Back From the North

Sorry I haven't been out and about in the Blog World this past weekend. We spent the weekend up in the Adirondacks visiting our cabin and dropping off a bunch of appliances we bought so the contractor can have them installed for us: a propane-run instant hot water heater, a propane wall heater, propane lights (they're like gaslights, and will likely be a good way to get light without needing electricity), and a shower apparatus to install in the bathroom.

When we first made our way up the gravel road to the cabin, we were surprised to find that a fairly large tree had fallen across the road - directly before the driveway to our property. So we had to cart all the heavy boxes up the side of the hill to reach the cabin instead of parking directly next to it! It wasn't until we'd gotten everything up there that we realized the obvious solution: We should have driven the Jeep up the hill. Sure enough, it went right up with no problem, even though it was a steep hill and had no gravel or anything to make it easier. We are still not thinking like Jeep owners, I guess!

Giggles over at Wits and Wiggles was talking about getting back in touch with her inner "nature girl" and I must say that I am feeling the same way whenever we go up to the Adirondacks. When I was young I was very into birdwatching and my mother was always showing me wildflowers in the woods. Living in semi-urban New Jersey for my whole adult life, it was harder and harder to find anything worth looking at. Now that I'm able to go to a location that is rich with wildlife, I'm getting back into what I enjoyed so much when I was younger.

This was another good visit in terms of seeing and hearing interesting wildlife. On our way up the main road, we saw an actual porcupine waddling along the side of the road! He looked up at us and started to head into the woods before I could get out my camera. He must have been somewhat alarmed by our presence because his quills started to rise on his back. Neither of us had ever seen a real porcupine before!

Then while we were sitting out on our deck having lunch we heard a strange call in the woods. It went on for quite awhile. We couldn't tell if it was an animal or a bird. After Googling "coyote calls" and "wolf howls" on the Blackberry I decided it was neither of those. When we got home I was able to do a more thorough search and found that the spooky sound was a Barred Owl. Go here to listen to what we heard. (Go to the Barred Owl and click on the link called "typical"). I was surprised because it was still daylight and I didn't realize owls were out during the day.

I also came across some great wildflowers - I saw a Jack in the Pulpit and also a whole bunch of Trillium. I even managed to take some pictures of it without them turning out all blurry. Here is one of them:

Here is another attempt at nature photography - the new ferns popping up among the leaves around the pond:

While I was walking along the roadway, I saw an Ovenbird, but didn't get a picture of that. I am amazed that anyone can manage to get great pictures of birds. It is a real skill. Of course, they probably have better cameras with very close-up lenses, unlike my point and shoot variety.

Speaking of Nature, we discovered that Something has been destroying trees around our cabin. Check this out:
This was a perfectly good tree. Now it has three huge holes in it. There are also several farther up in the tree on the other side. After seeing this, we noticed a bunch of other trees in the woods with similar damage, some done recently and some that was obviously from previous years. We can only conclude that it is caused by our friends, the impressive, beautiful, Pileated Woodpeckers, which I decided after Googling "Pileated Woodpecker Damage." (See below - note pile of wood chips like ours).

I was so thrilled to see them when we were up there last fall. Now I'm starting to think of them as a menace to the forest!

So much for Nature! Now I'll move on to our other adventures.

During this visit we also put the Jeep to another test. First we took it around to the other end of the Jeep trail that runs past our cabin again. Since we'd done it last time, I was feeling very brave. I even got out and took a picture of one of the somewhat challenging parts of the road. Here is the stretch of road, followed by the Jeep making its way up:

We then decided to do something even more daring. We turned down a side trail off of that road, and headed toward Lake George. We didn't even know whether it went all the way through. As we went along, it got less and less like a road and more and more like a bunch of rocks strewn along a narrow ledge; the hill sloped steeply away from the edge of the trail. At any moment I expected the trail to end abruptly with a bunch of trees and couldn't even imagine trying to back up! I also envisioned tumbling over the side of the cliff to my right if the Jeep tipped too much going over a rock.

I didn't get any pictures of this road. I was too busy holding on for dear life, closing my eyes and calling on the Diety to protect us. Even Diva was nervous - she was panting the whole time!

We did finally make it through to the road that goes along Lake George - and lived to tell the tale. And, the Jeep made it through with no problem! I guess that's what they're made for! I even made up a new motto for Jeep, based on the fact that the GPS map was showing no road where we were driving. "Just because the road ends doesn't mean you have to stop!"

I'll end with a few more pictures of the cabin and the surroundings. It was wonderful to be away from it all. We didn't even watch television while we were up there this time. However, we still got our newspapers and learned that Souter plans to retire from the Supreme Court. In the next post, it is Baxter's turn to do a news roundup so we'll get back into current events then.

Here is the cabin with its new green metal roof:

The new slate underneath the woodstove, and the new pine flooring that was installed. Now it just needs to be stained.

Birches reflecting in the pond.

Scenery along the Jeep trail.Views of Lake George.The little public beach on Lake George that is nearest to our cabin.

Speaking of Change...

I think I'm ready to write about something other than politics today. It's Saturday, and I'm still basking in the euphoria of Obama's victory on Tuesday. Let's let things rest for a couple of days.

This actually happened last weekend when the weather was nicer than it is today, and DH was out mowing the lawn and I was indoors on the computer:

***
The phone rang as I sat at the computer, feverishly looking at every blog and polling website trying to piece together a feeling of certainty about the upcoming election.

"Hello?" I said impatiently.

It was DH, calling on his cell phone from the back yard. He said, "Come look at this caterpillar."

Most people would have said "What? Don't bother me about some stupid caterpillar when I'm busy trying to figure out who's going to win the election!" (Well, that's what you might expect ME to say, anyway, based on my usual reaction to interruptions from DH during a blogging session).

Instead, I said, "OK!" and hung up the phone, running down the stairs.

This is because I had suddenly become nine years old. When I was that age, we had just moved to upstate New York to a more rural area, and I had become fascinated with all of the wildlife in the area, which consisted of many more types of birds than I was familiar with, strange creatures in the back yard (groundhogs), and yes, caterpillars.

There was not a caterpillar that didn't fascinate me. I'd find them on bushes, trees, and shrubs, let them crawl onto my fingers, and I'd bring them home, along with a good supply of leaves, and put them in a jar with airholes in the cover. I'd watch as they spun their cocoons, and then wait while a miracle took place inside their little homespun houses. Then one day, a butterfly (or moth in some cases) would emerge, and I'd bring the open jar outside and let it go free to start the cycle all over again.

Naturally I had a Peterson Guide to Insects, similar to my bird guidebook, to identify the creatures I was finding.

We had a lot of milkweed in our back yard so I was always looking for the Monarch Butterfly larva, which is a colorful striped caterpillar that loves to chow down on milkweed. I did find one once. Another time I found two caterpillars that turned out to be Mourning Cloak Butterflies once they hatched.

Hearing the words, "Come look at this caterpillar" made me immediately start wondering what kind of caterpillar it was. The first one that came to mind was the Wooly Bear, since they are relatively common in this area.

Sure enough, when I found DH, halted in mid-mow so as not to cut up the caterpillar, there crawling obliviously in front of the mower was a nice Wooly Bear with the distinctive three colored bands - black at either end and a rusty brown in the middle.

I put my finger in front of him and he obligingly crawled onto it. Then I picked him up and took him over to the garden at the side of the yard, and tried to get him off my finger. He finally fell into the weeds and grass (luckily we don't weed our garden much!) and rolled tightly into a little ball of fuzz, as Wooly Bears are wont to do when feeling nervous.

Wooly Bears are known for supposedly predicting the severity of the upcoming winter weather. This one had a fairly even distribution of color, with the middle brown band taking up about a third of his length. This probably means a relatively average winter as I found pictures of Wooly Bears with much wider brown bands.

According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, a long-term study was done at Bear Mountain, New York, to determine if there is any truth in this old wive's tale, and apparently there is a certain amount of accuracy to it, although it certainly wasn't very scientific:

"Between 1948 and 1956, Dr. Curran's average brown-segment counts ranged from 5.3 to 5.6 out of the 13-segment total, meaning that the brown band took up more than a third of the woolly bear's body. As those relatively high numbers suggested, the corresponding winters were milder than average. But Curran was under no scientific illusion: He knew that his data samples were small. Although the experiments popularized and, to some people, legitimized folklore, they were simply an excuse for having fun. Curran, his wife, and their group of friends, who called themselves The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear, escaped New York each fall for the glorious foliage and the meals at the posh Bear Mountain Inn."

In 1988, the annual Wooly Bear collection was resurrected at Bear Mountain, conducted by the nature museum at Bear Mountain State Park. According to the Almanac,

"This fall, museum director Jack Focht will gather a dozen or so caterpillars, as he has done since 1988, and spread them out on the kitchen table of his "folklore consultant," Clarence Conkling. The two men will count the brown segments, average them, and declare another forecast from Woolly Bear Mountain. 'We're about 80 percent accurate,' he says."

Eighty percent? Pretty good for an old wive's tale!

(Actually, according to Mike Peters at the University of Massachusetts, it is more likely that the width of the bands is reflective of the previous season's weather rather than the upcoming winter's severity. But that's no fun.)

The Almanac is apparently a bit out of date, because the Times Record-Herald up in New York State says that Mr. Focht retired in the 90s and the counts stopped for awhile.

However, the Hudson Highlands Nature Preserve has apparently continued the tradition of collecting the caterpillars as a children's event. The prediction for this winter? Mild!

We'll take it!

(Photo courtesy of Cold Spring School.)

The Silence of the Wrens

No, they're not dead. At least I don't think they are. But they're gone.

Yesterday morning the wrens were chattering away, with the mom and dad feeding the babies in their usual frantic fashion. Last night when I got home from work it was quiet, although I thought I heard the chattering of a wren in the next yard somewhere. I figured they had gone to bed for the night.

But this morning, when they were usually highly active, there was silence. The bird house was still hanging on the back of the garage, but there was no chattering emanating from it. No adult wrens flitting back and forth with moths in their mouths. Nothing but silence.

Could the cats have killed both parents and all the babies starved to death in one day? I tiptoed over to the bird house with trepidation, worried that I'd find a bunch of dead baby wrens inside. I peered into the hole but there was nothing but silence and emptiness. No baby wrens.

I went inside and Googled "wren life cycle" and found a thorough article on the House Wren. Sure enough, it said that the incubation period for the eggs was about 13 days, and from birth until the babies were fledged was 12 to 18 days. The timing is right. The wrens have flown the coop.

Apparently House Wrens are quite prolific and actually produce two broods per summer. So the first one has to get up and out so they can start working on another one.

I am sure I heard the chattering of a wren nearby this morning so they must be around somewhere. According to the article, once the breeding is over they are much less conspicuous and much quieter.

I expect they don't produce their second brood in the same place as the first so I guess my days of sitting on the deck in the morning hearing the chattering and singing of the wrens are over. The silence is a little sad but now I hear other birds that were drowned out by the wrens. And today I heard the first cicada. The cycle of life continues.