Forest life

That’s the last of them! This morning the eastern pewee’s plaintive call echoed through the forest around my cabin. The pewee is the very last of the summer residents to arrive. So now everyone who normally should be here is here. Oh, I could have another one or so. Some years I have a yellow-billed cuckoo somewhere on the mountain. I suspect that poor bird has yet to find a mate, at least here on Roundtop. The calls echo throughout the summer, moving from spot to spot as though hoping for someone to answer. Maybe someone did answer, eventually, but I don’t think it was here on Roundtop.


So now, instead of trying to find new summer residents, I can relax, pull up a chair and...No, that’s not going to happen. I have a list of outside work that’s longer than my arm, starting with trimming back the various tree branches and bushes that scrape the sides of the car as I travel my driveway. Just because I don’t have a yard doesn’t mean that there’s no work to be done. It can be a near-constant fight against multi-flower rose, poison and assorted saplings determined to take hold and cover the cabin.

It can be tough work, particularly when it’s hot outside, so now is the time to get at it. Some years it gets hot so early in the season that I don’t really get it done to the point that I’m relatively happy with it. This year so far, it’s been fairly cool, so at least I don’t yet have that to deal with. Still, it’s something of a race to get done, because I know summer’s heat is only a few weeks away.

I use hedge clippers and a longer handled clipper rather than a weed whacker. I used to have a weed whacker. Several, in fact. None of them lasted very long. I couldn’t handle the heavy weed whackers and the lighter weight ones didn’t hold up. I’ve had the clippers for years. I don’t mind that this is a battle I will lose. My only goal is to keep the tendrils of new growth from scraping the car along the driveway or me as I walk around the cabin. The forest will win, eventually. So be it. In fact, I hope the forest does win, eventually. If not now then at some point, even if that time is far into a future I will never see. I have faith in the strength of the forest to survive even mankind’s mindless destruction. Though I also believe that mankind would survive longer than I expect they will if there were more of us who believed in the importance of forests.

Sharing a hazy June morning with pewees

Morning comes late to the narrow valley between the two mountains. The sun doesn’t appear above the eastern hill until 10 a.m. even just a few days before the year’s longest day. And so many of the avian denizens of these deep woods are first active later than their counterparts that live up on top of Roundtop.

Down here, crayfish don’t appear out from under a rock much before noon. The minnows aren’t very active until the first patch of sunlight warms their pool. The haunting call of the pewees is the exception. Their call echoes through the valley at all hours, and the birds themselves are as tame as robins, tamer even. These little birds are a drab gray color but make up for their lack of beauty with their antics and flying ability, swooping across the stream like a circus performer, snatching bugs out of the air and then pausing to eat or return with the prize to their hidden nest, soon to reappear and repeat the performance.

Pewees are considered to be a declining species, though are still common. A few thoughts about that are in the literature. One is that the forest habitat in their wintering range of the Andes and Central America is disappearing. Another cites the heavy whitetail deer population here in the east. That idea suggests that deer thin out the lower story of vegetation, the very foraging space favored by the little gray birds. Perhaps that’s true. All I can say is that Roundtop is flush with both pewees and deer.

Pewees are pretty much the last summer resident to arrive in the spring. It’s usually well into May before I hear the first haunting call. Pewees are the first bird to call in the day’s pre-dawn hours and are also the last call I hear well after dark, sometimes as late at 9:30 p.m. during these long June days.

On this day, I realize the pewee I’ve been watching off and on for the last hour is actually two pewees. The one is happy to sit within two arms’ reach of my chair and bob its tail in between bouts of flycatching. The other seems a bit shyer. They are likely a pair with their tiny nest somewhere nearby.

The nests are typically perched on some thin, horizontal branch, perhaps one that extends over the stream. Wherever it is, it will be held together and onto the branch with strands of spider webs. In it will likely be three eggs or perhaps by now, three tiny balls of gray fluff. If they survive, the little pewees will soon join the parents in flycatching over the small stream. Perhaps next week or the one after that, I’ll get to see them.

A matter of perspective

The forest was especially quiet this morning when Dog and I started our early morning walk. The sunrise was just getting organized, but already showed signs of bad weather ahead. It wasn’t the “red sky” of sailors’ legend, but it was orange and mauve and leaning in the red direction. Perhaps that foretells a puny little storm or a maybe bad storm that won’t hit for a while longer.

The wind was calm, and as the birds woke up and started to sing, the sounds carried for what seemed to me like longer distances than is typical. The pewee’s haunting song is one that winds throughout the forest on any day, and this morning’s moist air carried the notes even further. Who would think that such a tiny little bird could make a sound like that? Perhaps it’s the pitch or the notes, but there’s something about the song that surrounds the air with its song. The cardinal’s song doesn’t carry the way the pewee’s does. The wood thrush song comes close, but I still think the pewee wins that contest. Perhaps it’s the way the pewee holds the notes, when many other birds clip off their notes. I have no answer.

I do know that to me the pewee’s song is every bit as haunting and as lovely as a loon’s. Their song conveys that same eerie mystery of the wild, only their song speaks of the Appalachian forests, if not the northern woods of the loon.

Dog pays no attention, of course. To him the walk reveals nothing of interest—no rabbits, no fox, no squirrels—to capture his attention. He plods beside me, head down, bored.

My photo today was taken a mile or so from the mountain.  I felt the need to see a vista the other day.  The trees are hiding all the ones at the cabin until fall.