More Sweet WV Moments

 Hard to put into words how good it felt to be among friends (all of us freshly vaccinated and tested) for a week in West Virginia again!  Amy, Keith, and Kim. Oh my gosh was it great to see them after such a long hiatus! Our time was too short, and there was too much going on for the long yaks I craved, but we ascertained that we are all still alive and thrilled to be together.

And then there was Jim and Paul...parking lot hijinks. Such fun to be in the field with these fabulous naturalists!

Had a deliriously wonderful day at Babcock State Park, co-leading with Jody, here in joyful lead. 

 I love being out with other weedpickers, as Bill used to call those of us who walk looking down, squatting frequently to exclaim about tiny wildflowers. This is Bellis perennis, an introduced daisy from Europe that I love without reserve.

Jody helped us with violets. This is Sweet White Violet Viola blanda. The red stem is the tipoff.

Babcock was showing rather well on this May morning! Ah, West Virginia, when you shine, you really shine!

The historic gristmill would be enough, without the songs of Swainson's warblers ringing from the great rhododendron surrounding it!

Birding this wildly scenic place with other naturalists: heaven.

Sugar Creek is always one of my favorite trips featured by the New River Birding and Nature Festival. We're never sure what we'll find, but it's usually really good. 

On this beautiful day, way down at the bottom of the mountain, a surprise awaited. There was a Swainson's warbler, quest bird of the festival par excellence, just showing off. For casual bird lovers, the Swainson's warbler is a rare and local specialty of the New River Gorge of West Virginia. It needs impenetrable thickets of great rhododendron, and it's easy to hear, but famously hard to see, in that dark and tangled milieu. Lots of people come to the Gorge to see their life Swainson's warbler. Sometimes they come home only having heard it. It can be an undertaking to catch even a glimpse. Bill used to say his syncopated, emphatic whistled song says, "Screw you! Screw the world!"

That interpretation, of course, born of the frustration of staring into rhododendron tangles for hours, hoping for a glimpse of the author of that disembodied voice.

 Have you ever seen a Swainson's warbler on a powerline?

Us neither. A moment of cognitive dissonance, to see this famous skulker of the rhodies perch on a wire. 

Nobody was playing a recording. This bird just did not care.  Or maybe he associated groups of birders with recorded songs, and was just heading us off at the pass? 

Birds can surprise us...maybe he's been exposed to enough birders to know we carry singing Swainson's warblers in our big pockets. It always pays to think outside the envelope with birds, because they LIVE outside the envelope.

I never thought I'd shoot a SWWA in flight! Such a big, strong, hearty bird, so different from any other warbler we have; a skulker in great rhododendron thickets, a syncopated singer, rarely seen.

Except for today

 

with the tiny leaves of a hornbeam hanging like squirrel ears all around him. 

I don't expect to ever have such a session with a Swainson's warbler again. We take what we get, gratefully. 

It was a charged and magical day. I wrote in an earlier post about the homemaking cerulean warbler who knocked us out with her aqua blue crown and persistent plant fiber pulling as she gathered nesting material on a roadbank. Here she is wearing her cat's whiskers!

We were birding slowly along the same roadside when a red truck rolled slowly up. The driver stopped to tell us about a potential hazard along the road and his little red and white dog stuck her head and then most of her body out the window, wanting to join the conversation. One gentleman in our group was drawn like a magnet to her gentle overture, and, though I wanted to pile on and pet her too,  I thought it best that I capture this sweet moment between them. And I marveled at dogs, and humans, and the instant and dear bond they are able to forge with one another. What a sweet, sweet moment. 

Yes, I sent this photo to Jeff. :) Too sweet!

Hello! You are a nice man, I can smell that. You have dogs at home, yes you do. I would like to touch you, and have you touch me, because I am a dog.

Dogs: Is it any wonder we love them so? Open hearted, gracious creatures they are.

Cerulean Homemaker

It seems I've just returned from a week in West Virginia, and yet I look at the calendar and it's been almost a month. Such is my life during Vegetation Time, when all that free time I fritter away doing things like editing, blogging, writing and painting gets sucked up in Vegetation Management. Oh, there's plenty of that all winter long, but it's more like upper body workouts, and not as horribly pressing. In southeast Ohio in May, you manage your vegetation or smother under it.

People have been asking me about No Mow May. "Is it bad to mow my lawn during No Mow May?"  The whole concept makes me laugh in a snorty way. Whoever came up with that doesn't live in southeast Ohio. Maybe doesn't even have a yard to maintain at all. I've thrown a belt and broken a pulley mowing my paths this spring. Yesterday I mowed a path that I had inadvertently skipped--it went about three weeks without mowing. Aaaack. I barely got through it; the rider mower was gagging and growling and burping on grass.  Then, just as I was finishing up three hours of path mowing, I threw a belt again. What fun. It takes my beloved neighbors Bill and Kathy and me to get the damn deck off, belt replaced, and back on the mower. Every time.  I'm all for not mowing. But around here, you'd better have a tractor and a brush hog ready if you quit for the month of May. Honestly, what could those No Mow May folks have been thinking? 

Kathy and Bill, saving my bacon again, and again, and again.

I am in the market for a new rider lawnmower. I need one that doesn't throw

belts like a Chippendale dancer, and doesn't give me PTSD

every dang time I climb on it.

Anyway, I'm not here primarily to kvetch about having to mow. I'm here to celebrate West Virginia, ancestral home of the Zickefooses, West Virginia University, ramps, and kick a-s birds. I celebrated my 20th year of involvement with the New River Birding and Nature Festival this spring by committing to an entire week of guiding. It wasn't nothing, getting up at 5 every morning, leading a 7-hour field trip, then getting up and doing it again the next morning, and the next...

But oh, the places we went, and the things we saw! 

I will now share some glorious things in a random way. 

One of the things I love about our field trips is that they are entirely bird-driven. If we find a bird, or birds, we stop dead and hang out for an hour or more, just taking in what the birds give us. Such was this moment with a female cerulean warbler we found visiting a junky-looking pile of winter stems on a Fayetteville road bank. 

You'll want to click on the photos to see her.

Birds are natural botanists and artisans. Like me in an art store, they know what materials they're looking for, and when they find the right stuff, they'll keep coming back. This little beauty was stripping papery fibers, perhaps from a winter milkweed or goldenrod stem.

It took some effort, and she'd throw a wing out and flutter as she pulled, which is what drew our attention.

It didn't take her long to get a billful, and she'd bear that off into a tall maple where, unseen, she was weaving a masterpiece.

We were charmed beyond delirium.

The female cerulean warbler has a dusty aqua/cornsilk yellow/dove gray color combination you just don't see on any other bird. She owns that muted color scheme, wears it beautifully. Please see her crown. Heavenly blue!

Seeing this little miracle taking place before our astonished eyes was such a full-circle moment for me. Years ago, I received a commission to paint nesting cerulean warblers in a West Virginia mountain setting for the WV Breeding Bird Atlas. I watched cerulean warblers and shot some landscapes for reference on this very same road, with my same WV friends. And the great big beautiful vastly informative and carefully researched book is out, and it's SO good, and I'm so proud to have decorated the cover. You can find out more at https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08980-5.html

It almost always rains for part of the festival, and I really wanted to convey a sense of West Virginia's mist-shrouded mountains. 

Taken from the New River Gorge bridge early one morning during this year's festival...wonder where I got the inspiration for the painting?

The little cerulean warbler didn't know any of this stuff that was swirling around through my head. She had work to do. And so she kept tugging and pulling and gathering, and we kept smiling. 

                               

All this on a trashy-looking mountain road bank, that just happened to have the right kind of bark for the nest of one of our most beautiful and imperiled warblers.