One of the Guys

Spring Valley Wildlife Area

We are wrapping up a stretch of those rare autumn days—those seemingly more wonderful than the fleeting days of summer. For they visit us after the frost has fallen, when summer has packed her bags and moved on.

Friday’s forecast promised sunshine and blue skies--uncommon for November in the Ohio River Valley. Where the usual day is clouded and gray, and each piles up, one upon the last, neither freezing nor warming, until we long for any change— even one that brings with it something white.
Knowing the weekend days would undoubtedly be overrun with revelers of all sorts grabbing what, with each week’s passing more certainly is the last of its kind, I chose to make an early start ahead of the rush—packed a lunch, grabbed binoculars and camera, and for good measure, tucked a can of pepper spray into my pocket.
Remote places hold the best treasures. The winding trail that leads deep into the woods, until all traces of another disappear, is the walk I find most worth the taking. Yet, the lone car left by the side of the road marks my place on the map. And imaginings scare me.

The parking lot was just as it said—unmarked and three tenths of a mile on the right. The small gravel pad tucked several yards off the quiet road backed up to dense woods and what I hoped was the wildlife area in which I intended to spend the day. I tentatively pulled in.
It was only mid-morning, and already I found it filled with vehicles. Rolling slowly past pickup after pickup, some with large, empty metal cages stacked in the back, and their drivers nowhere in sight, I found three men gathered behind the last, sipping from the silver tops of their thermoses a steamy, hand-warming beverage. They wore outfits of all sorts. But, all were layered for warmth and all were trimmed with the color of the season, blaze orange.

(this story continues here)

Spring Valley Lake,
Waynesville, Ohio

Quiet on the Mountain

“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself,
What if I had never seen this before?
What if I knew I would never see it again?"
~Rachel Carson

"Muddlety"

The blue and white school bus slows and comes to a stop at the top of a hill, the gravel road beyond winding down and disappearing into the cool, white cloud surrounding us on this very foggy morning. After a week’s travels on the back roads of West Virginia, to the north, south, east and west of Opossum Creek, peering through steamy windows, as the passengers, birders, load and unload themselves at every stop, I could not tell you on this day, exactly where we were—
somewhere, though, wonderful.
A mountaintop I’ll remember as “Muddlety.”


Several days’ rain has left these woods thick and rich —
new spring green, strong shades in leaves bursting from buds along every branch. Mosses, luxuriously dense and soft, run up and over every still surface. Ferns, stems bent, heads rolled as they slowly lift layers of leaves from the ground, stand in clusters across the forest floor.

Dwarf Ginseng, Panax trifolius

Cranesbill, Geranium sp.

From the edge, where I watch, knee-deep in brilliant yellow blossoms, vines hang in tremendous tangles, brown ropes stitching tree to tree.
Steep hillsides step away from the gravel road,
rocky ledges tumble toward it.

Misted spiderweb and Golden Ragwort

And through the fog, there is bird song.
This mountain drips with life.


Barely more than black silhouettes against the white sky, small birds dart between the treetops overhead--fine forms, intent upon seeing who has come to these woods, in song, calling to them on this foggy morning. Our guide, again, calls into the mist, and one flits close with an answer. Singing proudly, long and sweet, from a branch just a few feet away--a Cerulean Warbler, sky blue strokes upon white.
Out of this mist, comes beauty.
The song that fills this space has wings.

Foamflower, Tiarella sp.

West Virginia White, Pieris virginiensis

Wrapped up in the magic of that West Virginia mountain,
I could have stayed there all morning, happy to sink into its rich bed of life, pull the cover over my head and rest--
imagine all I’d heard about destruction and lost habitat within the Appalachians, to be somewhere else.

Red Eft,
juvenile stage of Eastern Red-spotted Newt, Notophthalmus viridescens

Somewhere not as wonderful as this.
Somewhere I would never see.

land snail

Looking back from the valley, beyond the gravel road, the logging creeps up the slopes of Muddlety.
Once bare, the blasting will begin.
Her future promised to coal—
her life upturned, and left—
mountaintop removed, valley filled,
with more than waste rock and coal dust.
Filled with the quiet of a silent spring.

(click to enlarge)

“We stand now where two roads diverge.
But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair.
The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy,
a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.
The other fork of the road, the one less traveled by,
offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth."
~Rachel Carson from Silent Spring

Read more information about Mountaintop Removal Mining here.
Get involved with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition here.

Capturing the Eft
photo by Julie Zickefoose

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See more Camera Critters here.

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The Field of Dreams

Reflection

I have retired.
Not in the social security sense—
that age-determined status that promises perpetual care,
the reward for life’s contributions already made.
But in the sense of taking a changed path—
to determine each day the direction for myself,
to discover that contribution yet within me.

Damsel in the grass

From a car parked beside mine, a man left the gravel lot and walked off into the woods on a narrow trail barely visible through the eagerly reaching, green spring grass. On his back, lashed to a large pack that I suspected of hiding a camera, long-legged photographic paraphernalia swung with each step, as he disappeared into the undergrowth. It is a lovely spot where a broad lake attracts folks of all sorts for fishing and birding and thought. Yet, his determined stride had taken him away from all that. The object of his pursuit, uncertain to me.

painted turtle

I had come there to walk the trail as I had always walked it.
A wide, raised bank adjacent to the water ran a straight course north. On one side, sycamore trees bent low over the still surface, their gnarled fingers pointing to newly emerging lily pads, while on the other, turtles flopped, one after another, from the sunlit spot on a log into the safety of the steadily thickening green swill. Times before, I had watched from this edge as swans approached and posed for my camera to create a picture framed by the sycamore’s reflective arching arms. On this day, however, the geese commanded the lake. In the distance, the faded ring of cattails rimming the marsh drew the barest line between two oceans of blue.
For a moment, a fancily clad crane fly drew me several feet off course, as she bumbled about on long, striped legs before finally coming to rest clumsily on a thorny cane at my feet. Above me, a pair of blue-gray gnatcatchers flitted in and out of the branches, their wheezy call the only sound along the trail.

Mute Swans on Spring Valley Lake

Canada Goose

Phantom Crane Fly

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher

teneral damselfly

Returning to my car, I was reminded again of the man who had turned from the lot and set off with such purpose into the nearby woods. He had come, conquered and gone, all in the time that I had wandered the water’s edge.

So, I ducked past the brushy boughs hiding its course into the woods and followed the path he had taken, slowly and quietly, to its very end in a farmer’s field. The dirt was freshly plowed, dark and warm under the afternoon sun and it rose to a point on the horizon where earth brown met sky blue.


Some wait for fields of roses.
Days filled with dandelions will be good enough for me.

Dandelion seedheads

Heard Only

Lake Nettie in the Morning

I wake this morning to the sound of tree frogs.
Warm, heavy air has been spread over the Ohio River valley like a scratchy wool blanket that I would peel back and crawl out from underneath, if I could.
The weight is almost stifling—the dampness on my skin, constant.
But in the hush of dawn, those few brief moments before daylight brings the rustling of leaves and the chorus of songbirds to these woods, I recall the sounds of northern Michigan—the birds heard only, not seen.
And I remember in a dream the richness their simple song can bring to a cool and silent night.

Just beyond NettieBay Lodge, our home-base for a week of Birding & Botany in beautiful Presque Isle County, a narrow gravel lane draws a straight line north past woods that give way to water, then become woods once more. Thick and brushy, an undergrowth of alders rims the single-lane road. Peering past them, white cedars with buttressed bases can be seen standing in several inches of dark swamp water. As daylight fades, the dim woods become darker still.
The sounds from beyond the road’s edge are sharp and strong as we walk past—a veery’s strident call.
Soon, the distant song of a whip-poor-will is answered by another, much closer, who sings faster and stronger, from deep within the alder thicket. This narrow lane with its dimming light is the only opening in these very dense woods--the perfect place for the wide-gaped birds to wait and snatch some tasty moths drawn to this clearing in the brush.
High overhead, against what little faint blue remains, an almost imperceptible twitter betrays the dusk display of a woodcock. Around the sky he tumbles on whistling wings, then drops to the ground in a small, grassy clearing beside us to resume his courtship dance for the benefit of one we cannot see. We leave his persistent peent at the edge of the dark woods and wander further down the road.
The sound of frogs has grown loud and shrill. Spring peepers fill the wetland. Gray tree frogs’ calls resound all around. Here, amidst the foreign, I find the familiar—what I know so well of the warm spring nights spent beside my vernal pool. Yet, to listen for birds at this water’s edge, their calls are overpowering.
Stepping away, we wander slowly back to the car and roll softly down the lane, windows down, combing the night air, soaking in the sounds of northern Michigan. The whip-poor-wills are now perched at the road’s edge. In the moonlight, their red eyeshine eerily flashes in the headlights of our approaching car as they grab insects from their posts beside the road and cross in the beam of our light to the other side.
Lake Nettie is calm and still beyond the door of my cabin. Beneath a clouded moon, the mournful call of a pair of nesting loons spreads across the 278-acre lake. Perhaps more than any other sound, it is theirs that, to me, captures all that is wild and pure of the north woods.
A call, like the others of this night, that is rich and distinctive, revealing of its place.
A call that with it brings a cool breeze to a dream in an Ohio River valley summer night.

Lake Nettie
from NettieBay Lodge

One of the Guys...III

Reflection

(This is part III of a story that begins here.)

While the pheasant dashed between the rows of corn stubble without so much as a pause or backward glance, I pulled the car to the side of the road and waited. The dogs, still running circles in the tangles beside me, apparently had lost him at the road’s edge. And the fact that my vehicle now stood between them and their prey’s low, escaping form had stopped their pursuit in an instant. They ran, tails wagging, back through the fence row in haphazard bounds and were gone.
I rolled off down the road—now beginning to comprehend the great gathering of pickups drawn to a small, unmarked lot, tucked several yards off a quiet, rural road on an otherwise unremarkable Friday morning.


The lot at the lake’s edge was larger and less busy.
Within minutes, I was out on the trail—a wide, mowed, grassy path that ran up the entire south side of the lake, before finally veering off into the woods and joining the marsh beyond. Beside it, thick brush filled a corridor separating the grassy path from the pavement of a well-ridden bike trail.

sycamore leaf on water

basking turtles

I could peek past their branches to see a small, shallow pool where fallen logs collected leaves and spots of sunshine drew turtles from beneath its thick, green surface to bask in an autumn afternoon.

katydid

Autumn Meadowhawk dragonfly on sycamore leaf

Autumn Meadowhawk, Sympetrum vicinum

Familiar Bluet, Enallagma civile

From within each bush, katydids chirped boldly as I walked past, as they and a number of late-flying dragonflies and damselflies warmed their wings and cruised the unshorn edge. And the air was heavy with the smell of fresh mud, still dark and wet, applied to the large mound of straight, pointed sticks erected by the beaver whose muddy tracks I crossed again and again, as I made my way along the grassy path.

Cattails

Spring Valley Lake with blind (far right in distance)

The open water of the lake was broad and blue, rimmed with cattails and fading stems of grass that hid several blinds, strategically situated to look out upon its center, and, in a different season, hide the hunters within. Empty on this day, I tried one on for size. A cozy box of space, its roof was draped with nets and its sides wrapped in layers of mottled, shaded fabric. With random branches fixed to its face and a modest bench, it became a nice place to pass the hours--to see and not be seen. For it would appear that our hunt is much the same —it is just our capture that is different.


Slow, deliberate steps rustled the leaves a few feet off the trail. And sure that its source was smaller than a deer’s browsing, larger than a songbird’s scratching steps, I followed, creeping through the bare branches, hoping to see. Up and over the pavement he scurried, to the thicket and swamp beyond. With ease he left me far behind, snared in the thick, tangled mass.

Where the lakeside trail turned toward the marsh, I stopped. Discordant sounds had begun all around--clearly hounds, whose constant calling grew clear and then faded as pairs turned and tracked their prey. Distant shots rang out. And, the dogs ran on, spreading through the woods like wind on wildfire. Until I sensed a transparency I would not expect to feel in such a wild place. In these woods there was no place to hide.


I met a man in blaze orange, his shotgun ready and hunting knife plainly carried in a sheath at his belt, while his dog sniffed the ground at my feet.

“What’s going on,” I asked, my rather wide-eyed look difficult to conceal.
“Opening day on pheasants,” he replied. “Seen any?”
I hesitated and grinned broadly, in part, exploring the options for my response, and in part, now recognizing the utter uselessness of the can of pepper spray hidden in my pocket.
“You wouldn’t tell me if you did, right?”
“Probably not,” I agreed.
“It’d be a good idea to get some orange on.”
“Yep, I’ll be sure to do that. Thanks.”

And we went our separate ways, hunting--
our separate ways.

Hunter

Hunter of a different sort

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