Hitchcock Presents.

This week's blog post has been postponed due to an enormous invasion of birds and other chaos.  If they weren't so ridiculously cute and harmless, I'd have to say the bird swarms and near Hitchcockian in scale.  As it is, I'll be back when the avian end of life returns to a more normal, or at least manageable pace.  Oh, and did I mention, there are a lot of freaking birds?

 

Pictured here:  Holy BIRDS, Batman!  And below, closeups of the birdy bonanza.

Freedom of the Hills (with all due respect to the "Seattle Mountaineers")

There are few better things in life than donning and sturdy pair of boots and a pack that feels as though it was custom built for your back and roaming off along winding trails to a windblown peak.  Beyond the scenery that draws many to mountaintops and woodland trails, the sheer joy of movement over an ever-changing uneven path through a crisp breeze - and mountain air is seldom completely still - is simply exhilarating.  It's only a side bonus that when, as often besets a field tech, means are rather limited, hiking remains entirely inexpensive.
Hiking Acadia's hills and trails is no exception.  Though Acadia's mountains are small, some barely qualifying in height as mountains and others not at all, restless sea winds flow and rush incessantly over their summits, stunting and gnarling resident trees and scouring bare granite ledges until they resemble the tops of inland mountains thousands of feet higher.  From innumerable rough-hewn stone steps winding steeply through spruce forest up the back of Beech Mountain to the tumbled pink granite sides of Acadia Mountain, from clear views of Sound and ocean to the two-legged cairns that mark Acadian trails, no two hikes have been quite alike, and none have disappointed.  Here, in pictures, are few:

Somewhere between Valley Peak and Acadia Mountain, Acadia NP

A mountain seen from a mountain: looking out from Norumbega Mountain.

An Acadian cairn

Somes Sound, from above

Quietside

Another exploration, another excursion, inland this time, though that's not a concept frequently associated with Acadia or with Mt. Desert Island. Nevertheless, there is an “inland” unlike the island's more famous coast, and there, and around the “Quietside,” the southern half of the island less frequented by tourists, I ended up.  Driving back roads to hike Beech Mountain, different sort of lovely landscape emerged.  There were golden fall fields and still-active farms backed by dark hills, tiny old graveyards in quiet corners, their small clusters of aging headstones relics of communities gone before, simple, weatherworn houses whose beauty is not in decoration but in their bones. Plain, sturdy things in whitewash or cedar shingle, these old houses in their fields and villages have stood a century and more of stern New England weather, and intend to stand a while longer yet. 

~

Emerging onto Rt. 102, traveling south and east, more and more modern houses lined the roadsides among their historic counterparts. In large part, the people who live along southern and southeastern edges of Mount Desert Island really do live here. These are not the enormous “cottages” of the rich and famous, “rusticators” present or past who summer elsewhere along the shore. There are average homes, and some tiny, some even verging on ramshackle in construction and upkeep, concessions to a love of place or way of life that far outstrips earning potential, or to a lack of funding that makes escape to another place impossible. While this is hardly the venue for a discussion of economy or gentrification, it bears mentioning that among the dreaming vacationers, the wild park, and the seaside palaces, there are also regular people working and living on Mount Desert Island, and there is sometimes poverty too.  Tourist or wandering tech, with means or none, it seems visitors come to places like Acadia with visions often very different from the reality of those who live here. It's an odd thought, comparing the two, an odd experience when they collide, and one I find I'm not yet prepared to comment on more intelligently. But it was definitely on my mind, rounding the final bend in the loop that is 102, back toward Acadia and Southwest Harbor, back to the bubble of hiking trails and harbors filled with sailboats, followed by a vague, uncomfortable sense of intruding in that doesn't happen sightseeing among wealthy seasonal playgrounds seemingly built for show.  It's something to think about.

Morning to morning, bird to bird

Every morning from the banding site where we work, I watch late coming cars winding their way up to the peak of Cadillac Mountain to watch the sunrise, headlights glinting in the shadows. That sunrise is slowly becoming a genuinely pleasant experience, rather than merely a bafflingly beautiful reminder of hours of potential sleep sacrificed. As September mornings grow colder, its rising glow means growing warmth, happily anticipated. 

 

A Cedar Waxwing, in the process of being banded.

And so it goes, chill mornings turning to warm, even hot days, and back to cool nights. The order of the day this fall is catching and banding birds, passerines and their near relatives, mostly – songbirds. The catching is done with nets made of fine dark colored mesh called mist nets. Common in avian field research, mist nets are used for many reasons and in many ways to safely ensnare birds of all sizes (all quite alive) for closer inspection before release. For this project in Acadia, we are “passive netting,” which essentially means setting up semipermanent net lanes in areas of potentially high bird traffic, in hopes that birds passing through will pay us some inadvertent visits. Our targets: any bird unwise or unwary enough to blunder into our nets. 

Morning catch: a row of bird-bags, each holding a captured bird.

 

Our goals? Contrary to occasional lingering misapprehensions, nearly all modern banding efforts have serious, well defined research purposes; ours is, broadly speaking, to estimate which and how many of the songbirds and their near relatives travel south along the Gulf of Maine during autumn migration, and what paths they take and habitats they frequent when doing so. Thus, with nets in several habitat types ranging from open field to forest, and additional surveys in vegetative structure and available food within those areas to more precisely define their characteristics, we keep track of not only who is migrating through our site, but in what sort of habitat they are seen and caught. When all is said and done, the results should prove useful for many reasons, including planning for current and future land and coastal ocean management, and for tracking how a changing climate will affect these birds in seasons and years to come (hint: most probably in unfortunate ways).

For now, though, the days continue to cycle from golden morning to bright noontime, from bird to bird, bit by bit a picture building of a season and of the lives of a few of the living things with whom we share it. It's a work in progress and an interesting one, at that.

Acadia: Transplantation

Standing in the woods for an early morning bird survey, the cobwebs clinging to my face are a fairly close match to the cobwebs lingering in my head. I'm functional, yes, but never truly reach full capacity on mornings that require predawn rising. Lately, I've been amassing a sizable collection of beautiful sunrise pictures, which may surprise those who know me, but what else is there to do when confronted, stumbling and half-awake, with a gloriously dawning sky? Certainly not finding suitable words to coherently describe it. No, I pull out the camera to attempt to convey what my brain won't be able to for at least the next several hours.

The car sits by the view form my front door.

 In the last two weeks in Acadia, on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine – two weeks that, in the way of truly engrossing experiences, feel like much more – there have been several times when words have eluded me, and by no means have all been because of wee early morning cobwebs. Acadia is lovely like few other places. Driving north through Downeast Maine, even on the highway, the smell of salt and tidal mud was in the air, rich with childhood memories. Despite the middle of August, there was and is a faint chill in the wind, maturing to something much more definite when rains or fog seep in, grey and evocative. Low, rocky mountains, their summits scoured by sea wind, stretch slopes clad in boreal spruce over the short distance to meet the Atlantic in a jumble of pink granite shadowed by mist and bleached by sun. 

Ship Harbor.

A spray of herbs at the doorstep.

A 2-legged cairn fogged in at Wonderland.

Lovely indeed.

Belated

The last time I sat down to write it was still midsummer. Every afternoon July heat wrapped the world in humid, sultry haze, but beneath out feet, ripened grass crunched, golden and sere. Summer's first mowing lay scattered around farm fields in rounded yellow bales. Thistleheads that had covered the ground in down resembling the remains of an epic pillow fight turned withered and brown beneath the sun. And then our season was ended. Our sparrows no longer filled the fields with their nesting and singing - most had gone still and silent in the stifling heat, if not vacated altogether from the blazing grasslands - yet still the season felt unfinished. Perhaps it was the speed at which it passed, perhaps it was the dearth of results leading to a spare and sparse cluster of data, perhaps the forever provisional nature of our final weeks' plans, but in many ways the season barely seemed to have gotten off the ground.

Nonetheless, it was done. Awkward goodbyes were said, crews dispersed back to where we came from or where we were headed next. The remaining grassland sparrows, no longer ours, were left to rule their tiny kingdoms in peace. And I drifted on, north to the Frenchman and the cats for a few weeks peace of my own, then on again to start a fall season of banding birds.

~

A season finished incomplete, and the time between moving on and arriving bring, to mind other things as yet unfinished, left behind. Though it's been alluded to several times, what exactly it is I do, and why I'm to be found rambling over and through all sorts of landscape in almost any weather, pestering reluctant, often recalcitrant wildlife, has gone largely unexplained.

So: I am by trade a field biologist, or for those who prefer the more accurate and somewhat more arcane, a biological field technician, educated in wildlife biology but not yet advanced to designing, running, and frequently pulling my hair out over my own projects as full biologists do. What that means in practical terms is doing the on-the-ground work necessary to research, monitor, and manage wild creatures in their own habitat, in the wild. The actual work can take many forms, from perpetually criss-crossing open fields trying to flush nesting grassland sparrows and keeping tabs on the nests they flush from, to netting and tagging migrating butterflies in the gardens and green spaces of a charming seaside tourist town, to bushwhacking through endless miles of northern forest with a backpack, a notebook, and what is essentially a portable loudspeaker, broadcasting the call of some sought-after species, hoping something will answer.

That's just to name a few. There are as many ways to inquire into the lives of wild things as there are wild things to inquire about; more, even. Field work is often seasonal, bound to the schedule of a species or natural occurrence, and over time a typical field tech will rack up quite a roster of places resided and creatures pursued. As to what motivates the endeavor in the first place, though specific goals and questions vary, usually they relate somehow to conservation, the preservation and restoration of the beings and places that are the focus of the work, for the future, and not inconsequentially for their own sake, which to most field biologists and techs alike is just as important as human concerns.

And that, in short, is the what and the why.  And now I will be moving on again to the place I am currently from.

Another Lazy Blog Post

Truly, it's been a while since the last post, and truly, something more should be forthcoming.  That said, it has also been an enormously fatiguing week, of the sort where tired thoughts seldom coalsce coherently into the form of, well, thought, let alone arrange themselves for expression through the written word. So for now, while the weekend works it's restorative magic, I'll once again be letting pictures do most of the talking.   More writing will come, but not tonight.  Sleep well.

Discovered not at all far from the center of town, on a peaceful evening walk: a pretty authentic farmscape.  Not so peaceful: the nearby traffic.

 

 An unidentified creek in evening sunbeams off one of two main roads entering town from the east.

On the roadside by our plot, chicory...

...one of my all-time favorite wildflowers.

On campus at tiny Clarion University

Another part of the university, in less than flattering light.

Round Two?

These thoughts had begun fermentation in the morning as a contemplation of waning and winding down. Though the last week of June is hardly a time normally associated with fading, it is true that the first thistles are turning brown, and late May's daisies, earliest to bloom, are beginning to droop. It is also true that our field season is too quickly approaching its last remaining month.

It's been a difficult season of nest searching for this field crew, even a bad one. We've had scarce few finds, and sometimes, it seems, scarcer luck. The first wave of nesting sparrows all but eluded us earlier in the month, when time and odds were more on our side, leaving us collectively frustrated, dispirited. We, and almost surely our boss, whose research rides at least in part on our success, were concerned we may not find enough. We are still.

But the sun, barely into the fullness of its strength, still burns high in the summer sky over the yellowing grass of our open fields. The daisies may be wilting, but black-eyed susans have just begun to flower. Newly opened orange daylilies raise brilliant flowers on long green stalks along the roadsides, mixed with huge drifts of sweet pea and crown vetch in every shade of pink, while thorny blackberries stitching through the grass have barely begun to ripen their fruit. Summer in all its vigor is far, far from over. And today, we found two new nests.

Grassland sparrows often do nest twice in the course of the summer, with luck or skill raising two families of chicks to independence before the season is through. We've hoped for this second wave for several weeks now, since it became obvious the first had passed us by. Granted, two new nests does not yet a redemption make, not when we need to find many more to reach statistical viability. Many things could happen, including another crippling nest-drought. There may not be a second wave to pull us through to success. Nonetheless, like successive floods of flowering, two just-laid nests are a hopeful sign, and it surely does make for a good day. I'll open a good porter this evening in celebration and let tomorrow do as it will, with hopes of more good things. 

Rain

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of France Dewaghe (www.pbase.com/birdbum)

Sitting on our dilapidated couch watching early evening rain pour past our open front door on to the gravel parking lot and yards beyond, listening to soothingly low, pensive rumbles of thunder, brings to mind the old trope of a world washed clean. No pattering showers falling lightly on the world, this steady, thorough sluicing over roofs and cars and leaves of trees promises to carry the week's dust back down to the earth, leaving behind a vista vibrantly restored. Sometimes, I wish this could be done for human histories and lives.

Mind you, I'm not nearly so poetic when standing in the middle of a field as rain douses my head. In sodden boots and clinging trousers, so long as there is no danger to the creatures, fieldwork must go on. And it does. Our sparrows don't change their daily plans for rain. They live outdoors after all; running home to wait out the inconvenience of bad weather is not among their options. Sparrows continue on as usual, and so do we, dodging downpours beneath foliage much as they do, emerging again once the worst drenching has passed. It may make for some definite grumping, marching back and forth through the tall wet grass with my arms squished to my torso for warmth, glowering at the lack of rain pants that ensures I remain wet from nearly the waist down (water creeps up the fabric of regular pants as if infiltrating a sponge, I've discovered, even under the hem of a good rain jacket), but it also makes for an interesting philosophical point.

It's a very different thing to be out in nature, and a part of it, than it is to simply visit and appreciate it. Several years ago, before I left the field for a while and became accustomed to the physical “comforts” of the indoors, I was much more at peace with the both the joy and the privation that come of being intimately tuned to nature, and much more articulate about it as well. For me, at least, there has always been measure of inner peace to be found in accepting and adapting to the uncontrollable elements around me, and a sense of belonging that comes with respect for the surrounding world I experience with so much more of my being, rather than merely seeing it with the eyes and thinking about it in the head. That is, if I can get over being wet. It takes time to build, or to rebuild, rhythms that deep. I can feel the memories of them stirring even as I sputter and grumble about my squelching shoes. Someday soon, I hope to be writing about them again in the way I used to be.

Some Pictures While the Next Post Is In the Works

Banding in the early morning.

 

Baby grasshopper sparrow, nearly ready to fledge.  Note the rather cute lack of a tail.

Getting her/his bands.

 

All done, and no doubt wishing we would be, too.

A Good Day for Butterflies (June 1)

Butterflies were out in droves today, drifting and fluttering, tiny bits of light darting about in a stiff, comfortable breeze. Swallowtails and sulphurs, monarchs and skippers, even a lone mourning cloak (closely pursued by a swallowtail) skimmed the tall green grass beneath a brilliant, forgiving sun. In every corner, on every stalk, in bold freshly opened daisies and tiny flowers hidden in the grass, countless species of the bright winged insects pursued their tiny purposes.

Several stories above the kaleidoscope flitting among summer's first bloom, tree swallows frolicked beneath blue skies, pursuing insects at high speed with enviable acrobatics. All in all, it was a beautiful day to be in the field, the kind you want to be out in. A joyous sun-bright memory gilds over wet feet and hours of walking, long searches for recalcitrant sparrows reluctant to divulge location or nest. In the evening's cool, it's wind and wildflowers that remain.

Photo courtesy of France Dewaghe (www.pbase.com/birdbum)