Semiotus marciae (photo © Sam Wells)

“Congratulations, Mom!” the email from my oldest son, Steve, said. “You finally have an organism named after you. Semiotus is a genus of very large, tropical click beetles [and] S. marciae is a species from Ecuador. Your beetle is large (about one inch) and very colorful, like all Semiotus. You’ll probably end up in quite a few collections.”

Steve is an amateur entomologist specializing in beetles. His friend, Dr. Sam Wells, is a professional entomologist who works at the Western Field Technology Station of Bayer Crop Science in Fresno, California. His specialty is click beetles. Since one of my favorite insects is the salt and pepper-colored eyed elater click beetle Alaus oculatus with its two large black false eyes on its pronotum (front part of the thorax between the head and the abdomen), I was pleased to learn that I would have my own orange and red click beetle—Marcia’s click beetle—as Steve called it.

Furthermore, he wrote that “the etymology is given in honor of Marcia Bonta, author and naturalist.” This followed the detailed description of the beetle in Kolepterologische Rundschau (translated as the Coleopterological Review), a German journal that includes an English translation.

Needless to say, I was thrilled by the honor and reminded of my early studies of the history of Pennsylvania’s natural history. They started shortly after we moved to our mountaintop home in west central Pennsylvania four decades ago, when I began learning the names of all the creatures and plants that lived here. One of the first birds I identified was the eastern phoebe—Sayornis phoebe—because four couples nested on ledges inside our garage, old outhouse, and guesthouse and plastered on the side of the springhouse.

The eastern phoebe is one of three phoebe species in North America which includes the western Say’s phoebe—Sayornis saya—doubly named for Thomas Say according to Ernest A. Choate’s The Dictionary of American Bird Names. In addition, someone named Bonaparte created the genus name Sayornis, not the Bonaparte but a nephew—Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte—who came with his family to Philadelphia in 1822 where many naturalists resided. During his six years there he re-edited a massive book on American ornithology and thus became the so-called Father of Systematic Ornithology. Bonaparte’s gull honors him.

But who was Thomas Say? Say, it turned out, is called the Father of American Entomology. Of French Protestant stock, he was born in Philadelphia in 1787. His great uncle, William Bartram, who wrote Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the first American nature book, encouraged Say to collect butterflies and beetles. At that time, Philadelphia was a hotbed of naturalists who started the Academy of Natural Sciences, and when Thomas Say joined, he found to his consternation that the collection of natural curiosities only consisted of six common insects, a few shells, a dried fish and a stuffed monkey. He resolved to increase the collection.

Thomas Say by Charles Wilson Peale (1818)

A handsome, amiable man always ready to help others, he devoted much of his life to the study of natural history, specializing in insects and shells, although in 1819, as the zoologist in Major Stephen H. Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains, he reported on everything from the Indian languages to wolves, snakes, birds, and shells. But both before and after this expedition, he published papers on insects and land shells, beginning with “Descriptions of Seven Species of American Fresh Water and Land Shells” and “Descriptions of Several New Species of North American Insects.”

Unfortunately for natural history, Say left Philadelphia in 1825 to participate in the altruistic, socialist community at New Harmony, Indiana. There he met his wife Lucy. But rancor quickly drove the founders of the community apart, and peaceful, kindly Say had to carry on with very little help, dying there in 1834 at the age of 47.

However, he left a worthy legacy in his three-volume work American Entomology or Descriptions of the Insects of North America published in 1824, 1825, and 1828. He was credited with being the first efficient and extensive describer of North American insects, especially Coleoptera (beetles).

Since beetles were his specialty, I wondered how many were named for him. After several hours on the Internet studying BugGuide.net, I found 22 insect species that honor Say from two species of caddisflies to Say’s stinkbug. Of those, ten are beetles including Ampedus sayi, an orange and black click beetle that LeConte named.

Could that be the LeConte of LeConte’s sparrow and LeConte’s thrasher? Indeed, it was. John Lawrence LeConte, who was born in 1825, was, according to Arnold Mallis in his excellent American Entomologists, “our greatest coleopterist, not because he named almost five thousand species of beetles, but because he showed their systematic relationships and pointed the way to the scientific classifications of American insects.”

John Le Conte (artist unknown, 1874)

Son of the naturalist Major John Eatton LeConte, who raised him when his mother died shortly after his birth, he learned about beetles at his father’s knee as a toddler while the major worked on his beetle collection. He was raised in New York City but moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was 27.

By then he had graduated from college, begun his travels to the West in search of insects and written several papers on ground, tiger, and long-horned beetles from the eastern United States. In 1859 he edited The Complete Writings of Thomas Say on the Entomology of North America and with his friend and pupil Dr. George H. Horn he wrote The Classification of the Coleoptera of North America in 1883, which was based on the 11,000 beetle species in LeConte’s and Horn’s collections. He was also the founder and president of the American Entomological Society.

Of the 36 insect species named for him that I found, almost all were beetles. One favorite exception of mine that lives on our mountain is the striking black and white LeConte’s haploa moth Haploa lecontei. Beetle species from Alaska to Texas, New Jersey to California bear his name—clown beetles, long-horned beetles, leaf beetles and, of course, a click beetle Elater lecontei.

LeConte did his fair share of naming too. The attractive hairy fungus beetle Mycetophagus melsheimeri is one of them. This brought me back to the very beginning of insect studies in North America because before Say and LeConte, there was Frederick Valentine Melsheimer, also called the Father of American Entomology. He was considered the first serious American entomologist because he made the first important insect collection and wrote the first important entomological work in the United States in 1806 entitled A Catalogue of Insects of Pennsylvania. Sixty pages long, it dealt only with 1,363 species of beetles of which about 400 are recognized today. His catalogue also included the habits, life histories and food plants of some of those insects as well as the oldest description of a beetle larva in North America.

Friedrich Valentine Melsheimer (artist unknown)

But Melsheimer was primarily a minister. Born in Germany in 1849, he was ordained a chaplain in a regiment of Hessian Dragoons. Shortly after he preached his first sermon, the Dragoons were sent to North America to fight for the British in the American Revolution. After landing in Quebec in 1776, they were sent south, captured at the Battle of Bennington, and imprisoned first in Massachusetts and then in New York. Finally, Melsheimer was sent in 1779 to Bethlehem, where he resigned his commission as chaplain, assumed several Lutheran congregations in Lancaster County and married a Bethlehem native. Over the decades he served in Manheim, New Holland, Lancaster, and Hanover.

In addition, he founded German-American schools and was a professor of German, Latin and Greek and one of the founders and the second president of Franklin College (now Franklin and Marshall College) in 1787. Of his eleven children, two sons followed his entomological interests. Johann Friedrich Melsheimer was an active insect collector, but he died and his brother, Dr. Franz Ernst Melsheimer, took over the collection and library. In 1842 he was elected the first president of the Entomological Society of Pennsylvania. From 1846 to 1848 he contributed seven papers on beetles to the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences and in 1853 he was elected president of the American Entomological Society. That same year the Smithsonian Institution published his Catalogue of the Described Coleoptera of the United States, which had been revised by Samuel Stehman Haldeman, still another early Pennsylvania entomologist who lived near Harrisburg, and LeConte. Altogether, his insect collection consisted of 14,000 specimens of 5,000 species.

I could not find nearly as many insects named for any of the Melsheimers. In fact, only five insects—one moth Cicinnus melsheimeri called Melsheimer’s sack-bearer moth–and four beetles. One, an antlike leaf beetle—Emelinus melsheimeri has a clear “M” on its back. And yes, one is a click beetle Zorochros melsheimeri. Perhaps that isn’t such a surprise because there are at least 9,300 known click beetle species worldwide and more to be named. And we all know the famous quote about beetles by British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles” because there are more beetle species than any other form of insects and comprise one fifth of all living species on earth.

An eyed elator click beetle from Plummer's Hollow (photo by D. Bonta)

Click beetles in the family Elateridae are able to click and jump when they are on their backs by bending their heads and prothoraxes backward and then their body is suddenly straightened, producing an audible click and propelling the beetle into the air and turning it right side up again. Their larvae are wireworms, a few of which are injurious to the roots of crops. The eyed elater click beetles, which I am most acquainted with, are found in the northeast and southeast United States and Ontario. The Semiotus genus occurs principally in tropical America from Mexico to Chile.

Dr. Wells began studying click beetles while in pursuit of his doctorate and says that despite their abundance little is known about them and much more taxonomic work needs to be done. He received the specimen he named for me from a colleague, Sergio Riese, in Italy, and it resides in the Bonta/Sam Wells personal insect collection in Fresno, California.

“Now,” Wells says, “All I have to do is go collect Semiotus marciae for myself.”

All photos and videos in this column are from trail cams on the mountain placed and monitored by the Scotts. (If you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader, you may have to click through to see the videos.)

Almost as soon as they settled into their new home, back in 2009, our caretaker couple — Troy and Paula Scott — installed three strobe cameras. As avid hunters, they were interested initially in monitoring the movements of deer over our square mile of mountain property.

But soon they were capturing other creatures on their cameras, especially at night. Paula quickly became the chief monitor of their cameras, and when the company that produced their strobe cameras — Wild Game Innovation — came out with video cameras, they purchased three of them.

Paula admits that monitoring the cameras throughout the year is addictive to her. She used to dislike winter, once hunting season ended, but now it’s her favorite time of year. That’s because she uses bait to attract a wide range of wild creatures. She hangs a discarded deer carcass by a wire from a tree limb, so it swings a foot or two off the ground directly in front of a camera.

Of course, when bears are abroad, she does not use bait, although she did get a bear on the surprising date of February 27. And that’s what she likes most about the cameras. She learns more about animal behavior especially with the video cameras. In less than two years, she has gotten excellent footage of 15 species of birds and mammals.

Her favorite sighting so far has been of two different fishers that kept returning to the bait. One especially she describes as a “camera ham.” It swung back and forth with the carcass and often faced the camera. Then it turned on its back and rolled with the carcass. All the while it seemed puzzled by this strange source of food.

Both Paula and I have had excellent sightings of fishers in our woods. We’ve also seen tracks in the snow. But the video footage of fishers gave us a whole new perspective on fisher behavior.

Watching two raccoons and an opossum feeding peacefully around the carcass was another surprising behavior observation for Paula.

“I figured they would be competitive and they weren’t,” she says.

She was also surprised that an American crow fed beside five turkey vultures.

And both she and Troy were amused and chagrined when an old hen decoy they had used to unsuccessfully attract gobblers years ago proved irresistible to six jakes at a time. She even has a video of a gobbler displaying in front of the decoy.

Besides the fishers, her other favorite sightings are several photos of a bobcat at the bait at night and a lovely video of a red-tailed hawk near the bait during a snowy day. I’m particularly fond of photos she has of red and gray foxes, despite the presence of coyotes in our area, because coyotes are supposed to prey on red foxes.

Recently they used a camera to find out what was chewing on their new deck at night. As they suspected, it was a porcupine. Instead of killing it, they put a cayenne pepper mixture on the deck and so far it’s kept the porcupine away.

Their original plan, to document deer, also has worked out well. They even have videos of a buck making a scrape and putting his scent on an overhanging limb. Paula cautions, though, that putting the cameras out during deer breeding season gives a false sense of the number of bucks in a hunting area because bucks come in from adjoining properties in search of doe.

When targeting deer, they put the cameras along obvious deer trails, leave them for a month, and then switch them. For other animals, it depends on the time of year and how successful the location is in capturing wildlife footage.

Learning how to obtain good images during the day means positioning them so that the sun doesn’t shine on them, otherwise, you end up with a lot of white footage, she says. You also have to hope that a bear won’t take issue with them. Paula’s brother-in-law Jeff had one ripped off and stomped into pieces, but so far they’ve been lucky. Only two cameras have been pulled down but not damaged.

Paula says in summary that, “these cameras, if you utilize them all year, pay for themselves. If you have a deer interest, as we did, and invest in cameras, you see it’s just not deer out there. It’s a lot of things.”

a bobcat at the bait pile

Discovering what’s out there has tempted folks throughout the world to invest in trail cameras. One writer friend, Ken Lamberton, recently posted on Facebook a beautiful photo of a cougar on a fallen tree in the Mule Mountains of southern Arizona where he and his wife Karen live.

Speaking of cougars, Valentine, Nebraska businessman Kirk Sharp has 16 trail cameras posted around his ranch, which is a half-mile north of Rocky Ford on the Niobrara River in the wild north-central section of Nebraska. One of his cameras, mounted on a wooden fencepost, captured a cougar closely chasing a deer at 11:00 p.m. It was the first authenticated footage of a cougar chasing prey in the state, although since there was a deep canyon directly in front of them, no one knows the outcome.

James Hill III of Waterford Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania wondered what was taking the suet at his feeders. Hill, the founder of the Purple Martin Society, has a 150-acre wildlife sanctuary. Although he figured a bear was probably doing the damage, he put out a camera with a motion detector. To his surprise it was a sow with two cubs sharing the suet with them.

“I was astonished,” Hill says. “I never figured there’d be a family. I’m happy to have them.”

While individuals are enjoying their cameras, and finding out more about wildlife on their properties, so too are wildlife biologists. For instance, two researchers from Texas Tech University — Blake Gresham and Phil Borsdorf — have been studying the endangered lesser prairie chicken at The Nature Conservancy’s Yoakum Dunes Preserve near Lubbock, Texas. By erecting remote video cameras on 15 water tanks at the Preserve, they photographed 800 visits to the tanks by lesser prairie chickens, disproving the belief that the birds don’t need open water because they get enough moisture, except during drought, from succulent plants, insects, and dew. Gresham and Borsdorf found that hens especially needed extra water during nesting time because it takes a cup and a half of water to produce a clutch of ten eggs.

gray fox

Conservation organizations are also starting to utilize trail cameras. A recent article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biological Sciences entitled “Community Structure and Diversity of Tropical Forest Mammals: Data from a Global Camera Trap Network” recounts the results from the world’s first global camera trap mammal study. It involved nearly 52,000 candid shots of 105 mammal species from seven tropical sites around the globe.

The camera traps, low on the ground, made no noise and emitted no light so poachers couldn’t spot them at night. But in Africa, elephants, like our black bears, don’t like strange objects in their territory and tried to crush them.

Jorge Ahumada, the lead author and an ecologist with the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM) says that “The study shows for us that for the conservation of these mammal species, size matters; …the size of the protected area and the degree of human activity around it have an effect on the …diversity of these animal communities.”

The Central Suriname Nature Reserve in South America had the most diversity — 28 species — while Nam Kading in Lao Public Democratic Republic in southeast Asia had the least — 13 species. The other sites included Uganda and Tanzania in Africa, Indonesia in Southeast Asia, Brazil in South America and Costa Rica in Central America.

The study ran from 2008-10 under the auspices of Conservation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Because of its success, they have expanded it into 17 wilderness areas in Panama, Brazil, Peru, Madagascar, Congo, Cameroon, Malaysia and India. Ahuda says that these cameras “are reliable observers of the state of our world,” and the study concludes that “camera traps are a useful, efficient, cost-effective, easily replicable tool to study and monitor terrestrial mammals.”

They are also useful for studying large raptors. Dr. Todd Katzner at West Virginia University, along with Kieran O’Malley and Rob Tallman of the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, is using them for estimating the size of the wintering golden eagle population in the Appalachians including Pennsylvania. The bait is road-killed deer dumped into a small clearing surrounded by tall trees where golden eagles can perch. The bait should be opened along the legs and abdomen to draw in common ravens and other birds that, in turn, alert eagles. Like Paula’s bait, it must be wired to keep it from being dragged off by other animals. The camera should be oriented to the north because that ensures that the sun is to the side or behind the camera, thus preventing white photos. The study is run from January 1 to February 15, and we are hoping to find a good place on our property for Paula to set up a camera.

Hunters in the United States, who first popularized the use of cameras to monitor deer presence, should feel proud of how useful these cameras have become in wildlife monitoring and conservation.

Barred Owl by lezzie5 on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)

It’s a cold, crisp morning in early November. Robins call and sing in the sunlit treetops at the edge of First Field. As I head down our woodland road, first one and then a second common raven flies low and “bonks.”

Above Waterthrush Bench I hear the continual ticking of songbirds near or in a medium-sized hemlock tree across the stream. In the still sunless hollow, I look and look and still can’t see any little bird, yet the ticking continues.

Finally, I give up and am about to walk away, muttering about my aging eyes, when I notice what appears to be an odd-shaped piece of wood on a lower branch of the hemlock. Slowly, I raise my binoculars and peer at it. To my great delight and astonishment, a barred owl seems to be looking at me except that its eyes are closed. I speak to it and its eyes blink open. For long minutes we stare at each other. Then I move on, and the barred owl remains on its perch, seemingly unperturbed by the human who has interrupted its sleep.

Still marveling at its calm demeanor and superb camouflage, I wonder how many times I have not seen a barred owl in our forest. If not for the ticking birds, I would have continued on my walk, unaware that what I think of as the “ghost bird,” was nearby.

I remember our first year here back in 1971 when a barred owl sat in full view on a branch beside our road throughout the summer months. We didn’t realize then that the owl would be only a memory for years to come. We often saw or heard eastern screech-owls and great horned owls but never the “who cooks for you, who cooks for you’all” of barred owls. After all, great horned owls are major predators on the slightly smaller barred owls. So are raccoons, larger members of the weasel family, and large hawks, all of which live and hunt in our hollow.

Barred owl in flight by Curtis Ellis (CC BY-NC-ND)

Still, we do have ideal barred owl habitat — a mature mixed deciduous and coniferous forest on either side of a small stream along our hollow road. The barred owl’s favorite food items — small mammals and birds — are also plentiful, especially chipmunks, deer and white-footed mice, as well as birds up to and including ruffed grouse in size.

Knowing all this, I expected to see more barred owls in the hollow. Instead, my absolutely best sighting took place about 20 years ago in the ice-enshrouded woods of Sapsucker Ridge one January afternoon, well within the more than square mile of territory a barred owl pair needs to survive the winter. Two inch long icicles hung from every tree branch and vine that gray, cold, misty day.

This time an American crow was the messenger, cawing and flying up from the trees ahead. Scanning the area it had just vacated with my binoculars, I spotted a large, plump figure perched on a tree limb a hundred feet away. I thought it was a great horned owl because crows had often alerted me to them. Instead, I was surprised by a barred owl — a puffy vision decked out in white, gray, and brown feathers, its horizontal barring around its collared neck accounting for its common name.

It turned its head back and forth on its swivel neck, then bent and peered down at the ground, no doubt hoping to surprise a mouse. I knelt, one knee in the icy snow, and studied the owl for ten minutes, admiring its nearly rounded-off, soft-looking head framed with what looked like enormous fur muffs, and its dark brown eyes accentuated by large, oval facial disks.

At last it turned its back to me, and I could see some black mixed with brown on its stubby tail before it leaned out and slightly down and launched into silent flight, propelling itself out of my sight.

Sleepy barred owl by Signe Brewster (CC BY-NC)

Standing upright at 18 inches, a barred owl weighs a mere 1.5 pounds and its rounded wings stretch 40 inches. Among the owl species, only great horned owls are larger than barred owls in the eastern United States.

Once barred owls (Strix varia) resided east of the Great Plains from the boreal forest of Canada to southern Florida, but recently they have expanded into portions of western North America, including the Pacific Northwest where sometimes they displace and hybridize with the closely related and much rarer spotted owls (Strix occidentalis).

They are supposed to prefer large trees in old forests for nesting, and here in Pennsylvania barred owls do inhabit wooded ravines and “nest in highest densities in old-growth forests of the High Plateau,” according to Gerald McWilliams and Daniel Brauning in The Birds of Pennsylvania. But they are also found in forested swamps, wet, mature woodlands, and even in cities and farmlands. Although they are less abundant than great horned owls and eastern screech-owls, they breed in every Pennsylvania County except Philadelphia.

Barred owls need large trees with cavities for nesting but will use old hawk, crow or squirrel nests too. They will even nest in nest boxes on occasion, such as the barred owl that nested in a box in Loyalville, Luzerne County, McWilliams and Brauning report. Even though they sometimes reuse the same nest for as long as ten years, they have been known to alternate occupancy one year or several years with red-shouldered, red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks and great horned owls in so-called “partnership” nests.

Barred owls also like to inhabit a forest with an open understory because it makes hunting easier for them. In addition, the closed canopy of an old-growth forest provides more regulated temperatures as well as protection from excessive mobbing by small birds. But often they remain attached to an area even as it changes around them, for instance, even staying in a woods while it’s being logged.

Young barred owl yoga by Matthew Paulson (CC BY-NC-ND)

If there is enough food, both the larger female and the male of a pair will inhabit their 695-acre-or-more territory all year. They are presumed to be monogamous and even though they call throughout the year, they call more frequently prior to egg-laying in late winter and early spring. That’s when you are most likely to hear dueting between a pair lasting two minutes and consisting not only of their familiar hooting but “loud and prolonged outbursts of cackling, laughing, and whooping sounds delivered very rapidly and interspersed, as well as ending, with the familiar ‘ho-hoo-ah,’” Massachusetts ornithologist William Brewster once wrote, adding a reference to “a prolonged and cat-like scream.” It’s enough to frighten naïve campers into thinking a mountain lion is nearby.

Regarding their courtship rites, Edward Forbush, writing in Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, recounts how a pair of barred owls perched in low branches over his campfire and “nodded and bowed with half-spread wings, and wobbled and twisted their heads from side to side, meantime uttering the most weird and uncouth sounds imaginable.”

The female barred owl lays two to three white eggs as early as December in Florida and March and early April in Pennsylvania. She also incubates the eggs from 28 to 33 days while the male brings her food. After the eggs hatch, the female broods the altricial young for two weeks and the male delivers the food at the nest in a bill-to-bill exchange with the female. Then she tears up the food and feeds it to their nestlings. She also does a little hunting on her own, but after two weeks of brooding, she does a lot more hunting. Both parents then drop food into the nest and the nestlings are able to eat it by themselves.

When the nestlings are between four and five weeks old, they leave the nest but they can’t fly. They either perch on the nest rim or they climb trees or branches by using their beaks and talons, grasping the bark in their beaks and walking their feet up the trunk while flapping their wings. At ten weeks old, they can make short flights and gradually lengthen those flights.

Barred owl parent and fledgling by Minette Layne (CC BY-SA)

The fledglings stay together and near the nest site for awhile and the adults continue to feed them. That’s when Tom Kuehl, president of the Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology, first learned of a nesting pair near his Murrysville, Westmoreland County home. As he wrote in PSO Pileated, the excellent newsletter of the Society, “I walked out our side door at 6:00 a.m. [in late May]… as I made my way around the house, I started hearing loud hissing noises… I looked up and in spite of many leaves, I quickly found three fledgling Barred Owls… For the next two weeks we [his wife Janet and he] enjoyed the dawn and dusk hissing and antics of the fledgling Barred Owls. More active at dusk, they performed flights across the yard, tree to ground, then tree to tree as darkness approached.” The Kuehls never did see the parents, although Janet was scolded by an adult when she tried to walk on their woods’ trail.

Most documented young barred owls disperse a mile to 38 miles from their nest site, but one young barred owl that was banded in Nova Scotia in 1999 was recaptured in January 2000 960 miles away.

Barred owl in a beech tree (detail) by Michael Hodge (CC BY)

Unlike many bird species, Breeding Bird Surveys from 1966 to 1996 showed a slight increase in barred owl numbers. But that was 15 years ago. Since then the opening and fragmenting of forests has increased in Pennsylvania, providing habitat for the more aggressive great horned owls. In addition to too many roads that have fragmented our habitat for decades, we now must contend with industrial wind farms fragmenting our remaining intact mountaintops and natural gas well pads doing the same in our state forests and parks. Add to that the death of our state tree — the hemlock — from the hemlock wooly adelgids, which destroy the most common conifer in our mixed forest. All of these factors bode ill not only for barred owls but for all the creatures and plants that thrive in mixed coniferous/deciduous unfragmented forests.

On the last day of October, twenty friends and members of the Juniata Valley Audubon Society hiked down the Allegheny Front beginning in State Gamelands 158, following the remains of the Bells Gap Narrow-Gauge Railroad. Back in 1872, it was built from the railroad station in the Logan Valley town of Bellwood to Lloydsville, nine miles uphill, to haul coal from the mines on the mountain summit down to the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

It also served as an excursion train for summer tourists, “on account of the grand and romantic scenery along its course, its mountain peaks, deep gorges, cuts and windings,” according to an Altoona journalist writing for a Pittsburgh journal, as quoted by J. Simpson Africa in his 1883 History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania. He had seen the “wilder gorges in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but nothing to compare with this in softness of beauty, graceful outlines, and richness of foliage.”

The cars, he wrote, were pushed up the mountain by a locomotive but descended using gravity and brakes. For a round-trip ticket, tourists paid the train company a mere 65 cents.

ca. 1875, from a series of stereoscopic "Views among the Alleghenies: Penna. Railroad" by R. A. Bonine

Near the top they alighted from the train at extensive picnic grounds containing walks, rustic seats, and a large covered pavilion called Rhododendron Hall “on account of the abundance of this flowering shrub on the mountain. There is a large bubbling spring of living water on the grounds, which is pure and cold,” as well as a pond and fountain. “These beautiful grounds are situated in the heart of a primeval forest, and beneath the umbrageous shade of widespreading hemlocks, oak, beech… Ferns and laurel abound…”

Over the years, the forest primeval was logged and the lumber hauled down to the valley railroad. The pure, cold, living water was heavily polluted by the mining operation.

Today it doesn’t cost anyone to hike, bike, or ride a horse up or down this railroad bed, now known as the Bells Gap Rail Trail. And while the forest primeval is gone, an extensive secondary forest covers the slopes as it did back in 1872. Rhododendrons still abound and so do oaks, beeches, and hemlocks along with many other tree species including mountain maple.

view of Bellwood reservoir and Brush Mountain

Indeed, even the view at Point Lookout, which the journalist described, hasn’t changed much — “bounded on either side by graceful mountains, clothed from base to summit with dark-green foliage, and away beyond for six miles the view is exceedingly fine, until it is shut out by Brush Mountain [the westernmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province where I live], which rises like an immense green curtain to form the background of the picture.” With most of the leaves off the trees during our hike, the lookout also included a view of the Bellwood Reservoir, which is like a blue eye in the extensive forest.

The four mile portion through the gamelands is a wide, grassy trail, and the descent is barely perceptible because the engineers who designed the railroad kept the grade at less than four percent.

Almost immediately, on the left of the trail, we reached a series of four ponds called the Lloydsville Run Site A/B Passive Treatment System designed to neutralize acid mine drainage in Lloydsville Run, which had been affected by both strip mining and deep mining coal extraction. Altogether, it covers seven acres and includes an anoxic limestone drain, a limestone vertical flow pond, sediment ponds, and aerobic and anaerobic wetlands. Finished in 2001 by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, its partners in restoration included the Altoona Water Authority and the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement (EAST). Although the EAST is now disbanded locally, many of the same volunteers continue to monitor the watershed.

staghorn sumac at the AMD remediation ponds

A Growing Greener grant of $337,515 and a further $166,455 from the United States Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining’s Clean Streams Initiative paid for its construction. I find it ironic that industry made the mess and took the profits over a century ago and that citizens today not only had to pay to clean it up through their taxes, but volunteered to monitor it. However, the investment was worth it because in 2000 its pH level was an acidic 4.1. By 2007 it had risen to 6.92. In addition, its concentrations of heavy metals had dropped significantly.

Our fellow hikers poked about at the edges of the ponds and found newts and tadpoles in them. Last spring, on a Mother’s Day hike with my husband Bruce, the wetland area was alive with singing red-winged blackbirds.

Soon we reached a series of calcareous sandstone outcrops probably formed when the workers cut into the mountain to build the railroad. While the bed itself is wide, we could always peer down the steep slopes to the right at forest below. On the left, the mountain also rises, and it is there that the outcrops overhang the trail, some more dramatically than others.

columbine on the cliffs next to the trail

Blossoming witch hazel, wild hydrangea shrubs, Hercules’ club, and common nightshade covered with red berries hung from the outcrops, and we wondered what other treasures we might find there in spring. On Mother’s day columbine, early saxifrage, Canada violets and Solomon’s seal bloomed on the outcrops, and we also saw doll’s eyes or white baneberry plants. Red-berried elder shrubs grew on and next to the outcrops.

Banks and banks of rhododendron often lined the trail and grew in thickets below the trail too. Large and small hemlocks looked healthy, because the hemlock woolly adelgids haven’t reached them. Clumps of paper birch signaled the colder climate atop the Allegheny Front.

Probably the most exciting find on our October hike was a porcupine in a tree. Many of the hikers had never seen one before, and it starred in several photos by the photographers in the group.

After four miles in the gamelands, we crossed on to the 2.1 miles managed by volunteers of the Bells Gap Rail Trail who keep it mowed under the direction of 87-year-old Bud Amrhein.

“He’s wonderful. I don’t know what we’d do without him,” Hazel Bilka told me.

porcupine along the Bells Gap Rail Trail

It was due to Bilka and a group of concerned Bellwood citizens back in the mid-1990s that the rail trail was developed. That group called itself the Bellwood Antis Community Trust and, in an effort to promote the area, surveyed the citizens in Bellwood and the surrounding township and asked them what the area needed. Overwhelmingly, the citizens wanted more recreational opportunities.

After raising money for a feasibility study to develop a Bells Gap Rail Trail, they were able to persuade major landowners, including the Altoona Water Authority and township supervisors, to turn over their property along the railroad. They then received funding for the work on their 2.1 miles from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. On July 8, 2007 the trail, beginning at Root’s Crossing outside Bellwood was officially opened to the public, and later was connected to the gamelands. A further spur of it down into Bellwood is shared with cars and trucks.

“I think it makes the area accessible to those who otherwise wouldn’t go up there,” Bilka says. “I hear from people all the time who tell me how much they like it.”

In addition to biking, hiking, and horseback riding, Bilka says that cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are popular winter activities on the trail.

cinnamon ferns in a wetland below the trail

But I was eager to do a spring hike with Bruce, who hadn’t been on the October hike, and Mother’s Day was ideal. We parked at the top of the mountain in a gamelands pull-off and were immediately welcomed by singing chestnut-sided warblers, American redstarts, and ovenbirds. Eastern towhees, black-and-white warblers, dark-eyed-juncos, wood thrushes, common yellowthroats, black-throated green warblers, blue-headed vireos, scarlet tanagers, worm-eating warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, black-throated blue warblers and common ravens sang and called along the trail and below in the forest during our six mile hike.

At 2,160 feet in elevation and 1,107 feet above Bellwood at the start of the trail, the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers were at least a week behind our mountain at 1200 feet and even further behind the fully leafed-out trees in Bellwood. Shadbush and red-berried elder bloomed and golden catkins dangling from black birch trees lit up the forest.

On the trail itself we stepped carefully to avoid beds of purple, sweet white and Canada violets as well as wild strawberry flowers. Along its edges, mayapples, columbine, and long-spurred violets blossomed, and once we found a cluster of eight blooming jack-in-the-pulpits.

At the magnificent curve over Shaw Run, known as the Horseshoe Bend in the railroad days, where the train had crossed on a trestle 76 feet high, we walked down to the rushing stream and followed a deer path upstream to eat our trail lunch in a bed of foamflowers and cut-leaved toothworts beside the picturesque run.

dolls' eyes (white baneberry) are common along the trail

Behind us loomed the Shaw Run outcrop, a calcareous opening/cliff natural community which, according to the Blair County Natural Heritage Inventory, hosts limestone cliff specialties such as walking fern, maidenhair spleenwort, fragile fern, purple cliff brake, wild ginger, and bishop’s cap, although we did not climb it to find out.

On our way back to our car, we watched common sulphurs and blue azure butterflies fluttering over the wildflowers on the trail.

During our five hours there we never encountered another person. And we scarcely noticed the gentle incline.

Spring, summer, autumn, winter — the Bells Gap Rail Trail is a trail for all seasons.

All photos (except for the historical one) are by Dave Bonta. See his complete set of Bells Gap Rail Trail photos on Flickr.

Basswood leaves in September

Once again the forest is almost empty of birdsong. Only an occasional blue-headed vireo holds forth. Even the waves of migrants are mostly quiet as they flit from tree to tree searching for insects and fruit. Noisy blue jays call as they harvest acorns. Eastern wood-pewees cry “pee-a-wee.” Confused looking immature ovenbirds blunder about on the forest floor. How brief is the time of birdsong. “Our” birds are already heading south to spend most of their year in warmer climes.

Along Sapsucker Ridge Trail, resident black-capped chickadees lead migrants to food sources high in the treetops, but I catch glimpses of eastern wood-pewees, red-eyed vireos, black-throated green, Nashville and magnolia warblers. Flocks of cedar waxwings join in along with resident tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, and downy woodpeckers. When I reach the spruce grove, I hear the tin drum calls of red-breasted nuthatches. They, at least, may be coming to spend the winter.

Most people welcome the cool, crisp days of autumn, and I can’t deny that by September I’m tired of the heat and humidity of summer. But I’m not tired of birdsong, butterflies, wildflowers, and the green of our deciduous forest. All too soon the green will be replaced by a brief flame of gold, orange, scarlet, and purple. By the end of October, most of those leaves will be on the forest floor, and my world will be primarily gray and black for almost six months.

Because I regret the approaching end of the fruitful season, I’m out every day in September, gathering memories to take me through those months until spring returns. One windy afternoon I sit in our goldenrod field with our four-year-old granddaughter Elanor. The plants tower over her head and she pretends it is a rainforest. (She’s a big fan of Dora the Explorer.) I am the mommy tiger and she the baby tiger. But mostly we marvel at the golden beauty enveloping us. She uses her binoculars to look at the honeybees and bumblebees nectaring on the goldenrod and at the turkey vultures wheeling overhead and coasting along the ridgetop. I also show her how to squeeze the blossoms of butter-and-eggs to make them talk.

Our spreading wingstem patch

Later, I take a walk by myself to admire the towering and spreading wingstem over the old covered farm dump. Its branchless, wing-shaped stem, which can reach as high as 13 feet, accounts for its name wingstem. This moist site is the only place it grows on our property and, according to one range map I looked at, we are at its northern edge. It is much more common farther south and west. It’s also called yellow ironweed because, like ironweed, it is tall, likes moist conditions and has similar lance-shaped leaves. But wingstem leaves are alternate, hence its species name alternifolia, meaning alternate leaf. Because they are bitter-tasting, herbivores such as deer and rabbits usually don’t eat them. That may be why wingstem lines West Virginia country roads during August, as we discovered the same August wingstem showed up on our property for the first time.

At the top of its stem are sprays of golden flowers. Each flower has 2 to 10 yellow ray florets that droop down and surround prominent and numerous greenish-yellow disk florets visited mostly by long-tongued bees, especially bumblebees. Caterpillars of silvery checkerspot butterflies relish the bitter foliage.

While I always know where to find wingstem, nodding ladies’-tresses move around like other members of the Orchid family. I first discovered 15 plants years ago at the edge of Far Field, but then the deer found them. By the time we fenced them, only a few remained. The following year I discovered a few farther out in the field and none inside the fence. Then two years ago one appeared inside the fence. In the meantime, I literally stumbled on a small patch at the base of the spruce grove in First Field. That patch too has moved around, and last September I found only one plant.

Nodding Ladies Tresses (Spiranthes cernua) by Magnolia1000 (Creative Commons Attribution license)

Nodding ladies’-tresses (Spiranthes cernua) are not showy flowers. As many as 60 small, bell-shaped, white flowers grow on a hairy spike in two to three tightly twisted spirals above grass-like leaves at its base. An early successional species, it prefers disturbed areas that are open, wet to dry, and often sandy. Its species name means “nodding,” which refers to its slightly nodding flowers. Ladies’-tresses was so-named because the stalk of flowers reminded earlier observers of a woman’s braided hair. Altogether there are 32 species in the genera Spiranthes. Nodding ladies’-tresses grow in most of eastern and midwestern United States and Canada except for Florida, Newfoundland and Labrador.

I say goodbye to many other wildflowers too including the aptly named turtlehead, as I point out to Elanor during a stream walk, ranks of lemon-scented horse balm, white wood asters, and even pearly everlasting, which does not quite live up to its name, although it does make a nice addition to a dried winter bouquet.

During September I also spend many hours at the top of First Field, sitting on Alan’s Bench and watching migrating monarch butterflies. One morning I was there by 9:00. Fog filled the valleys, but sun illuminated our 37 acres of goldenrod and asters. The first monarch sailed high overhead in the morning breeze, the second swooped low over the field, and the third fluttered across the trail. Then a fourth did what they all do eventually, It flew straight up from the goldenrod, over the bench and spruce grove, and on down the ridge heading south.

First Field is butterfly central. One warm, breezy day, in addition to monarchs, pearl crescents, orange sulphurs, cabbage whites, summer azures, meadow fritillaries and my favorites, the tropical-looking tiger swallowtails, nectared on the bonanza of asters and goldenrods. Numerous monarchs fluttered up from the field, some almost too high to see, coursed back and forth for a few seconds as if trying to catch a wave, and then sailed over the spruce grove.

On that day I did not see the dozens and dozens of monarchs that our son Dave had reported previously. But I was pleased that they seemed to be recovering from their disastrous all-time low in 2009-10 when the area of Mexico where eastern North American monarchs spend their winters reported the lowest numbers ever, according to Lincoln Brower, who has been studying monarchs for decades. Not only are monarchs threatened by illegal logging in their Mexican wintering habitat, but by land development and herbicide use where they breed in the summer. Dr. Brower wonders if the monarchs’ migratory phenomenon will survive.

Migrating monarch in First Field

But Mexican poet and novelist Homero Aridjis, who led the effort to persuade Mexico’s president to create the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that hosts most of the monarchs from the United States and Canada east of the Rockies, is determined that it will survive. Calling it the “environmental cause of my life,” he remembers as a boy climbing up into the hills of his native Michoacan State and seeing the monarchs “explode from the tree branches when the sun hit them.” And I remember, not so long ago, seeing a few of the deciduous trees on Sapsucker Ridge fluttering with monarchs on a windy September day.

Almost everyone can appreciate the beauty and grace of butterflies and the showier moths, but they aren’t as fond of the caterpillars from which they develop. One September afternoon, as I crossed First Field, I noticed an incredible infestation of caterpillars on one of our largest catalpa trees. The caterpillars were black with yellow bellies and a thin yellow stripe on their sides. A long, straight, black horn projected from its rear. Nothing was left of the tree leaves but stems. Catalpa sphinx moth caterpillars (Ceratomia catalpae) had caused the defoliation.

A member of the Sphingidae family, they are known collectively as hornworms because most have a horn, eyespot, or hardened button at A8 or abdominal segment 8 (out of 10) in entomological terms. They metamorphize into undistinguishable brownish gray moths, although some sphinx or hawk moths, as they are also called, are more attractive such as the Abbot’s and Nessus sphinx moths that nectar on our lilacs in spring and the day-flying hummingbird clearwings that hover like hummingbirds to drink flower nectar from a variety of plants.

Catalpa sphynx moth caterpillar in one of the First Field catalpas

But the caterpillars of the catalpa sphinx moth only feed on catalpa leaves. As a boom and bust species, it is “occasionally common enough to defoliate catalpa trees,” David L. Wagner writes in his Caterpillars of Eastern North America. “Females raft the eggs, sometimes laying several hundred in a single cluster… The catalpa sphinx is a ‘barfer’ and thrasher. When molested, the larva regurgitates a somewhat viscous green fluid from the foregut and thrashes violently.” When I touched a branch, the caterpillars leaped into the grass.

Although we have a couple dozen catalpa trees in First Field, only a few had been attacked by the catalpa sphinx moth caterpillars. And that was the first time in 38 years that I’d seen an infestation. Two weeks later, Dave found a parasitized catalpa sphinx moth caterpillar covered with white wasp cocoons. At least that caterpillar would suffer the fate that many do — being slowly eaten alive by developing braconid wasps.

But as September progresses, the forest understory changes color. First the black gum trees turn red, pink, and purple. Then black birches, witch hazel, and striped maples form golden bowers as I walk my trails. Ash trees at the back of our house turn bronzy red and gold. Our yard black walnut tree leaves have not only turned yellow, but many have already fallen and litter our veranda and front porch. Only when I walk to the top of First Field for a view of the mountains do I see still green forests.

Reluctantly, I say goodbye to all of that — visitors from the tropics, wildflowers, butterflies, moths, and green forests — until next spring.

*

All photos by Dave Bonta except where indicated. Click on the photos to see larger versions at Flickr.

wood thrush stunned by a collision with a window

It’s the tenth of August, and I can barely believe my ears. A wood thrush is singing two weeks later than I’ve ever heard one before. Such a wonderful, unexpected gift so late in the season when most birdsong has been replaced by the buzzing and chirping of crickets and grasshoppers. But then it is for the unexpected as well as the expected that I venture outside every day.

Sometimes, during the heat and humidity of August days, the forest seems as empty as it is in winter. Then, through a curtain of leaves, I watch a smaller bird silently chase an immature red-tailed hawk that is still learning how to navigate in its new world.

Behind me, a red-eyed vireo drones its monotonous song while a blue-headed vireo renders a brighter, livelier version of its congener’s song. Eastern wood pewees drawl their “pee-a-wees,” and Acadian flycatchers sharply cry “wee-see.” A flock of cedar waxwings lands on a wild black cherry tree, laden with fruit, and emit their high “zees” as they pluck and eat cherries. Sharp-shinned hawks, recently fledged from the Norway spruce grove nest, sit atop the trees and continuously cry for their parents to feed them. Eastern towhees call their names and northern cardinals sing “cheer-cheer.”

turkey hen in the field

All those songs and calls are expected for August. So too are encounters with wild turkeys such as one I have when early one sunny morning, near the beginning of the Far Field Road, a wild turkey flaps off from a tree branch. Then another follows. A third clucks unseen in the tree branches. When I move, she flies off, accompanied by a gawky teenager. As I continue my walk at least eleven more turkeys flush from the treetops.

During the same heat wave, my husband Bruce and I are driving back from town at noon. At the bottom of our road, Bruce slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a young American woodcock. It continues bobbing its awkward way up the left hand track of the road until it reaches a horizontal road drain covered by open grating that it can’t cross, so it flies off in a flurry. We are both amazed. We have never seen a woodcock closer than a mile from there in the woods near our deer exclosure, and we’ve never seen any young woodcocks on our property even though a couple males perform their sky dance on First Field every March. We conclude that somewhere on our mountain we do have breeding woodcocks.

During a pause in August’s heat and humidity, I watch what I call the march of the bucks from the top of the Laurel Ridge power line right-of-way. Through my binoculars, I see a deer crossing the top of the Sapsucker Ridge portion of the right-of-way. By the way it moves, its head held as erectly as an African woman balancing her worldly goods on her head, I know I’m looking at a buck. Then he slowly turns his head to catch the rising sun, which shines on a huge rack. As he disappears into the woods, a second buck emerges on the right-of-way. His rack is somewhat smaller than that of the first buck, but it is still impressive. After he melts into the woods, a suitable distance behind the super buck, a third buck, with an even smaller rack, ambles across the right-of-way.

antler of a large buck shot on the mountain

Such a scene proves to my satisfaction that bucks stay together when they aren’t breeding and that the one with the largest rack leads. But perhaps I am projecting my own ideas on what may have been coincidence. Still, Leonard Lee Rue III, in his classic The Deer of North America, writes that “In the springtime, white tail bucks are often solitary, or sometimes a big buck is followed by several younger bucks,” exactly what I witnessed except that it wasn’t in springtime, so what I saw still leaves me with questions about relationships between bucks.

Mammal relationships continue to interest me when I surprise three young raccoons in our stream early one August morning. They run up the slope and climb a tree. Five days later, much farther down the stream, I hear what I think is squabbling raccoons. I sit down on Waterthrush Bench, above the stream, and wait. A few moments later, mama raccoon parades down a fallen tree trunk toward the stream, followed by her three youngsters. I remain motionless and hear another squabbling outburst, but tree leaves block my view. After waiting awhile and seeing nothing more of the little family, I continue on down the road and look back up at that tree trunk. Below it is a large tree with a hole at its base, which I assume, but don’t know for sure, is the raccoons’ den tree. I also assume that those three raccoons are the same ones I saw before and that they are ranging a fair distance in search of food.

Luna moth on black walnut tree

Even insects sometimes surprise me. One August evening, a New Jersey visitor shows off his powerful flashlight, illuminating a spectacular, lime-green Luna moth on a black walnut tree trunk in our yard next to the walnut tree where we saw a Luna moth, freshly emerged, 364 days ago. According to David L. Wagner, in his Caterpillars of Eastern North America, the Luna moth’s caterpillar feeds on many forest tree leaves but has “decided local preferences” which include walnuts, as well as birch and black gum leaves in our area and pecan, persimmon, and sweet gum farther South.

But while seeing a Luna moth is an unexpected treat, walkingsticks always appear on the side of our house or on a screen door in August, and those same New Jersey visitors are impressed when I point one out. And any August visitors spend sleepless nights in our guesthouse, kept awake by the thrum of northern true katydids, even as we are lulled to sleep by them.

After years of pushing through the many orb webs of spined micrathena spiders and, indeed, expecting them in August, last August I saw only a few. Had their numbers crashed or was it an off-year for them? Sometimes, even the expected can throw me a curve ball.

But the wildflowers, in August, are predictable. Along our forest paths, the yellow trumpets of entireleaf yellow false foxglove (Aureolaria laevigata) blossom. On the hollow road bank, white wood asters and spikenard flower. Spikenards, which only began appearing several years ago near the bottom of our road bank, have been moving steadily uphill. Last August I found three below our big pull-off, two between the big pull-off and Dogwood Knoll, and two more between the forks and our old corral — a span of well over a mile. Their greenish-white flowers, growing in drooping, compound umbels, always seem too heavy for their stems.

orange jewelweed

Horse-balm and orange jewelweed or touch-me-not also grow along our road, but both are favorite deer foods. Many have been heavily grazed so I visit our three-acre exclosure for a view of shoulder-high jewelweed and waist-high horse-balm in the wetland corner of the exclosure. Late in August, I interrupt a small songbird migration over the exclosure and have a lovely view of a male black-throated green warbler and a magnolia warbler perched on a small ailanthus tree that overlooks the huge bed of jewelweed.

I pause, hoping to see a foraging ruby-throated hummingbird because I know that its needle-thin bill is perfect for penetrating jewelweed flowers. In fact, some ornithologists believe that jewelweed may have changed its floral biology to produce more nectar and encourage hummingbird pollinators. Sure enough, a female whirls in, lands close by on the fence to look me over, and then proceeds to nectar in the blossoms. Although entirely expected, it was lovely nonetheless.

Three days later, I am again hanging over the fence, this time admiring the jewelweed buzzing with native bumblebees. The horse-balm too is abuzz with bumblebees. The female hummingbird flies in to nectar at the jewelweed. She also tries the horse-balm several times, but she quickly rejects it and instead deftly ferrets out every jewelweed blossom amid a sea of horse-balm.

By late August, five species of goldenrod blanket our First and Far fields, and I spend hours “butterflying.” Altogether, I count nine species, including monarchs, common sulphurs, summer azures, an American copper, red-spotted purple, silver-spotted skipper, northern pearly-eye, red admiral, and dozens of cabbage whites.

cabbage white butterfly covered with dew

I’ve never been fond of cabbage whites because they are a European species that first appeared on this continent in Quebec in 1861, according to butterfly guru Robert Michael Pyle in his book Mariposa Road. He says that the cabbage white — Pieris rapae — called the small white in England, may have arrived as pupae on a cabbage crate.

Today, it is our most abundant and widespread butterfly even though some folks erroneously call it the cabbage moth because of its fluttery flight. Pyle calls it “adaptive” and “resilient,” even resisting DDT spraying in England while its predatory beetle enemies succumbed. Its preference for members of the cabbage family has earned it the enmity of farmers.

The chrysalis of a cabbage white can be “buffy brown” or “green,” Pyle writes, but its color doesn’t necessarily match its background, the so-called “chameleon model.” Instead, Pyle thinks that the hypothesis “balanced polymorphism,” in which “populations adapt a ratio of green to brown expression that optimizes the chances of finding the ‘right’ substrate color in a given environment — more green in a wet setting, more brown in the desert, but some of each in either,” may be the answer. In other words, they hedge their bets. No wonder they are so successful.

Pyle also refuses to call the red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) by its current name. he says that it’s a contraction of the Old English name — red admirable — and that it is not related to the true admiral butterflies in the genus Limenitis (the red-spotted purple, white admiral, and viceroy), but to the American lady (Vanessa virginiensis) and the painted lady (Vanessa cardui). I think I agree with him. The red admiral certainly looks more like the ladies, although its reddish-orange bands on its front and hind wings on a black body make it the loveliest of its congeners.

old chestnut oaks

As the month draws to a close, I mark the death of the huge chestnut oak tree along the Far Field Road that has harbored many wintering porcupines in its branches. Some branches now have brown, withered leaves and others are bare. Is it a victim of drought, old age, or both? Like me, it is broken down by our many years on earth and will leave its progeny to carry on the only form of immortality life on earth can hope for.

The chestnut oak has finished its life span. I have not, but its death is a reminder to me to cherish in my life both the expected and the unexpected every month of the year.

*

All photos by Dave Bonta, taken on Brush Mountain.

Then, one day a friend brought her a pot of purple field violets that she had dug up in a New England forest.  It also held a woodland snail.  After finding the hungry snail had chewed square holes in her letters during nighttime forays out of the pot, she put withered flowers in a dish beneath it and watched from her bed as the snail crept down the side of the pot and ate the blossoms.

“I could hear it eating.  The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously,” she writes in her charming and informative little book The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Thus began her sedentary adventures with this intriguing creature.

It reminded me of my own encounter with a woodland snail many years ago when our three boys were children.  On a hot, dry day in early August, I spotted one climbing a leaf.  When I looked at it with my hand lens, it ignored me and kept moving instead of withdrawing into its shell as snails usually do.

Fascinated by what I thought was an unusually sociable snail, I plucked the leaf and carried it and the snail home to show our sons.  When I put it down on the kitchen table, it quickly moved to the edge of the leaf and on to the table.  Then I put my forefinger in front of it, and it climbed up on it.  I could feel the suction from its pinpoint-sized mouth as it “tasted” or rasped my skin, a painless feeling similar to being licked by a cat.  I also watched it excreting slime from a gland behind its mouth, which enabled it to glide smoothly over my finger.

Moving one inch every ten seconds, it circled my finger several times before moving to its tip and extending its upper pair of tentacles toward my second finger.  It stretched the front part of its body across the gap and its head landed on my middle finger.  At the same time, its shell dangled in the gap and its foot or tail remained on my forefinger.  But it quickly pulled shell and foot on to my middle finger and performed the maneuver twice more to reach my little finger.

From tip to tip, its body measured two inches and its pair of larger tentacles with primitive eyes at its end was a half-inch long.  Below them, near its mouth, were two small tentacles that are sensitive touch organs.

When I put it back on the leaf, it withdrew into its shell. Still, our son Dave persuaded me to let it stay until my husband Bruce returned from work and could photograph it.  Bruce arrived two hours later, and I told him about my adventure.

As if on cue, the snail emerged suddenly from its shell and resumed its exploration of my fingers while Bruce took pictures.  What a ham! Afterwards, I put it outside on a leaf and off it went.

Later, I did some research on woodland snails and learned that they usually estivate on hot, dry days by drawing into their shells and sealing themselves off with a mucus door called an epiphragm. That same mucus it had secreted on my fingers has a high acid content that allows it to dissolve the calcium carbonate the snail must ingest to keep its shell strong.

A woodland snail obtains calcium by eating decaying leaves and wood, fungi, algae on wood and rocks, sap, animal scats, carcasses, other snails, bones, antlers, and soil.  They also absorb it through the soles of their feet.  Calcium carbonate not only forms their shell structure, but also helps in “fluid regulation, cell wall function, muscle contraction, and egg laying,” according to an excellent web site on Pennsylvania land snails, written by Ken Hotopp, Principal of Appalachian Conservation Biology, and edited by Tim Pearce, head of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Section of Mollusks.

Unfortunately, acid rain reduces forest soil calcium, which, in turn can reduce snail numbers by as much as 80%. Decaying sugar maple logs are particularly rich in calcium.  So too are calcium-rich limestone outcrops.  Maybe that’s why we don’t see as many woodland snails on our acidic mountain land as are in our limestone-rich valleys.

In captivity, a  woodland snail eats lime and paper to obtain calcium, which brings me back to Bailey’s adventures with what she later discovered was a white-lipped forest snail (Neohelix albolabris), a denizen of humid woodlands from Georgia to Ontario and west to the Mississippi River.

“Despite its small size,” she writes, “the snail was a fearless and tireless explorer… With its mysterious, fluid movement, the snail was the quintessential tai chi master.”

Bailey’s caregiver found an empty rectangular glass aquarium and fashioned a terrarium for the snail with goldthread, partridgeberry, checkerberry, mosses, polypody ferns, a rotting birch log and a piece of bark festooned with multicolored lichens, all organic materials on which a snail feeds.  Every week it also ate one slice of Portobello mushroom. A mussel shell held water.

Like my snail, Bailey’s snail “seemed to defy physics.  It moved over the very tips of mosses without bending them, and it could travel straight up the stem of a fern and then continue upside down along the fern’s underside.” But, in reality, it is its incredibly adhesive mucus that allows such feats.

She also watched it grooming itself  as it arched “its neck over the curved edge of its own shell and cleaned the rim carefully with its mouth…Its curiosity and grace pulled me further into its peaceful and solitary world,” she writes.

Snails are mollusks in the Class Gastropoda, meaning “stomach foot,” which refers to their method of locomotion. The word “snail” is Old English and comes from the German “schnecke,” a spiral-shaped yeast bun.

A radula or chitonous organ in its mouth is covered with tiny teeth that point inward so it can grasp its food.  Its soft body has a lung, heart, and gastrointestinal system which is connected to its shell by a mantle that stores up to 1/12^th of its weight in water.  It breathes partly through its skin and partly through a breathing pore, a little hole on the right side below its head called a “pneumostome.” Next to it is an anal pore for excreting undigested food in the shape of a tiny, twisted rope.

A woodland snail has three senses — smell, taste and touch.  Their rudimentary eyes can only distinguish light from dark, and it can’t hear at all. Its tentacles are smell and taste receptors and can be regrown if they are injured.  If its shell is broken, its mantle, the membrane-like organ around the snail’s aperture or opening from whence the snail emerges, builds new shell material.

Nearly 1/3 of a snail’s daily energy goes into mucus production, which is filled with antioxidants and regenerative properties.  It even has material useful in treating acne.  Mostly important for maintaining a snail’s skin and allowing it to move, it also is used to deter predators.  When attacked, it exudes copious amounts which confuse or even smother its enemies.  Such enemies are legion — beetles and their larvae, flies, nematodes, ants, mites, spiders, millipedes, shrews, mice, amphibians, reptiles and birds, particularly ground foragers such as ruffed grouse, wild turkey, thrushes and blackbirds.

Even larger snails, such as the gray-foot lancetooth (Haplotrema concavum), a widespread Pennsylvania species, eat smaller snails.

One of the more interesting predator/prey relationships is that between land snails and Cychrine beetles, the latter evolving narrower heads to pull snails from their shells, while snails have evolved more obstructed apertures.

In winter, a woodland snail stops eating, makes a burrow with soil and leaves, and withdraws deep into its shell, its sealed opening facing upward.  Its heart rate slows to a few beats a minute and its oxygen to 1/50^th of its usual intake.

Land snails mate in late spring, early summer, or fall, depending on the weather.  Because most Pennsylvania land snails are hermaphrodites, meaning they have male and female reproductive organs, each snail produces eggs and sperm.  Some snails can fertilize themselves.  That’s what Bailey’s snail did.

Some snail families, after circling each other and exchanging tentacle touches and before mating, shoot tiny darts of calcium carbonate into each other.  Researchers believe these are reproductive hormones that increase paternity odds.

Then they embrace in a spiral direction and mate by exchanging sperm, which is often in spermatophore packages.  The donor’s penis transfers it into the receiver’s vagina, which, in both cases, is an opening called the “atrium” on the right side of the snail’s head.  Once inside, the spermatophore releases the sperm and sperm and eggs meet in a fertilization chamber.

Shortly thereafter, depending on the species, one to dozens of eggs is laid in a damp area.  Bailey’s snail laid some on top of the ground and some buried in the soil.

“Under a microscope the translucent egg-envelopes present a beautiful appearance, being studded with glistening crystals of diamonds,” wrote Ernest Ingersoll “In a Snailery” back in 1881 and quoted by Bailey in her exhaustive study of woodland snail natural history.

Bailey may be the first person to have recorded observations of a snail tending its eggs.  Her snail produced 118 offspring, losing none, as it would have in the wild, to predators.

Eventually, Bailey recovered and returned home, releasing not only her original snail but also its offspring.

Worldwide, 35,000 land snails have been named, but tens of thousands are still not identified.  In Pennsylvania, malacologists have discovered 120 land snail species of both shelled animals and slugs, although very little is known about the life spans and movements of most species.  But one study in Illinois of the broad-banded forestsnail (Allogonia profunda), a species also living in Pennsylvania, found that it moved back and forth between its winter hibernation spot and its home in pieces of log mold during its four-year life span.

All these small lives are virtually unknown to us.  And, as Bailey and I have discovered, even individuals in a species can behave differently.  I never could figure out why the woodland snail I found was out on such a hot, dry day.

*

For more information:  Consult the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s website at http://www.carnegiemnh.org/mollusks/palandsnails/

Read Bailey’s book, but if you find it at the library, as I did, be forewarned that it has been classified as a memoir by librarians, instead of a natural history book.  It has a several-page bibliography of books and articles about land snails, both recent and historical. Here’s the trailer from YouTube.

pink lady's-slipper

Although it starts to bloom in mid-May, it holds its single crimson-pink slipper for three weeks.  The pink lady’s-slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule) is also called moccasin flower, squirrel-shoes, camel’s foot, hare’s lip, and whippoorwill-shoes because of its unique, pouch-shaped flower.  Supposedly, whippoorwill-shoes comes from an old Indian legend that says when whippoorwills go courting at night, they wear lady’s-slippers as moccasins.  In Pennsylvania, lady’s-slippers once were called “ducks” because when children partially filled the lip of the flower with sand and floated it on water, it looked like a duck to folks.

Usually, I count between 50 and 60 blooming pink lady’s-slippers along our wooded trails, but I find many more sets of two large, parallel-veined leaves without a flower.  For years, I was puzzled over this until I read about Dr. Frank Gill’s 14-year study of 3,300 pink lady’s-slipper plants in a Virginia forest.  Over the years, only 1,000 flowered and of those, a mere 23 had been pollinated.  Even though it looks and smells like a nectar-producing flower, not only does it not produce nectar, but it traps a bee inside its pouch. The bee has to force its way back out, bearing a blob of pollen on its head.  Only a dimwitted bee would visit a second lady’s-slipper to complete the pollination process or, as Dr. Gill concludes, “What I think is that a minority of bees don’t learn or that their levels of desperation are sufficiently high to make a second visit.”

White clintonia

Another wildflower that puts out more large, parallel-veined, oblong-shaped leaves than flowers is white clintonia (Clintonia umbellulata).  Its single stalk holds an umbel of fragrant, white flowers, often dotted with purple or green.  Every year I find 12 or more plants clustered at the base of an oak tree above our hollow road, but only one or two flower.  Another spot beside our stream produces five plants and sometimes as many as three of those plants flower.  In the deepest part of the hollow above the stream, single plants often flourish and flower.  A member of the lily family, it is also called speckled wood lily and white bead lily, the latter name because its cluster of black berries looks like beads. This elegant plant lights up the dark forest and is one of my favorite wildflowers.

Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), like white clintonia, is spreading every year along our hollow road and beside our stream.  It too sends out more of its leaves than its flowers because it takes three or more years to produce a flower. Each leaf has three leaflets, hence its species’ name triphyllum, and looks much like a trillium leaf.  It is famous for its sex change performances, called “sequential hermaphroditism” by botanists, meaning the plant can be male, female, or both, depending on its environment the previous year.  Those with two large sets of leaves are female and should probably be called jill-in-the-pulpit.  The smaller plants are males. But jack-in-the-pulpit depends more on asexual reproduction by underground corm, a bulb-like stem that forms buds which produce new plants.

Fly on a Jack-in-the-pulpit

Jack-in-the-pulpit has even more nicknames than pink lady’s-slipper, to whit, brown dragon, Indian jack, wood pulpit, little pulpit, starchwort, cuckoo flower, devil’s ear, dragonroot, memory root, Indian turnip, pepper turnip, marsh pepper, and Indian almond.  The plant is poisonous because it contains calcium oxalate crystals, but the corm, if properly dried and cooked, can be used as a root vegetable, thus the turnip names.  It was also an Indian medicinal for treating sore eyes, rheumatism, bronchitis, and snakebite.

Its most intriguing nicknames, though, refer to its amazing shape — the pulpit or hood-like spathe a light green, veined with a deeper tint, or stained with purple — arched over the jack or club-shaped spadix.  At the base of the spadix, grow the tiny, unisexual flowers.  This unique wildflower has even inspired a long poem by Clara Smith that begins, “Jack-in-the-pulpit/ Preaches today/ Under the green trees/ Just over the way.”  The preacher even moralizes, rebuking the “White Indian pipes/ On the green mosses lie!/Who has been smoking/ Profanely so nigh?”

I don’t believe any of our jack-in-the-pulpits grow close to our Indian pipes.  They flourish mostly higher up Laurel Ridge in numerous clumps that appear later in June.  The Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is white with scale-like leaves, its flower looking like a drooping pipe before it is pollinated. Afterwards, it turns its pipe skyward.  Because it lacks chlorophyll, it cannot get energy from the sun.  Hence, it is parasitic on fungal hosts, mostly in the Russula genus, which, in turn, get their energy from trees. Also called ghost plant, corpse plant, convulsion root and fits roots, the Indian pipe has recently been reclassified in the heath family (Ericaceae) from the family Momotropaceae.

In early June, I can usually find a couple clumps of squawroot (Conopolis americana) growing along our Pit Mound Trail. Before a previous owner logged that portion of our property on Sapsucker Ridge, I found dozens of these intriguing flowers thriving among the decaying leaves of 100-year-old red oak trees. A member of the broomrape family, squawroot is parasitic on the roots of oak trees, its suckers forming large, round knobs on the host tree’s roots.  The plant looks like an elongate pine cone covered with overlapping brown scales, its hooded, two-lipped, yellowish flowers set between the scales. Growing singly or in groups of several from a thickened base, one of its alternate names—bear corn—aptly describes its appearance, whereas squawroot refers to its use by Indians in treating women’s health problems..

Black cohosh

Another plant used to treat women’s health, the well-known medicinal black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa), flourishes beside our hollow road and inside our deer exclosure.  One of its alternate names is squawroot.  Others are black snakeroot, bugbane, bugwort, rattleroot, rattleweed, and, my personal favorite, fairy candles.  How else to describe its upright spires of white, feathery, ill-scented flowers growing above a wreath of sharply-toothed leaflets?  Instead of driving bugs away, as its generic Latin name indicates as well as its nickname bugbane, its carrion smell attracts pollinating insects. Its plant is also the sole food for the caterpillars of the Appalachian azure butterfly (Celastrina neglecta-major).  This butterfly lives in the central and southern Appalachians from southern Pennsylvania to northern Georgia and thrives in rich, deciduous woods, especially near streams, exactly the habitat we have. I don’t think that I’ve seen this species yet, but we may not be far enough south, or perhaps I have misidentified some of our spring azures.  Rattleroot and rattleweed refer to the seeds of black cohosh that rattle inside their pods or perhaps, along with snakeroot, to its use against snakebite by Indians.

"Fairy candles" (black cohosh)

The rest of our June native forest wildflowers are less showy.  Both sweet-cicely (Osmorhiza claytonia), also called Clayton’s sweet root, and aniseroot (O. longistylis) grow beside our hollow road.  Members of the parsley family, both have fern-like leaves, small umbels of white flowers, and club-shaped, blackish fruit that cling to clothes, but sweet-cicely has hairy stems and short styles whereas aniseroot has longer styles than the petals and smoother stems. In addition, all parts of aniseroot are anise-scented.

A few Philadelphia fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus) plants also grow beside our hollow road.  A member of the daisy family, its small, pink-rayed, yellow-centered flowers have from 50 to 100 petals, and its leaves clasp its soft, hairy stem.  Another name for this attractive plant is the Philadelphia daisy.

Hooked crowfoot (Ranunculus recurvatus), also called hooked buttercup or blisterwort, is a buttercup with tiny, pale yellow flowers that grows along our stream and is pollinated by small bees.  The “hooked” refers to its spiny-looking fruit.  Wood ducks, ruffed grouse, wild turkeys, and eastern chipmunks relish its seeds.

The single, greenish or white, five-petaled flower of thimbleweed or tall anemone (Anemone virginiana) grows atop a two-to-three-foot high, hairy stem above a set of whorled, three-part, toothed leaves. Its name comes from its thimble-shaped fruit.  It too grows along our hollow road, and, like hooked crowfoot, is a member of the buttercup family.

Indian cucumber-root as it will appear in September

Indian cucumber-root (Medeola virginiana) crowds our road bank and flourishes beside our stream.  Its lance-shaped leaves grow in two whorls, and beneath the upper whorl dangle two greenish-yellow flowers with long and spreading, spider like styles. A member of the lily family, its upper leaves are stained with crimson in the fall, a striking contrast to its dark purple berries above those leaves.  Its generic name is after the sorceress Medea, for its supposed medicinal values, but Indians used its rootstock, shaped like a cucumber, as food.  In fact, Indians called it “his cucumber” from which it got its name.  Euell Gibbons, in his classic Stalking the Healthful Herbs, describes them as “snow-white, crisp, tender, and delicious, with a distinct flavor of cucumber” and even made excellent dill pickles with them, although usually he merely substituted them for commercial cucumbers in his tossed salad.

Whorled loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia) is especially abundant inside our three-acre deer exclosure.  From axils of whorled leaves, grow flower stems, each of which support a five-petaled, golden-yellow flower marked with red.  Both its species’ name and an alternate name—four-leaved loosestrife—refer to the number of leaves in every whorl, although sometimes it has five leaves.  A member of the primrose family, it grows in dry, open woods.

Every June I discover at least one new native wildflower.  Last June I found a yellow-flowered plant nestled among huckleberry shrubs along Black Gum Trail—a legume with pea-like flowers and alternate, three-leaf, clover-shaped leaves.  On it, mating craneflies fluttered their long, graceful wings.  I identified it as wild indigo (Baptisia tinctoria)—an herbal “commonly known among farmers as horseflyweed, because it is often used by them to keep flies from annoying horses,” according to Joseph Harned in his charming Wildflowers of the Alleghanies.  He continues, “In the mountains this plant grows in great abundance.  Dried specimens invariably turn black” which I proved by drying a plant.  Furthermore, Harned claims, “It contains a bitter glucoside, is used as an infusion in typhus, locally for ulcers, and when given internally acts as a cathartic and emetic.”

Wild indigo (photo by Anita Gould on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC)

Authorities that are more recent add that wild indigo is a dye plant used as a poor substitute for true indigo, hence its alternate name “yellow false indigo.” Like black cohosh, its seeds rattle around in pods when ripe. Some lepidopterans such as Io moths, frosted elfin butterflies, and wild indigo duskywing butterflies eat its leaves.  Apparently, the wild indigo duskywing was comparatively rare until it also adapted to eating crownvetch and is now common.

Finally, the little pairs of fragrant, white, trumpet-shaped flowers of partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) bloom at the bases of its evergreen, shiny, white-veined twin leaves. This trailing plant blankets sections of our road bank and provides scarlet, edible berries for ruffed grouse, hence, its name, since partridge is a New England name for grouse as we discovered when we lived in Maine many years ago. In addition, wild turkeys, foxes, mice, bobwhite quail, and songbirds eat them. Also called checkerberry and twinberry, it is a member of the madder family, and its generic name honors Dr. John Mitchell, an able, amateur botanist from Virginia during colonial days.

With all these treasures and more to discover, I spend many June hours afield in search of both old plant friends and new.

All photos taken in Plummer’s Hollow by Dave Bonta except where indicated.

Dr. Jim Bissell points out dune grasses at Presque Isle

Thunder rumbled ominously as my husband Bruce and I rushed to join Dr. Jim Bissell on a Dune Walk at Presque Isle State Park.  Under a lowering sky spitting rain, we waited anxiously at Beach 10 Parking Area.  Cars pulled in and out, but no one arrived for the 10:00 a.m. field trip.  Then, Bissell drove up, leaping from his truck with his storied enthusiasm.  A few minutes later, one other person joined us.  She was a native of the Erie-area and was as eager as we were to learn more about the plants from a renowned expert.

Undeterred by the weather or scarcity of participants, Bissell, who is Curator of Botany and Coordinator of Natural Areas at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, launched into what turned out to be a two hour mini-course on the dune and sand plain plants of the park.  Since 1984 he has been researching and mapping the flora of Presque Isle State Park and has found 80 Pennsylvania threatened, rare, or endangered plants there.

“You can barely go anywhere without finding a rare species,” he told us.

And sure enough, we barely moved from one area, yet he showed us several rare and interesting plants.

The major dune builder now is American beachgrass, a Pennsylvania threatened species which is endemic to the Great Lakes — Ammophila breviligulata ssp.champlainensis— although some botanists consider it a distinct species and call it A. champlainensis.  Originally native to the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, the breakwaters erected on the western side of Presque Isle to protect the beaches created larger dunes and greatly increased American beachgrass at the park, Bissell said.

This species differs from the Atlantic coast species because it blooms in late June and produces much longer spikes in late August and early September.  Its undisputed genus name Ammophila is Greek for “sand lover” and usually grows on the first line of coastal sand dunes.  Its creeping rhizomes spread rapidly and thus it can flourish on shifting sands and withstand high winds.

Jim Bissell with coastal little bluestem

Another plant Bissell showed us was coastal little bluestem or seaside bluestem Schizachyrium scoparium var. littorale, which only grows in Pennsylvania at Presque Isle State Park, even though it lives on sand dunes throughout the Great Lakes’ area. This species is one of many Presque Isle species listed as Pennsylvania rare by the Pennsylvania Biological Survey.

Beach wormwood or mugwort (Artemisia campestris ssp. caudata), another coastal dune species that is related to western sagebrush, is listed as Pennsylvania endangered.  So too is hairy puccoon (Lithospermum caroliniense), still another plant found only at Presque Isle in Pennsylvania.  Known also as hispid gromwell and golden puccoon, it displays clusters of one-inch, yellow-orange flowers in mid-May.

A species that Bissell couldn’t show us is bearberry manzanita (Arctostaphylos uvba-ursi), also called kinnikinick, mealberry, hog cranberry, and sandberry.  This circumpolar species that grows in northern Europe, Asia, and North America is now extinct in Pennsylvania even though it was common on Presque Isle back in the 1930s.  A lovely, evergreen, prostrate ground cover shrub, it has white, urn-shaped flowers in spring and bears bright red berries in late summer.  Bissell blames its demise on deer which “outdo breakwaters in terms of damage” to plant species.

Back in 1949, O.E. Jennings, a botanist and former director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, writing in the Pennsylvania Park News, discussed what he called the “bearberry heath” at Presque Isle State Park and added that, “unfortunately there are now too many deer and the bearberry and many other plants of the unusually varied flora of the peninsula are being exterminated.” In 1987, speaking in front of the Presque Isle State Park Authority, Bissell also warned about deer damage especially to hairy puccoon, beach mugwort, and wild blue lupine (also Pennsylvania rare), but he said that “the exotics [invasives] really are the greatest threat in the park.”

Twenty-three years later he reiterated that same message to us and mentioned the same invasive he had warned about then—phragmites or common reed (Phragmites australis)—a widely distributed clonal grass that grows on every continent but Antarctica.  In Europe, it’s protected because of its important ecological functions.  In the United States, it is considered a threat to native wetland plants.  At Presque Isle, it competes with a host of threatened, rare, and endangered species.

Phragmites can grow 13 feet high, and its large flower plumes, which persist into winter, are filled with seeds.  Worst of all, though, Bissell said, are its incredible rhizomes or lateral roots.  They can grow 60 feet in a year, with new plants sprouting at each node, and when they are removed, they will recover in a few months.

We have been coming to Presque Isle State Park periodically since 1983, and on every visit, we are struck by how phragmites has spread on the peninsula.  Usually our botanical host is Evelyn Anderson who writes “Nature’s Way” for the Erie Morning News.  She has shown us dozens of rare and unusual plants growing in the six ecological zones of this seven-mile-long recurving sandspit.  Much of what she has learned has come from her association with Bissell so I was pleased finally to meet and learn from him, if only for a few hours.

The Dune Walk was one of several field trips offered at the Wild Resource Festival last May 1. As a member of Pennsylvania’s Wild Resource Conservation Program’s Advisory Committee, I had wanted to attend one of these nature-oriented events, which first began in 2005.  I was also curious to see the Tom Ridge Environmental Center at the park.

I remember the beginning of what was then called the Wild Resource Conservation Fund back in 1982.  That’s when Governor Dick Thornburgh signed the Pennsylvania Wild Resource Conservation Act, designed to support the management and protection of non-game wildlife and native wild plants and funded by citizens’ voluntary donations of part or all of their state income tax refund.

Bob Harris and his social wasp display

My filing cabinet contains all the issues of the WRCF’s Keystone Wild Notes from volume 1, number 1 published in the summer of 1985 until the Fall/Winter issue of 2007.  Since then this little publication, crammed full of information about the many funded projects, such as the otter reintroduction, fisher reintroduction, study of freshwater mussels, the breeding bird atlas, etc., has been published online.  The latest edition features pieces about the energy challenges ahead and how they will affect Pennsylvania’s natural world.

Today, the WRCF has been renamed the Wild Resource Conservation Program and is administered by the DCNR.  It is financed not only by state income tax refunds, but also by Growing Greener grants and public contributions.  Although they continue the work of studying and conserving our rare species and habitats, they have now “a special emphasis on helping our species and natural systems survive global climate change,” according to their website.  “We are Pennsylvania’s biodiversity conservation program,” and they work closely with the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission to conserve Pennsylvania’s non-game animals, wild plants and their habitats.  The needs are great, but the funding is dwindling even as Pennsylvania’s natural world faces more problems than it did when the WRCF was started.

The weather had worsened and the festival’s afternoon bird field trip to Gull Point was cancelled.  But over a thousand people, mostly families with children, visited the many exhibitors set up in the 65,000-square foot, state-of-the-art, green-designed Tom Ridge Environmental Center (TREC).  In addition to permanent exhibitions that feature Presque Isle’s history, ecosystems, wildlife, plants, and bird migrations, TREC has five classrooms and eight laboratories for research and educational programs.  It also houses the Regional Science Consortium, a collaborative, non-profit organization that focuses on and coordinates research and educational projects for Lake Erie and the upper Ohio basin, such as migratory bird night flights, invasive plants and animals, and local bat populations.

The Regional Science Consortium, along with Gannon University, Presque Isle State Park, and TREC were partners with the WRCP in presenting the Wild Resource Festival.  The exhibitors came from a range of state government, non-governmental organizations, and museums.

We were struck particularly by the number of enthusiastic volunteers displaying examples of pressed specimens they had photocopied and mounted of some of the rare plants and invasives from the TREC Natural History Museum.

“We are the invasive capitol of Pennsylvania,” one volunteer said.

Another volunteer, Bob Harris, a retired engineer who looks much younger than his 78 years, took us back to the laboratory area to show us the social wasp display he had designed and constructed as well as other examples of his work.  He also gave us a tour of the Aquatics Lab.  Clearly, he and the other volunteers we spoke with are proud of TREC and devote many hours to it.

As usual, the most popular exhibitor was Chris Urban of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission who had live rattlesnakes and turtles, including the endangered bog turtle, on display. The crowd was so dense that I could barely get a glimpse of the creatures.

John Rawlins, also on the WRCP Advisory Committee, and Robert L. Davidson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History showed off rare insects and encouraged folks to bring insects for them to identify.  Mark Klinger, also of the Carnegie, displayed local butterflies and offered a Butterfly Walk.  Tom Erdman and Tim Taylor of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry helped folks identify trees and answered forestry questions.  We especially liked their wildflower picture display and nice guide books. Other knowledgeable people presented material for kids and adults on prehistoric animals, the American chestnut restoration, composting first-hand for kids, the Climate Change Vulnerability Index, and more.

Maria Wheeler's golden eagle display

We were interested especially in Maria Wheeler’s exhibit about the DNA study of eastern golden eagles by the National Aviary.  She told us that it looked as if the eastern golden eagle is not a separate subspecies even though it has a different life style from the western golden eagle.  Most likely, she said, that was because western golden eagles had been brought east when the easterns were dying from DDT spraying.

Overall, we enjoyed our first Wild Resource Festival and urge anyone interested in nature and conservation to attend this year’s festival at Point State Park in Pittsburgh on October 15.

To subscribe to Keystone Wild Notes: www.dcnr.state.pa.us/wrcp/subscribe.html.  This is an excellent teaching publication and contains information for folks of all ages. The WCRP website:  www.dcnr.state.pa.us/wrcp.  You can also e-mail them at ra-wrcp@state.pa.us.

Hepaticas blooming at the beginning of April, 2010

Instead of April showers last year, we had unprecedented heat.  On April 2, it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Flowers and trees bloomed days and even weeks ahead of records I’ve been keeping since 1971. By the middle of the month, we had a May woods.  Even the mayapples bloomed in April.

During the first half of the month, it was downright spooky.  Most of the trees and shrubs had leafed out, and yet the woods were silent.  Finally, on April 16, I heard the first ruby-crowned kinglet.  After that, a steady parade of Neotropical migrants returned more or less the same time as usual.

Coincidentally, I read Early Spring by Amy Seidl.  She is a field scientist who has worked around the world studying a huge variety of ecosystems from the Antarctic to the tropics.  Now she lives in rural Vermont.

“The natural world is changing,” she writes.  In the Northern hemisphere, “species are moving on average three and a half miles per decade northward and twenty feet per decade upward in elevation.”

Last year eclipsed 1998 as the hottest year on record.  The last decade — 2000-2009 — was the warmest decade on record.  When I compared my records of several blooming dates, I was surprised to note that in most species 1998 had the earliest blooming date except for 2010, for instance, purple trillium April 12, 1998 and April 7, 2010, rue anemone April 12, 1998 and April 5, 2010, and sweet white violet April 12, 1998 and April 7, 2010.  And for the first time ever, our French white lilacs bloomed on April 15, the date of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination about which Walt Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”  I had always thought  that that date for lilac-blooming corresponded to the date in Washington, D.C., but the United States Department of Agriculture has found that lilacs in the United States are blooming two to four days earlier per decade than they did 40 years ago.  Apparently, our lilacs were beginning to follow that trend.

Shadbush stayed in bloom for only a few days

Climate scientists have been hesitant to attribute separate weather events, such as a flood in Pakistan, a drought in northern Africa, or a hurricane in New Orleans, to global warming.  But they have decided, using mathematical models of how the atmosphere would work if carbon dioxide levels had not increased from 278 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 389 ppm today, plus using information on ancient climates and historical weather patterns, that our carbon-based economy has led to approximately 75% of the heating of our planet.

In addition, the way it is heating also points to human causes.  If a hotter sun was raising earth’s temperature, they say, it would heat the upper atmosphere.  Instead, the lower atmosphere is heating up while the upper atmosphere has cooled which points to the greenhouse effect.  So too does the warming of the oceans, the unbelievably rapid retreat of arctic sea ice, and the change in rainfall patterns — droughts followed by deluges instead of dependable, gentle rains, a phenomenon we have witnessed here during the last several years.

“Natural causes alone can’t explain this,” Ben Santer, climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says.  “You need a large human contribution.”

That human contribution includes the burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — in vehicles, homes, and factories.  In addition, the destruction of forests — boreal, temperate, and tropical, which act as large repositories for the Earth’s carbon — is contributing twice as much carbon to the atmosphere as all the world’s cars and trucks.  For example, boreal forest in Siberia and North America absorb an estimated 20% of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions.  They are also the summer home for many of our songbirds.  Yet they, like the tropical forests, are being cut at an unsustainable rate.

But what about us here in the central Appalachians.  How will we be affected by the rising temperatures?  It depends on how high they rise.  According to the Pennsylvania Climate Impacts Assessment done back in 2009, Pennsylvania may warm up as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit, which is the high emissions scenario.  If so, our summers will be like those now in northern Alabama.  Under the low emissions scenario — a rise of three degrees or less — our summers will be more like those in southern Virginia.  This will lead to an increase in precipitation, especially in the winter, to a three-to-five-week longer growing period, a more extreme climate with longer dry periods like last April when our vernal ponds dried up, and harder rains, even in winter, an increase in stream temperatures, and great changes in our forests.

One of our beech trees. By May 10, the trees were fully leafed out.

Many northern hardwood species, such as paper birch, quaking aspen, big tooth aspen, and yellow birch would be greatly reduced even under a lower emissions scenario and possibly extinct in the state.  Other species like American beech, black cherry, striped maple, eastern hemlock, red and sugar maples, eastern white pine, black birch, white ash and American basswood — all of which grow abundantly on our property — would decline.  Oaks and hickories would increase except for northern red oak and chestnut oak, again, the major species on our mountaintop now, which would decline and be replaced by southern oak species.  We might also have other southern species such as loblolly, shortleaf pine, common persimmon, and red mulberry, although scientists aren’t sure how they would get here unless we planted them.

And plant them and other forest trees we will have to do for forest regeneration.  Acid deposition, native and non-native insects and disease, severe storms, and fire would pose even greater threats to our forests than they do today. The assessment also urges that we should stop high-grading diameter-limit cutting, maintain forest buffers along our streams, restore aquatic systems, and minimize groundwater pumping.  Even if our forests were not threatened by global climate change, such recommendations would greatly benefit our forests.

That’s what the eighty people from thirty state and national government, research, and non-governmental organizations concluded at a conference I attended last April called “Weathering Climate Change: Framing Strategies to Minimize Impacts on Pennsylvania Ecosystems and Wildlife.”  Held at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center in Presque Isle State Park, the keynote address by Bruce Stein of the National Wildlife Federation was entitled “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be: Conservation in an Era of Climate Change.” Stein talked about “global weirding,” the incredible increase in weather extremes, an increase, but the way, that Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer that sells policies to insurance companies to cover their policy holders’ risks, agrees with.  They’ve been tracking climate change, using a database which goes back for centuries and have found that the frequency of worldwide serious floods has tripled since 1980 and hurricanes and other severe wind storms have doubled.

While we could, but probably won’t, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent the high emissions scenario, we must focus on preparing for and coping with the impacts by practicing what Stein called “climate smart conservation.”  He urged proactive management of vulnerable species and improving habitat connectivity to allow species to move more easily.  Unfortunately, with the incredible number of roads and spreading suburban sprawl in our state along with the huge increase in gas well pads and industrial wind farms, it will be harder than ever to maintain, let alone improve, habitat connectivity.

Will climate change doom "our" cerulean warblers? (Photo by Gregory Breese/USFWS)

Dan Brauning, Chief of Wildlife Diversity for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, spoke about the State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) and Pennsylvania’s responsibility for certain species.  Of immediate concern are the eastern small-footed bat, especially because of the threat of white nose syndrome to that species and the other cave-hibernating bat species in our state, and the Allegheny packrat.  The golden-winged warbler, Appalachian cottontail, and cerulean warbler are of high-level concern, and of maintenance concern are the wood thrush and the scarlet tanager.  In fact, Pennsylvania hosts 18 % of the world’s population of scarlet tanagers which includes an estimated 575,000 males.  Altogether, there are 36 SWAP species of conservation concern — 9 birds, 10 invertebrates, 4 mammals, 6 mussels, and 7 reptiles — as well as 29 plant species, all victims already of habitat loss.

Several other speakers spoke of the threats to our natural resources, and Nels Johnson of the Pennsylvania Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) mentioned the need for long-term research, a more collaborative work culture between government, non-governmental and research organizations, public engagement and education, and focusing on existing stresses, which makes sense even if we are uncertain about the degree of climate change our state will experience over the century. In essence, we must help nature become more resilient by a combination of management, restoration, and protection strategies.

To my great delight, TNC purchased the other end of our Brush Mountain overlooking Altoona on one side and Canoe Creek State Park on the other.  Describing it as 640-acres of a large, intact forest, it will be part of what they call their Working Woodlands Program and is open for hiking, birding, and hunting.  It was logged before its sale to TNC, and they are planning restoration as part of their management strategy.  Unlike our lower end of the mountain, it has a population of eastern timber rattlesnakes, most likely Allegheny packrats in the extensive talus slope, and provides habitat for many other creatures in the SWAP, most notably wood thrushes, cerulean warblers, and scarlet tanagers.

Amtrak at the Plummer's Hollow crossing. We need a lot more train travel and a lot fewer cars and trucks!

Our mountain, the westernmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province, is an important fall migration route for raptors.

“In the future,” the Pennsylvania TNC website says, “It may provide the connectivity many animal species will need to migrate away from and adapt to the effects of global climate change.”

Bill McKibben, an environmentalist-writer who has been warning about the effects of climate change for over two decades, says that “The world will never again be as whole as it is even now, and already it’s degraded, altered, impoverished.  So one of our tasks is simply to bear witness.”

I hope that the nature journals and records I have kept here since 1971 will be part of that witness as our climate continues to change.

All photos by Dave Bonta except where indicated.