Still life

I really think this wraps it up in terms of posts about my trip to West Virginia (I can't believe it's only been a month since we returned home - it seems like it was an eternity ago, somehow!). There are still some images I'd like to share though. I'll let them tell you the story of how lush and beautiful the hills of West Virginia are, and how magical they can be after it has just rained and everything is still dripping wet and bursting with life. Enjoy.

Fern getting ready to unfurl


Leaf of a Wild Ginger plant - perfect symmetry


The saddest-looking Squirrel Corn flower I've ever seen


That's a long way down for a snail...


Wild Geranium flower, in repose


An example of the diverse flora on one tiny swath of hillside


I kept my distance from here, thank you very much. A large arachnid lives within.


Fern Study, I


Fern Study, II


Almost in bloom...


... and in full flower
These images remind me of the cool, damp spring morning that it was when I took them, something that sounds positively delightful now that the weather is starting to heat up.

My attention, divided

It was Friday, our next to last day at the New River Birding and Nature Festival. On one hand I was tired from a week so full of activity and learning, but on the other hand, I was not ready for this week to end. For one thing, I had spent very little time wandering the property of Opossum Creek Retreat. Nestled back in the woods, there was plenty to see just within a short walk from our cabin.


Our cabin at Opossum Creek. It felt just like home (except substitute oaks and maples for all the hemlocks).
Granted, I had poked my nose and my camera here and there, but there was still much more wooded bliss to be explored. One thing that both Nina and I wanted to check out was a small colony of Pennywort Gentian that was verified to be in flower by our buddy Jim McCormac. He gave us some rather cryptic directions as to where to find the colony on a hillside above the laundry facilities ("There's a downed log with a long stick propped up against it," he said. Sorry, Jim, but there were LOTS of downed logs with what appeared to be long sticks propped up against them!). Eventually, we found the little white beauties poking their heads out of the leaf litter. Nina and I spread out to each find our own little patch of flowers to work with (you can see Nina's Pennywort Gentian photos, along with a Blue-grey Gnatcatcher and a teeny, tiny spider HERE).

Pennywort Gentian, Obolaria virginica

Twin Gentians
I was supposed to be concentrating on the gentian, but I kept getting distracted by the delicate, fragile, skeletal remains of decomposing leaves.


This lacework is all that's left of a leaf in the process of breaking down, giving of itself back to the soil. Notice in the bottom of the photo a new Pennywort flower attempting to break through the leaf litter.

Same leaf, different angles

Even while the flowers bloom, the leaves vie for my attention.

Never have I seen the process of decomposition look so beautiful.
And so it goes, a quick walk in the woods to find one thing...

... quickly turns into a journey into a completely different world.

And so it goes.

The Life List and the emotional birder

What makes a bird a Life Bird? First of all, what IS a Life Bird? I heard a few folks ask this question on trips in the latter part of the week at the New River Birding and Nature Festival. Simply put, it's a bird that you're seeing for the first time in your life.

Even though I like to keep lists of birds seen in various places, and I am keeping track of my Life List, I don't really consider myself to be a "lister," . Since I've started giving public talks about birding, I figured I should have an idea of how many birds are on my Life List, just in case anyone asks. My list (currently at 133 species) is pretty meager by some standards, but that's fine by me.

You might ask, "If you keep lists, why don't you consider yourself a 'lister'?" Valid question. The term "lister" has a strange connotation in birding, if you ask me. It seems to imply a certain mentality of "I must get this bird to add to my Life List at all costs." In my mind, listers are folks who travel far and wide to see a bird for what will likely only be a short period of time, and it might be a bird that's only guessed to stay put for a day or two. Depending on how far you have to travel combined with the likelihood that the bird is just "passing through", you might get to a location only to find that the target bird has flown the proverbial coop. Across the pond in the U.K. this activity is referred to as "twitching," and from what I've read about British birding, they are even more serious about it there than we are here in the U.S.! Listing and twitching can even get to the point of being like a competitive sport (which I can't say I'm above, as we had a friendly list competition going at New River for the most species seen/heard - which I LOST!) My slant may sound negative, but please don't interpret it that way. I have no problem with folks feeling a need to go after a bird, and feeling like they REALLY NEED TO SEE IT. It's just that that kind of birding is not for me.

So let's come back to the question of "what is a Life Bird?" Do you count it if you only saw it for 5 seconds? Do you count it if someone else had to point it out to you? Does it count if it's only seen in the hand (i.e. for a banding demonstration)? (The American Birding Association recording rules, for example, do not allow birds restrained by a mist net or a hand to be countable by their standards; my standards say that these birds DO count for my personal Life List.) Will you only count it if it makes you cry (if you don't know I'm talking about here, it will become clear shortly)?

My philosophy is: my list, my rules. One of my rules is that if I only hear the bird, but don't see it, I'm not counting it. During the festival I heard a Black-billed Cuckoo one day, my first ever "by ear" encounter with the species. I didn't see it, however, so I didn't count it as a Lifer. I expected to leave it at that, and was content with doing so. Luckily, I was fated to actually see the bird during my last field trip of the week. We heard it first, and after some discussion, it was decided that a small group of us for whom this would be a life bird would take our chances among the poison ivy and ticks and go scout out the Cuckoo. With the help of Bill Thompson III, I got my life Black-billed Cuckoo, and I will remember it forever.

Black-billed Cuckoo - photo courtesy Doug Sanchez. Note the red eye ring - one of several diagnostic marks separating it from it's Yellow-billed cousin.
With some encouragement from Bill's bird song app of choice on his iPhone, this cuckoo came right out into the open, and STAYED THERE for about 5 minutes. Bill told us this is most unusual behavior for a cuckoo, just one among a number of species that is well-known for its skulking, blending-into-habitat behaviors. And so, in a matter of minutes, I had a very good sense of this bird's color, shape, size, and song, and also its habitat requirements. This bird went onto my list with a full understanding of it in my brain. It wasn't just a quick glimpse. If I saw another BB Cuckoo all on my own, I would know what it was.

This brings us to another criteria that some folks cite about adding birds to their Life List: they feel that they need to be able to identify the bird on their own, without anyone's help. Sometimes it's not enough to have someone just point it out to you and move on. I applaud that, and wish I could say I use that criteria for my own list. Sometimes, though, in the heat of the moment, it's easy to add a bird you're not all that familiar with to your list just to say, "Yup, I saw it."

This has come back to get me, though. For example, I marked the Yellow-breasted Chat as a Life Bird during my trip to West Virginia. I got really good looks at one, heard it sing a lot, and got a good understanding of its habitat. I can now easily identify a Chat on my own. And I thought I hadn't seen one before the New River trip. However, on a recent bird walk at Lake Hope State Park, we saw a Chat, and it suddenly came back to me that a Chat was pointed out to me on a hike in the very same location 2 or 3 years ago. But it hadn't stuck with me. Why not? I can come up with a number of reasons: it just didn't register, I was not familiar enough with it, I was still somewhat new to birding, I wasn't really sure about what I was hearing or seeing, etc., etc. Needless to say, it obviously did not make an impression on me at that time. And a bird that makes an impression goes a long way to elevating a bird from a Lifer to one that goes on the Emotional Life List (that's ELL for short). This list is much shorter than my standard Life List, and only includes birds that I feel some sort of connection with, and that have touched my life in some significant way. The Eastern Phoebe and Carolina Wren hold the top 2 spots on my ELL.

I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, which means that I'm also wiping tears from my eyes with that same sleeve on what some would consider to be strange occasions.

Take a look at this beautiful male Magnolia Warbler.

This Magnolia Warbler (Maggies, for short) is being held by Bill Hilton, Jr., who was banding birds throughout the week at the festival.
He's gorgeous in the photo, but a two-dimensional image really doesn't do justice to just how stunning this bird was. As I was looking at him through my camera lens, tears were welling up in my eyes. It was a Life Bird, and goes on the ELL for sheer beauty alone.

A bird that's a little higher up on the ELL is the Black-throated Blue Warbler. I went into the festival hoping to see this bird. I already have an affinity for one of his cousins, the Black-throated Green Warbler, because when I encountered it for the first time, I was in a very sacred place in the Hocking Hills area. It was early morning, the park was not yet full of people, and it was pretty much just me, my camera, and the woods full of bird song. A special moment was etched into my soul, and that bird will always be a part of that. My Black-throated Blue moment was just as powerful. I get all worked up just thinking about it. I make no effort to hide the fact that this bird made me cry.

The Black-throated Blue Warbler has some very specific habitat requirements, and one place where it nests is in the higher elevations of West Virgina, such as in Cranberry Glades. Photo courtesy Jim McCormac.
The Black-throated Blue was just a small part of an incredible experience, but I'll leave the magic of Cranberry Glades for another post.

Moths on our cabin

In addition to the plethora of birds that I was bound to see and hear at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, I eagerly anticipated encounters with other fauna that I knew would be abundant in this richly forested area of West Virginia. I had heard good things about moth encounters at the restroom at the Burnwood day-use area (directly across SR 19 from the New River Gorge Canyon Rim Visitor's Center). I've never looked forward to seeing a bathroom so much in my life! Unfortunately, many of the evenings during our week-long stay were quite cold (some nights dipping down into the 30's), and cold nights are not conducive to moth activity, no matter how attractive the lights.

As luck would have it, though, we kept the back porch light on at our cabin every night, and we were treated to some very nice moths right outside our back door on the warmer evenings. These were actually all photographed during daylight hours, and I suspect that the afternoon sun that beamed onto the wood siding on the back of the cabin was inviting to them as they warmed up in preparation for evening flight.

Here's a Rosy maple moth, Dryocampa rubicunda. This little show stopper greeted us the day we arrived at the cabin, staying tucked up against the door frame. This was my first encounter with the moth, but Nina had seen this on previous treks to New River and was able to identify it right away. As its common name implies, the host plant for Rosy maple moth caterpillars are maples, such as red maple, sugar maple and silver maple.
My moth ID skills are horrible, so I can't tell you who some of these beauties are (I can't wait until Seabrooke Leckie's new moth guide comes out in 2012!). To anyone out there who is more knowledgeable, I would love to be informed of their identities.

This moth seems like some kind of leaf mimic to me. Wonder what it would have looked like with wings spread out?

This unknown moth looks like it escaped an encounter with a predator based on the chunk missing from its wing.

Here's another one that's looking a little on the tattered side. I saw a number of these on our cabin, and they all liked tucking themselves up under the wood siding.

I really love this one for its coloring. It puts me in the mind of lichen.

This view is even better. The markings on the upper "back" look to me like closed eyes with big false eyelashes on them.
All of these moths so far are on the relatively small side (bodies a couple of inches in length, and most could probably fit on a half dollar piece with wings closed). We were very lucky, however, to see the largest moth of the trip one afternoon later in the week.

This is a member of the silkmoth family, Saturniidae, and some internet searching the day that we encountered this moth turned up the name Promethea moth, Callosamia promethea. Pretty stunning, right? Well, wait till he opens his wings - the difference is like day, and... night:

Yes, this really is two pictures of the same moth. The males can be told apart from the females by the black coloring of their open wings. The photo is blurry because this guy didn't hold his wings still once he had opened them.

Nina and I were able to snap a few photos of him with open wings before he took off, never to be seen by us again. Interestingly, Jim McCormac found a female Promethea moth hanging out on his cabin, which was maybe 200 yards away from ours. I wouldn't be at all surprised if our male moth paid his female moth a little visit, if you know what I mean. Read more about Jim's encounter with the Promethea HERE.
Having said that my moth ID skills are not very good, I came across something confusing on the Butterflies and Moths of North America website when I was trying to learn more about the Promethea moth: there is a VERY similar-looking moth called the Tuliptree silkmoth, Callosamia angulifera. Being not well-acquainted with these creatures, I never would have been able to call the ID on my own. It seems similar to the novice birder's attempt to distinguish a Downy Woodpecker from a Hairy Woodpecker, or a Cooper's Hawk from a Sharp-shinned Hawk, if you've only seen one and not the other and have no reference on size or habits. To make matters more confusing, both will use Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) as a host plant for their caterpillars, and there was an abundance of Tulip trees around our cabin.

A tidbit about the silkmoths is that the adults do not feed. They emerge from their cocoon, mate, lay eggs and die, often in a matter of days. When I learned about this a few years ago, it boggled my mind, and it still does. I imagine there has to be a name for this type of life cycle, and I've been scouring the internet for such information, but so far I have come up empty-handed. It's information and questions like these that keep me ever-interested in the complexity of nature.

Intense birding in West Virginia

I returned home from the New River Birding and Nature Festival 3 days ago, but I'm still adjusting my brain and my internal clock to "the real world." Over the next week or so I'll roll out posts that detail what kinds of things I saw and heard there, but right now I have to try to put into words the essence of the festival before it all slips away and seems like a dream.

At the encouragement of my friend Nina, I signed up for the full week-long deluxe package, which included lodging in a wonderful little cabin in the woods at Opossum Creak Retreat, 3 meals a day, birding by day and presentations each evening after dinner. That week was total immersion in birds, botany and natural history. Put another way, as quoted on the New River Festival website, it's a week of "birding, ecology, friendship and fun."

I've never been to a birding festival before, but I think the bar has now been set pretty high for any future bird outings that I might go to. They really take care of you at the New River Festival. For one thing, having your meals provided for you is a huge convenience that I didn't appreciate until I came home and realized that I had to go back to fixing my own meals. This may sound silly, but it's just part of what lets you devote ALL of your attention to birding - someone else worries about all of the logistics for you (a HUGE thanks goes out to Dave Pollard for that - thanks, Dave!), while you just sit back and enjoy the birds. A bus drives you to the designated trip locations, lunch comes with you, and you have access to the guides basically from dawn till dusk. Groups are kept small, with a ratio of approximately 10 guests per guide, for maximum learning potential. Have a target bird in mind? Let the guides know, and they will do their best to get it for you.

Morning comes early, with communal breakfast at 6:00, and then you're on the road by 6:45. I had to laugh some mornings when I would look at my watch to see it was only 10:00 or so, thinking to myself, "Wow, I've been birding for 3 hours already!" Most trips would return by 2:00, giving you a few hours of down time in the afternoon, but there were a few day-long trips available that kept participants out until 8:00 or 9:00 at night (including dinner, of course). It was intense, to say the least. We were all a little loopy by the end of the week, I think, due to lack of sleep, but the intensity was worth it. I was speaking to someone on one of the trips about time I spent in France as a college student, where I was immersed in the language and the culture for a handful of months. This birding trip was not terribly unlike my time in Paris. It was full-on immersion into the world of bird behavior and bird song, and it give me such a better understanding of the habitat requirements of all the birds I saw (a diverse mix of habitats are covered over the course of the week if you pick the right trips). I left for this festival with a desire to get to know my warblers better, and I feel like that goal was reached. I knew that all the learning had paid off when, during the return trip home, I was able to easily recognize some birds that were still relatively new to me during a quick stop to do some road-side birding 30 minutes away from my house.

In addition to the immersive nature of the festival, there was also an insular feel to the event, which was not something that I expected going into it. It was as if we were in our own little birding heaven, giving thought to little else. Not much news from the outside world reached me during the week. I heard about the killing of bin Laden on Monday morning, but other than that, I was removed from news. Nothing about the royal couple, nothing about this reality personality or that movie star or this million-dollar company buying out some other company. I chose not to watch television or listen to the radio. This was my first true vacation from news media in quite some time, and it was refreshing! Even my social media contacts were limited mostly to other folks who were making Facebook posts about the festival. Yes, we were all right there together, talking face to face, but also communicating via Facebook. While social media (including the good ol' telephone!) kept me somewhat tethered to the outside world, mostly I felt like I was on a very special little birding island, where all I wanted to do was learn about and observe birds as much as possible, and that was okay with everyone around me.

As much as I birded, I didn't get many bird photos due to the constraints of my equipment. And while I birded hard, I also took time to appreciate some other aspects of my surroundings. I'll tell you more about that in upcoming posts.