Snow, beautiful snow!

Isn’t it amazing how snow can transform the look of a landscape?  Even though I’ve lived at the cabin for more than 20 years now, the forest around me looks like an entirely different place when it’s covered with snow.  Yes, I know all about the downside of snow—the constant shoveling, the dicey driving, the sore muscles that follow the constant shoveling.  And yet, looking at the forest covered in snow never fails to inspire me.  I wish more of the year was snow-covered.

So far this winter, I’ve had a few days with just a trace of snow—that’s not really enough to make me appreciate it.  Then I had the 31” storm that was nearly melted a week later.  Now, I’ve added another 6-7 inches of snow-cover.  This one is likely to stay on the ground for a while, as temperatures are to plummet for the next 4-5 days. 

Unlike the blizzard, which was as powdery and lightweight as a feather, this was a heavier snow that even in a rather stiff breeze is sticking to the trees, which only adds to the beauty of the winter forest.

Sparrow's big adventure

My puppy Sparrow had a big surprise last evening. Actually, it was a surprise for me, too. We were taking a walk at dusk and were on our way back, just a short way from the cabin on the lane up the mountain. I had her on the long lead, and she was ahead of me, goofing around and sniffing stones and twigs the way she usually does.

Suddenly, just ahead of her, three deer dashed across the lane. She stood still, ears up, watching them go but made no move to chase them or bark at them. The deer were very close, even for me several steps behind her. She looked after them, already disappeared into the dense undergrowth of the forest. 

So we started to move again. We moved ahead about 3 steps when a fourth deer charged across the lane, now even closer to us than the first three. Her reaction was the same. Perhaps she was just as surprised as I was, too surprised to do more than watch them. These were the first deer she’d ever seen. Several times before I tried to get her to look at deer that I saw but they were always too far away to interest her.

After the fourth one, no more deer passed. I moved forward and counted my steps from where I was to the deer tracks in the dirt road. I counted just 14 steps, which put Sparrow about 10 steps from them. I wonder what she’ll do the next time she sees deer?

Thank you

Oxeye daisy

I want to thank everyone for their thoughtful words about the loss of Dog, my faithful friend. He was the smartest dog I’ve ever known, a constant joy and source of trouble. He learned a new command after being shown it one time and remembered it months later even if we didn’t practice it. Dog created trouble just for the fun of it, I think. Of course, his version of fun typically corresponded to trouble for me.


Baby Dog and I are finding the cabin rather quiet and empty right now. Baby Dog no longer has to bark impatiently while she waits for me to bring Dog back into the cabin after a walk. She is strangely quiet and only an invading raccoon or a fearsome deer makes her break silence.

Dog was 12 and diagnosed with cancer in January. I’ve known since then that this time would come, though I can’t say that knowledge made the end any easier. He had good days and bad days and was pretty good through the Memorial Day weekend. He began to seriously decline the Tuesday after the holiday and by Friday I knew this time he would not bounce back.

On our last day together we shared some ice cream, a treat he had been denied for a while because of the special diet he needed in his last months, and then went to see some cows—a favorite activity for him.

Baby Dog and I both miss him.

Dog

R.I.P

May 11, 2001 - May 31, 2013

Loyal, brave and true 

Foggy morning

View from the backyard of dad's farm (west), taken on Saturday

Fog still obscures Roundtop mountain this morning. Trees are just shadows of their clear-day selves. The distance is entirely invisible, lost in the grayish white of snow and fog. Sounds are amplified or distorted, seemingly disembodied from any one place.

It’s as though nothing exists beyond a middle distance. My cabin, the trees that surround it may as well be the only thing in this world that’s closer to a dreamscape than a landscape.

Dog and I penetrate the shadows carefully, slowly, avoiding the ice. Dog is elderly now and more cautious than he used to be. He slips once but recovers. I move haltingly, afraid to slip. The headlamp does me no good. We move slowly, going half the distance, or less, than we usually do. He is glad, I think, when we turn around and head back. I know I am.

The fog is pretty, in the way that things that are different are pretty or at least interesting. After a day or so the novelty wears off, long before the fog does.

Unexpected weirdness

I can’t really give you a good reason why I like this photo of vines twisted around a couple of saplings. I just do. Perhaps it’s the way the morning light warms the background, perhaps it’s the twists themselves. No matter.

Last night I was watching a TV show on DVD on my computer. The show took place in a rural setting, and in the background of one of the scenes I could hear a red fox barking. Now, this sound was probably added in some studio, simply as a way to add more “atmosphere” to the scene. I probably wasn’t even supposed to notice the sound, but being the kind of person I am, I did. And so did my dogs.

Dog and Baby Dog went nuts. They are attuned to the sound of a fox barking as much as I am. We have suffered many fox attacks on my poor chickens in the middle of the night. A pair of local foxes lives near the cabin and frequently bark to tell each other where the other is. I’ve had them gallop under the cabin, under one side and out the other. I’ve had them race down my driveway.

Well, those two dogs thought I had a red fox in the bedroom. They started barking, which soon turned into howling and later degenerated into lunging, utter chaos and full-scale destruction. The cats scattered and hid under the nearest piece of furniture. I had to the turn the DVD off to get them to calm down.

That’s the first thing they’ve ever paid attention to on the TV or computer. They totally ignore dogs barking on TV. They ignore wolves howling. Nothing else on TV has ever made me think they even heard the sound. But they sure heard that fox.

Global warming with Dog

One bit of news I’ve heard mentioned a lot this year in the news media is that the wacky weather this year is caused by global warming. Right now, I’m having August in early June. August may well be my least favorite month, and only its proximity to September and the promise of eventual cooler weather gives me any relief.

News people are saying here that what we now consider a hot summer will pass as a cooler summer by the middle of this century. I’m glad I’ll be dead by then because this heat is no fun at all.

Last night I took Dog down to one of the snowmaking ponds for a swim. Now that he’s 10, I didn’t want him pulling some of his antics from his earlier years, so I kept him on his long lead while he swam. When he was younger, he’d try to chase the resident geese by swimming after them, a fool’s adventure if ever there was one. And then he’d get so tired and swim so far that I feared he wouldn’t make it back to the shore.

I didn’t want any of that to happen this time, so I kept him leashed. The photo today is after he’d taken his initial swim but before he took his second or third or fourth swim of the evening. Eventually, he got wet all over, and he was relegated to the back deck until he dried off. In this heat that didn’t take very long. Is winter ever coming??

Forest wars

My cabin is the battleground for a major avian war this week. The pileated woodpeckers are causing a near-constant ruckus. It started on Saturday and was still going on as of last evening.

Pileated woodpeckers are a large bird and make a lot of noise even on a good day. The local pair is nesting, I believe, in a tree at the back of the cabin. On Saturday morning I heard the woodpeckers fussing and screeching, which isn’t unusual. Something always sets them off. They return fire with scolds and screeches for a few minutes and then the perceived danger leaves and the forest returns to quiet. Except that this week the return to quiet part hasn’t happened.

With the woods so thick with leaves, it was hard to see what was going on at first, though I’ve caught glimpses of the birds swooping and looping in those rare moments when they are visible. And then on Saturday, I finally got to see what was going on. A second male pileated woodpecker is apparently trying to lure the female away or perhaps just hoping to extend his territory so that it overlaps with that of the nesting pair. In any event, the actions of the second male are destroying forest harmony around my cabin. Just when I think the dust is settling, male #2 drums on a tree, and that sets off the whole round of screeching and swooping yet again. Even the dogs notice.

Baby Dog, the self-appointed forest police force, is the worst. When the pileated woodpeckers really get going, she chimes in with her alarm barking. Her barking awakens Dog from his elderly slumber and then he joins in. Two barking dogs soon equals two howling dogs, and sometimes even the dogs half a mile away add to the chaos. Why I ever thought that living in the woods was peaceful is a thought I have been disabused of this week, that’s for sure.

Of course my photos today depict none of this. At least they look as though my forest is filled with peace and quiet.

Dry weather

View to the south from Waggoner's Gap hawkwatch

I’m posting one last photo from Waggoner’s Gap—at least until I make another trip to the hawkwatch. This one is looking to the south and towards Roundtop, which is the fourth bump in the distance from the left. When I looked at the view from my perch at the hawkwatch, I enjoyed how clear everything looked. But when I looked at my photos from the trip, the view is quite a bit more hazy than I remembered it.

At Roundtop it has now been three weeks since I’ve seen any rain. The forest crackles underfoot. Dust rises like smoke from every step. The next chance of rain isn’t until Sunday and that isn’t a very good chance. If I don’t get any rain then, another week will pass before any chance returns again.

So perhaps it’s because of the dry weather that not much is going on around the cabin right now. Birds seem to have disappeared almost entirely. Butterflies are nearly gone. The closest thing to excitement was seeing a small raccoon on my morning walk with Dog. The raccoon was low in a tree, on its way down the tree, I think, when it spied us and hustled back up. I only saw it because of my headlamp. Dog never saw it, which is just as well, as that would mean a pulling fest between the two of us, and 5:45 a.m. is simply too early for that kind of effort.

Yesterday marked the first day this season that I could see the constellation Orion high in the morning sky. Facing due south, the constellation is about at 11 a.m. on a clock face. The moonless sky and ever-later dawn combined to make the old warrior visible yet again. I’ve spied the constellation as early as the end of August, but this year the moon and clouds conspired to keep it from my view until now. Welcome back!

Weekend Soup and a few sightings

My weekend was a soupy one, as you can see by my photo this morning. The soup continues into Monday and certainly contributed to my need for a headlamp when I walked the still slightly skunky Dog this morning. Were the humidity within a normal range, he might not give off an odor, but with the atmosphere looking like this, I can still get a whiff of skunk every now and again.

The good news about the soup is that it means the temperature isn’t 90 degrees or more. Saturday felt almost like fall, though I’m sure part of that was simply my relief that it wasn’t 90 degrees. The sense of fall was heightened by the drought-withered leaves falling to the ground in the slightest breeze.  You can see the results of that in today's photo, with yellowing leaves littering the path.

I found a large eastern garter snake stretched out in my driveway, likely hoping to catch a few rays. I was glad I didn’t have Dog or Baby Dog with me when I saw it, though a camera would have been nice. I carry my camera whenever I take a walk, but not usually when I’m feeding the chickens.

The soup also likely contributed to the great horned owl calling at a time when on a sunny morning he would already be abed (or is that a-limb?). The eastern pewees and wood thrush were singing together this morning, the pewee no doubt confused by the late dawn, and the wood thrush not to be deterred, despite it.

Overall, I think the soupy weather reduced the number and variety of birds I saw this weekend. Once the air clears, early migrants will certainly move and give me something new to look at.

Skunk 1, Dog 0

Last night around 10 p.m. Dog got skunked. The skunk in question was small, hardly more than kitten-sized. I didn’t see it until it was too late. I glimpsed it for a second in my headlamp before I saw what happened and attended to Dog.

Fortunately, the stink is not as bad as it might have been. Perhaps it wasn’t a clear shot. I wiped Dog down with a baby wipe and will wipe again when I get home today. But until I can’t smell that smell, he is banished to the back deck.

Do you think he looks repentant? Perhaps he does a little but not nearly as much as he should look. This was only the second skunk I’ve seen at Roundtop. The first was shortly after I moved in nearly 20 years ago and that one was an adult tiptoeing carefully down a dirt access road.

The encounter lasted but half a second or less. Dog himself is fine. If there was any actual physical contact between the two there is no sign of it. This skunk was across the driveway at the edge of the lane, and I thought Dog was heading over there to do his business. Guess not. I suspect he won’t be so eager the next time if he finds another skunk.

Snow and Ice

The last of the “warm” weather will end today. At the moment I’m defining warm as maybe reaching 35 degrees. More snow is on its way followed by what is becoming the usual weekend cold and wind. I took advantage of the calm to make sure the dogs got a good walk this morning and let the chickens outside the pen for a few minutes.

None of my brood may get much in the way of walks or outside time over the next few days. At the moment, wind is running in a tie with ice for being my least favorite outside phenomena. Ice is more of a fooler, though. A path that is snowy one day quickly turns icy after a few hours of sun or footsteps that pack down the snow. One step is safe and easy, the next a slippery accident waiting to happen.

When it’s icy everywhere, I wear Yak-Trax over my boots, but they can be a pain to put on and wear over the long haul. So I end up not wearing them unless I have to. The problem is, I can’t always tell when it’s okay to not wear them. This morning even Dog miscalculated a step while he was fooling around and slipped sideways. He looked embarrassed, I thought, and with good reason as he at least has four legs to my two.

I haven’t seen one of the chickens slip and fall, yet. They don’t much care for the snow, but willingly walk along an icy path, looking for a tiny patch of bare ground to peck at. When one finds a patch, she is soon happily joined by all of them. It doesn’t take much to make a chicken happy.

The west pond

Dog and I enjoyed a pleasant walk down through the valley between Roundtop and Nell’s Hill. In this area, many of the valleys between mountains have been cleared and homes built through them. The steep hills remain largely forested and undeveloped, but the flatter valleys are usually considered prime territory. So I am lucky to have a forested valley so near my doorstep.

The habitat down in the valley is moister and shadier than up on the hills. Sunlight doesn’t penetrate until midday. Down in here are lots of ferns and other moisture-loving woodland plants. In the summer the valley is filled with ferns, thousands of them. The little Beaver Creek runs through the center, and the temperature is much cooler.

During the fall, sunlight penetrates a bit earlier in the day, though is always filtered by the trees of the forest. Except for the ever-green Christmas ferns, the other species are brown or gone by mid-November. There’s a nice pond down here just under two miles from the nearest public and paved road. The pond is the only nearby opening in the forest, and I enjoy coming down here and just sitting, listening to the quiet on a calm day when there are no leaves to rustle and break the silence.

Sometimes I find interesting birds down on the pond or near it. Not today. A dozen wary Canada geese eyed me suspiciously but I saw nothing more unusual than that. You can see them in the second photo, somehow blending in with the browns of the trees and cattails.

The blue jays screamed, the turkey vultures took advantage of thermals over the pond to swirl overhead. A Red-tailed hawk caught the air and joined the turkey vultures. Dog sniffed in the mud along the banks.

It was a pleasant hour or so. Nothing too much happened. That was the best part.

November walk with Dog

After a cool summer and a cool October, November at Roundtop is shaping up as unusually mild. On Sunday the weather was especially pleasant—blue sky, calm winds and sun. Dog and I both needed an outing, so we took advantage of the day and headed down into the woods and along Beaver Creek.

The distance we covered wasn’t very much. I enjoyed ambling along and looking at anything and everything that caught my eye. I stopped every few feet to look at something or take a photo. The area where we walked is where I take the kids from Adventure Camp in summer. For them, I have to find things that are big and exciting and keep the pace moving. Now that I didn’t have the kids along, I could enjoy the day on my own terms.

I haven’t been down here since the leaves dropped, so the difference is, as always, a bit startling to me. Perhaps I simply startle easily. With rifle deer season just two weeks away, it’s hard to say when I will get down again. I’d like to think my Sundays will be calm enough that I can come down every week, but I know better than to make predictions.

After a summer encased in greenery, green is now much harder to find. Christmas ferns are still green. The other 4-5 fern species that I found here this summer have disappeared into the forest floor. I can’t even find their remnants. The other green I found was moss, which is growing very nicely and looking very healthy. That was pretty much it.

Dog found a deer—a large doe—and innumerable squirrels to keep his attention. I also saw Canada geese down on the pond. Blue jays scolded as we invaded their woods. Chickadees joined in, as did the white-breasted nuthatch. Other than that, the woods were quiet. Of course, where I live, it is most often quiet, and so doesn’t seem unusual to me. In fact, I have grown to expect quiet, though other people always remark on the quietness when we are down here.

If the November weather could have been any better for a walk in the woods, I don’t know what I would have done to make it better. Quiet, blue sky, comfortable temperatures and calm wind add up to perfect. The only thing that would be better if if I could walk down here every day.

Quiet (?) night

The daytime quiet continues here on the mountain, though last night Dog and I encountered a deer walking down my driveway as we were walking up. The deer stopped and looked at us. Dog stood up on his hind legs, balancing with the tension in the leash, and everybody stared at each other for a bit. Then the deer calmly ambled off the driveway and into the woods. My arm still hurts from Dog trying to follow.

I’ve wondered if the deer was one of the pair that ate my juniper bush last winter. It certainly wasn’t afraid or wary of us.

And the raccoon again. That large and furry mammal has now destroyed the new platform bird feeder I just got this year. It's tossed the plasic "windows" down into the woods. It's pulled the top off and eaten, I think, the rope. The suet feeder along the side is pulled off. Ah, life in the woods. Never a dull moment, not even when it's quiet.

Wet leaves

Rain soaked Roundtop Mountain this weekend, a hard, chilly rain on Saturday heavy enough to wet through two raincoats. On Sunday the weather went from rain to sun and back again so many times that I couldn’t keep track.

The weather limited my forays into the woods. I prefer to avoid mud, as a rule. I’m fine with dirt and snow, but mud isn’t high on my list. The rain seemed to hurry along the ongoing drop of hickory nuts and acorns. Whenever a nut dropped onto a hard surface, the sound was loud enough to wake Baby Dog. She always woke up barking, no doubt expecting some attack by squirrels.

We had a quiet weekend, dogs lounging for most of the day, me brewing cups of hot tea and enjoying the solitude. Even the local birds were mostly in hiding. Perhaps we are all hunkering down in sort of a dry run for the winter ahead. Perhaps we were all just lazy. The quiet was nice, for a change.

Looking towards Roundtop

The morning was still fully dark when Dog and I took our walk today. Not even a hint of dawn colored the eastern sky. Orion was high overhead. Today was the first I’d seen this warrior-protector since last spring. If I’d been awake at 2 or 3 a.m. and walked down the lane to where the woods opens to the sky, I would have seen it months earlier. But that didn’t happen, and today marked the first clear morning when it was still dark enough for me to see the constellation.

The clear morning was a continuation of yesterday’s clear sky, which you can see in today’s photo. I was hawkwatching up on Waggoner’s Gap again, staring into the blue sky and looking for hawks. I knew it would be a good day, as that nasty east coast storm finally moved off and after two days of rain finally allowed the birds to fly. It was a good day, but it would have been better with a few clouds in that sky.

The one-day record for Bald Eagles at Waggoner’s Gap is 30, and for a few hours yesterday, it looked as though the record might fall, but in the end it didn’t. Still a day when 28 Bald Eagles are seen can’t in any way be termed shabby. Back 25 years or so ago, when I hawkwatched almost exclusively at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a group of the regular hawkwatchers had a habit, after the day’s hawkwatching was over, of toasting each eagle we saw that day with our alcoholic beverage of choice. It was a rare day to see one, much rarer still to see 2 or 3. We gave up the practice about the time when 7 were seen on one day. Back then, the thought of seeing 28 in a single day wasn’t even dreamed about.

Today’s photo was taken atop Waggoner’s Gap looking south towards Roundtop. Roundtop is the second bump from the left side of the shot. I’ve always wondered if I turned on all the lights in the cabin, if I could spot the lights from this distance. I know I couldn’t now, with all the leaves on the trees. Perhaps I’ll try that later when the leaves are down.

Happy Friday

Happy Friday! After two days of high humidity and heat, this clear and almost cool morning feels wonderful. Dog and Baby Dog both misbehaved, often a sign of improved weather. They are simply too wound up to listen, instead finding all kinds of smells suddenly far more interesting than paying attention to me.

This morning Dog was certain that a deer had only instants before walked on This Very Spot, and if I only allowed it, he could catch up and give chase. Baby Dog plugged her nose into the earth and inhaled deeply as though she was trying to get high from the scent. The deer, far up on one of Roundtop’s slopes, raised its head from grazing only briefly before returning to its breakfast.

Both of them completely missed the fox trotting across the lane perhaps 50 yards ahead.

My photo this happy Friday was taken at an orchard near Roundtop. The apples on those trees will soon be ready to pick.

Night and dawn

The forest was dark when Dog and I began our morning walk today. The night sky was already starting to pale, but the trees still held the darkness close under the canopy of leaves. Today, the first sound I heard was not the sweet summer call of the pewee, the forest’s earliest riser. It was the hoot of a great horned owl, the night hunter.

The owl was a short distance up the mountain from us, its hoots loud enough to resonate. What better sign could there be that the days are already shortening? Instead of the morning bird calls I’ve been accustomed to for the past several months, today the night caller was still reigning the woods.

Dog and I hadn’t gotten far before the pewee began to sing, and for a few minutes I heard both the last call of night’s creature and the first call of morning’s. The owl would hoot, and it seemed the pewee answered, the two calling back and forth with perfect timing. For a few minutes the two shared the forest, in that hazy time when both night and dawn appear to be the same. And then it was truly dawn, and the owl retreated, while the pewee continued its song, this time a solo.

A mid-summer afternoon

I’m almost afraid to even mention the weather this weekend. I’m more superstitious than I’d admit to, I guess. I have this feeling that no sooner will I mention that it is not too hot here that the solar flood gates will open with a vengeance and the temperature will rise into the mid-90’s and turn humid.

It’s a (very) rare summer in southern Pennsylvania when summer hiking is pleasant. But this year the weather has routinely been nice enough that I can hike in the woods in mid-afternoon and still enjoy the experience.

So yesterday Dog and I headed into the woods, on a trail I haven’t walked for a bit. Many of my hikes this summer have been to examine the trail that I take with the camp kids on Thursdays, so I can know what I am likely to see and to identify interesting plants that I don’t already know. But this week, Dog and I took another trail down into the valley.

It was a pleasant afternoon. The woods are a bit dry, though not dangerously so. Dog enjoys these walks enormously, sniffing under as many logs as he can. We walk down along a grassy two-track road. The trail isn’t much used, if at all. The grass is nearing knee-high. The breeze kept various biting insects at bay. Our walk was mostly shaded, the leafy canopy too thick to allow in much sunlight.

Midsummer, even on an afternoon as pleasant as this one, is not the time when the forest is at its most active, so our walk was a nearly silent one. A few wood thrush sang their fluted call, a towhee questioned our presence, and a single chipmunk darted across the trail as fast as if his tail was on fire. But mostly, the walk was quiet and peaceful, lacking in drama of any kind. That’s what I liked about it. Forays into the woods don’t need drama to be interesting to me. The lack of drama is its own reward, a respite from the bustle of daily life. That alone makes it worthwhile.