Local Names for Birds, Part Two

I begin Part Two with a list of a few more local names for birds:

• Bull Bat, Common Nighthawk
• August Bat, Common Nighthawk
• Bee Martin, Eastern Kingbird
• Till & Teal & Teal-Mouse, Tufted Titmouse
• Jenny Wren, Carolina Wren, or maybe some other wren, (Bewick's Wren?)
  
• Thresh, Brown Thrasher
• Leaf Bird, Cape May Warbler (maybe other warblers, and vireos?)
• Pewee Bird, Common Yellowthroat
  
• Joreen, Eastern Towhee

I believe Bull Bat is used over the entire region by many speakers. Variants I have heard include August Bat, because as the speaker told me: "that's when they fly." I heard one speaker born in Giles County refer to the Common Nighthawk as Fall Bat, for the same reason.

When I was a kid I knew of several folks who would find a prominent place of nighthawk migration flight, and these men would aim their shot guns, sometimes rifles, and see how many they could kill. I don't know if any of these folks really believed these birds were bats, but that was the justification they used--sort of ridding the world of vermin I guess. Or maybe it was just an amusement for them. Right now I don't know of anyone who goes out hunting Bull Bats, so I guess that is a wee bit of progress. Of course, sad to say, the migration flights are nothing in number like they were fifty years ago, or even 25 years ago, when I could still see several thousand in an evening before sundown.

As for Bee Martin for Eastern Kingbird, I knew a couple of people who said that name, pointing out one perched on a bean pole. Sure enough it had a wasp in its bill.

I assume Till or Teal or Teal-Mouse is a dialect variant of Titmouse. The pronunciation is with a really long "eee" and some speakers say it with a glide that slides it into two syllables: "tee--eel". I know I have come home to my young time and place when I hear that name. Either that or a time warp is happening again.

I don't really know which wren people referred to when they said Jenny Wren but the only wren around was Carolina Wren. I believe the name came over from England, and there of course it must have referred to "THE wren" (aka, the Winter Wren, here). I'm just guessing, mind you.

Thresh is just a local variant on thrash, or thrasher.

I know a couple of people in Montgomery County, VA right along the New River who called the warbler we were watching a "leaf bird". It was pecking aphids very systematically from under the leaves of maples. The leaves were loaded with aphids, and the Cape May Warblers were chowing. They would just perch on twigs and peck and peck---this made for easy eating. One of the men said "this is what we've always called 'em" when I asked him about the name "leaf bird."
Actually this foraging strategy is quite typical of Cape May Warblers. It's a great way to glean food and store up energy for the long haul to the tropics, and the Cape Mays have already been traveling a long while before they get to our area in September.

The Pewee Bird is the one that started me bird watching at age five. My father showed me its nest. It took me several years to figure out what this yellow-breasted bird was. It also had a black mask. I eventually learned the book name---Common Yellowthroat. I sometimes tell kids this story, and I sometimes tell these kids that because it has a mask it is a bandit bird. I hope they know I'm joking.

The Joreen is a local name for the Towhee in Franklin County. I figure like "towhee" or "chewink" it is an echoic name for the towhee's call notes. I saw three Joreens in the catbriers in Radford this past Saturday, and they all said Joreen not Chewink. I guess the Eastern Towhee is my favorite bird, but ask me another day and I'll mutter something else is.

In a couple of weeks, I'll write a little about local names for insects.

Local Names for Birds, Part One

One day back in June 1984, my Uncle Dallas guided me through some of the farm lands where he was born near Woolwine in Patrick County, Virginia. I was participating in the Virginia Breeding Bird Atlas.

We both heard a Pileated Woodpecker cackling among some tulip poplars up ridge from us. He said, "that's an Indian Hen." My father had always used the name Wood Hen.

My Uncle and I searched some bottom land soggy places for a little while. He said he had seen baby snipe here many years earlier. I knew which species he was referring to....American Woodcock. It is also the species of much local lore and speculation in Franklin County and Patrick County, the most famous I guess...the snipe hunt.

A snipe hunt is a prank to fool a person who knows nothing about snipe or woodcock. As folks have described it to me:

you take the person out into the woods
you give 'em a sack to catch the snipe
you tell the person that you will drive the snipe to 'em
you go home and enjoy a coffee lace or other beverage
the person never gets a snipe in the bag
the person is left "holding the bag"

I know somebody that played that trick on his fiancee. She married the guy anyway. They're still married, now almost 60 years.

Below is a short list of a few species with field guide common name and the local vernacular. There are a couple of sad notions in my head as I write this blog: (1) the saddest: most of the folks who have shared these names are now quite elderly, or have died in recent years, taking these local names and much more with them so to speak, and (2) people who still use the local names, often apologize for using them, saying something like "I don't know what the book name is" or "I only know this name, not the book name."

My Uncle Dallas told me also that he could tell where folks were from just by their accent. Yeah, we can still do that. But what he meant was simply this: He knew a certain person was from Meadows of Dan by their Meadows of Dan accent, since he was from Woolwine...and the number of miles ain't very far between the two places. Transport, radio, TV etc has definitely reduced the number of our accents...but I digress, here's a first short list:

These are all local names I have heard people use in the New River Valley or in Franklin, or Patrick Counties.

Local name, Common name in field guides:

• Keel, Bufflehead
• Mud Duck, Pied-billed Grebe
• Blue Crane, Great Blue Heron
• Shytepoke, Green Heron
• Snipe, American Woodcock
• Yellow Hammer, Northern Flicker
• Indian Hen, Pileated Woodpecker
• Wood Hen, Pileated Woodpecker
• Baldpate, American Wigeon

The name Baldpate of course is in some of the older bird field guides, so one hunter may have been repeating a book name.

I'll post a few more local bird names with another entry soon, and then one about local names for insects.

Clyde Kessler

The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950

Scott Jackson-Ricketts' question in the comments section about amphibian survival after premature emergence brought to mind something I'd been told about once. It's called "The Great Appalachian Storm" of 1950. Because it happened in late November, it probably had little effect on amphibians. But weather.com has it listed as number eight in their "Storms of the Century" list. Read about it here.

It began on November 25 and lasted nearly three days. It started in North Carolina and moved north, and then twisted west. Appalachian states got up to five feet of snow. The record snowfall coincided with what some meteoroligists say was the most geographically widespread windstorm ever to hit the northeast. Because the winds occurred at high tide along the coast, there was destructive flooding as well. It was 26 degrees below zero at Mount Mitchell in North Carolina. (Although I remember when the Rocky Knob ranger station on the Blue Ridge Parkway reported more than 30 below during a horrible winter in the early '80s. Grape vines at Chateau Morrissette were killed by this ferocious cold.) There were 160 deaths as a result of this one storm system.

The Great Appalachian Storm was the Hurricane Katrina of its day. It was the costliest storm ever up til that point, surpassing insurance damage claims for all hurricanes and tornadoes til then. See a pressure map of the storm here.

Cluck surprise

With this post we welcome Mr. Michael Hayslett of Sweet Briar College to the Mountain Naturalist blog. He started the "Vernal Pool Society of Virginia", whose website you can find here. This piece was originally written three years ago for his "Notes from the Field" column online.

The Society is dedicated to promoting conservation and research on vernal pool wetlands, a vital habitat for many threatened species. You can see Mr. Hayslett's work on the mole salamander (Ambystoma talpoideum) at this site.

--Seth Williamson


________________________________________________________


Funny how favorite things seem to find me, no matter where I roam. This bemusement was illustrated recently on a personal outing in which vernal pools were not expected to play a part. I spent several days at the beginning of the New Year camped in solitude atop House Mountain in Rockbridge County. I went up there alone to explore the summits, contemplate my ancestry, and to obtain some much needed renewal of mind, body, and spirit.

On my first full day, I took note of a remnant feature from bygone days when a pasture and orchard thrived in the saddle between the mountain's twin peaks. A round, concrete watering trough of 6X2 feet in size, bore the scrawled message on its rim, "JUNE 3, 1958 A.L.C." Setting at an elevation of 2,700 feet in a montane landscape, and being full of water I thought, "wonder if wood frogs could use this as an artificial breeding pool?"

I never gave it a second thought, until the following morning at 8:30, as I sat fuzzyheaded after a blustery night with little sleep. I thought I heard a hen turkey clucking out in the nearby gap, so I peered out the opening of the shelter and listened closely. Then I heard the distinctive double-note of a lone male Wood Frog, calling from that watering trough below me, that only yesterday was partly covered in ice!

This was certainly earlier in the season than anticipated to hear this sound. In fact, at that elevation, I wouldn't expect to hear this obligate amphibian for nearly another two months. But we had been experiencing an unseasonably warm spell of weather, and the temperature at 8:30 a.m. on the 4th of January, at 2,720 feet elevation in the western mountains of Virginia was only 52ºF! Of course, this was only one early, eager male and not a whole chorus.

I can only wonder if there is, in fact, a breeding population up there and where (if at all) there might be or had been a natural vernal pool in the area. Wood frogs are more mobile than mole salamanders, and they were more capable of monopolizing high-elevation springs and human-made features as alternative breeding sites, especially during the good ole' days of mountaineer homesteads.

Written from the field on 4 January 2005 by Mike Hayslett

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

Postscript: It rained lightly on that same night (with air temperature about 50ºF) and I heard a (different?) wood frog male calling again at 10:00 p.m., this time up slope and not near the water source.

Author's Note: I have seen numerous instances of vernal pool amphibians migrating or breeding outside their expected seasons over the last five years (e.g., spotted salamanders immigrating in early autumn, marbled salamanders emigrating in late spring, etc.), as other researchers have, no doubt.

Many believe that these phenological anecdotes are evidence of global warming effects on local populations of amphibians. Consider also, that on the morning of 5 January, as I prepared to depart my mountain campsite, I found a soil-covered American Toad. She had just emerged from the leaf litter as a result of the warm rains and fog of the previous night!

Full moon snow

Terry Gleason called me last night with a simple request and a hidden agenda.

"Would you go outside and look at the snow and tell me what color it is? Oh, and same with the moon. Then call me back and I will tell you what this is about."

So I bundled up and went crunch-crunching up to our orchard field, following my breath. I expected 'blue' to be the answer, but that's not what I saw. Standing beneath a slightly overcast sky, the moon and I eyed one another for several minutes. The snow around me was slightly pink, the moon a yellowish pink, with lavender undertones. I kept looking for blue, but it just wasn't there.

Back inside, I called in my report to Terry, whose reaction was a tempered approval. He had seen the same thing, though his dominant color was yellow. This was also what he saw on the previously very clear night before.

"So what's the deal, Terry?"

"As you know, I have been looking at full moons all my life, and especially in the winter. It has been a few years since we had snow cover and a full moon, and with the recent arctic air, I expected to see the familiar blue tint. You know, arctic air is the cleanest air we get. But the colors I saw are not about clean. There is something else in the air."

This is speculative, yes, but as with much of the color in our skies, we all know some of it is due to pollution. In the most recent (Jan/Feb) edition of Mother Jones Magazine, there appeared an article on China's rapid industrial growth: "The Last Empire. " Within this lengthy and disturbing description of China's poor environmental record, there stood out one report on a massive sand storm in 2001, a direct result of desertification, rising up over Inner Mongolia, and parts of this sand reaching as far east as Maine, Georgia, and even the Canary Islands.

I guess the point of my bringing this up is that we need to be vigilantly mindful of our shared interest in the health of our small planet. For Terry, his observation was innocent enough, with no expectations. But as we compared notes, the tone of our conversation turned to a sense of loss.

Every time we anticipate our migrant spring warblers, thrushes, vireos, tanagers, are we simultaneously anticipating less? Was our cold winter moon yellow with foreign particulates floating between us? I encourage anyone reading this little article to seek out the Mother Jones issue, and decide for yourself.

Scott Jackson-Ricketts

Winter bats

The article below is reprinted from the Ferrum Nature Society Bulletin. You can visit the Society web site at www.ferrum.edu/fns and subscribe to an e-mail list by sending me a message at tfredericksen@ferrum.edu. Articles for contribution are welcome!

--Todd Fredericksen

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The vast majority of bat species occur in the tropics. Some species, however, have adapted to temperate areas where they face a prolonged winter period with a shortage of food (mostly insects) and cold temperatures that require higher metabolic rates to maintain thermal homeostasis.

The most common solution to this problem is hibernation. Of the 18 species of bats in Virginia, nearly all hibernate to some extent. Some bat species, such as the Eastern Big-eared Bat (Plecotus rafinesquii), only hibernate in the northern part of their range. Many species will hibernate colonially in caves or mines, but some, such as the Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus), prefer to hibernate in buildings.

Most hibernating bats do not feed during the winter and live only off slow-burning brown fat stored during the summer. They often huddle in dense clusters for warmth. In some species, hibernation is interrupted by periods of activity when the bats will awaken to defecate or drink. Hibernating bats are easily aroused by cavers and the higher metabolic rates of awakened bats will deplete their fat reserves. It is best to avoid disturbing hibernating bats for this reason.

The time of entry or departure from hibernacula varies by species. The endangered Indiana Bat (Myotis sodalis) enters its hibernaculum in October and stays until April, while the Small-Footed Myotis (Myotis leibii) will hibernate only during the coldest part of the winter.

Many hibernating bat species breed in the fall, but the females store sperm in their reproductive tract, only becoming pregnant late in the hibernation period. This delayed fertilization leads to the birth of bat pups in April and May, a time coinciding with a high abundance of insect prey.

Another solution to the stress of winter is migration, which is a common strategy in vesper bats (Lasiurus). Many bats will also migrate to the southern part of their range to hibernate, a compromise solution between long-flights and colder temperatures. The Indiana bat migrates 300 miles to limestone caves in the southern Appalachians, but most bat species do not migrate as far. Since Virginia has a fairly mild winter, some bat species, such as the Silver-haired Bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans), will spend the summer in the northern U.S. and Canada and return to Virginia and the Carolinas to spend the winter. The extent of migration and the migratory routes of many bat species is unknown.

During the winter, one may be surprised to find bats flying about at dusk. These are most commonly Red Bats (Lasiurus borealis) or perhaps Big Brown Bats, light-sleeping species that awake when temperatures rise above 55°F to take advantage of winter moths and flies. In the past two years, I have observed bats flying during the first week of January when temperatures have hovered between 60-70° for several days.

Some southern Appalachian webcams

Here are a few good ones:

This one gives a view of Cold Mountain in the Shining Rock Wilderness of the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina.

This is the view from Look Rock in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

This is looking south from Brasstown Bald, the highest peak in Georgia.

And this is looking north from the same spot.

iew of C
Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina

Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program

The Great Smoky Mountains Institute in Tremont, Tennessee is offering a certification course in the natural history of the southern Appalachians. Details are here.

Courses will cover the ecology of the southern Appalachians, bird life, plants, aquatic natural history, reptiles and amphibians, mammals and more.

The classes are focused on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but nearly everything one could learn here is applicable elsewhere in the southern Appalachians. Sounds like a great idea for those who have the time.

Clyde's frosty morning on the New River

With this post I am happy to welcome Clyde Kessler as a contributor to the Mountain Naturalist blog. There are few in western Virginia with an interest in the natural world who are unaware of Clyde's amazing reputation as a birder and naturalist. For boring technical reasons this first post appears under my name, but the words are Clyde's. In a day or two we'll get the technical issues ironed out and he'll thenceforth post under his own name.

--SW

This morning just before 0700, the temperature is 12°F. I am lucky the mean northwest wind hasn’t kicked up yet.

At Riverview Park in Radford, the usual dawn flight of Ring-billed Gulls is following the New River downstream in a long sequence of ragged V’s . Over 700 have eased past the boat landing already. Near the steep bluff across the river, some turkeys are chattering and hitching along under some cedars and through broom-sedge. A few jakes are scratching into some leaves and snow and say some thin puttering quips to each other.

There is a mink scurrying along the opposite shore. I watch it for about a minute until it disappears into a jumble of driftwood beside some scraggly sycamore roots.

Well upstream at a bend of the river are several Canada Geese, Mallards, and a couple of Gadwall, about 50 Bufflehead, one female Green - winged Teal and a dozen or so Hooded Mergansers. Most mornings since Christmas they will usually sit tight on the water or forage there just at the edge of identification by my binoculars.

It is unusual for these waterfowl to be panicked into the air. But something has them on edge, and small groups of about 10 to 15 mallards begin flying up frantically and circling till all the ducks and the geese are overhead and after a few minutes begin exiting the area heading towards Claytor Lake. A killdeer bolts up from the shore, and squeals a few times as it flies away, and heads upstream away from where I am.

I wonder if maybe a stray dog or some hiker is rambling along the shore. Then I think maybe a hawk or an eagle has spooked the waterfowl.

A few minutes later I finally see what had frightened the birds. Two kayaks are floating along the far shore, each with a man wearing a thick dark brown hooded coat. They paddle a while, and then stop near the same driftwood pile where I last saw the mink. One man deftly steps from his kayak, and walks behind the driftwood. He is carrying a large black trash bag.

I cannot really see what he is doing. The two men are talking to each other a lot. The one in the kayak is nodding and lifting his paddle occasionally from the water. The man on shore hands the trash bag to the other man. The trash bag has something bulging at the bottom. I wonder if it is the mink or some other animal.

I figure these two kayakers are checking traps, perhaps set for muskrat or beaver, both species very common along this stretch of the New. Occasionally somebody sets a series of traps along the river, but I didn’t know anyone was still trying. The last person I knew about had quit trapping about five years ago.

Other than those two men, I have the river all too myself because of the cold. Even the traffic noise on I-81 is subdued this morning. It is cold enough in fact that hardly a wren or cardinal had bothered a dawn song today, though I did hear a brief melody from one wren, one cardinal. I had also heard a couple of crazy mockingbirds with a brief splutter of alarms at first light

Just before I decide to drive home I hear a jay-like “queedle” from way up high in the air. It is answered by a high-pitched bunch of notes sort of like somebody playing a quick burst of song on a xylophone. Two ravens are flying across the Riverview soccer field. They fly toward the property that used to host the outdoor drama about Mary Ingles. They fly to a tree and perch above a few cattle.

I look back at the river and see that the men are continuing downstream in their kayaks. I decide to head home for breakfast because I then abruptly realize I feel quite frozen.

So how about a Southern Appalachian Big Year?

We previously reported on Robert Michael Pyle's Big Year for butterflies out west. Pyle is attempting to see as many butterfly species as he can during the calendar year of 2008.

Well, this post is about yet another kind of big year, and it's not Appalachian-related either, but when I read about it, I couldn't help thinking that it would be a good project for somebody here in the southern highlands.

During 2007, Jim Brighton dedicated himself to what he called his Delmarva Photo Big Year. It was an effort to support the American Bird Conservancy's Junin Grebe project. His goal was to photograph as many birds, reptiles, butterflies, dragonflies, damselflies and mammals living in the Delmarva Peninsula as possible. Over the course of 2007 he got 397 photographs, many of which you can see here. The painted lady thumbnailed above is available for sale at his site as a printed glossy in several sizes, along with photos of many other species. Prices are cheap and they're gorgeous -- check it out.

As a bonus, he got state records in Maryland for the furtive forktail and duckweed firetail damselflies, as well as a photo of the King's hairstreak. The latter had been found previously only in a tiny part of Maryland.

He raised $1200, and blogged about his adventures here.

As I paged through his photos and read his blog, what I was thinking was, "Wow. What a cool project!" And also, "I wish I had a job that would let me do this kind of thing."

This would be a wonderful undertaking for somebody in our part of the world. Heck, why not throw wildflowers into the mix and post photos of those as well? Forgive my chauvinism, but I think a Southern Appalachian Big Year could produce even more beautiful photographs and a higher species total. It would be fun to watch as somebody tried this in the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Smokies, etc.

All we need is an intrepid volunteer.

Anybody? Anybody?

Was eastern North America a big marsh?

Whoa -- here's something different.

A couple of scientists at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania say that our image of the eastern North American landscape before the arrival of European settlers is all wrong.

You need to read the story at New Scientist and then the original paper to learn all about it. But, briefly, Robert Walter and Dorothy Merritts are saying that "the the 'original' North American landscape of forested hills and meandering streams that carved their way down the valleys and out to sea" is not what actually existed.

Instead of a land of rivers that were confined to single, winding channels, what the first European settlers found were "collections of many small channels spreading across broad wetlands." One botanist in 1750 reported a landscape of "swampy meadows," which these researchers say was more the rule than the exception. Here in the Appalachians, the terrain may have been more favorable to species like the one in the photograph above, the smaller purple-fringed orchid, Platanthera psycodes.

This state of affairs changed, and it changed fast, say Walter and Merritts. The settlers almost immediately constructed "tens of thousands" of dams to mill grain. The resulting series of "staircases" drained the water out of valleys. The remains of old mills and dams are, needless to say, a familiar sight in streambeds here in the southern Appalachians.

The two researchers started out trying to trace the source of sediment in storm runoff. "After every rainstorm, our creeks and streams run like chocolate milk," says Walters. Their original assumption was that it came from modern working farms.

They discovered that this sediment did not come from today's farms, but instead from ancient farmsteads high atop mountains in the Appalachian chain.

By 1840, the settlers had built more 65,000 dams between South Carolina and Maine, a number and a date that I find astounding.

I'm not competent to criticize the authors' research, but it reminds me of another bit of geographical revisionism here, in which geologist Robert Thorson presents good evidence that the stereotype of New England's soil as thin and rocky is an artifact of logging done by early settlers. I highly recommend Thorson's book.

In either case, it gives one pause to think that the landscape we consider "natural" may be an artifact of human modification.

Silver-haired bats in Patrick County

Dr. Eric Johnson, a retired ornithologist who lives near Stuart, found a silver-haired bat in his home. This is the second time he's caught one of these critters and released it outside.

Bat Conservation International says that Lasionycteris noctivagans is one of the most common bats in forested areas in North America. I'm no bat expert, but it's not a species I'm aware of having seen myself. The most common bats I encounter in our area are the little brown bat and the red bat.

The silver-hair is associated with coniferous and mixed coniferous/deciduous forests. BCI says they are dependent on old-growth forests, and for that reason the maintenence of forest corridors is important to this species.

Read about the relationship between forest-dwelling bats and old-growth forest at this link.

A friend of mine who knows this species tells me that one way to tell a silver-haired from other species in the half-light of dusk is the marked slowness of its flight compared to other bats, such as the little brown bat. The silver-hair, he says, "dawdles around" in the air.

The range maps for the silver-haired may be misleading, because over big parts of its nominal range it is present only during the spring and fall migrations. Dr. Johnson says that, as far as he's concerned, finding two in his house, on both occasions during winter, settles the question for him of whether or not they're in our part of the southern Appalachians this time of year.

Like many birds, the silver-haired bat is good at getting home again. One individual traveled 107 miles back to its home roost after migration.

Red-tailed hawks are known to predate bats in some areas, especially out west, especially at dusk, as the bats pour out of caves to feed for the night. And why not? They're basically flying mice. I found myself wondering if redtails in the southern Appalachians feed on bats to any significant degree. The overlap between a redtail's normal hunting hours and those of crepuscular species like bats is brief. Does anybody have good data on this?

A "Big Year" for butterflies

Why didn't I think of that? That was my reaction when my friend Clyde Kessler directed my attention to Robert Michael Pyle's project to identify as many butterflies as he could in the space of a year.

Birders have been doing variations of this challenge for decades. So far as I'm aware, Pyle is the first to try it for butterflies.

All I can say is, I wish I were him. There's a heck of a lot more butterfly species in America than birds. But it sounds like a great way to spend a year.

Read his first dispatch here

This guy is a great writer on lepidoptera, by the way. He's been studying monarchs for over half a century. Here's something he wrote about the Bt corn debate.

Is anybody inspired to try something like this here in the southern Appalachians? There are species and subspecies that occur here that are hard to find elsewhere.

Groping back to bed...

...well, the Philip Larkin poem continues from there with a rude word or two, so I won't print the rest of it. Google it -- it's a great poem. But every now and then I'm up in the middle of the night, and sometimes before I hop back in the sack, I go out on our porch in Slings Gap to listen to the night.

Last night we were socked in with fog and chilly rain. Before midnight the wind roared in the treetops high above our house. Our part of the gap is oriented roughly west-to-east, so the prevailing winds frequently whistle through the notch.

Between 1 and 2 am when I was up briefly, the wind had died back a bit, so it wasn't as noisy. It was back to how it usually is in our little holler in the middle of the night, which is dead quiet. No lights, no neighbors, no cars.

With the fog and heavy overcast, it was pitch black. Rain dripped from the branches overhead, the wind pushed the wet fog across the front porch. The moisture-laden air was thick and heavy and cold. At 43 degrees, it wasn't freezing, but it was chilly on bare skin. Down below the yard, the creek tinkled.

I just listened, as I usually do. Nothing.

Then, after a couple of minutes, maybe a quarter mile down the holler, the shivery sound of an eastern screech-owl. We've heard them before in the holler, but not often. The common owl here is the barred owl. We probably don't have enough open terrain for screech-owls here. But my neighbor Jenny Chapman saw one on a fence a mile or two down the road earlier this week. Maybe this was the same guy.

This owl was far enough away that I could barely pick him out above the wet wind sighing in the black trees. Just two or three high, quavery wails in the night. Then silence.

Sometimes I wonder: do the little mice and other rodents who are the prey of owls hear such noises and quake in fear? Or is that anthropomorphizing them? Probably it is. But I wonder anyway.

Just night thoughts. In a pitch-black holler in the mountains as the wind soughs in the trees. Night thoughts. . .and then back to bed.

Native bees

On the NRV Natural History list last year, there was some discussion of native bee species that have become more evident after the disastrous decline of the honeybee (which is an exotic in North America).

It struck me at the time that it would be cool if we could take a stab at identifying the native bee species in our area. Not a lot of good reference material for that easily available. Now comes this notice from Sam Droege of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland:

There will be a "week-long, hands-on workshop on native bee identification at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia from March 24 through March 28. It will be taught by Rob Jean of Indiana State, Mark Arduser of the Missouri Department of Conservation, Cory Sheffield of York University, and Droege himself.

The point will be to train people to ID bees down to the species level. "A synoptic collection of eastern and central bees will be available throughout the week along with large numbers of surplus specimens that participants may keep as reference material. There will also be collecting trips, plus discussions on monitoring, survey and processing techniques. If you've found something locally you can't ID, bring it along and an expert with give it a try.

Details from Sam Droege: sam_droege@usgs.gov

His agency's website is here

To his announcement, Sam appended a neat poem by Carl Sandburg:


Bee Song

Bees in the late summer sun
Drone their song
Of yellow moons
Trimming black velvet
Droning, droning a sleepysong.

It's not what they don't know that's dangerous...

...it's what they know for sure that just ain't so.

That sentiment has been attributed to Ronald Reagan, Herbert Hoover, Mark Twain and a bunch of others. For the record, I don't know who said it first.

But I was reminded of it while reading a thread on the DELMARVA HERPS list. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources came up with a proposal to experimentally reintroduce northern pine snakes to the Pocomoke State Forest in Worcester County in Maryland. After soliciting comments from the public, a panel of three experts recommended against the idea, saying there was too little evidence that the snake was a recent part of the ecosystem in that area.

There have been disgusted, dissident voices on the herps list. The claim is that fauna occur in some areas where their presence is kept "hush-hush" (possibly for landowners to avoid dealing with the endangered species act?). The same writer claimed that New Jersey chorus frogs occur in Delaware but are ignored in frog counts.

Another writer claimed to have found mating northern red-spotted newts in vernal pools in early fall in south-central Pennsylvania. He reported this to a local professor, who claimed they were actually congregating due to "a change in barometric pressure," and weren't really mating. The writer sourly observed, "I still marvel at his ability to judge this from the comfort of his office while on the telephone with me."

Another and more troubling accusation was this:

"Most remarkable is the credentialed recognition of naturalists by the government regulators (many of whom are nothing but office bureaucrats). Many field workers are government-approved consultants who pay for a professional permit in addition to a regular license in order to qualify for site surveys. Others are involved with research projects associated with the institutions where they are professors and hence subject to academic as well as political pressures. The product of all this is a "good-old boy" (or sisterhood) system of conformity and subordination. If you don't abide with the policies and philosophies of the authorities, you don't land lucrative contracts to survey for endangered or threatened species on sites scheduled for development. If your research isn't consistent with the dogmatic doctrines of the state, you don't publish." [Spelling and punctuation corrected in this quoted passage]

Is this true? I know a couple of local naturalists who do contract work, and the ones I know are scrupulously honest. Furthermore, given the figures I've heard quoted, the contracts are anything but "lucrative."

But I would like to know if others regard the situation adduced above as a serious problem. Whatever one may think of legislation like endangered species laws, it is important to have a true picture of the presence or absence of threatened species in a given area.

January odes and leps

This warm spell puts me in mind of a few winters back in the late '70s and early '80s, when I was seeing wildflowers in January.

Earlier this week I saw a mourning cloak butterfly flying at the edge of the woods bordering the Blue Ridge Parkway near mile 122. A friend reported an orange sulfur elsewhere in Roanoke. And further east toward the coast, somebody else spotted a green darner dragonfly. It's hard to avoid a touch of spring fever.

The mourning cloaks are interesting because they over-winter as adults in forest leaf litter. They'll come out on warm winter days and fly a bit; then, when it gets cold again, they'll snuggle back down under the leaves and kick back til the next warm spell.

Added to all this, a friend reported seeing a couple of female redwinged blackbirds in his Roanoke yard a day or two ago. They're normally harbingers of spring. And we've had reports of blueheaded vireos and and pine warblers taking their chances on over-wintering in the Roanoke area. What a "winter" so far!