Help Arrives!

 As I write, I can smell the pungent, fruity aroma of about twenty pounds of pawpaws in the foyer. I knew there would be a cost to my exuberance in hunting and harvesting 39 pounds of pawpaws.

I am blessed to have a friend who was willing to drive almost five hours to help me process them. Just another magical application of social networking...Anne, an old friend and fellow birdwatcher and foodie, saw my posts about the harvest and up and offered her services! It took me about two seconds to type back YOU BET!! When can you get here?

It turned out to be kinda late...about 10:30 on a Saturday night. Chet Baker stayed up to wait. He listened intently. He can always tell when someone's coming to visit.

The last time Anne visited, she brought two toys for Chet. He somehow knew they were in her suitcase, and he got down and dug for them until he found them, to gales of laughter all around. This night was little different. She put the toys on the kitchen table, and Chet invited himself up on her lap.

He commenced to sniffing around and quickly discovered the toys. I think he knew they were there all along.

Both were toast within a half hour, reduced to drifts of foam and Hollofil.

After a nice sleep, we started Paw Paw Processing Day with a great morning's birding from the tower. The view was spectacular, autumnal colors just aborning.

We held our own little Confusing Fall Birds workshop, with numerous appearances by Tennessee warblers

and their nearly identically-colored Doppelgangers, Philadelphia vireos (below). But note the vireo's bigger rounder head, much heavier blunt bill and shorter, heavier bright bluish legs.

There were lots of pretty magnolia warblers about

and a stunning fall parula, too. This is a spring parula, but ours wasn't much duller.

We could have stayed up there all day, watching for red-headed woodpecker flyovers, sharp-shins, sapsuckers...but there was work to do. 39 pounds of work to do. It was time to set up the Pawpaw Processing Plant.

Worthless Dog

You might think that, Chet Baker being a pretty smart example of a pretty smart breed, I could train him to find and fetch pawpaws for me. Well, I am here to tell you that I have tried, to no avail.

I would love to say this is a photo of Chet looking for pawpaws, but he is looking for a squirtle.

Chet Baker! Get the pawpaw! Fetch the pawpaw! Bring it to Mether!

You are kidding, right? I have things to do, rodents to meet.

I saw a pawpaw tree leaning over a wide, deep creek (pawpaws love bottomland). It was loaded with big fruits, but as luck would have it, I knew they'd roll right down the steep, slippery, muddy bank and go right into the creek. So I called Chet Baker to my side and shook the tree. 

Six big pawpaws thudded to the ground and began to roll. Get the pawpaw, Chet Baker! Fetch it!

And I was astonished when he skibbled right down that bank and to the shore and catpawed a pawpaw to him, bobbed a couple of times and came up with it in his jaws!

GOOD BOY!! OK, bring it Mether! Come on Chet! Bring me the pawpaw!

And after a couple of false starts he picked it up and carried it up the slope! It was like an episode of Lassie. It was amazing.

He bounded up the slope and stopped about 15 feet away and put the pawpaw down.

And he buried it.

He took that big beautiful pawpaw and covered it with leaves and there was nothing I could do about it. No amount of coaxing, yelling, encouraging or dissolving in helpless laughter could change his plan for the pawpaw. The slope was so severe and so slick I could barely move, much less get over to rescue the pawpaw. For awhile I thought I might not get back up to the level part, it was that slick and that steep. I was on all fours, 16 pounds of pawpaws in my backpack, crawling around like a hurt spider, slipping two feet back for every foot I got up. And my dog was burying a pawpaw just out of reach.

With a final push of his nose, he dislodged the pawpaw and it rolled back down the slope into the creek. I saw my chance. 

"Come ON, Baker! Bring it to me! Come on! Good Boy! Bring it to Mether!"

He waded in, grabbed it again, carried it back up the slope near me and dropped it again and it rolled back down into the creek. Together, we sat and watched it bob off  toward McConnellsville. Chet silent, me laughing like a loon, us all alone there in the woods over the deep creek.

I thanked the Lord I wasn't sprawled on the ground with my leg in a bear trap and the trap key just inches out of my reach with only Chet Baker there to help me.

Lassie he is not.

We made our way back to the parking lot where we'd left the car and Chet indicated that he would like to case the school and see if there was anyone inside who needed their face washed.

No, Bacon, there's nobody there and they probably wouldn't let you in if there were. I'm sorry. Come on, let's head home.

You could have opened that door for me. I like schools and chirren. Sometimes you really let me down, too. I have tried to train you to let me in everywhere there is a door and you have failed to learn it.

 Back in the car I kissed him, hugged him and told him that he was simple, the most utterly worthless dog the world had ever known. 

 I notice you are saying those awful words in a very loving tone, Mether. Here is what you do not understand. When you have a food that is smelly, and the pawpaw was VERY smelly, you have to bury it immediately. You do not bring it to anyone. You bury it and then nobody else can find it and then what you do is you come back and get it later.  Why you do not understand such a simple thing I do not know, but I was doing you a big favor, burying that smelly fruit for you to get later.

We made our way home through the countryside we love so much, and that darn dog ruined my best picture with his little punkin head, a blocky little cartoon head full of strange ideas and unrealized abilities.

 Worthless.

Pawpaw Frenzy

This secret pawpaw patch is an exceptionally nice one to hunt--level ground, open understory, very little poison ivy and comparatively few nettles. Sometimes pawpaws grow in such thick undergrowth that you can't find the fruit after you shake it down.

No such problem here. Although good technique involves locating the fruit overhead, marking its position in the tree, then shaking it vigorously while watching closely for the fruit to fall. It's really nice to have a couple of helpers along who can stand aside and watch for falling fruit while the shaker winces and ducks (we each took a pawpaw to the head in this hunt).

We had to work on that with Liam, who is given to wildly shaking trees without waiting for backup.

It helps to have a tall drink of water for a daughter when picking pawpaws. 

It helps to have help carrying your haul. I strongly recommend a sturdy backpack for mulepacking them out. I take this little JanetBasket everywhere I go. It's held everything from pawpaws to squash and strawberries to cameras and laptops.

 The kids are hoisting 23 pounds of pawpaws in this photo. We had to take shifts carrying them out of the woods.

You'd think I'd be satisfied. But no. The very next morning I had to take Phoebe back to school for a track meet, so I ventured into the pawpaw patch again. We'd gotten 23 pounds the evening before--could I squeeze more out of it?

I took my best pawpaw doggeh with me this time.

He is admittedly more interested in chiptymunks and squirtles than pawpaws.

It was only 58 degrees, drippy and cold in the woods, but that was perfect, for pawpaw hunting can be sweaty work. 

Tromping around, looking up, shaking, ducking, bending, collecting, and hauling the booty.

Within two hours I had 16 more pounds of pawpaws. I'd brought my trusty Osprey backpack this time, so toting them wasn't so onerous. I'd also thought to include some plastic bags.  The riper pawpaws can split upon hitting the ground, and the custardy pulp gets all over everything.

More than that, their sheer weight in the pack crushes the ripe ones.

So here's a tip for the pawpaw hunter. Take the softest, ripest ones and bag them before putting them in your pack. And try to keep them on top!

One finds the most beautiful and mysterious things while hunting pawpaws. 

There are many puffballs out this fall, but this one was different. About the size of a cantaloupe, it had a nettle leaf imprinted on its humid skin.

There was nothing left of the leaf but its color, a membranous shadow, a memory of the leaf that had somehow dissolved into the mushroom. So beautiful, a natural decoupage.

I carried the memory of my babies picking the night before in the silent, dripping woods

and was completely happy.

Pickin' Up Paw Paws

But most assuredly NOT putting them in my pocket.  This is the photographic journey of a woman (temporarily) possessed by pawpaws.

 Thirty-nine pounds of pawpaws. I am not making this up.

Phoebe, she of the flame-red hair, spied a large grove of pawpaws while training for cross-country near Beverly, Ohio. She stopped and picked one and shared it with her teammates. This thrilled me on a number of levels. First, my girl recognizes the trees when she sees them. Second, Phoebe doesn't like the taste of pawpaws, but she still wanted to share them. She's showing strong Science Chimp tendencies.

 She came home and told me of her find, and that Friday when I had to drive over to the same area and pick her up from training she and Liam and I went to investigate.

It was rich bottomland woods along a creek, low and mucky and just what pawpaws love. It was full of the trees, mostly quite young and slender. But pawpaws can be deceiving--they can bear fruit when they look barely old enough to think about sex.

Here's the take from a tree about 1.5" dbh--just a sapling, really, but loaded with eight nice fruit. Average take from a young pawpaw like this is about four fruits. Pretty amazing for a tree that small (that's its trunk in the picture).

They were slender and pliant enough to allow us to bend them so we could reach the fruit. 

A little albino spider monkey, foraging for his lunch.

Sometimes monkeys work in tandem. One bends the pawpaw tree while the other gathers the fruit.

The most commonly used and exciting technique, though, is to shake the tree and wait, head down and wincing, for the heavy plop plop plopadop! of fruit all around you. 

Only rarely are they good enough to land at your feet. Usually they land and roll and hide under nettle leaves.

Nettles are the constant companion and plague of the Ohio pawpaw hunter. 

Wickedly armed with urticating spines, stinging nettles go right through Columbia's "Titanium" fabric, so forget wearing the nice light zip-off birding trou while hunting pawpaws. Just sayin'. Wear long pants and long sleeves, and make them thick. And prepare to be sent after the fruit in the thickest nettle patches, or hear the moans and yelps of your shorts-wearing progeny.

Next post: You'd think 23 pounds would be enough...

PawPaws and Waterthrushes-Hidden Jewels

This spring I took a trip to Barren River State Park in western Kentucky.  I had been asked to give a talk to the Kentucky Ornithological Society. The trip was squozed in between a couple of others, and I knew it'd be tight, but I wanted to see something of Kentucky, as I'd only been to Louisville and back. It was a beautiful place, just as I knew it would be. 

 Lyre-leaved sage Salvia lyrata turned the meadows misty blue

 and I learned something about pawpaws I hadn't known.

A few were still in bloom, but most of them were fruiting, a couple of weeks ahead of ours in southern Ohio.

 I learned that each pawpaw flower can make a bunch of little fruits, which explains something I"d always wondered. I'd see a small pawpaw tree with maybe five flowers on it, and then in September I'd see clusters of fruit. Well, those clusters all come from one little flower.  And here they are, the baby fruits forming. I was so excited I squealed.

 In September, they'll look like this, each the size of a small mango. Five in this cluster! Pretty cool.

Overhead, summer tanagers sang their halting songs in leafy fastnesses

and I crept silently through the underbrush to catch a glimpse of a pileated woodpecker and yes, I was pretending it was his huge cousin Campephilus--the setting was so perfect for seeing black, white and scarlet streaking and hitching through the watery mystery

I was helping my new KOS friend Scott Marsh--the tall one; that's my other Kentucky friend Carol Besse, president of KOS, in fetching pink-- lead a walking birding trip through the park. 

We found a phoebe nest, and Scott was tall enough to hold my camera up to immortalize its contents, which are doubtless flying and catching their own moths by now. 

It was here at Barren River State Park that I had one of my favorite-ever moments as a naturalist. Our little band of birders was walking up this beautiful stream, and there was a Louisiana waterthrush singing lustily, his wild ringing song filling the green spaces. We came to a little stone bridge and the waterthrush flew up, chipped at me twice, then flew a short distance away, watching me and bobbing his tail. It was clear to me he had a nest nearby. He might as well have said it in English.

"This is a perfect spot for a waterthrush nest," I told the group. I stood on the bank and quietly studied the opposite side, which was hung with grasses and roots. 

 

Just the kind of spot a Louisiana waterthrush would choose to hide its leafy, rooty little nest. Within seconds I found what I was looking for...some muddy leaves, tucked way up inside a nook in the bank, where no muddy leaves ought to be. The Louisiana waterthrush builds a little porch of muddy wet leaves that, when they dry, make a sturdy landing platform for the parents as they come and go.  It's one of the best-hidden warbler nests I know of; in fact when Hal Harrison wrote his photographic field guide to bird nests (in the Houghton Mifflin Peterson series)  the only one he couldn't find himself was the nest of the Louisiana waterthrush!

And the female waterthrush was sitting on her nest. With some difficulty, I pointed her out to everyone. It was hard to make her out. Her two white eye stripes, converging at her bill, gave her away. In this photo she's head-on, and you can see her eyes and bill. 

Knowing the gig was up, she hunkered even lower until all we could make out was one bright eye with a white stripe over it. It's under a little triangle of white grasses.

And the best part of all was that, in discovering her, we never put her off her nest. That's the beauty of listening to what the birds tell you, knowing where to look, standing back quietly, and having the right optics to do it. Serendipity favors the prepared mind.