America’s Eastern Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) Population,” “to ensure the long-term sustainability of Eastern Golden Eagle populations, ultimately making the species a flagship species for conservation.”

*

Here are some more photos of other wildlife at the spruce grove bait pile (click the thumbnails for larger versions). Thanks to Paula Scott for all the great trail cam photos!

Last January I walked along the Black Gum Trail. Since our son, Dave, constructed the trail halfway up Laurel Ridge, back in the 1990s, I had never been able to take the trail in winter. Usually, it was deep in ice and snow as was our north-facing hollow road. But on that mild day there was not a smidgeon of ice or snow on the trail or road.

I neither saw nor heard any creature despite the warm day. The long-promised sun was trying to shine through a matrix of puffy, white clouds drifting past patches of blue sky. At dawn it had been 34 degrees and breezy, and the thermometer had been slowly rising all morning.

Then, as I descended the trail, I glanced down at my pants and socks and pulled off seven adult black-legged ticks. I could hardly believe it. I had considered winter to be tick-free on our mountain. Usually, they spend their winters buried under leaf litter that should be covered with snow. But they are tough creatures, and as soon as it warms up they are out and about. At that time the adult females are not carrying Lyme disease because they had had their last blood feeding on white-tailed deer. Some even winter on the deer.

But, as Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York says, don’t blame deer if you get Lyme disease. The immune system of deer kills the bacteria that cause the disease.

“We don’t know why,” Ostfeld says, “but the deer immune system clears the infection. When they get bit, they wipe out Lyme. Deer play a tremendous role in suppressing adult ticks from spreading the bacteria.” He also dislikes the name “deer tick” and prefers “black-legged tick.”

White-tailed deer in Plummer’s Hollow (photo by Dave Bonta)

After all, like any arachnid to which ticks are closely related, the nymphs and adult ticks have eight black legs. But the larvae only have six. The larvae hatch from the several hundred to a few thousand eggs each female adult tick lays in spring. She then dies. Both the larvae the first summer and the nymphs the second summer feed once on a mammal and prefer white-footed mice, although they will feed on other small mammals or birds if they can’t find a mouse.

And it is white-footed mice that are the real culprits. They can get the Lyme disease bacteria and pass it on to the ticks even though the bacteria don’t seem to sicken them. Because nymphs are so small, no larger than a poppy seed, they are liable to bite and never be detected during the three to four days they need to take their blood meal. At least 70% of Lyme disease cases are from those nymphs that do not look like the black and reddish-brown adult female ticks. Instead, they have dark heads and bodies that appear to be translucent. Adult male ticks, which don’t feed but will attach to a host when searching for a female to mate with in the fall, are either black or dark brown.

Entomologist Thomas Say named the black-legged tick — Ixodes scapularis — back in 1821. But the first known case of Lyme disease wasn’t identified until 1975 when several children in Lyme, Connecticut were diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. It turned out to be what later was named Lyme disease. In 1982 scientist Willy Burgdorfer isolated the bacterium causing the disease, and it was named in his honor Borrelia burgdorferi.

Scientists also thought that a new species of tick carried the disease and named it Ixodes dammini. It was only later in the 1990s that they realized the tick transmitting the disease had been around and named long ago. But they did recognize that the tick belonged to the family Ixodidae, the so-called hard ticks. They have a hardened plate called a scutum on their idiosoma region, which is a specialized part of a tick’s body that expands to hold its blood meal.

White-footed Deermouse (Peromyscus leucopus) by J. N. Stuart (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)

Like ticks everywhere, the nymphs and adults climb a shrub or blade of grass, hold out their forelimbs, and wait for a victim to brush past. They also lurk on fallen logs, tree trunks, or even on the ground, especially the nymphs which can’t climb as high as the adults. Since they arrived on our mountain, about six years ago, I no longer have the pleasure of sitting on my hot seat on the ground, my back against a tree, watching the life of the forest. They even reach me on our benches unless I pull my feet up on to them.

Ticks have a Haller’s organ on each foreleg with spiny indentation packed with sensors and nerves capable of picking up a breath of carbon dioxide, heat, sweat, or even vibrations from your footsteps. So no bird or mammal can escape their sudden lunge. As I’ve discovered, the small huckleberry shrubs on Laurel Ridge Trail and the grasses of First and Far fields, are ideal “questing” posts for ticks, as well as the underbrush in our forest off the trails where I rarely venture anymore.

Once a tick arrives on its host, it probes around for a soft, bloody site to attack, often in private crevices. Normally, you won’t feel a thing. As David George Haskell writes in The Forest Unseen, “I suspect they charm our nerve endings, taming the cobralike neurons with the hypnotic music of their feet.”

The tick presses its mouthparts into your flesh and saws an opening. Then they lower a barbed tube, called the hypostome, to draw out blood. Because it takes several days to get a full blood meal, it cements itself to your skin with a glue-like material called “attachment cement,” which is why a tick is so difficult to remove.

During the first 24 hours it is attached, it is harmless. But later, when it is full, it takes water from your blood into its gut and spits it back into you, which is when it can transmit Lyme disease or two other diseases — babesiosis and anaplasmosis. The parasite Theileria microti causes babesiosis and Anaplasma phagocytophiolum causes anaplasmosis. As many as 2 to 12% of Lyme disease patients will have anaplasmosis and 2 to 40% babesiosis. This complicates the diagnosis and treatment sometimes because the tick might transmit one or the other or both diseases and not Lyme to a patient. In rural New Jersey, for instance, the Center for Disease Control studied 100 black-legged ticks and discovered that 55 of them had at least one of the three pathogens.

Black-legged tick by Jerry Kirkhart (CC BY license)

Both babesiosis and anaplasmosis have flu-like symptoms similar to those of Lyme disease but without the telltale bull’s-eye rash. Some folks don’t recognize or even have symptoms of babesiosis, yet they can pass it on to others through donated blood. So far, Pennsylvania seems to be almost free of those two diseases, but they are more prevalent in New York and New Jersey. Unfortunately, it is probably only a matter of time until these diseases increase in the commonwealth.

Last year was supposed to be especially high in Lyme disease cases. That was because in 2010 there was a bumper crop of acorns, followed by 2011 when there were practically none. Dr. Ostfeld, forest ecologist Dr. Charles D. Canham, and colleagues at the Cary Institute first worked out the connection between the amount of acorns and the population size of white-footed mice. In abundant acorn years mice numbers soar but they crash when the acorn crop fails. According to Ostfeld, that leaves a large number of infected ticks looking for hosts. Without the mice, they are after us instead.

At least one hunter friend of ours contracted Lyme disease last June. Although he did get the rash, he never saw the tick. I suspect it was a nymph that bit him. He also listed four places where he could have picked up the tick — turkey-hunting at our place, at a friend’s country property, and on his own country property, or his backyard at the edge of Altoona.

If Ostfeld’s research is right, his backyard was the most likely habitat. In a paper for Conservation Biology Ostfeld and other colleagues entitled “Effect of Forest Fragmentation on Lyme Disease Risk,” they wrote, “Our results suggest that efforts to reduce the risk of Lyme disease should be directed toward decreasing fragmentation of the deciduous forests of the northeastern United States into small patches… The creation of forest fragments of 1-2 hectares should especially be avoided, given that these patches are particularly prone to high densities of white-footed mice, low diversity of vertebrate hosts, and thus higher densities of infected nymphal black-legged ticks.” Given both the size of our forest and the diversity of vertebrate species, we should have less Lyme disease here.

Berberis thunbergii – Japanese Barberry berries by Virens (CC BY-NC-ND license)

On the other hand, another study by Tom Worthley and other researchers at the University of Connecticut Forest in Storrs claims that eliminating the invasive Japanese barberry shrubs (Berberis thunbergii) will help control the spread of Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, and babesiosis because white-footed mice favor the barberry’s habitat.

“When we measure the presence of ticks carrying the Lyme spirochete we find 120 infected ticks where barberry is not contained, 40 ticks per acre where barberry is contained, and only 10 infected ticks where there is no barberry,” Worthley says.

Unfortunately, our neighbor’s old 100-acre property that we were able to purchase only after it was poorly logged, is filled with Japanese barberry and other invasives. It’s also moved into the edges of our fields and even into the edge of portions of our older forest. Eliminating all of these bushes will take many manpower hours. But our caretaker hopes to experiment with a few of his own ideas for removing them over the next several years.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to follow most of the suggestions for avoiding tick bites, including super vigilance of my clothes and body, even in winter, when I take my daily walks.

Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird by Katie Fallon tells you everything you might want to know about cerulean warblers as she follows researchers at the Lewis Wetzel Wildlife Management Area in West Virginia’s northern panhandle and the Royal Blue Wildlife Management Area a few miles south of the Cumberland Gap in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains. Both areas are thought to be in prime cerulean warbler habitat, which researchers say stretches from southwest Pennsylvania through all of West Virginia and into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.

Along the way, Fallon profiles the prominent senior cerulean warbler researchers — Paul B. Hamel and Petra Wood — as well as the graduate students and others who search for cerulean warbler nests during late spring and early summer. She spends days in the field with them and days in the library researching the history of the cerulean warbler beginning with the early bird artists Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon. Wilson, known as “the father of American ornithology,” was a Scots man who immigrated to Philadelphia. In his Volume II of American Ornithology, he calls the cerulean warbler “one of our scarce birds in Pennsylvania,” but he saw it “on the borders of streams and marshes, among the branches of the poplar” in the Philadelphia area early in the nineteenth century.

Fallon also discusses the threats to cerulean warblers on their breeding and wintering grounds — mountaintop removal coal mining and habitat fragmentation in their core breeding areas and sun coffee agriculture and logging in their wintering habitat in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and maybe even as far south as Bolivia.

She even travels to Colombia to attend the Cerulean Warbler Summit and visits the Cerulean Warbler Reserve — a 500-acre forest created through a partnership between ProAves and the American Bird Conservancy in 2005. This was the first reserve in South America created for a bird that breeds in North America.

Because Fallon is a creative writing teacher, her book is lively, and she records numerous adventures both here and abroad. Black and white photos of habitat and people are sprinkled throughout the book such as one of boys dressed as warblers in San Vicente, Colombia, as part of a parade celebrating ProAve’s Fifth Annual Migratory Birds Festival. ProAves, which means “for the birds,” is a nonprofit Colombian organization formed in 1998 “to protect birds and their habitats in Colombia through research, conservation action and community outreach.” Fallon also includes dismal photos of the remains of what used to be Kayford Mountain in southwestern West Virginia, and, of course, a photo of the beguiling bird itself perched on the finger of a West Virginia researcher.

Her Epilogue entitled “Help Save the Cerulean Warbler” includes a plea to buy shade grown coffee because the forest canopy above the coffee shrubs provides a winter home for cerulean warblers and many other migratory and resident songbirds. She also asks readers to speak out against mountaintop removal coal mining which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. calls “the worst example of what human beings can do to their environment when they behave irresponsibly.”

Here in Pennsylvania many folks feel the same way about Marcellus shale gas drilling. That brings me to my second book The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone by Seamus McGraw, a 51-year-old journalist whose mother contacts him and his sister about whether or not she should sell gas-drilling rights on her property near Dimock, Pennsylvania in Ellsworth Hill.

McGraw sets out to discover all he can about the natural gas rush in the commonwealth. As he said in a later interview, “the risks are real and profound and cannot be minimized,” but he also thinks that there are real benefits to those who strike it rich and to our greater society looking for a clean energy future.

Unfortunately, the extraction of natural gas is neither clean nor quiet as neighbors discover. And in Dimock, at least, some wells are polluted with methane due to improper drilling by one company. But, on the other hand, at least one person, Ken Ely, strikes it rich.

McGraw has written a book that satisfies neither the gas industry nor the conservationists opposed to gas drilling. Mostly, it is about how the drilling affects individual lives, namely Ken Ely and his neighbor Victoria Switzer. Ely sells off his gas rights, figuring he’ll never see another penny. To his amazement, the Ely well produces so much natural gas that he is a millionaire overnight. And that’s only the beginning.

Perhaps Tom Brokaw best summed up the book when he wrote, “The End of Country is an elegantly written and unsettling account of what can happen when big energy companies come calling in rural America. This cautionary tale should be required reading for all those tempted by the calling cards of easy money and precarious peace of mind. The result too often is bitter feuds, broken dreams, a shattered landscape.” I can testify from friends living in fracking land that it does mean “the end of country” and all that might imply.

But, needing the money and assured by the gas company that the risks are minimal, like many of her rural neighbors, McGraw’s mother signs over her rights for $2500 an acre, far more than many of her neighbors received who took offers as low as $25.00 an acre earlier.

And Ken Ely? You’ll have to read the shocking (to me) ending to find out.

Among the Ancients: Adventures in the Eastern Old-Growth Forests by Joan Maloof is a book I wish I had written. Imagine visiting old-growth forests from Alabama to Maine and New Jersey to Michigan — twenty-six forests in all — in each state east of the Mississippi River. Actually, I was surprised at how many we have visited — the Sipsey Wilderness in Alabama’s William B. Bankhead National Forest, the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in North Carolina, West Virginia’s Cathedral State Park, Michigan’s Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, and Pennsylvania’s Cook Forest State Park.

Some are more impressive than others. Maloof is especially disappointed by Mississippi’s Bienville Pines Scenic Area in the Bienville National Forest, “a forest gone missing,” she calls it after a fruitless search for what was described on the Internet as a scenic area of 180 acres containing “the largest known block of old growth pine timber in Mississippi.” The advertised trail is gone and no local person knows anything about it. When she finds it she sees that it has been logged, a ‘mechanical reduction’ to lower the risk of fire near a populated area that is “standard forestry practice.” Mississippi does not look good in Maloof’s account and neither does the National Forest Service or forestry practices in general.

But Maloof has a list she calls “Other Forests of Interest” at the back of her book, and the alternate for Mississippi — Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area–is an excellent remnant of old-growth forest according to our son Mark who has lived in Mississippi for several years and just finished writing a book on the natural places of the delta area of the state. Sky Lake WMA, in the Mississippi Delta, has a board walk through old-growth bald cypress forest and is heavily promoted and visited by local people proud of it, unlike the citizens near Bienville Pines Scenic Area who are either unaware or scared of the place. Incidentally, Maloof’s other choice in Pennsylvania is Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area.

Along with a map, travel directions, and a photo, each chapter also has fascinating natural and human history material, for instance, on wildflowers and beetles, butterflies and crabwood, bluebead lily, Lucy Braun, nesting hawks, the Bealls, Henry Ford, tulip poplar trees, Bob Leverett, and, in Pennsylvania, the family Cook. People, she stresses, have saved these forests. Many have been private landowners and others, such as Lucy Braun and Bob Leverett, have studied and promoted old-growth.

She concludes by naming her top four old-growth forests — the Porcupine Mountains, the Sipsey Wilderness, Congaree National Park in South Carolina, and our own Cook Forest. “These are the places I keep urging others to visit so they, too, will see and understand what our land aspires to be, and what it can perhaps be again in more places, given enough time.” Maloof, a professor biology and environmental studies, is well-qualified to write such an eloquent, opinionated, and convincing book about the worth and beauty of old-growth forests.

At last, we come to the ideal book for the nature nerd on your list: The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell. He too, is a biology professor who chooses to sit for hours at a time observing one square meter of old-growth Tennessee forest on the Cumberland Plateau. He calls it his “mandala” which he explains is “a re-creation of the path of life, the cosmos, and the enlightenment of Buddha. The whole universe is seen through this small circle of sand,” a mandala he saw that was created with sand by two Tibetan monks on his campus. But he sits on a flat slab of sandstone on a forested slope in steep, rock-strewn terrain that kept the loggers away.

There he sits through the four seasons many times a week and covers a vast number of subjects in great detail such as how deer digest their food, the lives of Plethodon lungless salamanders, the biology of ticks, the reproduction or rattlesnake ferns, medicine from nature, sharp-shinned hawk, in summary, something for everyone who has an interest in some aspect of the eastern forest.

His account can be poetic, i.e. “lightning-white fungal strands crackle over black leaves,” and introspective, “the world does not center on me or my species. The causal center of the natural world is a place that humans had no part in making. Life transcends us. It directs our gaze outward.”

He also makes frequent comments about conservation, some so subtle that you have to read them again to appreciate them. For instance, in a section he calls “Chainsaw” he asks, “How should we treat our forests, as a gift to be wisely and sustainably managed or as an ‘industrial process’ in which we run down nature’s capital, mining the soil, and then discarding the spent land?…Our laws and economic rules place short-term extractive gain over other values.”

Finally, maybe the most controversial point he makes as an ecologist has to do with white-tailed deer. “Most of the scientific studies of eastern North America forest ecology in the twentieth century were conducted in an abnormally unbrowsed forest…’Overbrowsing’ by deer may be returning the forest to its more usual sparse, open condition,” he writes. Haskell quotes from old letters and diaries about the great abundance of deer in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and mentions that Native Americans cleared and burned forests to provide food for plentiful deer.

Merry Christmas and good reading!

Marcia’s library is dominated by nature books and field guides

red oak in snow (all photos in this post by Dave Bonta except where indicated)

Every autumn the first hard frost comes later. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when we were engaged in intensive gardening, we could expect a hard frost in the first week of October. Gradually, as the years passed, the hard frost date arrived in the second week. Then, in this century, it moved into the third week. And last October it finally came on October 28.

Just as the date for the first hard frost has advanced year by year, so too has mild autumn weather. Instead of several days of Indian summer weather at the beginning of November, we have stretches of Indian summer weather throughout November and, last autumn, well into December.

Final leaf fall is also later every year. In the seventies and even into the eighties, we could count on a brisk wind at the end of October shaking down every last leaf and leaving us with the bare branches of November. Yet despite last October’s heavy snowstorm, most of our red, black, white, chestnut and scarlet oaks held on to the majority of their leaves until the third week of November.

Remembering the previous year’s mid-October snowstorm that brought down so many trees and branches overburdened with leaves and snow, I was apprehensive when I woke to snow on October 29. As the snow piled up on leaves and branches, I walked down our road, dreading to hear the sound of breaking branches, but I heard only a few. Once I picked up an oak branch, its leaves heavy with snow, and marveled at its weight.

Later in the day, the thermometer slowly rose to 34 degrees. The trees dripped even as it continued snowing, but the warmth saved most of our leafy trees. The one casualty I found was a large, live, black oak along our road. But it was hollow throughout much of its trunk length and would have come down soon in any case.

bottom of the First Field in an October snowstorm

By November most of the snow had melted, and we finally had a couple weeks of what is normally “October’s bright, blue weather” and dazzling leaf color after a mostly soggy October. The sugar maples along the Far Field Road were still a blaze of red and gold. The coppery gold of American beeches lit up the hollow. And from Alan’s Bench, I gazed at the oaks of Laurel Ridge, which glowed reddish-gold and burnt orange.

Although I saw an occasional buck during my walks, squirrels, chipmunks, and turkeys were scarce. What few acorns the oaks had produced had been plucked from their branches by blue jays weeks before. I also saw little evidence of hickory nuts. Even our black walnut yard trees hadn’t produced many nuts. After the previous year’s feast, the wildlife was faced with famine. As soon as I put my bird feeders up, in early November, they were mobbed by gray squirrels and chipmunks.

The birds were not as affected even though our wild grape crop had also failed. Berry eaters, such as robins, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds still called most warm days. Carolina wrens caroled back and forth in our yard. The female tapping cardinal returned to our stairwell window. Winter wrens called and bounced up and down beside the stream. Golden-crowned kinglets foraged in the spruce grove. And, in Margaret’s Woods one day, I found dozens of singing, foraging white-throated sparrows, several dark-eyed juncos, a Carolina wren, and at least one fox sparrow in a large hedge of multiflora rose covered with bright red rose hips.

Raptors, too, were plentiful. A male American kestrel sat on his favorite power pole overlooking our First Field. On a hazy warm day in late November a male northern harrier flew silently past me as I sat on Coyote Bench. Driving down our hollow road, I flushed a sharp-shinned hawk. And on Thanksgiving Day our son Steve and his wife Pam watched a barred owl swoop down on a tree branch beside the Far Field Road. Steve also saw a golden eagle migrating along Sapsucker Ridge that day.

Hermit Thrush in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, November 9, 2011 (photo by Christopher Eliot, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence)

But I had the most unexpected sighting of Thanksgiving. As I circled the Far Field on Pennyroyal Trail, I flushed a hermit thrush. Never had I seen one so late in the season. When I checked McWilliams’s and Brauning’s The Birds of Pennsylvania, it reinforced my belief that hermit thrush migration peaks during October, which is when we usually see them. By the second week in November most hermit thrushes have moved south. A few winter over at low elevations in Pennsylvania, particularly in the Piedmont area. But more surprising than my sighting occurred three days later, on a warm November 27, when our son Dave heard a singing hermit thrush on Laurel Ridge. Since we rarely hear one singing here during spring migration, we were especially surprised to hear one so late in the autumn.

Whether it was the acorn failure or merely the lure of our birdseed, we had many excellent views of southern flying squirrels at our feeder area. Because it was still warm and some bears were no doubt still about, I brought in my feeders every night throughout November and December. On Thanksgiving evening I turned on the back porch light before going out to retrieve the feeders. A flying squirrel was busily scarfing up seeds on the porch floor. So intent was it that my husband Bruce was able to take several photos of the creature through the storm door. It only fled down the steps when I went out to get the feeders.

My next sighting was the first of December when I watched one flying squirrel chase off another on the birdseed-covered ground below the back step. The victor continued eating, even burying most of its body beneath the grass and seeds in its quest for food.

A full moon illuminated the sky on the tenth of December when Bruce startled a flying squirrel on the back porch. It zipped up the porch railing and sailed over near the juniper tree where it made a rough landing and disappeared down slope. The next evening I surprised the flying squirrel on the back porch steps, and it performed the same maneuver as it had for Bruce the previous night.

flying squirrel on a black locust tree in Plummer’s Hollow

We saw at least one flying squirrel at our feeder area throughout December, and we thought it was only fair that we should feed flying squirrels at night since we hosted at least 11 gray squirrels by day.

Whether or not the flying squirrels were affected by the unusual warmth, at least one woodchuck was. Below the back porch a fat male woodchuck continued to emerge from his hole every afternoon to eat the fresh greenery on the slope into December. The last time I saw him was mid afternoon on December 22, again a record breaker here for a woodchuck. Usually, they are tucked into their hibernation dens by mid-November and we don’t see any until the following February when the males are busy visiting female dens.

Plants also responded to the continual warmth. Several so-called green immigrant flowers, those that came from over seas, bloomed later than I could remember. On November 27 I found a pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) blooming beside Alan’s Bench. A member of the Composite family, it was once dried and used in making memorial wreaths and for decorating vases and wall brackets. Today it still appears in dried flower arrangements. Its small, white, globular-shaped flowers grow in clusters atop a cottony stem with thin, toothless leaves that are sage-green above and woolly-white beneath. Other names for it are silverleaf, cottonweed, lady-never-fade, Indian posy and ladies’-tobacco. Since it came from Europe, Indian posy seems inappropriate and I doubt whether ladies smoked it. But they did use it for coughs and as a poultice for bruises in pioneer days. Its latest blooming month, according to Rhoads’s and Block’s The Plants of Pennsylvania, is October, which was why I was amazed to find it flowering in late November.

On that same day several forsythia flowers blossomed on a scattering of branches. Forsythia originated in South China where it grew wild. The Chinese called it golden bell. Robert Fortune, a young Scot, was sent into China to collect new plants for the Royal Horticultural Society of London in 1845, three years after the Opium War, when westerners were resented and mistrusted. So Fortune, disguised as a Chinese man, dressed in native garb and wearing a pigtail, explored the South China coast with a crew of Chinese workmen in springtime. There he found the countryside filled with forsythia. Although he later named it for the second curator of London’s Chelsea Gardens—William Forsyth—who was also a Scot, golden bell is a more evocative name that was quickly forgotten.

Dandelions also thrived in our driveway and during this longest autumn, I found a dandelion blooming on Butterfly Loop on December 5. It too came over with the colonists who used it as a cleansing herb and pot herb. It probably originated in Asia Minor long before anyone thought to notice it because both the Greeks and the Romans cultivated it. The Chinese called it earth nail and used its long taproot and green leaves for food and medicine while in Japan it was grown as a decorative plant. In Britain, the Celts used it for both food and wine and the Anglo-Saxon tribes that settled in the British Isles after the Romans left valued it as cure for scurvy and as a laxative and diuretic. Here in Pennsylvania, the Germans grew dandelion in their gardens and even today the Amish value and use the plant in early spring. Years ago, I too harvested the leaves every spring and served them with an Amish bacon dressing that I devised.

dandelion seedhead

As the warm weather persisted, so too did Lyme disease ticks and I continued to pick them off my pants throughout December. Even on December 15 it was 54 degrees late in the day.

It rained on the winter solstice and the following day. But it was back to Indian summer the next two days before winter weather finally settled in, at least for a short time. What changes I have seen during my 41 years here on our central Pennsylvania mountaintop. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined, back in the 1970s, when autumn began at the beginning of September and ended at the end of November that the seasons would shift and autumn would become the longest season of the year.

White-crowned sparrow (photo by Mike Baird, Creative Commons Attribution license)

The white-crowned sparrows must be wondering about our strange weather. Last October, near the end of their fall migration, they were met here by a heavy snowstorm. For the first time I can remember, we even had a white-crown at our feeder area from October 31 through November 2.

Usually, I see them during their spring migration in May when one appears almost like clockwork eating the dandelions gone to seed in our yard. And sure enough, during the heat wave in early May, one appeared to eat dandelion seeds on May 3 and 4. I thought that was my one look for the year at this spiffy bird—its two broad black head stripes neatly separated by a white stripe—when it or another white-crown, appeared on our driveway near dusk on May 11, feeding peacefully on weed seeds along with a small rabbit.

Would or wouldn’t it show up the following day when I was in the midst of my Pennsylvania Migratory Count? It waited until I was resting in the afternoon on the veranda to fly into a tulip tree sapling beside me. But it also appeared at the same time and place with the bunny as I concluded my count, proving that sometimes nature does repeat itself.

Why all the fuss and bother over seeing this species? Here in Pennsylvania it is only a migrant bird, passing quickly through our state in spring to reach its boreal nesting grounds in northern Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador. One white-crown, banded by Ralph K. Bell at Clarksville, Pennsylvania, on May 6, 1962, was recaptured 1,500 miles to the north at Battle Harbor, Labrador, on June 12, having averaged 40 miles a day. (Bell, incidentally, who is now 97, still leads bird clubs around his Greene County farm.)

The white-crowns migrate even faster heading southwest to central Texas and the lower Ohio Valley for the winter using, some researchers believe, the stars to navigate or some geomagnetic navigation because they have found slight amounts of the mineral magnetite embedded in the facial tissue of their head and neck muscles.

Several white-crowns do stay here in Pennsylvania throughout the winter at feeders and in open areas such as lawns, weedy fields, brushy places along fences and woodland edges at low elevations, especially in the southeast part of the commonwealth. However, seeing one on our mountaintop property was a special treat.

It came in two days after the seven-inch snowstorm, landing in our feeder area with a dark-eyed junco, one of two species it hangs out with in the winter. The following morning it returned with a couple congeners—the closely-related white-throated sparrow—Zonotrichia albicollis. In fact, researchers believe that the white-crown—Z. leucophrys—diverged from the white-throat 750,000 years ago and separated from its sister species, the western golden-crowned sparrow—Z. atricapilla—50,000 years before the present, but that all three sparrow species split from Harris’s sparrow Z. querla 1.2 million years ago.

White-crowned Sparrow, mature (Kelly Colgan Azar, CC Attribution-Share Alike)

I must confess that I had often mistrusted other feeder watchers who reported white-crowned sparrows, figuring they were mixing them up with male white-throats, because we almost always have abundant numbers of the latter in the winter. After all, the adult sparrows of both species have black and white striped heads, white wingbars on reddish-brown wings and dark-striped brown backs, but white-throats have a yellow spot above its grayish beak and a bright white throat, while a white-crown has a grayish breast and a pink bill. Furthermore, the immatures of both species have brown and white striped heads, but the bill colors remain the same as the matures, and the immature white-throats have streaked breasts while the white-crowns’ breasts are plain.

In the few days I had to observe the white-crown, it seemed to be the dominant species, chasing off the white-throats from the birdseed I had strewn on the back step.

White-crowned sparrows are known as the “white rats” of ornithology because they can easily be kept in captivity for study, particularly of birdsong. They are also widely distributed, abundant, and easy to see in the wild. In the western United States, four western subspecies have provided lots of opportunity for study, particularly Z.leucophrys pugetensis, Z.l.nuttalli, and Z.l.gambelii. While four of the five subspecies migrate, Z.l.nuttalli, which breeds along a narrow strip of the southern California coast to Santa Barbara, does not. Z.l.gambelii intergrades with our subspecies Z.l. leucophrys in northeastern Manitoba and is the Alaska, western United States Rocky Mountains and western Canadian subspecies. It, in turn, intergrades with Z.l.oriantha in broken populations also in western Canada and the western United States. Z.l. pugetensis breeds along the Pacific Coast to northwest California where it meets with Z.l.nuttalli.

All of this wouldn’t be particularly important except that most of the lauded scientific studies have been done on the western subspecies and that the behavior of these subspecies differs substantially from one another. Most galling of all, at least to those of us in the eastern United States, is that our subspecies Z.l.leucophry, from which all the others may have evolved, is the least studied.

White-crowned Sparrow at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland (Amy McAndrews, CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike)

Thank goodness Roland C. Clement, a vice president of the National Audubon Society back in the 1960s, traveled to Goose Bay, Labrador, to observe what he calls “a subarctic and alpine zone bird” on its nesting grounds. It is, he writes in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Cardinals, Grosbeaks, Buntings, Towhees, Finches, Sparrows, and Allies, an “open, stunted tree growth and brush that attracts nesting white-crowned sparrows… I found them nesting only in the open, often burned, black spruce and dwarf birch on the high, sandy delta of the airport plateau [at Goose Bay].”

On June 16, 1957 he discovered a bird building a nest, forming a cup in a bed of hairy-cap mosses and Cladonia lichens, weaving it of grasses, lining it with fine root fibers and tucking it beneath a dwarf birch. Of the 30 nests he found in Goose Bay, all were built on the ground, but other researchers on the Labrador coast located them in small firs. These nests — four inches in diameter and two and five-eighths inside — are the smallest nests of any of the subspecies.

Two weeks later, Clement was in Quebec and found a nest with eight eggs and three parent birds, two females and a male, proving that at least a few of these birds engage in polygyny. In addition, he observed that a single female lays three to five eggs (the other subspecies lay as many as seven) and incubates them from 11 to 16 days. The young develop quickly and can fledge as early as nine days if they are disturbed to as long as 12 days, although the average is ten days. Both parents attend to nest sanitation and feeding the nestlings. To encourage them to fledge, the parents stop feeding them. Seven to ten days after they leave their nest, they can fly.

White-crowns are principally plant eaters — 92% of their diet — but they also eat insects especially from April until August when, presumably, they need more proteins to sustain themselves and their young. Mostly, they consume a wide variety of weed seeds (74%), with smaller amounts of berries and small grains. Clement observed up in their breeding grounds that they eat the green capsules of hairy-cap moss and furthermore, that he watched one white-crown pick and eat 120 capsules in one minute.

Like the white-throat, white-crown males sing all year, although they are particularly active in the spring, especially when they are busy acquiring their territory and mating. Clement says he counted 194 consecutive songs from one white-crown. They use their songs to defend their acre or more territory, attract a mate, and stimulate their mate’s reproductive capabilities. In addition, they can use the songs of other white-crowns to distinguish between neighbors and strangers, different dialects and even different subspecies. The eastern white-crowned sparrow song does show fewer small-scale differences in song dialects among populations than those in the western subspecies which is probably why white-crown song study has all been done with western birds.

White-crowned Sparrow singing (Kenneth Cole Schneider, CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike)

One recent study discovered that older white-crowns will ignore the singing of younger ones in their territory, but aggressively defend their territory from rivals their own age. Another study found that younger males have a harder time attracting females than older ones.

White-crowns have also been used in numerous studies of how birds learn songs. Recently, researchers discovered that young white-crowns don’t need to hear a song in its entirety to learn it correctly. Gary J. Rose of the University of Utah and his colleagues played the white-crown song to young white-crowns in two-part phases — BA and DC instead of AB and CD for example — and the youngsters were able to piece together the typical white-crown song in reverse. But without the pairing, the young birds sang a jumble. This early musical exposure, Rose says, influences combination-sensitive detectors in their brains, allowing them to piece together song elements of nearly normal length with melodies dependent on what paired snippets they heard.

When researchers aren’t studying them, young white-crowns listen to their fathers and learn perfect “Oh gee—it was the whiz-whiskey” or “more wet wetter chee zee” white-crowned sparrow song. To Clement, “sitting in my tent or in some miner’s shack in the iron ore belt of interior Labrador in 1957, the song of the white-crown reminded me of a diminutive eastern meadowlark.”

Inclement weather, particularly snow storms on their nesting grounds, causes the most mortality in white-crowns, but shrikes, snowy and short-eared owls, sharp-shinned hawks and American kestrels prey on them.

The eastern white-crowned sparrow has continued to extend its winter range both eastward and northward since 1950. Clement attributes it to “climatic amelioration,” the planting of multiflora rose, which provides great cover in the open areas they favor, and the huge increase in bird feeding. They also relish the seeds of plants we scorn—pigweeds, foxtail-grasses, panic grasses, smartweeds, chickweeds, docks and ragweeds.

Once they weathered last October’s snowstorm, the living must have been easy for those that chose to spend the mildest winter in living memory here in Pennsylvania.

Video by Garth McElroy of a white-crowned sparrow eating dandelion seeds in a lawn in Maine (watch on YouTube)

Common green darner by Ken Slade (TexasEagle on Flickr) — Creative Commons BY-NC licence

After a hot, humid day in early September, a large swarm of common green darner dragonflies hunted for food above the barn bank. Our son, Dave, had alerted me to the phenomenon, and we stood watching as the dragonflies darted about. Dave tried to catch one in my insect net, but every time he zigged, the dragonfly zagged. We also attempted to count them but again they were too fast for us to tally.

We stood mesmerized by their aerial display—flying sideways, backwards, and forwards as they hunted. Sometimes they hovered, like helicopters. Then, they would beat all four wings together and accelerate as fast as 30 miles an hour, according to researchers. They can also stop instantly by lowering their abdomens and wings.

Added to their flying expertise is their amazing eyesight. Those bulging eyes that cover much of their heads have more than 28,000 facets so they can see above, behind, and around themselves. No wonder Dave couldn’t catch one.

green darner close-up by Linda Rae Duchaine (Beadmobile on Flickr) — CC BY-NC-ND

Because of the heat, I was almost certain that we were watching a feeding swarm. On such days, common green darners might be pausing in their migration and waiting for a cold front from the north before pushing south. Or, on the other hand, they may have been permanent residents.

Common green darners, like some of our birds, have two populations. The permanent residents mate in the summer and lay their eggs in leaves underwater. Their nymphs hatch in about three weeks and spend their winters in ponds and other slow-moving water. By June they have hatched into dragonflies and are coursing over water in search of food.

The migrators mate in spring as soon as they return, and brand new dragonflies are ready to migrate by August. But those migratory populations alternate generations between breeding in the north and breeding in the south. Often, they migrate as individuals, but some years they migrate in huge swarms, especially along the Atlantic seaboard.

Like birds, they follow mountain ridges and the shores of the Great Lakes and ocean. Last fall—2011—was a big year for the migration of common green darners. The Internet was filled with reports of swarms in West Virginia and Ohio backyards and especially in New Jersey. One report, from the panhandle of West Virginia, occurred just a couple days after our swarm, and I wondered if it was the same one we saw. The video they made of the swarm looked exactly like the one Dave had made of ours, flashes of dragonflies moving too fast to see.

common green darners depositing eggs by Ken Slade (TexasEagle) — CC BY-NC

Through September 18, I observed an unusual number of common green darner dragonflies flying over First Field, and I suspected that on the 18^th, which was cool and clear, I was watching migration. On that same day raptors were also on the move south, and I sat at the top of First Field on Alan’s Bench above a tableau of gold as 38 acres of goldenrod waved in the breeze.

Dozens of monarch butterflies and common green darners flew up the field, heading south. Then, a sharp-shinned hawk flew up First Field, and over the spruce grove, followed by a merlin. Merlins and American kestrels seem to time their migration to that of common green darners because despite their excellent eyesight, the dragonflies have blind spots to their rear and below so merlins and American kestrels, and farther south, Mississippi kites, swoop beneath them from the rear, catch and eat them.

It was professional hawk counter and bird bander Frank Nicoletti, working at the Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth, Minnesota, who first noticed that common green darners migrating down the North Shore of Lake Superior were providing ample food for migrating American kestrels later in the day. In September 1995 Nicoletti counted 1,106 kestrels and 10,330 common green darners. And observers at our own Hawk Mountain also have great views of migrating common green darners as well as American kestrels and merlins in September.

green darner in flight by Jim McCulloch on Flickr — CC BY-NC

But why do some of these large, blue and green dragonflies, popularly known as “devil’s darning needles,” “mule-killers,” “snake doctors,” and “mosquito-hawks,” migrate? After all, many common green darners do perfectly well living much longer lives in the north. Researchers are still trying to answer that question.

And common green darners are not the only dragonfly migrators. Of the 5200 dragonfly species worldwide, at least 25 to 50 are migratory. In North America, with more than 300 species of dragonflies, approximately nine species in two families—the darners and skimmers—migrate including the twelve-spotted skimmer, blue dasher, wandering glider, spot-winged glider, and black saddlebags. Sometimes a few of these species, predominately black saddlebags, join a common green darner migration or feeding swarm.

While many researchers are studying bird migration, the study of dragonfly migration is in its infancy. But Martin Wikelski, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University as well as a licensed pilot, along with five colleagues, decided to study whether dragonfly migration is similar to bird migration.

They glued miniature radio transmitters four-tenths of an inch long and .01 ounce in weight to the undersides of the thoraxes of 14 common green darners—seven males and seven females–and followed them during their autumn migration using receiver-equipped Cessna airplanes and ground teams. They took the dragonflies from five sites in New Jersey. All were newly-emerged adults still strengthening and developing when the urge to migrate started them on their way south.

mating pair of green darners by David Hofmann (davidhofmann08 on Flickr) — CC BY-NC-ND

The fourteen dragonflies took off within three minutes after the transmitters were attached. The researchers hypothesized that since the male common green darners often carry the females during copulation and also capture prey larger than themselves, they would have no trouble carrying a transmitter weighing the equivalent of a paper clip.

Although they followed them by receivers on the ground using tracking vehicles and handheld devices and by aerial surveys, it was easier to keep track of them from the air, Wikelski told reporters, “Because they move so much. From the ground it’s almost impossible to follow them.”

They found that most of the dragonflies traveled on average 38 miles a day, but one did fly 100 miles in a day. The common green darners followed the same flyways used by songbirds and raptors along the Atlantic seaboard, gathering around shores and mountain ridges. The researchers stopped surveying individual migration movements when the dragonflies moved out of their driving or flying range, approximately 84 miles from Princeton.

Like songbirds, common green darners did not migrate if surface winds were more than 15 miles an hour. Also, they flew on days when the previous night was colder than the night before that and they stayed put when the nights were warmer. Although they headed south from Princeton, when they reached the Delaware Bay at its mouth, just like songbirds do, they turned north again until they could find a narrower place to cross. They also did not seem to compensate for wind direction but flew with it as the migrating songbirds also do. Unlike songbirds, though, common green darners moving northward in the spring have little wing wear, suggesting that they are newly-emerged adults that have never flown the route before.

Probably the best book to read about common green darner migration is a lavishly illustrated children’s book by Laurence Pringle entitled A Dragon in the Sky. He says that migrating common green darners fly above the treetops and catch strong southeast breezes that enable them to glide much of the way like raptors do. Since they can eat on the wing, they can keep flying even while they catch insects and ballooning spiders. Each night they roost in trees. If it rains, they hunker down and wait for sunshine and a cold front.

Northwest winds often push them toward the Atlantic coast, hence the huge numbers seen in New Jersey. Eventually, most end up in Cape May, most notably on September 11, 1992 when an estimated 400,000 dragonflies, mostly common green darners, flew over Cape May and then turned northward again to avoid flying over Delaware Bay just as Wikelski, et. al. discovered in 2005. Instead, they flew along the eastern shore of the Delaware Bay and, in mid afternoon, turned and flew west over the bay where it was only four miles wide.

Farther along, when they reach the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, Pringle writes, they follow the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, thus avoiding the 17 miles of open water across the mouth of the bay.

Often they pause to feed in swarms over farm fields, marshes, and other open places with lots of midges, craneflies, gnats, and mosquitoes. They rest on cloudy or rainy days because they use sun compass navigation, flying according to the sun’s position in the sky with the assistance of an internal clock that makes up for the earth’s rotation and keeps them on track.

common green darner resting by Ken Slade (TexasEagle) — CC BY-NC

They rest by hanging under the leaves of trees or roosting close to the ground in fields or shrubs. During their migration they go from tenerals or immatures to full adults. The males’ purplish-brown abdomens gradually turn blue while the females have gray-green abdomens. Their reproductive organs are developed, and they are ready to mate in their southern retreats in Florida, Texas, or even as far south as Mexico, having taken as long as two months to get there.

Presumably, it is their offspring that head north in the spring to begin again the cycle of common green darner life, either mating and laying eggs immediately or becoming permanent residents by waiting until summer to mate.

But whatever their life style, the common green darner—Anax junius—which means “Lord of June,” is seen from April to October in Pennsylvania, flying over ponds, marshes, and pools as well as over open fields, meadows, and uplands far from the nearest still water, such as our First and Far fields.

Be sure to click on photos from Flickr to see larger, sharper versions.

Here’s the video our son Dave made of our hairy-tailed mole. Listen for a cardinal cheering, the calls of eastern wood-pewees and eastern towhees, train whistles, and a loud plane going over as well as vehicles from the interstate as background sounds.

On a cool, clear morning in late August, my husband Bruce came rushing into the bedroom where I was doing my exercises.

“Hurry, hurry outside,” he said with so much urgency that I ran out on the dew-covered grass in my stocking feet.

Bruce pointed at a small, black, furry creature digging in our lawn.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“A hairy-tailed mole, I answered as I looked at its short, hairy tail. But to be sure, I waited until it executed a quick turn and exposed its nose which was not star-shaped like a star-nosed mole but pointed.

Although we have lived here for forty years, only once had I seen a live hairy-tailed mole moving along the Short Circuit Trail, but quickly disappearing when it sensed my presence. This one, however, was going about its business of digging and snuffling as it worked.

Bruce called our son Dave, who lives in our guesthouse, and he came armed with both his still and video cameras. We stood over the mole, and Dave put his video camera practically on top of the mole to get its sound over the noise from the interstate, yet the mole ignored us.

I was so entranced by its plush, black pelt that I reached out and touched it. It never reacted. Even when we started to speak in quiet voices, it paid no attention to us. Had we been so inclined, we could have easily picked it up.

For ten minutes it snapped grass roots. Occasionally, it pushed at the long grass with its head and stopped to scratch. Then it shuffled off, its sausage-shaped, six-inch-long body swinging from side to side. Once it paused at a small section of dead grass to sniff. Then it continued on through green grass, pausing frequently to nose various areas like a miniature terrier.

When it wriggle-ran, we had an excellent view of its hairy tail, triangular-shaped head, moist, pink nose, and elongated forefeet, especially when it trundled across the cement floor of our veranda. As it careened past our rocking chairs, I was reminded of the Zuzu Pet toy our granddaughter Elanor had shown us months before.

From there the mole climbed up a small slope covered with the remains of daylily leaves, long grass, and clusters of blooming, brown-eyed coneflowers beneath a medium-sized black walnut tree. We could still hear the mole snapping roots and making cat-like purring sounds, not the harsh, guttural to quiet squeaks described by researchers, but our hairy-tailed mole was hidden by the plants. Finally, it disappeared, and we could not find any tunnel entrance in the mat of vegetation.

Still, for half an hour we had been immersed in the world of the hairy-tailed mole, and we felt privileged to have had the rare opportunity to observe a wild creature going about its business, seemingly unperturbed by our close observation.

Apparently, hairy-tailed moles can hear well, so I don’t know why it didn’t react to our voices, quiet though we were. These moles also rely on their excellent sense of smell and feel to navigate through their fossorial (underground) world. Their hidden eyes only allow them to distinguish light from dark, and even though they labor day and night eating three times their weight in food every 24 hours, they usually come to the surface only at night.

Their diet consists of 30% earthworms and 30% insect larvae and pupae, particularly those of beetles. They also eat snails, slugs, sowbugs, millipedes, and small roots. That snapping sound we heard had been the hairy-tailed mole eating grass roots.

Closely related to shrews in the Order Insectivora, hairy-tailed moles are one of 42 species of moles worldwide in the Family Talpidae. But the hairy-tailed mole is the only member of its genus Parascalops, which, in Latin, means “large, rounded forefeet that act as a shield,” according to Joseph E. Merritt in his wonderful Guide to the Mammals of Pennsylvania. Its species’ name breweri honors Thomas Mayo Brewer, a nineteenth century American naturalist who authored the three-volume A History of North American Birds with Robert Ridgway and Spencer Fullerton Baird in 1874.

A native of Massachusetts, Brewer was a friend of John James Audubon and contributed to Audubon’s Ornithological Biography. Audubon named Brewer’s blackbird for him as well as illustrated and named “Brewer’s duck” that ornithologists now agree was a mallard gadwall hybrid. In addition, Audubon’s good friend, Dr. John Bachman of Charleston, South Carolina, named the hairy-tailed mole for Brewer, hence its alternate name “Brewer’s mole.”

Pennsylvania has three mole species—the aforementioned star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata), hairy-tailed mole, and, in eastern Pennsylvania, the eastern mole (Scalopus aquaticus). All three species produce molehills that are the bane of farmers, golf-course groundskeepers, and gardeners, which are formed when they push extra soil from below ground out of their burrows, but those of the hairy-tailed mole are smaller than those of eastern and star-nosed moles. Using their broad, front feet that are turned outward for digging, they also have powerful muscles in them and in their chests for digging.

The molehills of hairy-tailed moles are the result of their deep tunnel digging in fall and are 10 to 18 inches below ground. They are used for nesting in spring and as winter homes below the frost line because these moles do not hibernate. Those winter nests, as deep as 16 inches below ground, are eight by six inches and are well insulated with leaves and grass.

This complex of tunnels can be used for as long as eight years, and although hairy-tailed moles are mostly solitary creatures, with each home range from 49 to 79 feet in diameter, the males, females, and young of hairy-tailed moles may all use the same tunnel system along with several shrew, vole, mole, and mouse species, i.e. short-tailed shrews, meadow voles, white-footed mice, masked shrews, pine voles, southern bog lemmings, star-nosed moles, and meadow jumping mice.

Hairy-tailed moles also dig surface tunnels in the spring and summer for foraging that produce inch-high ridges of soil above ground and often follow boulders or logs. Once in a while, one crosses a trail on our property. They keep both their deep and surface tunnels and nests clean by depositing their scats outside their tunnel entrances.

Hairy-tailed moles live in a variety of habitats from southeastern Canada inland through the Appalachians as far south as Tennessee and North Carolina. They prefer a sandy loamy, dry to moist soil in forests, open fields, old shrubby pastures, cultivated fields and even along roadsides and are not deterred by stones in their loam such as we have on our rocky mountaintop. Their constant digging and foraging not only tills the soil but rids it of injurious insects. For instance, one researcher in West Virginia reported that they destroyed the nests of ground-nesting wasps and ate their larvae and pupae.

Sometime in late February or early March male hairy-tailed moles, which are somewhat larger than female hairy-tailed moles leave their winter tunnel quarters in search of females’ tunnel systems. After mating, females build their spherical nests 12 inches below ground, which are six inches in diameter and are made up of layers of coarsely shredded dried leaves with a roof of dead leaves and humus.

In four to six weeks after breeding, they have one litter of four or five hairless, blind, toothless young, although back in 1949, N.D. Richmond and H.R. Roslund, while engaged in a mammal survey in northwestern Pennsylvania for the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, reported finding a female with eight embryos.

The young remain in the nest for a month under the sole care of their nursing mother, until they are able to eat solid food. Then they too, join in the burrowing life. At 10 months of age, females are able to have their own young.

Cats, dogs, foxes, opossums, owls, and snakes are known to prey on hairy-tailed moles. In Pennsylvania in 1949, Richmond and Roslund also reported that of the 2484 small mammal remains taken from barn owl pellets, 31 of them were hairy-tailed moles. An adult hairy-tailed mole was once found in the belly of a bullfrog in New York State, and three northern copperhead snakes in Virginia and West Virginia contained hairy-tailed moles. There is also some evidence that the voracious short-tailed shrews prey on nestling hairy-tailed moles.

But because of their usually secretive, mostly underground lives, not much is know about how they live and die. Their fossil record, though, is based on specimens from Pleistocene deposits in Frankstown Cave in my own Blair County, which proves that they’ve been around here for a very long time.