Killer Kitties

On days when I can't get out to the woods, I console myself with our resident wildlife:  Penny (on the table), Finn (at the end), and Selene (asleep in the chair).  They're taking a break from watching their IMAX of birds and squirrels at the feeders.

Those are pets, you say, not wildlife.  Yes, yes, they are pets (but don't tell them that; they think it's the other way around).  But it's also true, that if we booted them out, they  could fend for themselves almost as well as any lynx or bobcat.  I'm not saying they'd eat every avian, rodent, or lagomorph in a six-block area, but they'd probably make quite a dent in the population. Conservative estimates of the number of songbirds killed by outdoor cats each year come to at least a billion.  And that doesn't count baby bunnies.  That's why we keep our cats inside.

But isn't that cruel to the cats? I don't think so, and neither, it seems, do they.   They have each other to chase and pounce on and show who's boss and wash behind ears and snuggle up next to on cold winter nights.  The two girls spat some now and then, but even that is good feline intraspecies behavior, keeps them from getting bored.  Penny and Finn were both shelter kittens when we got them, so they never knew life outside. 

 Selene was living outdoors, in a muddy hole under the mobile home of one of my Hospice patients.  Each day when I came she would hop to the porch rail, stand up on hind feet, place her furry little arms around my neck, and gaze at me with the most gorgeous emerald eyes I have ever seen.  How could I resist?  And I'll tell you this:  ever since she's had regular meals and a clean dry home, she's never once asked to be let outdoors again.

Oh, we do let them out on short supervised visits to Mother Nature when spring comes around.  They creep to the edge of the porch and sniff all the burgeoning smells.  They venture down onto the grass and take some nibbles -- kitty salad!  They chase a few bugs and dig in the garden a bit.  But then, at the first blue jay scream -- CAT!!  CAT!! -- they tear back into the house and that's where they stay the rest of the year.

Once in a while they catch some prey.  We live in an old house.  We have mice.  Or used to have, anyway.  The cats don't eat these little mousey corpses.  They leave them for me to step on in the kitchen.  Before I've had my coffee.

Postscript:  My husband just took me to task for implying that housecats could be as adept as bobcats at catching prey.  They're not, of course, and abandoned pets suffer terribly when left to fend for themselves, though they still kill lots of wildlife on their way to an early grave.  But even well-fed pampered cats kill birds, if allowed to roam.  My point remains:  keep your cats indoors.

Stories in the Snow

How can you tell a grey squirrel's print from that of a cottontail rabbit?  In the squirrel's print the front feet are placed side by side; in the rabbit's they're one in front of the other.   Okay.  I already knew that.  But did I know why?  No, I didn't.  But I do now, thanks to Vince Walsh, ardent naturalist, highly skilled tracker, founder of Kawing Crow Awareness Center in Greenfield, NY, and one of the most engaging wildlife teachers I've ever met.

The leader of a tracking workshop conducted at the Wilton Wildlife Preserve yesterday, Vince not only knew his stuff, he also knew how to get the rest of us really engaged in tracking.  Even to the point of kneeling down to sniff the yellow snow.  Was it fisher pee?  Well, maybe.  There was a fisher trail. (See photo) But why would it pee right there where its trail crossed the hard-packed  snowshoe path?  Could it be a dog?  Dogs also trot along this path.  What does dog pee smell like?  Many of our group of about a dozen probably knew the answer to that, but only one of us put her nose right down there (not me, for once!) and pronounced the verdict: Dog!  So you see, you can't always tell just by looking.  Vince urged us to also use our noses, our ears, our fingers, our brains, our imaginations.

For example, imagine the rabbit escaping the fox: she scoots this way, then that, then that, zig-zagging across the grass until she dives down into her hole.  That's why her front feet are placed one behind the other, to enable faster turning.   Does the squirrel zig-zag across the grass as he high-tails away from your chasing dog and zips up the nearest tree?  Not on his furry life!  He plants those little front feet together and scoots in a beeline, as straight and fast as he can.  

We learned a lot of other things, too.  And had a lot of fun.  Many thanks to the Wilton Wildlife Preserve and Park, a sand plains and pitch pine preserve I often visit in warmer weather, when wild lupine and milkweed support the endangered Blue Karner butterflies.   And thanks again to Vince Walsh, teacher and tracker extraordinaire.  I plan to visit him, too, at his Kawing Crow Awareness Center.  He knows just an awesome amount of stuff about nature,  including where some ancient black tupelos grow. Eight-hundred-year-old black tupelos!  I want him to take me there.

Postscript:  I neglected to mention that this tracking workshop, offered free of charge, was sponsored by the Southern Adirondack Audubon Society and underwritten by Stewarts, Inc.

Many thanks all around.

Blood on the Snow

De-e-e-p snow.  Huff, puff!  More a snowshoe trudge than a hike to the river today through heaps and mounds of new-fallen snow.  I pity the poor deer trying to make their way through this.  I did see a deer trail today as I humphed through the woods to Rippled Rocks point, the first I've seen in this particular area this winter.    But the most prominent trail in the woods today was, I believe, a bobcat:    a four-toed, nearly circular paw print showing no claws, nearly as wide across as the back of my hand, made by a lightweight animal on big, soft feet, depressing the new snow by less than an inch.  What else could it be? 

Closer to the river I found mustelid tracks, about two inches wide, fisher, I'd guess; too big to be mink, too small to be otter, and leading down to the river where, oh my! some fresh drops of blood!  Then ooh! look at that! a chunk of something covered with hair!  Then Oh my God! as I raised my eyes to the ice-covered river to see this ravaged carcass,  splayed out in the middle of the bay.

At first I thought, hmm, must be coyotes brought this deer down.  But I didn't see any signs of a chase and attack.  What I did see was a human snowshoe trail and the imprint of a laden sled being hauled to the site, and then I remembered.  Naturalists from Moreau Lake State Park had told me they'd hauled a deer carcass out on the ice to attract bald eagles (the park keeps a count of these wintering raptors).  Sure enough, there were signs of huge birds landing on the snow-covered ice.  Lots of other tracks, too.  Here was a smorgasbord laid out for all the carnivores that haunt this always amazing stretch of woods and water. 

Winter Dreams of Summer Sex

Okay.  That's enough.  I know we've not reached the record yet (120 inches, winter of 1970-71), but jeez! there's just nowhere to put it!  That's my husband in the photo, standing on the sidewalk reaching up behind the snowbank in front of our house.  And he's a pretty tall guy.

I guess I wouldn't mind so much, but all the shoveling and the scraping of windshields and the digging out cars from the snowplow heavings has worn me out.  It's a perfect day for snowshoeing -- blue sky, moderate temp, not too windy -- but I need a nap.

While drifting and dreaming away on the sofa I thought about drifting and dreaming last summer while paddling the Hudson River.  Ah, lazy summer day, warm sun, gentle current, trailing my fingers in cool blue water, and hmmm, what the heck are those plants streaming along beside me?  Little white flowers just kissing the surface, shiny curlicue stems, long eel-like leaves translucent as Jello.  And nowhere to be found in my Newcomb's guide.  Then I remembered a piece Ed Miller wrote for Adirondac magazine some years back:  that must be wild celery (Vallisneria americana).

This is a truly fascinating plant.  What you see are the female flowers, and their corkscrew stems can coil looser or tighter to keep them exactly at the water's surface, creating a little dimple in the surface tension.  The much tinier male flowers grow at the base of separate plants, down at the bottom of the river (sometimes as deep as 20 feet but usually much shallower), and when ripe, rise to the surface and float along until they literally "fall for the ladies."  That is, the staminate flower slides into the dimple created by the pistillate flower and guess what happens next?  Well, yes, ahem, that, but then after the deed is done the corkscrew stem curls and contracts, yanking the new family down, down, down to where baby will grow in the nice soft mud. 

Now here's the irony.  Despite having evolved this complex and fascinating reproductive process, wild celery doesn't need to do it this way.  In fact, it more often reproduces itself not by seed but by cloning,  creating new plants from the tuberous tips of its spreading rhizomes.  Oh, well, even if they don't have to do it for babies, at least they still get to do it for fun. 

A Few Good Words for Weeds

     I want to put in a good word for weeds.  I'm looking at one right now right outside my kitchen window:  the box elder tree (acer negundo) that is wildlife Grand Central Station all winter long.  Of course, that could be because of the seed and suet feeders we hang from its boughs, and the discarded Christmas trees we cluster around the trunk, and the heated birdbath providing liquid water through 25-below-zero nights.  But I've also read that -- even without our additions -- the  box elder tree is ranked among those with the highest value to wildlife.

     That ranking is probably because of its seeds that, unlike those of other members of the  maple genus, hang onto the boughs until well into the winter, providing food for squirrels and birds when most other seeds are gone.  Another positive attribute is its ability to spring up from seedling to tree in a hurry, or as some might say, "grow like a weed."   That's what our neighbor (who actually owns the ground this box elder grows from) said about this tree when he wanted to cut it down.  "And just look at the mess it makes -- bugs in the summer, seeds all over the place, leaves plugging up the gutters."   Well, we begged and pleaded and pointed out how its boughs provide privacy for his tenants, and he relented.  Sort of.  He cut down about half of it, but what do you know, it grew right back to its original height in just about a year. Ha!

     Here's the thing: if you love the birds and butterflies and want to have them around, you just have to learn to love bugs and weeds.  Some people think I'm kind of a nut about that.  Two years ago, I led a wildflower walk in downtown Saratoga's Congress Park, a park more known for its Olmsted-designed formal gardens than for anything allowed to grow wild.  But (oh happy fault!) there are geologic faults that run right through Congress Park, creating the springs that Saratoga is famous for, as well as steep banks and marshy spots where the mowers just can't mow.  And there's where the wildflowers grow, dozens and dozens of beauties most often overlooked: birdseye speedwell, Canada anemone, willow herbs northern and hairy, buttercups, forget-me-nots, cuckoo flowers, cattails . . . I could go on and on.

     And I was going on and on, extolling at length the virtues of one particular plant that spreads through the grass, ground ivy.  I had read in a wonderful book by Hannah Holmes (Suburban Safari: a year on the lawn) that patches of this lovely little flower (see its photo above, as pretty as any orchid) are sought out by crows in molting, when their new feathers are poking through skin and causing them pain.  Apparently, this mint-family plant has both analgesic and antiseptic qualities that soothe the pain and prevent infection.  Now, I found that pretty fascinating and was sharing my enthusiasm for ground ivy when I was interrupted by "Ugh! That's  Creeping Charlie! [Another name for ground ivy]  I can't get rid of it in my lawn!  That's a weed!" 

     Well, yes.  It is.  But such a nice one.  I don't think she thought I was nice when I responded to her revulsion:  "Why would you want to get rid of it?  Get rid of the grass instead."  Because, you see, that really is my ideal:  why would anyone prefer plain old grass to deliciously herby ground ivy (what a pungent, minty scent it emits when mowed).  Or to speedwells of every kind, dainty little striped blooms in shades of blue from royal to mist.  Or to violets, white or purple or yellow.  Or to strawberries, buttercups, daisies, clover. . . good lord, even dandelions!  All carpet the ground no taller than ankle-high, so they don't need frequent mowing.  All grow without needing to poison the soil with pesticides or fertilizers.  All provide food for butterflies, birds, and bees.  All are as pretty as pretty can be.  And every single last one of them is a weed.

     Let's hear it for weeds.

Here Today. But Tomorrow?

     Where'd all these pine siskins come from?  From what I've read, they're common winter visitors to backyard feeders, but in all the 40-plus years I've been feeding birds, they've never visited mine.  Until about two weeks ago.  Then this squabbling mob arrived by the dozen, driving off most of the milder-mannered goldfinches and emptying the nyjer-seed feeder in a single day.

     Who knows why certain birds come to others' backyards but not to mine?  A friend in a town just ten miles away gets American tree sparrows and red-bellied woodpeckers.  Lucky her.  Another friend in a town even closer gets redpolls all winter long.  I've never seen one here.  But that doesn't mean I never will -- as the siskins' arrival shows. 

     My wildflower hunts are also full of surprises.  I keep a journal of flower finds, noting date and place of discovery so I can return each year to renew our acquaintance.  In the case of most of the flowers it's usually a happy reunion.  But sometimes I'm disappointed.  For three straight years I visited an odd little ghost of a plant called one-flowered cancerroot,  just off the path in the woods at Skidmore College.  Five years ago it disappeared.  Haven't seen it since.  Anywhere.  I grieve the loss. 

      Another loss is a whole island full of purple-fringed orchis, in the middle of a little stream in the middle of the little village of Lake Luzerne:  about 25 of these beautiful state-protected orchids in the space of an average living room.  I returned a few days later to find some fool had mowed them all down!   I returned the next year and found one, the following year none at all.  Sic transit gloria florae.  (Apologies for bad Latin)

     Luckily, the happy surprises outnumber the losses:  a cluster of tiny bright-pink centaury (above) thriving in the hard-packed gravel on the side of a road; a scarlet pimpernel peeking out from a crack in a downtown sidewalk; a native glaucous honeysuckle  almost lost in a  hedge of the alien invasive kind.   Like the siskins mentioned above, none of these is considered gorgeous or rare.  Just kind of pretty, and I'd  never seen them before.   Happy to make your acquaintance, little birds.  Just leave some seed for the others.

 

Up to the Bog

     Almost balmy today, temp in the mid-20s as I joined a group led by Moreau Lake State Park naturalists for a hike up into the mountains to Lake Ann.  It's a very tiny lake, up about as high as you can climb in this Palmertown Range, and remarkable for a shore that qualifies as a genuine sphagnum bog.  This kind of wetland is quite rare in Saratoga County.  We have lots of swamps and marshes, but bogs -- with their particular acidic conditions -- are hard to come by.

     This one was a little hard to come to today, what with deep snow, a trail untrodden in places, and some pretty steep climbs at times.  Our group, being mostly retirees (and not everyone in great shape), kept up a slow pace, so we hardly had time to explore the bog before we had to start back.  Anyway, most of the interesting plants that signify bog conditions were buried deep, deep down in the snow; exceptions were highbush blueberry shrubs, black spruce and tamarack trees. 

     I've hiked several times to Lake Ann during the spring and summer, so I do have these photos of some of the bog plants there: sphagnum moss, cranberry, and leatherleaf.  I once tried walking around Lake Ann to see what else might be growing there, but encountered signs posted by McGregor State Prison warning me not to proceed.  I think they might even have said intruders could  be shot on sight.  But probably not.   Today we could have just strolled around the lake on ice. 

I've Been to the Mountaintop

     Tuesday, January 20, was a glorious day in more ways than one.  First, we welcomed a new President, Barack Obama, who (we hope) will take better care of our planet.  And  second, the sky was blue, the sun bright, and the air cold enough to keep our abundant snow soft and dry, perfect for a celebratory walk in the woods.  Perfect, in fact (for reasons both practical and symbolic), for a climb to the mountaintop.

     Up, up I went, snowshoeing to a favorite overlook, looking down on the Hudson River where it makes a sharp bend to the northeast after flowing in a mostly southeasterly  direction from its source in the Adirondacks.  Because I had waited to hear our  new President's inaugural speech before setting out, I was still up on the mountaintop as the sun started going down.  A light snow began to move in from the northwest, spangling the air with hexagonal plate crystals, the declining sunlight glinting on diamond facets.  And that's when I saw the phenomenon pictured above, a sun pillar descending from the sun to the earth, as if in a blessing.   Please, God, may that be so!

Strange Fruit

     I was just enjoying one of my favorite blogs,  adknaturalist.blogspot.com, where "Nature Girl" posted photos and an account of coming across strange growths on a birch tree.  I  came across the same fungus ( inonotus obliquus) a couple of years ago on a beech tree, and mine had a fruiting body:  those light brown balls growing out of what looks like  a coal clinker.  Hence it's common name "clinker" polypore.  (Be sure to click on the photo to see the texture of these things up close.)

     Of course, I didn't know the name of it then, but I did know the name of a biologist whose specialty was fungi,  Sue Van Hook, and took her to see this thing.  She was quite excited, since it's not that common to find these clinkers in fruit.  Sue took some tissue and has succeeded in culturing the spores in her lab at Skidmore  College.  Apparently, this fungus may have some therapeutic use in treating cancer. 

     So you just never know what you might come across in the woods.  I  guess you can tell from my sidebar photos that I take great delight in fungi.   I just wish I could find a field guide for fungi as good as is Newcomb's for wildflowers.  Any suggestions?

Welcome President Obama

     Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty we're free at last of George W. Bush, who spent his last days in power trying to undo as many environmental protections as he could.  The woods and waterways all over the world are safer today, thanks to President Obama, who appears to be open to allowing science to actually inform his decisions.  Won't that be something?

     I have even more personal reasons for celebrating today, Inauguration Day 2009.  See those darling children with their beautiful mom in the photo above?  Those are my son Peter's kids and my grandchildren.  It is now a new era for black and mixed-race children, thanks to the election of Barack Obama.  Wow! What a role model!

     Yeah, yeah, I know, don't count your chickens and all that.  But today I just feel happy and blessed to be living in this grand country.  To celebrate, I'm off to the woods.  See you later.

Girls All Alone in the Night

     These are photos of my granddaughter Jenny, taken on a camp-out a couple of Septembers ago when she was nine.  I had taken her older sister camping a few times, and now it was Jenny's turn. 

      There are a number of primitive campsites along the Hudson both above and below Spier Falls dam, simple pee-in-the-woods kinds of sites with no facilities beyond a metal fire ring, accessible either by boat or on foot, but not by car.  We chose a site directly across the river from the Sherman Island boat launch and paddled across in an 18' tandem canoe, loaded with tent and sleeping bags and a cooler full of food.  Plus matches for starting a campfire and the fixings for lots of s'mores.

     We also brought my son Philip along, a full-grown man, mostly because he wanted to come but also to mollify Jenny's parents, who maybe share some of society's fears about girls all alone in the woods.  As for me, I prefer being alone on the trail or in my canoe.  With others along there's always chit-chat and we can't creep up on critters unawares; or somebody in the party thinks that the goal is to get to the top and chafes if I stop to identify a plant or listen to a bird.  But I'm glad to have my granddaughters along. I love to take them camping and show them  "See?  We're all alone in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, and there's nothing to be afraid of." 

    Well, yeah, I talk a good line.  For in fact, on this  particular night in the middle of the woods with Jenny, I had quite a scare.  Our tent was about 20 yards from where we had left all our food, and I startled awake in the very darkest hour of the night to a very loud scra-a-a-a-pe and thud!   "Oh, crap!" I thought.   "A bear's in our food.  And here we lie in the same smoky clothes we wore roasting wienies last night, smelling like a stash of Slim Jims!  What on earth should I do?"  I'm not usually afraid of bears; I'm sure they hide when they hear me coming.   But now I was with my granddaughter!  And what could my son do to help us?

     I lay there listening, terrified that the next noise I heard would be claws ripping our tent apart.  But the only sound I heard was my pounding heart.  For a long, long time.  Then I had to pee.  Oh God! did I have to pee.   Silently, silently I crawled out of my bag and shined my flashlight out the tent flap.  Nothing there.  The food cooler still stood, undisturbed, on the rock where we'd left it.  Huh?  Well, what was that sound I heard? 

 

     So I looked around, checking to see if our canoe was still there where we'd left it, tied to a tree and floating on the river.  The canoe was still there, still tied to a tree, but no longer floating on the river.  During the night the downstream dam had opened, the water level had lowered, and our canoe now rested, atilt, on the river bottom.  The paddles had slid across the thwarts and slammed hard onto the gunwales.  So that was the source of the scrape and thud that woke me in terror during the night.

     So I still can tell my granddaughters, "See?  We're all alone in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, and there's nothing to be afraid of."

Tupelos: Trees for all seasons

     The sun's brought the temp up to two by noon.  And a breeze has the  birdfeeders swinging.  I could pile on the polarfleece and keep my body warm enough.  But aargh!  My face!  If I wrap it in scarves my glasses frost up, and the frames freeze to my cheeks.  Think I'll settle for a virtual walk in the woods instead.

     I'll go back to Rippled Rocks Point and the marsh around Three Pine Island (see last post), where I took these pictures of a black tupelo tree, one last October and the same tree three days ago.  I had never seen a black tupelo until I began paddling this area on the Hudson, and I don't find them very often anywhere else.   I met a forester a few years back who told me that tupelos are usually found farther south, but a moderated microclimate that extends up the Hudson and on up the Champlain valley allows them to thrive this far north.  At least locally.  They're never as common as maples.  They love to have their feet wet, so they grow in marshes and drainage ditches and on river banks where the water rises up into the woods from time to time.  Like the Hudson River here between two dams.  And apparently -- so this forester said --in a swamp in the nearby Lincoln Mountain state forest, where some specimens have been found to be over 600 years old.  I guess they've been here long enough we can call them natives.

     I have no idea how old this tree is.  Just because it's kind of spindly doesn't mean it's young, I've been told.  I do know, though, that it's one gorgeous tree,  with green glossy leaves in summer that come into their glory in autumn, turning a brilliant cranberry red and much earlier than its neighbors.   This one's a female tree that has nearly invisible blossoms in summer that turn into blue-black berries in the fall -- favorites of  turkeys and grouse.  There are male trees nearby with staminate flowers.  Last summer, I took this photo of a ladybug exploring one of these flowers.  On a cold, cold day like this, I like to remember summer.