Just Another Gray Morning

Here comes another gray morning

A not-so-good morning after all

She says, "Well, what am I to do today?

Too much time, so much sorrow.

She hears the baby waking up downstairs

She hears the foghorn calling out across the sound

Repetition in the morning air

It's just too much to bear, and no one seems to care

If another day goes creepin' by

Empty and ashamed

Like an old unwanted memory no one can claim

The clouds put their heads on the ground

She's gonna have to come down.

-James Taylor, "Another Gray Morning"

Yesterday, a nondescript gray flannel day, like all the other countless nondescript gray flannel days in the Mid Ohio Valley, I was treated to GRAUPEL!!

This is graupel. It's formed when water droplets freeze around a snowflake on its way down to earth, making a foamy little ball.

You've probably seen it and thought it was just pelleted snow or freezing rain. Well, isn't it nice to have a groovy German term for it? I think so. I am fully in support of meteorological arcana like "graupel" and "derecho" and "Kelvin-Helmholtz Wave Clouds" entering common parlance, and I hereby pledge to continue to foment this trend, because the more bizarre and interesting words one can add to one's everyday speech, the better. Like my DOD said, "Keep 'em guessing."

I noticed on this gray and grumpy morning that sycamore leaves catch graupel best of all, their quilted venation making runnels and channels for the tiny dots. 

The leaves themselves are so beautiful, so huge--ten inches across! I stood outside one very dark night in November and listened to them hitting the ground all around me. It was actually scary-freaky, because they sounded like large manila folders being thrown from great height, and I couldn't see them, and feared being klonked on the head by one.

It's just the leaves, I said. Just the leaves.

Like graupel is just ice. But then again, it's more than that. It's ice, drawing leaf outlines on leaves--this one a poplar! My hike devolved into about 50 deep knee bends as I found pattern after pattern, tracing the visual music across the orchard floor. It was marvelous.

So out I went this morning, hoping for more graupel, but the leaves were clean, and the moss had no dusting of stars.

It was a good thing I had my dawg along, because he doesn't mind another gray day.

            

This is what happens when you ask Curtis if he wants to go into the woods. After years of wheedling, trying to get my husband and (younger)  kids to come into the woods with me, it's so nice to have someone who is always just thrilled to come along! His enthusiasm for life is so affirming. Going deep into the woods is his favorite thing of all. 

I'm reaping the benefits of some hard trail cutting the past few weeks. It's SO nice to be able to grab my trek stick and NOT the clippers; to just go and enjoy an open path where once there were briars and trippy sticks and logs and roots. Its so worth the hours it takes it to clear yourself a trail and the minor maintenance to then keep it open. If you're going to go into the woods, it behooves you to make it easy on yourself.

I wound my way down into the west valley, wondering if I should read the messages on fallen logs, take them to heart. There had to be some meaning there. 

 

VOWN!

MOBE

Further down the holler, some beautiful things clinging to beech trunk and rock, both hairy

and crustose. I love that word, crustose. I honestly don't even really know if these are both lichens, but the thought that they are colonies of living things, perhaps very old, thrills me. UPDATE: what a wonderful world! From the comments section, by Jame: That's a liverwort on your beech! Frullania forms beautiful dendritic patterns on tree bark.

Curtis had long since gone off on a far-ranging adventure as he is wont to do, looking for deer gutpiles and chasing rabbits and squirrels. That's par for the course--he ditches me. But then he also comes back to find me. It can't be hard; I move so slowly. It's always so nice when he picks up my trail and comes barging down through the leaves to get a hug and give me a kiss. Even though he has deer poop breath.

I stood awhile in the sacred circle where we'd had our family cookout so many winters and sleeps ago

and thought about how I never, ever would have imagined myself standing here alone so many years later, with all that happened, having happened. 

But still I was glad to be here, so glad. 

I headed straight up the steep hill out of the holler, making for a gasline cut at the top. I am enjoying my trek stick because I can stump my way up hills like that (and down them) so much faster and surer than I can without it. 

And I saw something white in the leaves, and headed over to pick it up and put it in my pocket, because litter doesn't stay on my land.

And it wasn't litter at all! It was beauty! This nondescript gray morning was a frost flower morning!

A lone pennyroyal, growing on an open slope in the woods, was festooned with frost flowers! 

You can see why, at a distance, I thought it was litter. 

I hurried up the slope to the open cut where pennyroyal grows wild. 

There I beheld the largest bloom of frost flowers I'd ever seen. Click on this picture to get an idea...there were hundreds of them! 

Frost flowers only appear on still, humid mornings when the temperature is a few degrees below freezing. I think, though I don't know, that it helps to have the perennial roots of the plant producing them be alive and still extracting water from the soil. The way I theorize it, the roots are likely still pulling water up, and the lower stem dutifully sends the water up the stem of the pennyroyal (or wingstem, or aster). But hard freezes have shattered the stem tissue, creating paper-thin cracks in the stem. That good rootwater oozes out of the cracks, freezing on contact with the air, making seashells and ribbon candy and angels and tubes. It's their midwinter bloom, I guess.

One possible  factor that might also be at play is fungus. There is a fungus that's been found in "hair ice" that extrudes from rotting wood in Germany, called Exidiopsis effusa. What a great name! Here's an article about it. http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-hair-ice-exidiopsis-effusa-03051.html

The scientists found that using fungicide or dunking ice-producing wood in hot water--killing the fungus--stopped the production of hair ice. And they found lignin and tannin--exudates of fungus--in their hair ice samples, so they think the fungus is necessary for the weird hair ice to form. 

I tasted part of a frost flower to see if I could taste any lignins or tannins, but it was nothing but ice to my tongue.

Hair ice on beech, photo by Diana Hofmann

Now, I'm not at all sure that a fungus is at play here in my frost flowers, but it might be. New goal: to find hair ice. Thanks to my friend Charlotte --on Instagram she's @charlottes_woods_witchery

who knows so much and shares so nicely

for planting this fungus in my path.

Until I find some hair ice, I'm down on my squatters, photographing frost flowers, seashells, and caterpillars, and wondering if there's a fungus among'em. 

This one plant had a whole flock of flowers!

I loved this one, a symmetrical curl. I wondered how long it took to form. Could you set up a timelapse camera on them, or do they form in the dark? If I went out before light, would they be there? Not sure I'll find out, as I'm having an awful time getting out of bed these dark winter mornings. The covers and flannel sheets are sooo nice. 

It's enough to find frost flowers when I find them. It's a gift.

I like to say, you have to watch those gray mornings when you don't feel like getting out of bed. You can find graupel.

and flowers

bows and flows of angel hair

and a Christmas tree for fairies. 

Heres' what it feels like to find a whole field of frost flowers in bloom in December. 

                    

Last Saturday of Gun Season

 

Who could?

December 5, 2020

 

Every few seconds

Shots crack, shatter the stillness

Unnerve the poor cur

 

Who pastes back his ears

And, when unnerved, cannot poop.

The men who kill deer

 

Stymied by the rain, 

stayed home all week, but look out!

They’re back and blasting

 

Every few minutes

Somewhere, a shot is taken.

Any deer with brains

 

Not already blown

Would lie flat in a thicket

Burping up its cud

 

Waiting ‘til nightfall

When at last, it gets to stretch

Haul itself upright

 

Shake like a wet dog

And set out to find forage.     

I see them nightly

 

Tiptoe past the lens

Proud antlers shining bone-white

Eyes like shy headlights

 

Wise ghosts who know well

To walk when the woods are still

And men are asleep.

 

 

Bird Watcher's Digest and Me

 It has occurred to me that you might be interested in a brief history of my involvement with Bird Watcher’s Digest, the magazine I have been writing and painting for since 1986. I can’t quite believe it’s been 34 years! 

 

The magazine was launched from a brave notion, using my late in-laws’ retirement savings as they stood in 1978.

Bill Thompson Jr. and Elsa Ekenstierna Thompson, with Pokey. Clearly not 1978; more like 2009 or so. This is the den where a magazine was born. Now they're both gone, and the den is, too.

 My late mother-in-law, Elsa Thompson, took up birding in her 40’s, and thought there should be a digest for birdwatchers, since there was nothing of the kind out there. What a cool idea! It would have been between 1978 and 

1980 that I saw my first issue, featuring Roger Tory Peterson’s sooty terns, at Out of Town Newsstand in Harvard Square. Having only discovered that birding was a thing upon entering college as a lifelong but unconnected birdwatcher in 1976, I could NOT believe there was a magazine devoted to my passion! I remember standing there, reading it, marveling, and wondered if they would ever consider publishing my writing or painting. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t submit anything until 1986; I needed some time to hone my embryonic skills. Plus, the magazine’s interior was still being printed on newsprint when I saw it, and art looks ever so much better on glossy paper. 

My first cover, a stretching ruby-crowned kinglet, was published in 1986. Article after article, most illustrated by my watercolors, followed. I felt like the luckiest person in the world. 

 

My first 7 covers, spanning 1986-1992. I began writing for the magazine almost as soon as I started painting covers. The piping plover from 1988 has a big article about my work conserving piping plovers in Connecticut. There's a lot of personal history in these issues! To wit:

See that redpoll/junco cover, left, bottom row? Bill talked me into painting that for the Jan/Feb 1991 cover. He called me a lot more than he would have needed to, to get the painting over the finish line. By the time it came out on the cover, we were "talking," as my kids say.

 I didn’t meet BWD's (then) Managing Editor, Bill Thompson III until we collided at the World Series of Birding in May, 1990. We were married in 1993. Persuasive guy. 

I look at this photo and think, "Wha ha happen?" 

There followed a series of covers. Below are ones spanning 1993-1999. 

And here's 2000-2011.

Bill Thompson III was Editor and Publisher until he had to leave us in March, 2019. Though Bill’s bank of knowledge and energy was irreplaceable, Editor Dawn Hewitt comes as close as anyone could to filling his Size 12’s. Wendy Clark has added her considerable vision and energy as Publisher. I do my best to lean in and help the staff with anything remotely sciencey, as well as with thorny bird ID’s and bird feeding/housing/gardening advice. And I read every issue for scientific accuracy as well as flow and typos. By the time the magazine goes to press, it’s been by several mighty sharp sets of eyes.

 

I write a column called “True Nature” for every issue, right alongside such luminaries as David Bird, Mark Garland, Alvaro Jaramillo, Al Batt and Scott Weidensaul. Iowa’s fabulous Diane Porter writes frequently for the magazine as well. I also have a column in every issue of Watching Backyard Birds, which comes out in the months that Bird Watcher’s Digest doesn’t. It’s good to write a lot; to have to have something to show for all your rumination. I love sitting down to write a column, to winnow out all the things I see and then gather a lifetime of observations, to knead them all into dough and bake it into a story for our readers.

 

2013-2020.

35 years after that first little kinglet was published, I’ll have my 30th cover on the May/June 2022 issue! I've got something published in most issues, and I still feel like the luckiest person in the world to be affiliated with this magazine.

Here's the body of work as it stands...well, just the covers I've painted over the last 34 years. The articles and columns in many other issues are legion.

It’s pretty darned amazing that Bird Watcher's Digest is still humming along, cranking out excellent content for its beloved and very loyal subscribers. Chalk it up to love and sheer will. Thanks to that demon C-19, everybody’s been working from home since spring 2020—another thing that amazes me no end. HOW CAN IT BE 34 YEARS???

 

I guess what I’m winding up to is, “Why not subscribe now, when Bird Watcher’s Digest is having a half-off subscription sale?” I don’t know how they can give this magazine away for $15 yearly (and only $12 for Watching Backyard Birds!) I guess they’re banking on your loving it as much as I do, once you’ve gotten a load of it. Needless to say, it makes a terrific gift for that bird-loving friend—it can take you to the next birding level fast, wherever you’re starting from.

 

Publisher and Publisher Emeritus. Both worked their entire careers putting out the best bird watching magazine ever.

Oh! Here's that offer. And thank you very much for your indulgence. I hope you've enjoyed this retrospective--color, bird painting and a whole lot of love.

  https://birdwatchersdigest.com/promos/jz-holidaygifts2020.html