Explorations on Shank's Mare 1: The Eastern Trail in Snow

For the past year or so Sally and I have made walking our primary form of physical activity. Throughout the late summer and fall we greatly enjoyed discovering and exploring trails in the area that were new to us. I'll write about some of these in future posts. One of our long-time favorites, though is the Eastern Trail that connects Kittery in the south with South Portland in the north. (The ET is, in turn, part of the East Coast Greenway, a complex of roads and trails that stretches from Key West, FL to Calais, ME, at the Canadian border.) The Eastern Trail presently consists of a combination of on-road routes and off-road trail sections. We're fortunate to have a nice 6.1 mile off-road section that connects Kennebunk and Biddeford within easy striking distance of our house.

We've been enjoying our pedestrian excursions thoroughly and hated the thought of having to suspend them through the winter months when all the trails are covered with snow. The solution: snowshoes for each other for Christmas! Yeah! Bring it, Ol' Man Winter! We're ready!

But then...Christmas arrived and there was nary a speck of snow on the ground. The 5"-6" we got before Thanksgiving had long since disappeared. The new snowshoes remained in their boxes, unopened. When we did get snow, on the first weekend of the month, it was only a few inches, and was immediately followed by freezing rain. Crust everywhere; no nice, soft powder.

Not to worry. It's January and this is Maine; more snow arrived this past week. Again, not so very much, but enough to inspire us to mount an expotition today to break in the new snowshoes. There were even a few flurries in the air as we headed for Biddeford and the upper terminus of the Kennebunk-to-Biddeford section of the Eastern Trail.

It took us both a few minutes to get accustomed to the new appendages, and to do some tweaking of the bindings. But after that--man, what great fun! Why didn't we do this a long time ago? It felt so good just to be out and about after spending too much time indoors lately. The thought of being able now to explore the woods in winter, to check out all the animal tracks, to perhaps catch some glimpses of the animals that make the tracks, and to see what birds inhabit our woods in the winter, is very liberating!

The snowfall picked up quite a bit while we were walking, which added another layer of beauty to the scene. Sally noted that it was like walking in a snow globe.

There were not very many birds out today; just a few Blue Jays (which seem to be ubiquitous this winter) and a few small things fluttering about in a distant tree, too small and too far away to identify without binoculars. Lots and lots of animal tracks, though--time to brush up on my track identification skills!

Mostly what we saw were squirrel tracks, with probably a few rabbit tracks mixed in. But then there were others that we suspect might indicate the presence of Woozles! 

We started our walk at the trailhead in the parking lot of the Southern Maine Medical Center in Biddeford. From there we trekked southward for a little over half an hour, and turned around at the Arundel town line.There are markers along the trail at quarter-mile intervals, so we're able to figure that we did about two miles total. Not so very far, but not bad for an initial shake-down venture testing out new gear. We certainly felt evidence of our exertions in our legs, knees, and ankles!

We ended up feeling tired but exhilarated. Can't wait to get out for many more winter walks!

p.s. If you don't know what a Woozle is, and have never been on an expotition to look for one, you clearly had a deprived childhood! I recommend that you rectify the situation by consulting the works of A.A. Milne at your earliest opportunity!

Birder's Bookshelf 1: Joseph Kastner, "A Species of Eternity"

With this post I begin a series of reviews--though perhaps "discussions" would be a more apt term--of books from my personal library, books that I have found to be particularly influential, useful, or simply interesting. Don't look here for reviews of the latest and greatest new field guides, though that might happen at some point. Most of the works that I will be writing about will either be old, out-of-print books about birds (mostly), or newer ones that deal in some way with the history of ornithology, bird painting, and of humans' relationship with birds. I begin with a book not specifically about birds, but one that had an enormous impact on me when I read it (c. 1982). I will follow up this post with a look at a related work (that is just on birds) by the same author, Joseph Kastner, a long-time writer and editor at Life magazine. Both Kastner books played a big role in sparking the interest that led to the acquisition of many of the other books that I will be writing about.
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Joseph Kastner. A Species of Eternity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

It would be overly dramatic, but not entirely inaccurate, to say that this book changed the course of my life. It certainly sent me down paths that I had not previously traveled and started me on a journey that continues today, more than thirty years after I read it.

Kastner's book is a chronicle of the lives, work, and adventures of the men--and they were all men--from the Colonial Era to roughly the middle of the 19th century who laid the groundwork for the study of natural history in North America. It was a colorful cast of characters -- some rich, some poor; some with extensive formal education, others entirely self-taught; some eccentric and flamboyant, some staid and introverted; some working within the structure of an institution, others pursing their interests on their own. All were blessed (cursed?) with passionate curiosity about the natural world and had the drive to probe its mysteries.

Painter and ornithologist John James Audubon is the only one among them whose name is likely to be familiar to most people today, but the cohort included many others: Mark Catesby, an Englishman who made some of the earliest depictions of American flora and fauna; the Bartrams, John and William, a father-and-son pair known best for their contributions to the study of botany; Charles Willson Peale, painter, naturalist, and father not only to one of the first museums in America but also to a large family that included several more painters and naturalists; Alexander Wilson, a Scottish immigrant who is regarded as "the father of American ornithology" and whose own monumental collection of bird paintings preceded Audubon's by just a few years but has been forever overshadowed by it; and on and on. Their stories are invariably fascinating and Kastner relates them in engaging, eminently readable prose.

As noted in an earlier post, my own interest in the natural world extends back to my childhood growing up on a farm. Even as a youngster I had often wondered about how the plants and animals that I saw around me, and read about in guide books, had come to be named, and who had first identified them. A Species of Eternity opened the door to the world and work of those who began the task of making sense of the complexities of the natural world, those who charted the previously uncharted. How strange and wonderful and overwhelming it must have been to live at a time when so much about the world around us was unknown, when there were no books to tell people what they were seeing.

As eye-opening and fascinating as it was to read about the adventures and contributions of Catesby, Alexander Garden, Cadwallader Colden, Constantine Rafinesque, et al, what really hooked me in to wanting to find out more about some of these characters was learning that both Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon were musicians! Aha -- a link between the two worlds that I love the most! Sweet.

Audubon played fiddle and flute, and also worked as a dancing master for a time before he began work on Birds of America, his magnum opus. Through subsequent reading of his published journals I learned that he often played with local musicians on his travels--which encompassed a huge swath of territory, from New Orleans to Labrador. We know less about Wilson's musical activities. Kastner quotes a letter Wilson wrote to William Bartram in 1803 in which he says: "I have had many pursuits, Mathematics, the German language, music, drawing, etc..." (p. 163). Audubon himself gives us a glimpse into Wilson as a musician. The two men met only one time during their lives, in 1807 when the Scotsman happened to stop into the store near Louisville, Kentucky, that Audubon ran for a time. Audubon wrote of Wilson: "His retired habits exhibited a strong discontent or a decided melancholy," and further, "The Scotch airs that he played sweetly on his flute made me melancholy too." (p. 178). I will write more about both Audubon and Wilson, and what is known of their musical activities, in future posts.

The door that Joseph Kastner opened for me with A Species of Eternity has never closed. In the three decades since reading it I have continued my explorations into the history of natural history (as it were), with a focus on the development of ornithology and the activity of bird-watching. A second book by Kastner, A World of Watchers, that deals specifically with the history of (as the jacket blurb puts it) the "history of the American passion for birds," fed this interest. It introduced me to the literature of many early writers about birds and, as noted earlier, was in large measure responsible for me seeking out and acquiring many of the well-worn volumes that crowd the bookshelves in our living room. It, and the books it inspired me to collect, will be the subjects of future posts.

A Four Woodpecker Day

Four different species, that is. The lousy weather we had in southern Maine yesterday and today--roughly four inches of snow, followed by a light rain that put a thin, crisp crust on everything--brought a lot of traffic to our bird feeders. We had the usual abundance of Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, American Goldfinches, Blue Jays,White-breasted Nuthatches, and Juncos, but also a few somewhat less frequent visitors: several Tree Sparrows, a pair of Cardinals, and the first Red-breasted Nuthatch that I'd seen in some months. Because our house backs up on some woods we are blessed with having a lot of woodpeckers among the regulars. The little Downys are the most common--some days recently we've had as many as six at one time--and there are usually a few Hairys and a pair of Red-bellies around as well.

A pair of Pileateds has inhabited our woods for as long as we've owned the place--that is, I'm assuming it's been the same pair over the years, though I have no evidence to support that notion--but our sightings of them typically have been quite rare and fleeting. On a few occasions we've been able to get somewhat extended looks when they appeared on trees near the house, and in April, 2013, the male spent enough time exploring the hollow of an old branch on the old apple tree in the front yard for me to get a bit of video footage of him.

Until today, that had been the best look I'd had. About 2:30 or so this afternoon, when I should have been out shoveling the walks, I was instead watching the activity at the feeders in our side yard. I was particularly enjoying the sight of numerous woodpeckers competing for space on the suet cakes, and thought how great it would be if one or both of the Pileateds would show themselves to complement the ranks of their smaller cousins. I was enormously delighted, then, when I looked down into the woods a short way and saw one, working away on the side of a White Pine! I was even more pleased when a second bird joined the first.

We keep a pair of binoculars and a spotting scope handy by the feeder viewing area, so we quickly were able to identify the first bird as a male and the second as the female. The male was quite persistently working away in a single spot on the tree. The female was less tenacious. She started pecking away at a place of her own near the male's excavation and every now and then would try to get closer to where he was working. He would have none of it, however, and quickly and decisively warded off all her advances. She soon flew off to other nearby trees. She'd work on one for awhile, then move to another, and then come back to where her (presumed) mate was whanging away. She managed one decent-size hole a quarter of the way around the same tree where he was working, but never showed nearly the same determination that he did.

The speed of his labors was impressive! In ten minutes or less he had created a hole deep enough to engulf his entire bill and part of his face when he made his forward thrusts. I regretted that I had not begun my observations at the same time he started work so I could time his progress. Fortunately, after digging a hole that had an opening that looked to be perhaps three inches high, he re-positioned himself downward a bit and began working in a new spot. This time I was ready, and started the timer on my iPhone. In only two or three minutes he got all the bark chipped off in the new location, and after only three or four more had carved out significant depth. In less than fifteen he had created a hole roughly the same size as the first one.

He continued to expand the new hole downwards and after a total of about half an hour of work he had created a cavity more then twice the size of his first effort. Impressive, indeed. I tried to calculate the number of pecks per minute but his drumming was too irregular. Instead, I counted the number of pecks per burst of activity. These ranged from two to ten, in periods lasting no more than a second or two.

After he'd been working for nearly forty minutes he suddenly stopped and became perfectly still. As did the female who was, at this time, on the adjacent tree. As did the Juncos and Chickadees who were hanging out in the Rose of Sharon bush by the feeders. As did the Downy who was on one of the two suet feeders. A cliche from old Western movies came to mind: it was quiet...too quiet. I strongly suspect that a raptor was in the area, but damned if I could spot one anywhere. The birds-as-statues routine continued for several minutes, but they eventually resumed their activities as abruptly as they had halted them.

As I observed the male, he often took short breaks from his drumming to eat whatever it was that he was finding in the tree. The point of his labors was, after all, to find food. I was never able to see just what it was that he was eating, though presumably it was insects of some sort.

Later, after we did finally get out to do the shoveling, I took a side trip into the woods, yardstick in hand, to try to measure the bird's excavations. His first hole had an opening of about 2.5-3.0" while the second one was nearly 5.0". I was able to reach up and get the yardstick into the second hole and measure the depth. Not a terribly precise reading since the hole it was considerably above my head, but as near as I could determine the hole was on the order of 3.5-4.0" deep. Not bad for about 40 minutes of effort.

This was the best opportunity I've ever had for extended observation of a Pileated Woodpecker at work, and I'm grateful for the experience. This was also the first time that we've had all four species of resident woodpeckers--Downy, Hairy, Red-bellied, and Pileated--visible at the same time. Quite the treat! Had it been a different time of year we might have been able to add Flicker to the mix.