Fallen

Today's photo is one I took only a litte more than a week ago. Today, the same view is barren of leaves, with just a few brown stragglers hanging on. To me, it feels as though the forest takes forever for its color change to progress past the first few leaves. Then the blaze of color that is so breathtaking is gone within a day or two. Blink and you miss it. Even if you don't blink, it's gone quickly.

Some of these same leaves, no doubt, now fill my rain gutters and cover both decks. Leaves also find their way into the cabin, hiding under the kitchen table or sometimes right out there in the middle of the living room. Every time I open the door, one or two of them trails in behind me and the dogs, like stray puppies who are determined to adopt you as their family. The leaves are everywhere and get into everything--just like puppies. The other day I found one atop my bed, and I'm still trying to figure that one out. Maybe I can blame it on the cats.

Should I have a dry winter, the leaf problem will remain with me throughout. Rain weighs them down, but as soon as the surroundings dry again, the leaves are skittering back into the cabin. Snow is the best thing to stop their constant parade. Once covered by snow, they become earthbound, usually for good.

By spring, after three months under a snowy blanket, the composting process is well underway, turning last year's leaves into good soil to sustain the forest and foster new growth. The cycle will then start all over again. For now, I just need to clean the rain gutters.

Ancient history

This photograph was taken on Sunday afternoon looking up the road past my cabin, but already the photo is "ancient history." The color is gone. Indeed, the leaves are gone. The only shade left on the few remaining leaves is brown. Sometimes I’m shocked by just how fast the forest around me can change. And yet, this view is also a glimpse of a truly ancient history.

Leaves fall every autumn. Every autumn. Every year. The trees that line my lane are older than I am and will live long past my own span. The trees that cover this mountain are the direct descendents of trees that have covered this mountain for untold lifespans of other humans and for untold eons before humans first set foot here.

They are a living link back into the dimmest days of the pre-history of our planet. When I look at them, I can imagine the first humans who walked here. I can imagine a forest before people ever stood here. I can imagine the change of seasons and the quiet that then covered these hills.

Nothing else can tie us to the past as directly as the trees. Fossils of formerly living creatures are now simply interesting stone imprints. But the trees are living reminders of what has gone before. A reminder I can touch every day, a reminder that changes before me every day, a reminder that teaches me every day what history really is and that today is only today.

Wordless Wednesday

I'm away from the computer today, so I thought I'd leave you with just a photo. I like how the tree limb is bending gracefully over this boulder. It almost looks sheltering.

Monday sunlight and evening moonlight

I took today’s photo on Monday morning as I was leaving the cover of the mountain. The view is to the west, of the range across the valley. I was taken with how the morning sun basked the range in light under a cloudy sky.

Last night I drove back to the cabin after dark, under the light of a clear sky and nearly full moon. A white-tailed deer calmly trotted from the edge of one of the snowmaking ponds, across the driveway in front of me and into the edge of the woods.

I stopped to let her pass and watched her walk towards the woods. She didn’t even raise her tail in alarm. Then I saw where she was heading; two other deer, already curled up and laying down in the leaves, were not more than 20 feet off the road. They were as brown as the leaves and nearly invisible among them. They were unconcerned as I drove slowly by and didn't even stand up. One twitched its ears. They looked perfectly comfortable on their leafy mattresses. I didn't linger but inched by slowly. I hope I didn’t disturb them. They looked so comfortable. I don't think I did.

Leaves falling down

This is the last photo I will post of good fall color around Roundtop. The leaves are nearly all down today. A few days with a slight breeze was all it took to take the leaves from good color to brown to on the ground.

And in just that little space of time, suddenly I have lots of natural light at the cabin! Even on a cloudy night, as last night was, it seems almost bright at night because I can see the sky. I look forward to the falling of the leaves every year simply because I enjoy the added light so much.

The leaves are ankle deep on my decks, even though I swept them clean both days of the weekend. By the next morning, it didn’t look as though I’d done any sweeping. If there’s one constant about living in the woods, with the forest coming right up to the doors, it’s that I will never get ahead of the leaves.

This morning as I left the cabin, I waded through the leaves again. If I hadn’t swept them off the decks, I would be shin high in leaves. And that could happen before the end of the week, as I have a busy week ahead and will likely not have much time to spend at the cabin, let alone time to sweep the leaves.

You might think that once the leaves are down, my leaf sweeping regimen would end. That’s not true. As long as the leaves are dry, the slightest breeze will toss them about, and somehow they will end up on the decks again. It’s only when the leaves are wet or buried under snow that they’re not finding their way onto my deck. Sweeping leaves is not nearly as bad as mowing grass, at least in my mind, but it’s also something that needs to be done more frequently and for longer during the year. That doesn’t mean I’d prefer mowing grass. Not at all. Not for a moment.

Missing the daylight

As much as I like the weather of the cooler seasons, I also find it a bit frustrating sometimes. Here I am living in the woods, amongst all this beauty and natural life, and I don’t get to see it very often right now. In the evenings, I’m racing to get home while there’s still some light in the sky. Lately, I haven’t been making it. The sun is already behind the mountain, and woods around me are the monochromatic colors of dusk by the time I pull into the driveway. The birds are already quiet and roosting. In the mornings, it’s not much better, especially on these overcast mornings.

When I’m lucky, the mornings are not too early for the chickadees or the titmice to visit the feeder, but I get to see only a few of them before it’s time to head to work. It’s certainly too early in the morning for me to see the feeders when they are their most active. And I know the birds do show up eventually because the feeders empty so quickly.

It’s frustrating to live here and yet still not be able to spend much time in the woods or even see what’s in the woods much during the week. I can’t imagine how much greater my frustration would be if I lived in a town or a city where I would have to travel just to visit where I live. During this time of year, when the hours of daylight are short, even attempting to visit a natural area during the work week would be out of the question for a city dweller.

So is it any wonder that so many people are nature-deprived? It’s not just children who suffer from a "nature deficit disorder." Some days, even I feel that way.

Leaves of change

Autumn leaves around my cabin come in all colors, though yellow is the most predominant. This year, there’s a healthy dose of orange in there too. Red remains the least common of the colors I see. Since Sunday, when I took this photo, the colors are already fading. Oh, the brilliance of autumn lasts too short a time.

Overnight, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep after staying up too late to watch election returns, a little sprinkle dampened the woods, and the leaves started to fall, more with each drop of rain. Sometimes it didn’t even take a drizzle or a breeze. They just dropped, waflting past my bedroom window, slowly falling to the ground. It was simply their time to go. In another few days, a week at the most, they will all be gone.

I love winter and look forward to it each year with all my heart, but I will miss the brilliant colors of autumn and wish they would stay just a little longer.

Color on the mountain

I took today’s photo on Sunday morning. This spot is about 100 yards behind the cabin. I can’t see this view from the cabin as the leaves are still hiding it. Nell’s Hill is the closest hill. The further hills are the next range across the valley. Just two days later the colors are already fading. The next half-decent rain or bit of wind will bring them all down.

Waterfowl migration is ongoing right now. I saw three buffleheads on the new pond the other day, an uncommon species here on the mountain. It’s only since the new pond went in that I’ve gotten to see a few species of waterfowl on the mountain, other than a few lost souls once or twice a year. The new pond has been great for my "yard" list of birds spotted on the mountain. I pretty much reached the limit of seeing the woodland species that show up here years ago. Several years passed without seeing any new species until the new pond was built. So now, my local list of birds seen on the mountain is inching up again, and if it’s moving at a glacial pace, at least it’s no longer static.

Great fall colors

I don’t often get to ride the ski lifts on a pleasant fall afternoon, but I did this weekend. Roundtop was holding its annual ski swap, and one of the ski lifts was open for rides. The fall color was past the peak of brightness, but it made up for that with every leaf on every tree now showing color. Saturday was a tad hazy but the views were still great.

Riding the ski lift is fun, and the round trip only took about 15 minutes. A lot of people rode the lift up the mountain and then opted to walk down, but I can walk down the mountain any day I want to, and I was hoping the added elevation of the lift would allow for a slightly different perspective on the views.

The leaves have arrived at the point where the next rain or decent wind storm will bring down almost all of them. Tuesday and Wednesday shows a chance for drizzle, which probably won’t be enough to do the trick. Saturday might bring a storm strong enough to do it. I’ll keep hoping.

Each day more and more juncos arrive, though they either haven’t found my feeders yet or they’re not yet hungry enough to want to visit the feeder. Right now I have only the forest regulars—titmice, chickadees of both the Carolina and Black-capped species, white-breasted nuthatch, downy woodpecker and red-bellied woodpecker. For some reason, I haven’t yet seen a cardinal at the feeders, and the goldfinch have been ignoring the thistle as well. Likely, that simply means that they are all foraging well enough in the woods and don’t need the food from my feeders just yet. They will return soon enough.

Free Hawk ID program

Last week I told you about a free hawk silhouette guide. This week I'm pointing you to a new free PowerPoint presentation on hawk identification. The presentation is about 30 minutes long and available free for download for non-commercial use (if you have high speed internet access) here at the Web site of the Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA). If you don't have high-speed internet, you'll need to order the CD for $12.

The slide show is called Identification of Raptors of the Northeast and combines photos and graphics to show how hawks really look as they appear in flight and during migration. We all know that hawks on the wing don't look anything like poses in a field guide, and this presentation will help you identify the birds as they really look.

The program covers 19 species of hawks and vultures, and first focuses on how to identify the major raptor families so you can narrow down an identification. Then it zeroes in on the field marks and flight patterns that will identify each species as they look in flight.

The program was created by Susan Fogleman from Little Round Top hawkwatch in New Hampshire. I was one of the early "beta testers" and think it will be very useful for novice and intermediate hawkwatchers alike. Plus, it's a fun prgroam, and I think you will enjoy it.

Winter's coming--finches too

This morning I saw three dark-eyed juncos, marking the first time this year I’ve seen more than one at a time. The morning is dawning clear, after several days of clouds and three types of precipitation (rain, sleet and snow), but it’s still almost dark when I leave the cabin. That will change in two days when we "fall back" an hour’s time this weekend. The mornings still will likely not be light enough for a photograph, but maybe I’m wrong about that and it will be.

Now that this big nor’easter is past, I’m expecting that the next day or so will be particularly active around the woods. Hawks and songbirds both migrate heavily after big storms. Their migration is bolstered by a backlog of birds waiting out the storm, plus the storms apparently focus the birds’ attention on heading south. If the weather is good and food supplies are decent, they will hang around in their summer grounds and not feel the urge to move.

It may well be another good year for winter finch irruptions to the south. Hawkwatches are reporting huge numbers of pine siskins, especially, moving south over the past week or so. A few hawkwatches have counted 1200-1500 each day. Ron Pittaway has posted a detailed winter finch forecast here on e-Bird that focuses on the abundance of far northern food supplies as the predictor for each individual species. Locally, some red-breasted nuthatches have been reported already—none at my feeders yet, where the action is still limited to the local birds and activity is just starting to pick up.

The prospect of seeing northern finches is always exciting for me. Last year was a good one for me with redpolls, purple finch and red-breasted nuthatch all showing up. I know that these birds are down here because they’ve had a rough year up north, but if they come south, I promise to feed them well, so they will be good and fat when they head back north in the spring.

Easing towards winter

The wind that has dominated here is finally easing. Yesterday was the most intense—45-55 mph winds for much of the day. I lost power at the cabin several times, each time briefly. I can’t drive up the driveway and down the lane without needing to stop at least once or twice to remove a branch too large or too gnarly to drive over.

More juncos have arrived, though still not huge numbers of them. That might well change in the next few days. Once this nor’easter clears, those little snowbirds may decide they’d better clear out of Canada and head south while the gettin’ is still good.. The Canadian robins have also arrived. When I was a youngster, these were called "woods robins." These birds are a bit larger and browner than the birds that summer here (and which left about a month ago). Down here the Canadian robins tend to stay in small flocks and often stay throughout the winter, especially if the winter tends to the mild side. They don’t hang out in fields and yards like the summer robins. They prefer woods and sometimes abandoned fields. We used to think that "woods robins" were simply summer birds that didn’t migrate, but over the years research has shown they are really Canadian robins who have migrated, and after a trip of 1000 miles or so, they have flown south.

In general, though, I see few of the forest’s animals in weather like this. They are as hunkered down as I am, waiting for the raging weather to abate. The snow that fell in the Poconos missed me. I was on the southwest edge of the storm and so got the worst of the wind instead.

It’s a bit early in the season to have what is essentially a winter storm of such strength. This year will be the first year in what seems like forever to me where there will be no El Nino or La Nina effect to warm the winter. That doesn’t hurt my feelings at all, though I reserve the right to change my tune if I’m snowed in for longer than a week.

Was that snow? Maybe

Maybe I had a few flurries of snow last night. Mostly, though, nothing fell from the sky. Wind dominates my landscape at the moment, dropping ever more leaves from the trees. The wind will likely ruin the peak of fall color around me. The leaves will come down before they turn brilliant. Ah, well, such is life.

Last evening Dog and I took a spin around the ponds. Walking in the evenings now is turning into a race with sunset. The evening was the kind of weather I think of as a true October sky—angry dark clouds, crisp temperatures, a wind that bites. Usually, I don’t have to wait until the end of the month to experience that.

This October has been rather normal for its temperature—an improvement over recent years---but it has also been unremittingly clear with days on end of cool, windy days and blue skies. Much of the northeast has been the same. All I have to do is read the hawkwatching "dailies" to hear the complaints of counters suffering from "blue out." Blue skies are the bane of hawkwatchers. The undifferentiated sky is both hard on the eyes and makes it hard to see or even spot migrating hawks, who can fly much higher than they can when a little cloud cover holds them lower. Looking at teeny tiny little dots is not my idea of good hawkwatching. I’ve reached the age where I simply can’t hawkwatch in blue sky anymore. If I do, I won’t be able to drive home or walk down off the mountain.

So last evening Dog and I walked and then simply sat, enjoying the weather. He wandered off after a few minutes, nosing the ground and then he started to roll. Now, if you own a dog you know this is not a good sign. I was up in a flash, pulling him off his rolling spot, but it was already too late. He’d found some fox poop to roll in. And he stank. So I took him for another run, hoping to blow the stink off of him, at least a little. Eventually, I couldn’t put it off any longer, as darkness was closing in. My evening was spent giving a doggie bath—not how I wanted to spend my evening. And Dog wasn’t pleased either. He loves water, but he can do without the soap.

Out in the wind

Wind blew across the mountain all weekend. On Saturday, it was rainy and windy. On Sunday it was sunny and windy. When I returned to the cabin after running errands, I had to stop the car, get out and pick up branches before I could get up my lane and back down my driveway.

The wind blew mostly from the northwest, though even that swirled around and tossed leaves in many directions. I spent much of Sunday afternoon out in the woods. The sound of the wind was with me every step of the way, blocking out any other forest sounds. Missing was the usual sound of squirrels scurrying or deer trying to step lightly through dry leaves. I felt hampered by the loss of that sense, forced to rely solely on sight to notice what was around me.

That made observation more difficult than I would have guessed. My eye was drawn to motion, which meant I saw a lot of leaves blowing across the mountain. Normally, I rely on hearing to alert me to something interesting and then follow-up with looking towards the sound. Deprived of hearing, suddenly everything caught my eye. That turned out to be both fascinating and frustrating.

Even in ways I don’t expect, a few hours in the woods teaches me yet another lesson, one that I wouldn’t have experienced if I’d stayed inside. My inside environment, even in a small cabin, is a controlled one. Outside I don’t control anything, and I must react to what’s around me, whether it’s wind or sun or a herd of deer. That’s yet another reason why being in the outdoors is so different than working in a business or sitting in a house. That façade of control that we humans seem to value so much is torn away, even about little things. In the outdoors, you have to let go of that, if you really want to see and experience what’s out there.

In the air

For weeks, the weather here on Roundtop was crisp and clear, with low humidity and no rain. This morning the moon was veiled with high cirrus clouds, and by the time the sun rose, I could feel the moisture in the air. I had frost this morning, and I smelled the sweet, sweet fragrance of snow in the air. The coming precipitation will not, however, fall as snow later today. The clouds will thicken with each passing hour and cause the temperature to rise. Rain will fall tonight or tomorrow.

With the rain, many of the colored leaves of autumn will fall too. When the rain is over, the leaves that will remain will be those few that haven’t turned color yet, and for a few days the mountain will likely look green again. In a few days, another, this time the final round of color change will begin.

Winter is coming. I've smelled it.

Finding help for tough identifications

If you’re anything like me, you likely have a bookcase full of fieldguides in your house. And though you may have started with a fieldguide to birds or trees or mammals, somehow, inexorably, over the years you’ve added fieldguides on subjects you never would have guessed you would own back when you got your first one.

Some fieldguides are very complete. Birds are a good example. Many now show females, males, juveniles, inter-grades, hybrids and other plumages. As a result, if you get a good look at the bird (which of course it feels like something that rarely happens) you can probably identify it.
Other fieldguide topics are less satisfying, I’ve found. For something like fungi, for example, there are so many species that authors are forced to make selections about what species to include. So they look at the various habitats in the U.S. and then choose the most common species found in those habitats.

But there you are, out in the woods somewhere, new fieldguide in hand, fungus (or fern) in front of you and you can’t identify it. Isn’t that a bummer? I can’t really fault the authors of those national guides. With thousands of species, they simply have to make choices. Especially with plants and insects, the number of species found in just a single state will fill the average number of pages of in a single fieldguide. That doesn’t make it any the less frustrating for the rest of us.

A solution, I’m finding, is to search for fieldguides specific to the state or region where you live. In the bad old days when you were lucky to find any fieldguide for just mushrooms, say, regional fieldguides rarely existed. But now they are much more common, and even if you can’t find a guide to your state, it’s usually possible to find one for the state or province next door that will be better for you than a national guide that tries to cover a little bit of everything.

The regional guides will certainly include more of the uncommon species in your area than is possible for a national fieldguide to include. And so while I can’t guarantee that you will be able to identify that odd fungus or fern or wildflower you’re sitting in front of, those regional guides will increase the odds you’ll find out what it is.

Earthquake!

About 3 miles from me was another earthquake on Sunday. I heard this one measured 2.6. I didn’t feel it. The dogs didn’t howl either. One person reported a crack in the foundation of their house. Another reported a broken window. Until 2 weeks ago, the last earthquake in this area was 10 years ago. But in 2 weeks there’s been 2 earthquakes.

Geologists are telling people that these little tremors—the first was a 2.0—don’t mean a "big one" is imminent. Locally, people aren’t ready to agree. The second one was stronger than the first, so these might be "foreshocks." An "aftershock" is always weaker than the main earthquake. People are reporting hearing a loud boom coming from underground that is soon followed by a tremor. It’s because of the "boom" that people called the police, thinking it was an explosion or a dynamite blast.

There is supposed to be what’s been described as a "small" fault line through the area, somewhere. No one, not even the experts know exactly where. It doesn’t even have a name, so far as I’ve been able to learn. The geologists estimate the quakes are about 5 kilometers below the surface. Unlike in California, the rocks in this area are old and cold and rigid, so they don’t really cut loose very often. There hasn’t been a really big quake in the eastern U.S. for the past 100 years. That one was impressive, though—an 8.0 that was felt 500 miles away. In this area, the last "big" one was somewhere between a 4 and a 5 in 1988. I didn’t feel that one either. That's probably a good thing.

Catching Up

Sorry I was offline unexpectedly. Partly I was away and partly I had internet access issues. So I'd better catch everyone up on what's happened in the past 3 days.

1. I've seen the first dark-eyed junco (Sunday). It was only one, no doubt a scout. The timing for its arrival is just about average--2 days earlier than in 2006 but 9 days ahead of 2007 (which was late).

2. The nights are now falling into the upper 30's. I have had a frost. Neighbors in lower areas have had a killing freeze. It's chilly enough this morning that a front moving through could, theoretically, bring some snow flurries--except that it's been so dry and the front is so weak that it's unlikely any precipitation will reach the ground.

3. Action at my feeders is starting to pick up. I haven't had anything unusual yet, just the usual suspects: Red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, black-capped chickadee, Carolina chickadee, tufted titmouse, blue jay, white-breasted nuthatch. I haven't seen a red-breasted nuthatch yet, though several have been sighted nearby.

4. I have a very annoying grey squirrel at my feeders. I've been wondering why the seed is disappearing so quickly when the feeder action is still kind of limited. Now I know. Jabba the Hut of a grey squirrel sits in the middle of the feeder, lazes back on his haunches and stuffs himself.

5. The leaves continue to fall (hooray!) and I can now see just a teeny little bit of the very top of the mountain to the west of me. Okay, so it's not much yet, but my view is beginning to return. At this point, I'd estimate that about 20% of the leaves around me have fallen. Winter is coming!

Hawk silhouette guide for free!

The Hawk Migration Association of North America and The NorthEast Hawk Watch, a regional chapter of HMANA, have partnered to distribute a silhouette guide to hawks of the eastern (and most of the central) U.S. The guide is available for free Here as a .pdf file for non-commercial use. If you like the guide enough to want a laminated version, we're going to charge you $4. You can order that one here.

The artist is Paul Carrier, who for many years was the artist who created all the drawings for our journal, Hawk Migration Studies, of which I am the editor. Eventually, the journal went to photographs instead of drawings, but I will always have a soft spot for Paul's fine drawings.

The silhouette guide is 2-pages and shows hawks as they appear when soaring overhead, which is how most hawkwatchers see them. I can still remember the first time I saw a Cooper's Hawk sitting on a wire, years after I'd started hawkwatching and years after I was comfortable identifying them in migration. I couldn't identify the thing. It wasn't flying. For most people, though, identification works in just the opposite way. They see something sitting and identify it in a fieldguide. Then if they go hawkwatching, they end up being flummoxed, because birds they can readily identify sitting someplace look entirely different on the wing and (usually) overhead.

So this guide is designed to identify hawks when the only field marks you can see are the ones on the underside of the bird. There's also a little text to describe what to look for and views of the birds as they are heading directly at you. You will also find see the difference in hawk shapes among the major families of hawks.

The drawings are excellent--more of Paul's great work--and I highly recommend the guide. And after you've downloaded the guide, why not take a look around the HMANA Web site at http://www.hmana.org/ and see what else we have there.

The photo today was taken last Sunday and shows the lane heading up to my cabin. The color has changed a lot this week. I'll have a newer photo of it on Monday.

Ferns in sunshine

Even the ferns are turning color in the woods right now. I came across many of these colonizing a steep bank on my Sunday walk. These are the Lady fern, one of the most common in northern temperate climes like mine.

This fern was much prized by the Victorians during the Victorian fern craze. This species is probably the most common fern species I see around Roundtop. I’ve read that I could divide a plant in the spring and replant it up at the cabin, but I have an aversion to taking anything I find in the forest. That doesn’t keep me from being tempted, at least occasionally, though.

Of all the plant families, I think ferns are my favorite, though fungi are close. Often, identifying ferns isn’t a particularly easy exercise. There are many species and many of those are similar to each other. Reading about how one species is separated from another very similar species usually gets very technical very quickly, and sometimes I just zone out or give up. Sometimes, even when the descriptions use words I understand, they use those words in unusual ways, and I end up even more confused.

I love knowing what species of all plants are found around Roundtop, but I’m not about to make myself crazy over it when I can’t. Not knowing doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of their beauty. Nothing could do that.

A little Appalachian glow

This morning’s photo is a little early morning Appalachian-glow over on Nell's Hill. I suppose the correct term is alpenglow, but I’m not in the Alps. Although I took this photo on Sunday morning, the leaves have changed even more in just 3 days. I’m already starting to hope that some good color will remain by the time this weekend rolls around. A cold front will move through tomorrow night, and it will depend on how strong and windy that is.

The dry leaves make a brittle sound at the slightest breeze. The first time I heard it again this fall, I looked behind me, wondering if someone or something was there. It took me a moment to realize what it was. You’d think after all these years that I wouldn’t be surprised the first time I hear the sound again after a year’s absence, but I somehow I always am.

The first of the leaves are already starting to fall. Every morning I have to brush off the car before I head out for work. When the leaf drop is well along, I will be ankle deep in leaves. At this point, they are still just scattered across the driveway.

It certainly is true for me that each season makes me feel as though the old is suddenly new again. Although I've now lived through many changes of season, I fully enjoy the freshness that each one brings with it. Whether it's hearing the scratch of leaves in the breeze again or finding the driveway strewn with shades of yellow and red, it really doesn't matter. It's that sense of newness again that always takes me just a little by surprise that I appreciate. Too often daily life has a degree of sameness to it that can leave me in a bit of a rut. The seasons gently jolt me out that rut and remind me that life does change. Always.

Leaf and fern

Before anyone asks, I did not place this leaf atop the fern. It was like this when I found it.

In fact, when I first saw this leaf, I was too far away to realize what it was. I simply saw this bright red "something" as I walked along the path between the mountains on Sunday. From a distance, it looked a bit like a flower, and I wondered what could possibly be blooming that was so large and so bright. And then I saw the fern and wondered if the "flower" had poked up between the fronds of the fern, perhaps protected by it, and then I finally saw it wasn’t a flower at all but a bright red leaf sitting on the fern.

Perfect, isn’t it?

As lightly as the leaf rests on the fern, I suspect it hadn’t been there for very long, nor, I suspect, did it remain there for long, as I think the slightest breeze would move it. And so my finding it sitting there was about as lucky as winning the lottery would be.

The leaf is a red maple. It’s one of the most abundant hardwoods, and one that can thrive under a variety of soil types. You can identify this leaf by its 3 or 5 lobes. This one almost qualifies for 5, if you count the little points just off the side to the top. The opposite lobes are paired, which means the leaf is the same on its right side as on its left, and it has those little teeth along the leaf’s margin. You can make maple syrup from this variety, but it doesn’t have the higher sugar content of the other commercial varieties.

The fern is a Christmas fern, so named as it is still green around Christmas time and was used, especially in Victorian times, as a Christmas decoration. It’s very common in the wet woods on the steeper slopes down in the valley. And since the plant likes steeper slopes, the ferns can be used for soil conservation, because after the first frost, they will flatten to the ground, holding fallen leaves on the slope so they can rot and become new soil.

But all that pales next to the simple beauty of a red leaf sitting in sunlight atop a green fern on an October afternoon.

A walk on Sunday

Here on Roundtop, the weather this past weekend could hardly have been any better. The sky was clear, the wind calm, the temperature pleasant. It was fall at its best. Dog and I took advantage of it. On Sunday afternoon we walked through the forest in the narrow valley between Roundtop and Nell’s Hill. We didn’t see another soul. We never do.

Dog is a veteran hiker and backpacker, though we are a bit incompatible in our walking styles. He never wants to stop. I want to take pictures.

The leaf change is not yet at its peak, but the color is still pretty good and improving every day. I’m starting to think that pinning down the "peak" of fall color is harder to do than you might expect. In this area at least, I have many peaks. Some leaves are still pretty green. Travel 100 yards, and the color is suddenly well along. Some tree species are very yellow; others not so much.

On Sunday morning I woke up, turned over, looked out the window and saw that the woods had turned yellow literally overnight. That’s when I decided a walk into the valley would be my day’s priority. I waited, somewhat impatiently, until early afternoon to begin the walk because I’ve learned that the sun needs to be higher to penetrate between the two mountains. If I leave too early in the day, the light isn’t yet right.

Our first stop was along this old pond along Beaver Creek. Dog thought the weather fine enough for a swim. I stayed dry. Blue jays screamed through the forest, announcing our arrival. Perhaps as a result, we didn’t see many other animals. Dog found a gray squirrel that was in no hurry to run away, which thrilled him. The squirrel soon escaped up an oak tree, leaving Dog to stand with his front feet as high up the tree as he could reach.

We saw many ferns on our walk; most were sword ferns or common polypody ferns. Some of these are yellowing, some are still green. Even though it hasn’t rained for a week or more now, the valley still had wet spots from mountain run-off or small springs. Here, we saw opossum, deer and raccoon tracks, as well as turkey and smaller birds.

While I was walking, I was trying to remember how often I walk along this valley, and I think it only amounts to 6-8 times a year. I’d love to be able to walk it at least once a week, so I could really see the ebb and flow of the seasons down here. I know that’s not realistic. Between weather and work and other activities, I know I can’t make that happen. But perhaps I could make this walk 30-40 times a year if I made it more of a priority. It’s worth a try.

Summer and fall

Everywhere I turn, I see a little summer, a little fall. Fall is here, but traces of summer remain. The two sit side by side sometimes, like good friends or at least like familiar adversaries of long standing.

Today, it reminds me, a little, of different generations, of how the new generation gradually takes over from the older one. And then one day, only the newer remains and life is different than it was before.

For me, the forest around me and the seasons around me, are my greatest teachers. There is nothing of knowledge worth learning that I can’t learn by observing nature. I see parallels everywhere that teach me how to deal with or accept some aspect of my life away from the heartbeat of the forest.. I can’t imagine living any other way. I can’t imagine how people get through a day without it.

Solace and teacher. Summer and fall. Old and new. It’s all here.

Quieting

After a few chilly nights, the leaves in lower reaches around Roundtop are developing quite a bit of color. Higher areas are still pretty green, though it’s a deathly looking green, not the lush shades of summer.

The quiet around me grows ever quieter, as birds leave and their numbers drop. The insect chorus is much diminished, too. I am surprised to hear any at all, but some are still out there. After dark, I can now see my breath against the brightness of my headlamp. For a few moments that seems novel again, after months without it. I huff and puff and watch my breath smoke as Dog looks at me as if I’ve gone crazy.

Sounds that were muffled in summer after traveling through millions of leaves are now more distinct because there are fewer leaves to muffle them. I can hear a distant freight train rumble and its whistle blow, and then the rumble fades in the distance. In summer, the whistle is all I can hear. I am fortunate to live where quiet is always the rule, no mater what the season. In winter, sometimes the quiet can even feel too quiet, and a distant sound is a reminder that I am not really alone. At such times, a distant sound is welcome and feels almost friendly.

But for now and for most times, I enjoy the quiet and the quieting of the land around me. It’s like that deep, relaxing breath just before falling asleep at night. The one where you know sleep is only a moment away.

Last of the light

I’ve finally figured out why I’ve had trouble this week finding light good enough for my daily photographs. It’s the new daylight savings time.

When I first started this blog, we still operated under the old daylight savings time that ended earlier in the fall and started later in the spring. The result for me was that just at the point where I couldn’t take evening photos any longer, we made the time change, and I was able to take my daily photos in the morning for a while. This lasted about a month, and then it became too dark on workdays for either morning or evening photos. So I would take a week’s worth of photos on weekends and dole them out through the week.

But now that we’re on this new daylight savings time, I am already at a point where I can’t get decent light in either the morning or evening for my daily photos. I didn’t have any in-between switch from evening to morning photos before losing the daylight altogether. Why wasn’t I informed??

So please bear with me while I make the switch from taking daily photographs to taking all my week’s photos over the weekend. I’m just getting too old for all this drama.

Beautiful and deadly

I’m fairly certain this lovely, nearly pure white mushroom is one of the Amanitas, frequently called the deadly Amanitas as though the phrase is a single word. I believe it’s a Destroying Angel, though I’m less certain of that. With Amanitas the choices are wide and varied. This one was 4-5 inches tall, actually small by Amanita standards.

In any event, Amanitas are among the showiest and deadliest of the mushrooms. In southeast Alaska along the Chilkoot Trail, I found some nearly as tall as my shin, with a cap the size of a dinner plate. Now, those were impressive. Early fall is a good time to find them, partly because the forest floor is visible once the annual undergrowth begins to thin out and partly because September and October is the time when many appear.

Several species of Amanitas are called Destroying Angel. None are good in salads, as you might expect from the name. They are found up and into early November, throughout North America, in mixed woods, under or near trees. They can be reliably identified by spore prints, but I don’t touch them. Reading about death by mushroom (vomiting followed by diarrhea, cramps, and kidney and liver dysfunction leading to death) does that to me. If there is ever the perfect time to take only photographs and leave only footprints, the Amanitas make me extra sure that’s all I do.

Apple Harvest Festival

My big excitement this weekend wasn’t around the cabin for once. I went to the National Apple Harvest Festival in Arendtsville (pronounced like arent’s ville). The festival has been around for ages, though it’s only recently been named the National Apple Harvest Festival. I’ve always loved it, because it’s set in an old fairgrounds among mature pine trees at the base of a mountain. The pavilions all look as though they were built in the 30’s, and it’s like stepping back into a long-past time.

I’ve avoided attending for several years because the festival has grown so popular and crowded that I haven’t enjoyed it as much. But I’ve missed going, so this year I decided to brave the crowds and go anyway. Even so, my plan was to hit the craft and food booths early on Sunday, eat lunch and then leave in the hopes that I would avoid the worst of the crowd. I didn’t actually avoid the crowds, but my plan worked pretty well, overall.

The food booths are spectacular. You can get apple dumplings, apple crisp, apple pizza, funnel cakes, soft pretzels, cider, homemade soda and who knows what else? I only ate my way around about half of the fair. I think I won’t wait so long to go back again.

Friday Mishmash

It’s probably just me, but with the cooler than normal temperatures over at least the past 2 weeks (not to mention the summer), I expected that the fall color change would be a little further along than it is. Oh, I can find certain trees with some color change, but when I look at the mountain as a whole, it’s not very far along.

Other signs of fall are in full swing, though. So far, I’ve managed not to kill any of the dozens of squirrels that dart in front of my car’s path, all with nuts in their mouth. Many are not so lucky. Not a day goes by that I don’t see a new one or two killed somewhere along my driving route.

And fall hawkwatches have already passed the manic glory days of Broadwing season and are settling in for the long haul of 2 more months to migration season. Hawk counters frequently add interesting tidbits and sightings to their daily count statistics. Here’s one I found from Blueberry Hill in Granville, Massachusetts. The counter reported a "young Red-tailed Hawk playing with a purple toy balloon [on September 19]. The bird dove on the balloon several times, finally popping it with its talons." I’d sure love to see photos from that one.

No rain is predicted for this weekend, so I will be out and about (I hope) in the forest as much as I can be. Fall is too short to waste it indoors.

Angry Sky

Doesn’t this look like an October sky? At least this is what I think of when I think of October skies. I think of big, dark clouds interspersed with blue sky and cumulous clouds, racing to reach the far horizon. I think of weather that changes from moment to moment, temperatures that feel roasting in the sunshine and frigid in the shade.

So in accordance with this new month we’re in, I’m posting a month-appropriate photo. Gone are the flowers and blooms. Now comes the changeable sky of October.

This morning’s Harrisburg Patriot News has a front page article, "A frightening forecast for Pennsylvania’s climate." The article says a new report from the Union for Concerned Scientists indicates snow cover in Pennsylvania will become a thing of the past and that skiing and snowmobiling "could become nearly impossible" in the next few decades unless we vastly reduce the heat-trapping gases that cause the change. For me, this is hardly new news, but this does mark the first time I’ve seen the local paper explain the problem in such stark terms. I hope the message doesn’t get lost in the swirl of our economic mess and the Presidential campaign.

And the message still needs to get through to the average person. Last night I was returning to the cabin after an evening meeting. For the first time since May, it is dark when I drive back to the mountain. And what do I see? In a large field that is now the site of several large homes (they’re not quite large enough to be McMansions but almost) all built within the last 2-3 years, the homes are completely lit up. Each of the many windows has an electric candle. There are lights at the front door, lights over the 3-car garage, lights at the entrance to the driveway, lights on a single pathetic tree in the front yard. It’s so bright I could read by the light of those lights. Now here’s the odd part. Just a quarter of a mile up the same road, I pass an area of older homes, most smaller, some quite a bit smaller, and what do I see? Hardly a light anywhere. If the people are home, I see interior lights. In about half the cases, there’s a single porch light or a front door light. And that’s it.

The homeowners of the smaller homes are quite content to use electricity only where they need it. Those homes are even closer to the mountain and have forest or mature trees behind them that closes in on the properties, yet they don’t feel the same need that the people in the large homes in the middle of an open field have to surround their living space with brightness. What’s that about? Is it simply a case of "look at me! Look at my big house"? Are they afraid (something) will get them if they turn off their lights? One light on a house compared with 30 blazing lights on a house? Is it any wonder we’re in so much trouble?

One evening

I started out on a brief foray into the woods and surrounds last evening. The weather is still undecided from one moment to the next. Will it rain? Will the sun come out? Will the sun be out while it’s raining? Will I walk into a fog bank and never find my way out?

Last evening I experienced the majority of the weather events—minus only tornado and snow—that Roundtop experiences. In less than an hour, I was pummeled by rain, pelted by hail (very briefly), surprised by thunder and lightning, encased in fog and then finally treated to sunshine. Unsettled hardly begins to describe it, or me for that matter.

And yet, there was so much to see. The light went from breathtakingly exquisite to dead and dull—often in just the time it took to raise my camera. I didn’t expect to find many fungi just yet, figuring it would take another 24 hours after the rain for them to emerge, but I was wrong. Even in spots where I rarely find fungus, I found some. Fall leaf colors deepen almost perceptively in front of my eye.

Sometimes I think, how can anyone want to live in a city and never see all this? How anyone not want to be outside in a natural world when every moment vibrates with colors and light and things that dwarf any artistic expression we poor humans attempt? Sometimes I want to live in a tent outside because even the cabin feels as though it shields me too much from the forest around me.

Passages

Flowers are becoming few and far between here now. Asters of one color or another are still fairly reliably seen. That’s about it. This was, I think, an exceptional year for wild blooms. The spring rains and moderate summer temperatures were a good recipe for nearly everything, producing blooms both numerous and large.

For much of the warm season, it seemed I couldn’t turn around without finding something new. I might stumble through thistles and emerge to find a patch of wild geraniums, as thick as if planted in a garden. Wild raspberry bloomed large and purple in the deep of the forest. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only one to see a bloom as it grew happily away from the eyes of others. I shall miss that, the surprise of finding something beautiful where I least expected it.

Autumn, of course, has its own rewards, as does the winter to come. But for just a moment, I will lament the passing of the summer blooms and hope I shall see them again when next they fill the forest with color.

Rainy Weekend

Rain lasted all weekend here at Roundtop. A few times it threatened to clear, but within 5-10 minutes the rain would start again. The rain was needed, and it fell mostly as a nice gentle rain. I’m ready for it to be over.

A couple of times while I was walking Dog or Baby Dog, I saw a few fall warblers, but without binoculars it was too far and too dark and dreary to identify them. By the time I got back to the cabin and returned with binoculars, they were gone. A few deer poked their noses out of the forest to crop grass or simply stand in the open for a few moments, but even they didn’t seem to have much ambition. This year’s crop of fawns have mostly lost their spots, though they are still pretty small.

Some leaves are turning into their fall colors, though not the ones in today’s photo. The forest understory is thinning out. I can see the ground again for the first time in several months. My "green box" of foliage that surrounds me in summer is getting larger the greenery thins, and I no longer feel quite so confined by it. It will still be a month or so before I can see the mountain to my west again but at least I can see 50 feet or so now.

I was as lazy as a slug this weekend, no doubt affected by the rain and the dark skies. The dogs were little better, lolling at my feet, sleeping about 23.5 hours of the day. I could say I was simply following the pattern of the natural world around me this weekend, but even I don’t buy that one. I was as lazy as a slug, and there’s no getting around it.

Rainy Friday

The time of the year has come when it is now too dark for me to take a photo in the morning before I leave for work. I will miss that. For a few weeks yet I'll still be able to take an evening photo, so the photos I post will only be 12 hours old or so. But in another month even that will be gone, and then it will be time to try and take a week's worth of photos on the weekends. I've never been able to perfect that routine.

This morning I have a nor'easter blowing rain from the east. The weather people say I can't call this a hurricane as the storm doesn't have "tropical characteristics." But on the mountain where I sit, this storm doesn't look any different than Hannah or Gustav or Ike. One storm or another is supposed to keep my weekend a rainy one. The area can use the rain, so I'm not complaining, though I am looking forward to seeing what comes after the storm.

I expect that a storm like this will push the weather, the migrants and the animals even deeper into fall, and that's what will be interesting to see. So until the weather clears, I will busy myself with the never-ending indoor chores that I don't enjoy nearly as much as playing in the outdoors. The dogs will curl around my feet, and the cats will cuddle close, prentending to be cold. I'll have a cup of tea in the afternoon and later, perhaps a glass of wine. It won't be so bad.

Fall colors

Fall is starting to work color into the green leaves around the mountain. It’s still early in the process, but the basics seem right to hope for a season with extra-good color for a change. Weather in spring and summer dictates how intense (or not) the fall color will be. The best recipe for good fall color is a moist spring, followed by a cool summer and clear days and cool evenings in the early fall.

So far, that’s pretty close to what I’ve seen here this year. I do wonder how the 30 days without rain in August will play into this equation, but the leaves and plants most affected by that seem to have withered and fallen already. In any event, the signs pointing to good color are far better than they’ve been for the past two years at least and perhaps longer. I’ll keep you posted.

For the past several nights and mornings, I've heard both the Great-horned owl and Screech owls calling down in the valley. Though I can hear these calls in the summer, I associate them more with fall. Perhaps its simply that once the insect chorus fades away, the distant echo of owls can be heard again. The forest grows ever more quiet with each passing day. The dawn chorus is mostly gone, except for an occaisonal phoebe. The insect chorus is also fading, and I get the sense that everything around me is starting to prepare for the long sleep of winter. It's time for me to think about doing the same thing, to tighten the windows and secure the doors, to make the cabin tight again.

The rythmn of the seasons are more evident here in the woods than they are outside it. If I forget, the forest is always there to remind me once again.

the Black Witch

This photo of the Black Witch moth (ascalapha odorata) is not as good as the one I posted yesterday, though I think you get a better indication of its giant size in this photo. I also have good news about this sighting. Both BugGuide.Net and the Butterflies and Moths of North America sites have accepted my sighting record! Butterfliesandmoths.org will update their state maps in January to include York County as the second spot in Pennsylvania where this moth has been seen. I feel as though I’ve just used up 30 seconds of my 15 minutes of fame!

So now that Seabrooke identified the moth for me, I’ve been doing some research about this fascinating moth. It’s the largest moth, perhaps the largest insect, found north of Mexico. No doubt because of its extraordinary size, the Black Witch has a long and rather checkered folklore to accompany it. It’s also known as La Sorciere Noire, as well as the even more ominous Mariposa de la Muerte. Virtually all the common names allude to death, witches, sorcerers and the like. The most benign common name was Mah-Ha-Na in Mayan, which means "may I borrow your house" as it is not uncommon for these things to find their way indoors.

The Black Witch is common in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley, migrating north out of Mexico and Central America. They have been found in all 50 states, though Alaska only has a single record, apparently.

Death myths abound surrounding this lovely moth, mostly in force only if the moth gets inside a house. Here’s a few: a sick person will die if this "butterfly of death" enters the person’s house; the person will only die if the moth visits all four corners of the house (I can just imagine the rush to prevent this one); or if someone has already died, the moth is said to be an embodiment of that person’s soul returning to say goodbye.

A few myths are good ones—you’ll win the lottery or come into money if the Black Witch lands above your door and stays there for a while. In the Bahamas they are even call Money Moths or Moneybats. One myth is a funny one—if the moth flies over your head you will lose your hair.

So how did this tropical, far southern moth end up fluttering at my bedroom window? This moth has been confirmed to be seen within the eyes of hurricanes, and since Ike and Gustav both made an appearance here, perhaps instead of a hurricane bird, I got a "hurricane moth." I’m not complaining, and if you’ll excuse me, since I don’t feel ill I’m going to go buy a lottery ticket.

Update on Moth

My guess that my moth photo in today's regular blog entry was a Polyphemus moth was wrong. The correct identification is even cooler and rarer.

My moth is a Black Witch moth, normally a native in the tropics of Mexico and also in our southern states. However, this moth, which is often mistaken for a bat, as I did initially, has been seen at least occasionally in every state in the U.S., including Alaska (once near Auke Bay near Juneau).

I've submitted the record to a couple of moth and butterfly sites. Nina on BugNet has confirmed that this is a Black Witch. I'm still hoping the record will be officially accepted as the first York County record. The moth has been recorded in Allegheny County, and I have to wonder if that record came from the famous moth guy A.J. Holland, who worked at the Carnegie Institute back in the early 20th Century, and wrote what is still my favorite moth book, The Moth Book. (Gotta love that title!)

Thanks to Seabrooke at The Marvelous in Nature for correcting me on this identification. I simply wasn't looking at species that are normally found outside this area as a possible choice. Heaven knows, I had enough choices as it was without looking for moths from the tropics.

The Black Witch moth has a lot of interesting, if somewhat creepy, folklore associated with it, and tomorrow I'll tell you a little bit about some of that.

Thanks again, Seabrooke!

It's never easy. Why do I always expect it to be easy?

Sometimes identifying a species that I don’t know turns out to be harder than I expect it to be. This was true years ago when I was just learning bird species, and it’s true today. For some reason, the field mark that always jumps out at me, and which I’m convinced is the one to focus on, never turns out to be the one I need to identify whatever critter or plant I’m looking at.

That was painfully obvious to me again two days ago. It was evening, just before bedtime, when I heard a noise at my bedroom window. At first, I didn’t even realize the sound was coming from my window. It sounded like a soft and fast rat-a-tat noise. I thought perhaps they were discharging unused paintballs over at the paintball field, but that was long dark. Then I thought my heat had come on, but I haven’t turned my heat on yet. Still, I went over to the heater under the window to feel the baseboard just to be sure. And then I saw it. My first thought was a bat. I thought I had a little fruit bat at my window. How cool! Then I looked again. It was a moth! And not just any moth. It was the biggest most I’ve ever seen in my life. This moth was easily 5+ inches across.

From inside, the underside of said moth was a typical mothy color—various shades of brown. So I rushed outside with the camera, determined to try for a photo. That’s when I got the one you see here. Still, as it was dark outside, and both the flash and interior light affected the moth’s color, I couldn’t really tell what markings it had or much about its colors.

I wasn’t overly concerned, though. I had a semi-decent photo, a good moth book, and really, how many giant moths this size can there be? Wrong. There’s lots of them.

After hours of investigation, my best tentative guess is that this is a Polyphemus moth, one of the largest of the giant silk moths. Here's a link to some nice info and a much better photo of one in daylight. My moth is probably a female, as its antenna isn’t very bushy. I had to lighten the photo somewhat to see the eyespots. What really threw me in the identification is that the edges of this moth’s wings are very worn and raggedy, which I thought was how they were supposed to be. So I was looking for photos of giant, raggedy-edge winged moths.

However, the Polyphemus moth’s flight begins in August and this being late-September, I guess that’s what happens after they’ve been out in the world for a month or so.

The size of my moth fits the size of the Polyphemus, as does the location, the timing of its appearance and the abundance of host plants such as oak, beech, sassafras, hickory and wild cherry. So that’s what I’m calling it—unless any of you have a better idea.

A new season

This morning’s photo isn’t the last flower of summer, on this, the first day of autumn, but in a field that only a month ago was filled with brown-eyed susans, it is now the last one blooming. The days and nights are cooler. The cabin is filled with plants again, and only my very large fig tree remains outside. Bringing that in is a major project, and I just ran out of time this weekend.

I continue to see and be followed regularly by one of the red foxes. I’ve figured out that walking with a dog is what makes the fox less wary. Yesterday, the fox came within 20 feet of us in the early pre-dawn almost-light. The fox sometimes sat down and watched us, once even lay down under a tree for a few seconds. Then it padded behind us, sniffing at Dog’s footprints. So far, it’s been only Dog and not Baby Dog that brings out this behavior in the foxes. Perhaps it’s because Dog strains so much against the leash that he gasps for air, which sounds a little bit like a fox’s bark. Perhaps it’s because he looks like a very large fox himself with his bushy tail, pointed ears and fawn color. Perhaps it’s a gender thing, as he’s male. Perhaps it’s because Baby Dog barks, and the fox doesn’t like that. I don’t know.

In any event, I have decided that for the safety of all concerned, I will not walk Dog in the mornings for a while. I will walk him in the evenings when it is still light and the fox will not be out and around. Dog may enjoy a daylight walk more anyway, and I can sleep a bit later. On some level I will miss the close encounters with a fox, but it’s for the best

Get thee to a hawkwatch

If you have even a slight curiosity about hawkwatching, tomorrow, Thursday and probably Friday are likely to be prime days. We are approaching the peak of the Broad-winged Hawk flight, a small soarer that is one of the few raptor species that likes to fly in a group. On a good day, you can see thousands here in the east. On a good day in the midwest around the Great Lakes, you could see tens of thousands on a single day. On a good day in Texas, you might see 100,000 thousand of them.

These crow-sized hawks are not the world's best fliers, despite their twice yearly migration down into central Mexico. They like to fly the easy way. They like to ride thermals created by warm pockets of air. They don't like much wind, not even a tail wind. The wind breaks up their thermals. So these birds circle and circle, gaining altitude with each circle. When they reach the top of the thermal, they peel out in single file and soar to the next thermal.

For the eastern birds, their route takes them southwest, and they are forever gliding slightly off course, only to readjust their route with every thermal. As a result of this constant readjustment, broadwings can also be notoriously difficult to predict, both as to their exact timing and their location. Certain places are more likely to see large concentrations than others, though even a non-descript cow pasture has the potential to be a broadwing hotspot if the winds take them over it.

Roundtop is not the best broadwing spot in the world, but sometimes and in some years, it has been spectacular. Today I saw 8 late in the day, in an hour's watching. Tomorrow, I hope to spend most of the day on the mountain, hoping that this will be the year I see thousands here. Better broadwing spots in this area are Hawk Mountain and Waggoner's Gap, usually. If you're not a regular hawkwatcher, I recommend either of those spots, or one of the other 30-40 hawkwatch sites in this state alone. Check the Hawk Migration Association of North America Web site (www.hmana.org) for a site near you. Maybe I'll see you on a mountaintop sometime this season.

Leaf in sunshine

I took this photo yesterday when I happened to catch the sun shining through this leaf. To me, the leaf is starting to look a bit faded and not as plump as in the spring. Today clouds darken the mountain, and I was a bit surprised to find that it was too dark for a morning photo. It's that time of the year again, at least on cloudy mornings.

I am finding other signs of impending fall, too. I had't been out on my back deck since the rain two days ago, and last evening I was surprised to find it covered with dead leaves. These are the leaves that turned color during the month without rain. Still, I wasn't expecting leaves to be ankle deep on the back deck just yet.

The dogs and I are seeing the fox every morning. It doesn't always follow us. Sometimes it watches us from a rock or a ditch. Most of the time I wouldn't see it at all except for the eyeshine my headlamps reflects. The dogs see better in the darkness than I do and act up when they see it move.

My blogging may well be a bit spotty for a few days. I'll be hawkwatching. The Broadwings are flying! Yesterday, Hawk Mountain counted over 1000, so they are on the move. I am hoping I find a few over my mountain, too.

The foxes

I am starting to worry about the pair of foxes that live near me. They are becoming rather habituated to people, even to Dog and Baby Dog and me. For the past two mornings, one of them has followed Dog and me on our now pre-dawn walks. And they have not followed at a distance not have they disappeared when Dog or Baby Dog puts up a fuss and I bark orders at the dogs to attempt to quiet them.


It is common for us to see one or both of the foxes. But this trailing and following us, once at a distance of no more than 30 feet, is new. The first time was Monday. Dog and I with the headlamp were up in the north parking lot, heading back to the cabin as we finished our early morning walk. Suddenly Dog lunged against the lead, and I had to hold on with both hands. For a second or so I had no idea what was going on. I thought he'd seen a deer, maybe. Then my headlamp caught the eye shine, and I saw the white tip to the tail, a flash of moving legs.


The fox was likely heading back towards its den after a night of hunting, and I thought the brief, if close, sighting was interesting. Dog continued to lunge on the lead, and I thought he was just being overly dramatic. I tried to keep walking, telling him "no" and "bad dog" and other stupidities.

And then I realized the fox hadn't run off when it simply disappeared out of my view. It was still there. Dog continued to lunge against the lead, half-choking himself on the nylon collar. I kept dragging him away and after 20 yards or so, he settled down a bit, and I thought the incident was over. Then I saw the fox again, behind us, trotting, stopping, looking. Eventually, I got Dog and myself back to the cabin--me with aching arms.


This morning it happened again, twice in fact. This time the fox was no more than 30 feet away. I first saw it among rocks in a low area. Dog lunged, as he did before. The fox looked at us with what seemed like curiosity, trying to get a better view. Perhaps it was trying to figure out why we were there. Perhaps it thought itself hidden by the near darkness. Perhaps it smelled the doggie treats in my pockets. Perhaps it smelled something familiar about Dog's canine smell. It also occurred to me that Dog's half-choked gasps sounded similar to the fox's bark--all air and little voice. So perhaps that's what sparked its curiosity. My voice and dog's lunging didn't cause it to immediately run off, but we did get back to the cabin without further incident.


Then when I took out Baby Dog, we saw the fox again. Baby Dog barked and did her funny little hop, run and stomp that she does when she's trying to show how fierce she is. This time, the fox kept its distance.

I saw both foxes last Saturday, I think it was, when Baby Dog and I surprised them at the bottom of the lane. One, the female I think, bolted immediately. The other stayed and stared at us for a minute or so. Both looked healthy and beautiful. So I'm not really thinking that some awful disease is the cause of this lessening of natural wariness. I am worried that come hunting season this lack of wariness will result in one or the other of them getting shot, and I hope that doesn't happen. I like having them around, hearing their weird little barks. I would be just as happy if they stopped following us, though.

Passings

Another storm has passed, and fall now feels ever more settled in on the mountain. The early morning had a nip to the air that wasn’t there just 24 hours ago. I am starting to think about closing the cabin windows and wondering if tonight is the night I should bring in the plants that summered happily outside on the deck.

Perhaps not. Perhaps not just yet. Another day, perhaps a week, and then it will be time. For now, I will let them enjoy a few more days of sunshine and let them feel the night’s nip another time or two so they know I did not deprive them of days they might better have enjoyed outside. For them, winter is long enough. The days inside must seem endless and the summers short. In the spring they will look peaked, and I always hope it will warm up fast enough to set them out again before they die. By the time summer ends, they look fantastic and lush, and I want them to hold onto that as long as they can. Another day.

Storm coming, fall coming

Storms are moving through Roundtop again. It was brighter at 6:30 this morning than it was at 7:30 a.m. The approaching storm made it too dark to take a photo amongst the trees in my little corner of the forest. By the time I left the cabin this morning, it was nearly as dark as midnight. Beyond the cover of the forest, the morning looked only a little less dark, but it was bright enough to grab a shot before the sky opened up and the thunder rattled the hills.

I don’t like being away from the cabin when a strong storm of any kind is overhead. I think it is simply because I feel I will be able to do something if a tree falls on it or the basement fills up. I don’t like being at work with the worry in my head that something might have happened and that I won’t be able to see it or deal with it until I get home. Now, the odds are that nothing has happened, but until I know nothing has happened I won’t be able to relax.

Indeed, the leading edge of this storm has already passed, and autumn will blow in behind it. In the space of 3 days, the season has turned. Summer humidity is gone and the forecast shows no indication it will return. The nights now call for a blanket on the bed (albeit a light one), and the cats suddenly want to cuddle.

Hurricane Hanna’s breeze brought down most of the drought-withered leaves. They now litter my lane like a harbinger of the fall to come. The other result of that is that the forest suddenly looks green again, instead of green and yellow, but the shade is now that deep, dull green that is the last green before the leaves turn bright and then fall.

Fall is a favorite time of year for me. I like the weather. I like the coolness. I love the glorious shades around me. I like the changes I can see each day. Summer seems too static to me, too unchanging (though on some level I know summer is not as static as I feel it to be). Fall has drama but it's an ongoing drama, not the lightning bolts of summer. Fall suits me more and gives me nearly 2 months in which to enjoy it. I will revel in it. Happy fall!