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.