Eagle Hunt Delayed by Sparrow

The Anti-Eagle

I was pretty wiped out after work on the Fourth of July and had to take care of a few things, so I ran out of time for the eagle hunt. I'm hoping to get to it today.

Work on a holiday weekend is hectic enough. My duties grew more complex when the patriarch of the shop called me over while we were all out front watching Wolfeboro's parade.

"There's a baby bird here that fell out of the nest, and these kids are all upset and can't enjoy the parade. Can't you do something about it?" he said.

I suppose he imagined I would take it out back and club it with a tire iron to "put it out of its misery." You'd be miserable, too, if you'd fallen out of your safe nursery into a scary, noisy world full of huge creatures, indifferent at best, hostile at worst. One young thug had been winging rocks at the bird.

What I saw was a viable nestling, if only I could get it back to its parents or into a suitably quiet environment. I scooped it up and carried it into the shop. We lock up during the parade, so I had more than an hour to work this problem in peace.

I looked for succulent bugs I could squish in imitation of regurgitated food, but all I saw was ants. I've never seen a bird chow down on ants. Rather than waste a lot of time on it, I moved on to rehydrating the little bugger. He (she?) would take drips from a paper towel. Then I went on line to look for a rehabilitator. I'd dealt with a woman in Madison a couple of years ago with a young squirrel. I hoped I might find someone closer, but I had to start somewhere.

One phone call at a time, to Madison, then Meredith, I was able to arrange foster care and get instructions to help keep the bird alive. Every ten minutes I dripped diluted sports drink onto its beak until closing time. Then my associate in the workshop, who had overslept and had to drive instead of bike, kindly transported it to a rendezvous with the rehabilitator.

In the early stages of this process, when I still cradled the bird in my right hand, I saw bird lice swarming up my arm. I was pretty sure I interdicted all of them before they invaded my armpit and moved on to hairier pastures. Once I had the bird in a nest cup to await transport I executed the straggling lice with a bike spoke heated over a butane lighter as they crawled up the tissue paper away from the nestling. But when I got home, Laurie suggested a thorough shower and immediate laundering of all my garments. Probably a better idea than going paddling in my buggy shirt. Then it was 5 p.m. and I'd really had enough. Figure a minimum of two hours start to finish for the most cursory trip to Province Lake...not worth it. I still had to work full hours on Saturday.

My associate reported that the he passed the bird, still cheeping, to its next custodian. So it made it that far.

Herons and Eagles

As the designated crazy who paddles and hikes inconvenient areas, I get the call to look for things where other people probably won't. This week it's herons and eagles nesting along the jungle shores of two minor rivers.

Following reports of adult heron pairs on Pine River, I was asked to check downstream from the Elm Street bridge for signs of a rookery.

Pine River meanders so tightly that you can often look onto the next bend from the one you're rounding, unless the vegetation is too thick or the water level drops you too far below bank height. It cuts through glacial till, undermining the trees that grow along it. Nearly every bank-side tree can look forward to falling in eventually. Some fall along the course. Most fall across. It's surprising anyone can paddle through at all. There have been years in which it didn't seem worth the trouble.

Nature never stands still. The logjams cook down. Floods add or remove debris. On many of the more permanent ones, different water levels offer different options for crossing. At high water, float over a low spot. At low low water, limbo underneath. At varying mid levels the climb over may be harder or easier depending on what odd projections and additional logs might be exposed.

Yesterday the river was up at a high medium level, following several days of afternoon downpours. The swirling current was a dark reddish brown. The flecks stayed below the surface, so it didn't look like coffee with cream, but more like onion soup. Cold onion soup.

I hit the first log jam right where I expected it. It's been there for enough years that I thought it might have rotted down enough to let me pass easily. Instead I had to hop out of Scruffy, the kayak that loves to go sideways, onto a fat log that turned out not to be as buoyant as its bulk might suggest. I didn't go in, because I move very carefully, but it complicated my crossing.

One of the owners of my local Java haunt came by, walking her chocolate lab along the bank. She and her husband own a house formerly owned by other friends of mine, which includes a fair amount of unbuildable shore frontage. She said she thought it got worse downstream. As unwelcome as this news was, it still fell within normal variation on the Pine. I was doing this for Science. If Rick, the naturalist, could stick to a compass course through a chest-deep, basically uncharted bog, I could crawl through a few logjams.

A long stretch went by with no major obstacles. I'd reached the shore frontage of the shooting preserve on river right. I hadn't looked at it in years, since we aimless explorers were posted out. Early on they had bulldozed the bank to make what appeared to be a canoe launch, but that has grown back in. Only the signs forbidding entry, peeling from every other tree, reminded me of what had been a fine place to wander and watch the post-glacial terrain evolve.

A side channel invited entry but contained no nest sites. Then I came to the second stopper.

This picture is taken from the bank after I had hauled the boat out on that tree trunk.

A couple of boat lengths dragging through the grass and I was underway again.

Below that jam I passed a lagoon to the left. Someone's building a magnificent dwelling overlooking it, so I doubted herons would find it attractive.

Herons like tall pines, I was told. I figured since they're large and stork-like, they might have similar tastes, so I looked at all tall trees. I found nothing.

The forest opens out into flood plain with isolated hardwoods, many dead from the ice storm of 1998 and various flooding episodes. There are tons of birds. I saw one adult great blue heron, wood ducks, some other crested water bird, a kingfisher, a selection of woodpeckers, warblers, redwing blackbirds, cedar waxwings, phoebes, grackles and more.

When I reached an area I knew could be surveyed from roads on shore, I headed back upstream. Traveling two directions gave me another angle from which to tell there were no nests. I was briefly tempted to push on down to the public boat launch at Route 25 and call for a pickup, but I was less than halfway there. And I believe that you should get yourself out of whatever you get yourself into.

Paddling upstream into obstacles is easier in some ways than coming down on them with the flow. You don't get pushed into things. On the other hand, you have to pull for every inch. The crossings were a bit trickier, but somewhat familiar.

With arms and shoulders sore from the sudden surge of paddling, I pulled my way back to the launching site. We paddled the lower Pine on Sunday and ended up racing thunderstorms home.

The eagles may have to wait. These jungle cruises have a way of eating up time, even if you don't cover much ground. I have chores to do to get ready for next week.

Looking for bobcats

The center of Effingham is a mountain range unbroken by roads. Lacking waterfront, commerce or industry, the town's land has gone back largely to forest over the years. With little to attract disruptive development, the town's more or less functional ecosystems may end up being its best fortune.

The trick with environmental protection is to find the selfish human angle that accidentally brings along losing propositions like aesthetics or wildlife. As humans figure out that most of their drinking water comes from underground, they give more scrutiny to what goes on top of that ground. A natural environment produces better results than a built-up one. Even if you only drink beer and never bathe, clean water makes better beer.

The shriveling artificial lakes in the American west show that reservoirs don't hold water as well as aquifers do. And aquifers show the trickle-down theory in action. A lot of precipitation falls over a wide area and soaks down into the various layers that hold it for later use. To preserve recharge areas, a lot of land needs to be left alone. What luck. We happen to have a lot of land being left alone already.

This area and adjacent sections of Maine are already getting attention from groups like The Nature Conservancy because of the large tracts of restored forest and areas relatively uncut by roads, allowing not only for geological and hydrological function, but wildlife habitat and corridors as well. So interested towns and regional groups are taking stock of what is here and what could be here to set priorities for areas to protect.

The official surveyors need permission to enter someone's land and look around, so not every parcel gets examined in detail by an educated eye. The scientists depend on traipsing wanderers who cross unmarked property boundaries on an innocent bushwhack and might see and photograph sites and sights of interest.

Last Sunday, Mrs Umm and I headed out to a place she'd never been, on the advice of a naturalist that it looked like a promising area for bobcat denning sites. The naturalist is conducting an inventory of habitat types in town, but doesn't have clearance for this particular spot.

The search area was more than a mile from home and required about 1,000 feet of climbing to go up and over the peak behind us and start up the one beyond it. The slope is not very steep on average, but there's no trail. The leaves and black flies are both coming out in the sudden burst typical of northern New England. We should have gone two weeks ago, but weather and schedules did not cooperate.

The naturalist had told us to look for old porcupine dens that a bobcat would take over. We found several on our way up the long slope of the home mountain, complete with their scat.

One of the dens

Other scat was probably owl pellets. It was hard to tell, because they had dried to crumbly whiteness.

From the summit of our home mountain there was no clear line down into the col. That side was logged in the 1990s, allowing just enough time for it to grow back into sapling hell. The areas that weren't logged are still choked with undergrowth. We picked our way through the least tangled sections, trying to stay on course.

We found this rock wall in the middle of nowhere.

At the bottom of the col we intersected an abandoned ATV trail. An old logging road comes up from the paved road about a mile down on the other side of the ridge from our house. This trail continued that line over the col and disappeared down into young growth on the other side. It didn't help us much. We left it soon to head over toward the steep, rocky, overgrown face of the nameless peak where the naturalist thought we might find the cats.

With the new leaves and voracious bugs, we couldn't see very far or hold still to listen very long. Nothing in view looked like any kind of den. We'll have to go back when the leaves are off to get a better look.

It was a beautiful day for a hike, anyway. And on the way back down on our side of the mountain we saw two porcupines in a tree. One was climbing hurriedly up from the ground while the other one waited, looking very casual on a high branch.


The woods are full of wildlife this year. We had a lot of deer during the winter, and heard coyotes. Now we see a lot of turkeys, squirrels and assorted small birds, and have strong evidence of at least one bear.

Ignoring the Window (left over from late winter)

I have become like the many who spend their time shut up inside, staring into the infinite window of a computer screen because the view out the real window has so little to offer.

Here at this particular job, I can look at the near view of invasive species planted as shrubbery or raise my gaze to the house-raped hillsides, once the province of unbroken woods.

Expensive, impractical houses on the heights have become the new waterfront. Some of these erstwhile castle builders try to justify their foolish grab for prominent placement by saying that people lived up there a hundred years ago, so it's an established use.

Yes, people lived up there. And by choice they moved down again. And that was when people accepted a lower standard of comfort. If the horses or oxen could haul the wagon up the muddy ruts on twenty-percent grade, the road was passable. If heavy rains washed it out, the road would be laboriously rebuilt with pick and shovel. No one had to have broadband internet, perfect climate control or on-demand access to high speed roadways, regardless of the season.

Egotistical development of this sort has not yet managed to destroy the town where I live, though it has begun. Not even a good recession will save us this time, because the kind of person who wants to live up where everyone can see them has plenty of money. A recession will just bring their costs down. It will help them.

The Gathering Storm (Unposted in March)

The storm wind rakes the trees already. The heavy snow will not arrive for hours, but the trees sway as the surging gusts rush over them. Standing in the woodshed I remembered how this weather used to excite me.

I came here to get away from civilization, but it has followed me. To help guide what I cannot stop, I have had to spend more time with it. Gradually the old connection grows brittle, my own woods unfamiliar as I do not visit them. Mice move into the boats, mildew gathers on the backpacks, tents and climbing gear.

The weather now just goes on outside windows. It's something to drive through, not play in or spend much time observing

The Sensual Sailor

Years crept by as I lived inland. Then one day I drove to the coast. Long before I saw the water, I smelled it.

Lakes, even Great Lakes, can't equal the bewitching fertility of the sea. The wind carries the scent of life miles inland. I homed on it as if seeking the waters of my birth.

The water had been an arena of fear. When first I floated on it in a small boat, I felt my helplessness. Terror gripped me and jerked me in its claws faster than any rational thought could overtake it. I had wanted to be there, but visceral panic overwhelmed me, followed by shame and a sense of failure.

Just so you know where I came from. For some reason, I felt the water's deadly potential as if I'd experienced it before. At age six or seven, I had no thoughts of reincarnation. I just knew I had no control, strapped into a bulky kapok life jacket that felt like it would drag me to the bottom, stuffed down beside the daggerboard trunk of an eight-foot pram.

Later, larger, though still small, alone in the same boat, I stared into the green depths as the bottom dropped out of sight in Camden Harbor, and felt again that I was tempting the forces of nature to punish my impudence for daring to stick a spar and sail up into the fretful wind that swirled beneath steely clouds on what was supposed to be a summer day.

Still, something kept me coming back.

With so much clutter in my mind, I had difficulty absorbing the subtleties of racing. Junior programs were built around racing. Victory at sea was the goal.

I raced. I grew. I learned how to operate the boat, and some of the strategy and tactics. But mostly I relaxed in my growing confidence and absorbed the sensations of sailing and observed the environment as an object of technical interest and a work of art. Our finish placings suffered accordingly.

While many race days stand out, so do the other experiences, seeing Portuguese men-o-war floating in Biscayne Bay and catching glimpses of wild dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, or surfing across the sand bar into Dunedin Pass while all the other boats wended their way around a serpentine channel in careful single file. Indeed, from a lifetime on the water I have countless memories, and few of them are of glorious victory. They are of glorious existence.

Racing got me out there in conditions I might not have tackled. It was a bit like having a job. My skipper wanted to be in the event and I wanted to help him be there. I wouldn't mind a good performance, either. But there were so many distractions in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and various estuarine waters. We also sailed in lakes.

I love the lift and drive when we capture a puff of wind and hike out over the rail. I love the more violent acceleration downwind on a reach, catching waves that throw the boat ahead. Are we winning? I don't know. But we're moving right along.

One day, in strong winds, we rounded our leeward mark, which was also the starting line pin, just as the whole fleet of Flying Dutchmen got the gun. We came up to the wind and had to throw an instant tack as the surging flotilla leaped toward us all together on starboard tack.

Another day, not racing, I saw a Star coming out of Annapolis. We were well out toward the open bay. The Star was on starboard tack. We held course until we were right under the Star's bow and tacked at the perfect time, but the bigger boat's large and powerful rig overrode us like we weren't even there. I was laughing like a maniac the whole time, because I knew it was probably hopeless. The Star crew was laughing too, because they knew I was joking just for trying it.

All the stories would make a book. I could find enough gripping excitement to scare at least the inexperienced reader. And sometimes it's just nice to remember a good day on the water.

Territory

Idly Googling on a deadly slow day at the shop, I punched in Dolly Sods, then Roaring Plains, two places in which I began my backpacking education.

The Sods was little known when two Sods regulars initiated a couple of us to its mysteries. Most DC area hikers only seemed to go as far as Shenandoah National Park, or perhaps the George Washington National Forest.

Preparing for our first trip, a field trip from the bike shop in Alexandria where we more or less worked, Art and Scotty primed us with tales of a weird landscape, scoured by the wind as the bones of deer and free-range sheep bleached in the weather. We would be far more likely to see animals than people, they assured us. They had been going there since high school, and only saw the people they brought with them on any particular trip.

They were as surprised as we were when we found quite a few people out there on a harsh October weekend. Maybe it was Columbus Day Weekend. I didn't pay much attention to the holidays back then. I only knew that I had a couple of days off and we were going to have an adventure.

By bushwhacking, as was Art and Scotty's habit, we managed to go most of two days without seeing anyone but each other. The landscape certainly lived up to their description. The spruce trees were all flagged by the incessant wind, so they had branches only on their leeward side. Sandstone formations jutted up from the hillsides. We bounced over sphagnum bogs like kids jumping on a giant bed. No water showed. Only the springy mat of thick moss revealed that we weren't on solid ground.

As years passed, I learned more about the disciplines of hiking and met more people who explored the lesser-known areas. One of them, a guy named Jack, pushed into the plateau next to Dolly Sods, an area called Roaring Plains, and discovered many hideaways only an intrepid bushwhacker would find.

By the beginning of the late 1980s, ATVs had arrived out there. The locals laid tire tracks on a lot of what had been pristine and peaceful knolls from which to survey the rumpled mountainscape in quiet contemplation. At the same time, the small numbers of the intrepid grew and grew. It appears from the internet results that this may have generated some efforts to preserve the peaceful beauty against the onslaught of vehicle ruts. The cost, of course, is that none of it is a secret anymore. You don't have to look at a topographic map and deduce for yourself what you may find. You can look at a website and know for sure. I recognized some vistas, now named, with trails, that we found for ourselves with map and compass. There are names, personal and commercial, associated with the things we used to do out there just to do them.

When you visit a place often, or if you live there for a while, you develop a sense of territory. So it was with Roaring Plains, where I spent much of one whole day adding rocks to obstacle walls someone else had started, to try to fence out the ATVs. My companions urged me to give it up and just keep hiking, but I couldn't surrender without a statement. Ultimately, though, I left, and gave the field to them.

Twinges of territoriality return as I look at the pictures on the web. But the only way to hold claim to your territory is to be on it. If you're always on it, no one else can be. The need to possess it or be known for its discovery destroys what made it good in the first place.

But I was there. I peed on a bunch of trees. It's the natural way to claim.