Happy Friday

I think the tree fungus in today’s photo is false turkey tail, but please don’t hold me to that. Every time I think I’m improving my fungus-identification skills, I find another 20 species that seem to fit just as well. Not only is my learning curve on these things steep, but I’m starting to think it’s approaching hopeless.

I enjoy looking at and for woodland fungus, but you should probably take my poor attempts at identification with a grain of salt. Maybe I should just stick to birds. I’m pretty good with those.

A good many birders I know bemoan the days of winter birding as unexciting, but I don’t agree. It’s true that this time of year it’s difficult to find, say, 50 species of birds in a few hours of birding, but I find other compensations. This is a good time of year to spend more time watching the birds do what they do.

In May, it’s easy to get caught up trying to find that next good bird than it is to think about spending much time with something as common as a song sparrow. In November, the odds finding unusual birds are much higher, so you might as well pay more attention to the ones around the yard.

And if you are a new birder, now is the perfect time for birding. Spend some time getting to know the local and common birds so that when May or April comes around, you can focus on the visitors.

For me, winter birding is pleasurable because my view into the forest is now unrestricted by greenery. The birds are no longer just a brief flit between leaves. I can actually see them and watch what they’re going. I guess this is all just by way of saying that I’m ready for Saturday when I can spend a few hours in daylight fooling around and looking for birds. Happy Friday!

Quiet (?) night

The daytime quiet continues here on the mountain, though last night Dog and I encountered a deer walking down my driveway as we were walking up. The deer stopped and looked at us. Dog stood up on his hind legs, balancing with the tension in the leash, and everybody stared at each other for a bit. Then the deer calmly ambled off the driveway and into the woods. My arm still hurts from Dog trying to follow.

I’ve wondered if the deer was one of the pair that ate my juniper bush last winter. It certainly wasn’t afraid or wary of us.

And the raccoon again. That large and furry mammal has now destroyed the new platform bird feeder I just got this year. It's tossed the plasic "windows" down into the woods. It's pulled the top off and eaten, I think, the rope. The suet feeder along the side is pulled off. Ah, life in the woods. Never a dull moment, not even when it's quiet.

Quiet

Quiet is how the mountain is today. The air is still, and few birds are moving or even out looking for food. Nights are busier here this week. The routine of Baby Dog howling in outrage when a local raccoon raids the bird feeder at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. is predictable. I get up, flip on a light, watch the raccoon scurry away and go back to sleep. If I don’t get up, Baby Dog continues to howl and listening to her is worse than getting up. In the morning I barely remember it.

Deer are moving every night, and I’m finding them in places where I don’t usually see them. They are in the lane, galloping uphill along the dirt road like horses, or next to the chicken pen or beside the cabin within arm’s reach. That drives the dogs nuts, too.

To replace the long-departed summer pewees, the great horned and screech owls are nightly callers. The Canada geese are always up to trouble, too. They are always fussing about something, even in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I wish I could sleep during the quiet day and spend more time outside at night, seeing what else goes on. Maybe one day but not this one.

Weekend ramble

The "brown" season is settling in here at Roundtop. After six months of being surrounded by green, now I’m surrounded by brown. I’m still adjusting to that, in part because the change happened unusually fast this year. Normally, the colors of fall hang on for a while, sometimes for a long while. This year the colors were gorgeous for a day and gone literally overnight.

Yesterday the weather was a bit warmer than is typical and combined with a sunny sky and calm wind, the day felt wonderfully warm. I traipsed around the woods a bit, enjoying the temperature and the open view the now bare trees present. It’s much easier walking without underbrush and seasonal growth impeding my progress. During the warm seasons, I can’t easily stray far off a trail because of it. This time of year I can walk wherever I want, and that’s more to my wandering style.

I set off into the woods, following no path, not even a deer trail. I walked where the ground was easiest, skirting around boulders, avoiding low spots or steep climbs. I just wandered wherever my feet took me. The leaves are deep and fluffy on the forest floor, as no rain has fallen since they fell. The leaves aren’t compressed at all, and my every step was crunchy and loud. I had no chance to sneak up on any woodland animal unannounced.

I noticed that a few leaves still cling to the trees. I suspect they will soon become the marcescent leaves of this winter. The beech leaves in today’s photo will likely be among those that hang on. Oddly, at least to me, a same-sized beech tree about 25 feet from this one has dropped all its leaves. Both trees look much the same in height and girth. Both appear healthy. Yet one hangs on to its leaves and the other has dropped them.

A few trees have leaves that haven’t yet turned color. Those are increasingly rare. Several small chestnut oaks huddled together in a tight group fall into that category. Is it because those leaves are so large?

Birds didn’t mind the noise I made as I crunched through the forest. Dark-eyed juncos are here in numbers now. Later, when I was back at the cabin, I saw the first of them eying my bird feeders. The juncos have been here since mid-October, but until now they apparently found plenty of natural food and didn’t need to visit the feeders. They are still cautious, sitting above the feeders, watching the chickadees and titmice flit in and out before daring to dip down and feed themselves.

The chickadees and titmice are working hard on the dessicated flowers of the tulip poplar trees. They flit from seed pod to pod so quickly that until I eyed them with binoculars, I suspected kinglets or gnatcatchers.

Just being outside in the daylight is already a treat. The time change and having to work for a living makes my daylight forays a thing of the weekends only. Yesterday was a day lovely enough to get me through the week until I can be outside during the daylight again.

Moon rising over mountain

If you’ve read yesterday’s blog post, you may remember I put a bit of a teaser in there about how several hundred feet of elevation change means that up here at the cabin I am seeing at least one bird species in my local patch that I’m apparently not supposed to be seeing.

That species is black-capped chickadee, one of the more common species I see. The reason I know I’m not supposed to be seeing it is because E-Bird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s bird sightings site, considers it a "rare" species in my county and always asks me to confirm the sighting. E-Bird thinks I’m only supposed to be seeing Carolina chickadees. And if I lived down off the mountain, E-Bird would be right.

Ten years ago, I had to go in search of Carolina chickadees. Black-capped chickadees ruled the area. Carolina chickadees weren’t far to the south of me, though. Then a few years passed, and Carolina chickadees were reported at Pinchot park, just about three miles south of me. So I went to the bird blind where they were and waited what seemed like an awful amount of time, sorting through lots of black-capped chickadees until I finally found a pair of the Carolina chickadees.

Then a few years ago, I saw the first Carolina chickadees at the cabin. The Carolinas were much in the minority at my feeders, but occasionally, perhaps once or twice a week, I’d see the little, grayer birds and added them to my yard list. Last year, I was even lucky enough to get a photo of the two species side by side.

This year at my feeders Carolina chickadees are more in evidence, if not quite even with the black-capped chickadees. And, I’m seeing birds that I believe are intergrades of the two. It’s starting to make me wonder how they can be called two different species, but that’s a discussion for a different day.

Anyway, research shows that Carolina chickadees are moving further north, but also suggests that where the two more or less overlap black-capped chickadees do better at higher altitudes. So here up on Roundtop, the black-capped chickadee is still a common sight, but given the spread of the Carolina chickadees, I wonder how much longer that will remain true.

Frost

Last night the air was still and calm, and this morning I had a bit of a frost. It still wasn’t a freeze, and by my cabin thermometer, the temperature never actually reached 32. That could be misleading, though. I took today’s photo just 50 yards or so down the hill from the cabin, and the temperature apparently did dip to 32 near the ground down there. Dewpoints are usually chillier near the ground than a few feet above it. On still nights like last night, that chillier air isn’t moved around by a breeze, and so low-lying little pockets of air can be colder than the surrounding areas.

The temperature at the cabin is also different from what is found down off the mountain. The temperature here is often several degrees cooler than what people in the suburbs report. It’s cooler in summer, and it’s cooler in winter. I can routinely figure on 3-5 degrees, sometimes it’s as much as 7 degrees.

When you have mountains, air pressure is lower as you go higher. The difference in temperature is usually about 5.4 degrees per 1000 feet. As the altitude difference between suburbia and my cabin is only about 700 feet, the temperature difference between there and here should be around 3.5 degrees cooler at the cabin.

But that’s not the whole story. I also don’t have roofs and macadam and street lights around me. Those things can and do raise nearby temperatures. So the 3.5 degree difference in 700 feet should be true if you’re measuring, say, a forest at 300 feet above sea level to a forest at 1000 feet above. When one area is a forest and the other is urbanized, the temperature differences are more pronounced.

That slight temperature difference apparently also accounts for why at least one of the bird species I routinely see at the cabin is different than what people living in similar habitats off the mountain see. But I'll have more on that tomorrow.

Forgetting and remembering

Even though I’ve been on this planet for more than half a century now, I’m still surprised at how what happens outside my door every year seems new again when a new season arrives. Last night I was noticing how quickly it gets dark after the sun sets. Twilight seems shorter these days. Once the sun drops behind Nell’s Hill, darkness arrives soon after. This time of year no long twilights allow me to be outside in some degree of brightness for an hour after the sun sets. The sun dips behind the mountain and within 10-15 minutes, it is dark.

Last evening I was standing out in the darkening forest, and the night was approaching almost at the point where I needed my headlamp. Then I looked up. There at the tops of the tall oaks that surround my cabin, sunlight still touched the last of leaves that still cling to the trees. The tallest of the oaks here are white oaks, which can grow to 100 feet. As best I can determine, the oaks in my forest are middle-aged and so are in the 100-125 year old range, which should put them pretty close to 100 feet tall.

What surprised me is that the sunlight that still touched the treetops didn’t extend further down to brighten the woods, at least a little, onto the ground where I stood. But it didn’t. Up there, the leaves get more sunlight, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise to see why leaves remain longer on the tallest trees in the forest. But if I knew that or had made that connection in previous years, I’d forgotten it, and seeing the evidence of that last evening made the connection real again.

Each season that I live holds its own treasures of forgetting and remembering. I’m often surprised by the forgetting. I don’t think my memory is any worse than anyone else’s, but until I experience the differences each season brings anew, those older memories aren’t at the top of my consciousness. It takes the actual experience of the new season to pull them back to me again. Today, fall is new again.