Thomas: A Very Useful Baby

I've been reaching into my photobag, grabbing the sweetest moments as I find them. One of my trips during the New River Birding and Nature Festival in May 2022 was blessed by the presence of a young mother named Mary Luckini and her son Thomas, who was enjoying being toted around in a pack and frequently set free to mess about with pebbles and sticks on his own. I flashed back to Liam when I saw him head straight for a huge pile of gravel. Why, he could throw rocks there all day long! Just feed him and change him every now and then and he's good to go!

And it is here that I have to pause and marvel at the richness of blogging; it can be a window into others' hearts and lives. You see, I took some photos of Thomas that melted my heart, and Mary asked if I might send them to her. Oh yes, indeed I will!

Thomas is a little sobersides, with a steady and appraising gaze, who stole my heart immediately. 

He found some swallowtails puddling in a damp spot, as they do in West Virginia in May.

Slowly and very quietly he approached.  Low and slow, as we butterfliers say.  Well, he couldn't much help being so low! I always advise folks not to let their shadow fall across a butterfly--they'll take off. But the butterflies didn't mind when Tommy's shadow fell across them. Even his shadow was gentle.

There's something about baby hands that gets me--that little index finger, set to point.

The wonder and surprise--and restraint-- in those open palms.

The butterflies went about their business, untroubled by this sweet elfin person who came to sit down in peace with them. 

He never disturbed them. He just watched, occasionally pointing, then clasping his hands to his chest. 

He knew without being told that he mustn't startle or bother them. That right there is a Very Useful Baby. 

He's certainly had an amazing start, carried around like a joey in his mama's pouch, wherever she's gone. Hiking the Appalachian Trail at 34+ weeks, Mary was readying Thomas for the rhythmic cadence of her boots on the trail.

And when he arrived, she never left him behind. 

 This photo and the four following, all courtesy Mary Luckini.

After all, she was packing everything he needed.  She had breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. They were free as two birds. I'll never forget the joy of traveling with Phoebe and Liam as infants, when I had everything they needed. 

Mary tells me Tommy's favorite word right now is "OUTSIDE." Look at that impish smile! What a traveling buddy he is!

Mary and Thomas and his lovely grandmother Karen Luckini graced us with their presence at the New River Birding and Nature Festival in May 2022. That gal to the far left? Writer/avian rehabber/environmental activist Katie Fallon. Then there's Mary and Thomas in his casbah. Jessica Vaughan, BWD's Editor, is next (heart eyes emoji). That woodsman in the orange hat? That's Geoff Heeter, one of the founders and the stalwart of the NRBNF, 20 years strong. A lovely festivalgoer, then our friend Scott Jones, and bird trainer and educator Cheyenne Carter.  And the New River Gorge Bridge, currently the longest single-span steel arch bridge in the US, and the third highest bridge in the country, behind them all. A wonderful bunch!

This photo cracks me up. Click on it and you'll see the gaze Tommy fixed me with each time we met during the festival. 

I think my goofy grin set him off. He could tell I really wanted to get my hands on him.

About that richness that you get when you scratch the surface of others' lives: In corresponding with Mary, I learned that she and her husband had to work extremely hard to create Thomas. Seven years and the miracle of in-vitro fertilization finally gifted them with their beloved little boy. Imagine. 

Seeing a child so dearly wanted, so beloved, and being exposed to such beauty and richness at every turn moved me deeply. This is how a naturalist begins. 

Thomas, I hope I get to see you and your wise and wonderful mama and grandma as the years roll by. I'll look for a little boy with binoculars and an unblinking gaze. You are one lucky little sugarbean.

Ironweed Festival!

The Ironweed Festival is spotty; it's not going on everywhere. That's because ironweed (in southeast Ohio, we have Tall Ironweed) only grows in masses in badly overgrazed pastures. It is distasteful to cattle, so they eat everything around it, and as a result the ironweed takes over, enjoying the fact that its competition has been chewed to the ground. The main Festival Grounds are waay down at the end of Dean's Fork, about 2.5 miles from where I park.

I don't mind the walk at all.

I've made this walk/run more this summer than in any season before. I found three pairs of breeding rose-breasted grosbeaks down here in early June, and I was hooked for the summer. It's been a pure joy to see the vegetation grow up and different flowers come into bloom, to hear the periodical cicada chorus finally silenced, and to welcome the swamp cicadas, with their swelling oscillation, as they take over for shrieking hordes of periodical visitors.  To make a bird list every time I go out; see it swell past 80 species in May and shrink to barely 35 these days; to look forward to the total surprises like blue herons and skunks, snappers and redtails and Hannah the Appaloosa. 

Truth is, I've gotten hooked on it, on the peace it seems I can sometimes find only here. Shila helped me figure out something about running, and why it keeps us sane in an upside-down world. 

If you're caught in turmoil, whether it be from overly demanding work, relationships, indecision, world events, or some nasty combination of all those things, and you can't see your way out of it, go for a run. 

If you think of what's bothering you as a beast that's snapping at you, what makes sense? 

To run away from it. When you run, you send your primitive brain the signal that you're fleeing the beast. You've taken care of the problem. You've gotten away. 

And your brain says, "Oh, good. OK. Whew! Good going! You're going to be fine now."

And at the end of the run, you feel better all over. You could call it an endorphin high, and you'd be right, but I think the feedback loop is something as I've described it. Running makes you feel better. It shuts up your primitive brain, which is always screaming, "Well, DO SOMETHING about this!! Get the hell out of here!"

We all know that sometimes there is no getting out of the particular mess we're in. There's just picking the best way through it, living our lives as well as we can under the circumstances.

I usually fit in four miles a day, 7 or more when I have the chance. It keeps me going.

It's the best. I get out and see all my friends. 

The combination of tiger swallowtail's sweetcorn yellow and tall ironweed's royal purple is a mighty fine one. 

I love to watch them diving deep into the flowers, thorax pumping, head dipping--there's so much butterfly behavior to watch. They aren't just decorations. They are goal-driven, methodical little beasts.

On this cloudy morning, a surprise awaited me at the Ironweed Festival's Main Grounds. 

Oh no. What fresh hell is this? 

It was actually worse than it looked from afar. 

A five-foot deep trench where there had been a culvert. 

It ran clear out into the Main Festival Grounds. Damn, damn, damn it. Why can't they leave Dean's Fork ALONE???

All right then. A  huge new culvert is going in, right by the black barn I love so much. Whyyyyy?  I don't know why an untraveled dirt road needs a yard-wide culvert, but there you go. They've been working on Dean's for several years now. It used to be impassable, with ruts two feet deep, but now I could drive the Subaru top to bottom. There are new culverts going in all over the place in our area. I have a sneaking suspicion this is because they're expecting greatly increased traffic from huge heavy trucks in the near future.  See previous post. It comes down to oil and gas development.

Chet and I pushed around the mess and entered the Festival Grounds. Exhale. Accept what is, move on.

 All is well there. The ironweed is coming on strong and tall. 

 I have to be careful that I don't lose Chetty in the ironweed. It's hard to keep him in sight, and with his deafness, I can't call him anymore. When he loses visual contact with me, he starts zigzagging, head high, searching. It touches my heart. I've got to dash after him and make sure he sees me, or he'll light out for home, thinking I've left him behind. He's gotten much better, isn't so quick to panic and take off now, just as I've gotten better at making sure I stay in his sight.

We have an understanding. We keep an eye on each other now.

From this angle, I couldn't see the culvert dig.

I knew that soon enough the pipes would be in place and the road would be replaced. It would never be as beautiful as it was, but that's change for you. 

Sometimes you have to cling to what remains all the harder.

A female indigo bunting with a nest nearby gave her "SPIT!" call over and over. 

On the way home I looked at leaves that had fallen early. This one looked like a weather map of Florida to me, when a tropical storm is attacking.

The leaves that fall in August have something wrong with them.  Red maples shed a lot, and some disease has the yellow buckeyes dropping all their leaves, which turned red in July. 

Black tupelo. Mmm. They can make a red like no other, even when they're sick.

Another red maple, all blotched and spotted. Fantastic.

I looked up, and Chet Baker was waiting, smiling fondly. You and your leaves.

So, for those who miss the Ironweed Festival, this is how it looks this year. With Whipple's version of The Big Dig going on, perhaps it's best that there not be a full-blown Festival in 2016. Maybe we'll wait until it's all smoothed over. 

Torn up as it is, Dean's still saves me. Please, may it never see pavement.

Butterflies And Other Matters

Something happened to me in Sedona, Arizona, where I spent a week hiking and shooting photos with Shila while working at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival. I got my eye hooked back up with my brain, through my cameras. And I haven't been able to stop collecting images. Everything is so damn beautiful.

It was all I could do to leave home in late July. The birds and animals have been coming to me, right up to the window, right into the yard, and in the wild, too, whenever I go out.  It happened there, too. It's like the enchanted state I felt in Sedona has followed me home. 

The first couple weeks in August, there's an Ironweed Festival going on here. That's when the Ironweed does its thing, and the Joe-Pye weed, and the milkweed and butterflyweed too. I'm keenly missing my fellow celebrants. We're all just too busy and beset by life to eke out a gathering this August. I'm working extra long hours cutting double mats for my art for the American Birding Expo in Columbus, where I'll be doing my first show in a long, long while. I'll get to hobnob with a breathtaking array of vendors from more than 35 countries at this unique event. It's going to be amaaazing.  We're expecting more than 3,000 visitors. I'm hoping to sell some prints and originals and a lotta books, notecards and puzzles! I've made eight new prints of favorite paintings and I'm excited to debut them. Gotta crank that cash flow up...life and kids are expensive. 

Minor detail: I'm guiding a trip in South Africa Aug. 24-Sept. 9. Expo setup starts Sept. 15. I've got to have all my show prep done before I leave. Flat out doesn't quite describe it. So Casa Zick and the entertaining that goes on here is shut down for the foreseeable future.

But enough about me! There are butterflies out there, and I promised my friends an Ironweed Festival post or three, so they won't feel they've missed the whole thing.

It's so hard to photograph Joe-Pye weed in masses. A photo just cannot convey the majesty of an entire meadow stuffed with its hazy rose glory. I take these landscape photos, and sigh in exasperation.  Sifting out the pink from the green, which is of similar intensity, is a job for the human eye and brain.  The task just befuddles the camera's lens.  But you can see that the Joe-Pye Weed Festival is in full swing in the first part of Dean's Fork!

Tall ironweed, asserting itself, a foreshadowing of things to come farther down the road.

A bit of wingstem adds a welcome dash of lemon.

Joe-Pye is really best in closeup. And oh, those tiger swallowtails. Photographing butterflies in flight has become a pleasant obsession. It's hard to do. You have to keep your telephoto lens focused on them while they go through dozens of florets, and watch for little cues that they're about to move on, and hope that you have them in focus when they suddenly take off. Luck plays a huge part in capturing a photo like this. Rewards are few and far between, but they come often enough to keep me utterly engaged.

We move down the Fork, shooting butterflies as we go. 

A freshly emerged northern pearly-eye flies frantically, zigzagging like a crazy moth, until it stops to rest. WOW. What a bug! Be sure to click on these photos for a closer view. They're worth it.

I'd always wondered why this nymphalid is called a red-spotted purple. I'd always seen blue on it before this.

Catch a RSPU at the right angle, and there's the purple. Fantastic!

And then it turns and catches the sun and BAM! there goes that blue light.  Sometimes I call this butterfly the American Morpho.

And the underside is well worth getting down on one's knees to shoot.

While I'm looking down, as I always am, I notice frass in a puddle, right where it was last August 6.

I smile and look up, to see very young catalpa sphinx caterpillars chewing away on the big heart-shaped leaves.

They'll get big. People around here call them catalpa worms, and use them for bait. Not me!

They're just Zickbait. Love the little sphinxy prong off the tail end.

The Bacon comes along. He enjoys creekwalking most of all. Kerplop, kerplop, kerplop. Dean's is an ideal walk or run for hot days, because it's almost all shaded, and there's cool water for Chet the whole way.

The rose of Sharon planted in front of one of the two dwellings on Dean's three mile length is abloomin'. I frame it so it's silhouetted against the mancabin's dark front. Ahh. 

I find dodder, a parasitic plant, throwing its long orange tendrils around the ironweed. It will use their chlorophyll-made food for its own purposes, blooming and throwing seed, powered purely by sucking the life out of other plants.

I like dodder. It's interesting. I might not want it twining through my delphiniums, but in its place it's awesome to see.

There is human dodder here, too.  I don't enjoy seeing this kind. This photo has a lot encoded, for an eye that knows what it's seeing. 

First, the tall grasses behind the cordage I found strung all along the road are Miscanthus grass, probably the most horrible invasive exotic in our county, among many, many horrid invasives. This grass comes in by windborne seeds wherever soil is disturbed. It follows the bulldozer. And it makes impenetrable thickets of razor-edged grass, higher than your head, that are lost to diversity, lost to ironweed and Joe-pye, lost to butterflies and deer, too.

And the extension cords? Those supply power to sensors that are strung all down Dean's Fork's length, all down our road, all down every road in our area. Those sensors will pick up vibrations from enormous jackhammers that will come and pound the roads, and will by the profile they present  convey where oil lies beneath the Marcellus shale that underlies all this beauty. That will tell the oilmen where to site their drillpads. It's coming. We residents are kept in the dark. We don't know where the huge rigs, lit by kleig lights 24 hours a day, will go. We find out where the drilling rigs will go in when they start construction. We bear witness, and we live through it.

Some of us get paid by signing with oil companies. Some of us haven't, and don't. Whether you sign or not, it's coming, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. 

And my little dog waits and wonders what I'm doing, why I've stopped for so long.

Come on, Mether. The main festival grounds are just ahead! 

Bill reassures me. This is not the first oil boom that has invaded Washington County. It's the eighth. His grandfather came in on the first one, came in from Tulsa to work the drilling rigs, the shallow ones that look like toys compared to the miles-deep rigs they're putting up now. Each time, they drilled and got all the oil and gas they could, and left. This time will be no different. They're drilling deeper and fracking wider; they're making a lot more noise and felling more timber and cutting more roads, but by and by these oil men will leave, too.

And the tigers, who neither know nor care about sensors and drilling rigs, prowl the ironweed

and it's all too beautiful.

Hope for the Monarch, and a Great Golden Digger Wasp

The summer of 2013 was one of the saddest ones I've ever lived through, if you're talking about butterflies. All that summer, I saw exactly four monarchs, and no caterpillars. 

I am elated to report that 2014 is a different story. I've seen 25 monarchs this season so far. They're still scarce enough for me to count and treasure and try to photograph every one. I couldn't bear the thought that this magnificent butterfly might vanish from our meadows. I remember seeing endless streams of them along the Connecticut shoreline in September, all heading for Mexico. I hope to see that again someday.

This gorgeous male (identified by the thickened vein, second from bottom on his hindwing) was nectaring on narrow-leaved mountain mint in Harrisville, WV, not far from my beloved North Bend State Park. 

That thickened vein translates to a little black dot, which is a scent gland, on the upper surface of his hindwing. 

For whatever reason I've seen many more males than females this year. Male again (see the thickening?)

The monarch was a serendipitous add-on. I left North Bend first, and David and Mary Jane followed. I was driving along Rte. 16 when my eye was arrested by a stand of rose gentian so thick and fine I squealed! I pulled off and waited for David and Mary Jane to catch up. Flagged them down and introduced them to my favorite wildflower. It was new to them. New no more. Now they'll look for it wherever they go. A little gift I could give them, for turning me on to North Bend. I'll never be able to repay that giant present.

We wandered in the meadow, bending down to bury our noses in its delicate perfume.

A particularly nice combo with Queen Anne's lace. This is the best QUAL year I can remember. Best rose gentian year, too.

And enjoying the gentian and monarchs, I noticed this spectacular wasp, more than an inch long. It took me a little while with The Google, calling up images with tagwords like "orange black spider wasp" and finally "spider wasp Queen Anne's lace" to finally find an image that matched it. That led me to digger wasps, and I finally figured out what I had. It's a different kind of 21st century field guide I've got in my laptop. Leafing through it is kind of like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but eventually I get there. Having a little knowledge aforehand helps immensely.

Great Golden Digger Wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus, nectaring on Narrow-leaved Mountain Mint. A nectar feeder as an adult, the GGDW feeds its young on more proteinaceous stuff. This wasp makes vertical tunnels in sandy soil, into which she drags crickets and katydids that she has stung and paralyzed. There are several chambers at the bottom of her tunnel, a paralyzed insect deposited in each one. She lays an egg on each immobilized insect, and in the grand manner of parasitic fly and wasp larvae, the grubs eat around the hapless victim's vital organs until the very last minute, when the wasp grub is ready to pupate, thus keeping its food source fresh for the duration. Eating its host alive, as it were. Eeesh! Insects are the coolest, the most macabre, the most terrible and wonderful things on the planet. I find this sleek, peaceful fighter jet of a wasp captivating. Now I look for it on wildflowers, where it sips nectar, belying its katydid-paralyzing nature.

You beautiful thing, you make my heart sing. 

Beauty: my #1 motivator. Sharing it: #2.

You're welcome!