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. 

                    

Meet Buffy

Who's that behind the fallen pine?

Oh, my deer. Something's wrong. 

December 14, 2016. I'm watching Pinky and Flag, Ellen's orphans, when I see an adult doe hanging shyly behind the dying pines in our back yard. She's holding her left eye mostly closed, and there's a big tear streak running down her cheek.

I study her hard, looking for distinctive characteristics. Do I know this doe?

Here is where my Canon 7D with 70-300 mm telephoto is my best ally, snatching images of the animals I seek to know.  There's a powerful team working for the Science Chimp, and my camera's the star quarterback. Along with it goes my Mac, with its incredible search function. But neither of these players would be working so effectively for me if I didn't blog.  Here's why: When I'm blogging, I name all my photos and toss them into a file for that month's blog. And the moment I name a photo, I make it retrievable. And when I can retrieve a photo, I can access a goldmine of images that help me piece together these animals' stories.

I have a feeling the mystery doe with the weeping eye is a colleague of Ellen's.  I think I've seen her before. So I pull up all the photos labeled "Ellen" and study them.

January 31, 2014. Exactly two years ago today. There she is! Ellen's laying her chin on Mystery Doe's back. Sweet? Nope. It's a dominance move. She's telling this gal to get out of her way, in a gentle way first. But you can see by the backward set of the layee's ears that she knows a bap is coming next. And you can see by the divot of hair taken out of Ellen's flank that she's been scrappin'.

Here's what I see on this doe that I'm seeing in Ms. Bad Eye. Overall, she's very warm in coloration. The rings around her eye and muzzle are not white, but bright warm burnt sienna-buff. More than that, she's got a neat little black mark on her mandible that looks a bit like a shark's tooth coming out of her mouth. Contrast that with Ellen's much larger black mandibular mark.

I keep searching. Here she is on February 15, 2016, a little less than a year ago. Ellen's approaching her. Look at the overall warm brown suffusing her coloration. Ellen's already lost the sight in her right eye; you can see it's gone pink.

I have a little series from this interaction. Ellen is so much smaller than this gal, but she pushes the envelope. The buff doe turns on her and gives her a good bappin' with sharp hooves. 

February 15, 2016. Hey. Do you see what I see? If you click on this photo, you'll see a trail of tears coming out of the buff doe's left eye. My goodness. Almost a year ago, and she was already having issues with that eye. The things you see when you really look.

Fast forward to January 7, 2017. Same animal. Same trail of tears.

Her eye is still weeping, but she's not holding it closed as much as she was on December 14. Good.
Oddly, it looks quite a bit smaller than her right eye, sunken perhaps. I can't tell if this is a natural asymmetry or if it's related to her condition. If she's lost the sight in it, it could indeed have shrunken.

Now, having identified her, it's time to name her. I choose Buffy, to remind me of her coloration. Now that I've noticed these things about her, she sticks out like a sore thumb. I see the warm rufous tone; I check for the shark tooth, and the weepy left eye clinches the ID.

Buffy's been here all along, but I was too busy watching Ellen to really take notice of her. Now, my beloved Ellen murdered and gone, I watch Buffy, Pinky, Flag and Boss Doe all the more closely.

I won't say Buffy's funny looking, but she is a low-slung animal, large-bodied and not very long of leg. I doubt she's young, but I've no way to know how old she is. I haven't known her as long as I knew Ellen, whom I met in 2009. In this photo, it's January 11, 2017, and she's keeping her eye open pretty much all the time. 

A close shot from that same day reveals the trail of tears to be less extensive. The skin around the eye has gone from pink back to a normal gray, and that's a good sign, too. I am glad to see this and hope she's healing. I'm pretty sure she has sight in the eye; she doesn't whip her head around to check the surroundings the way Ellen did when she lost sight in one eye.

I like this photo of Ellen challenging the much larger Buffy from Feb. 21, 2016.

It brings me comfort to watch a doe who knew Ellen, to feel a continuity through the loss.

Even though they clearly weren't the best of friends. I remember taking this photo a year ago, before I'd given Buffy any special thought, and speculating that an interaction like this may be how Ellen lost the sight in her right eye. She can't even see Buffy's strike coming at this point. The damage has already been done.

I don't mean to implicate Buffy for striking Ellen blind. The thought that her eye might have been injured in a fight is just one possibility I considered. 

This is one of my favorite shots of Ellen (right), telling Buffy to f-off. Buffy's all hmmmpf!  Wee scrappy Ellen aways gave as good as she got. Feb. 21, 2016

I went for a walk in the snow a couple of nights ago, as the light ebbed from the sky. I had meant to go out well before dark, but a phone conversation kept me inside. Still I grabbed my big rig and headed out, hoping to photograph deer in the falling snow. 

I spotted two fawns who belong to a family with big black brisket markings. I've been trying to get a handle on them for a few weeks now, but they don't come into the yard, so I can't get close shots from my big climate-controlled blind. This little creature looked like an Ewok in the snow. It was so dark I knew my shots would probably be trash, but I wanted to take photos of deer in the snow, so I did.

And then magic happened. That fawn turned and flounced away from me, and I shot, hoping I'd get something interesting. And oh my, I did. Please click on this to embiggen it, and appreciate the rhythm of it, the saucy wag of the fawn's flag, the sweeping curves of the snow-lined branches. Amazing. I was at ISO 1250, F 5.6, and this was a complete happy accident, a coming together of bad light, a moving subject, and the fairy dust of serendipity.

The fawn dove off the bank and into the pines. 

 Soon it was totally dark, but I kept walking out the haymeadow toward the woods. I could find my way by the light bouncing back up off the snow, by the contrast with the black trees. As I walked, I frightened several deer, who had thought they had the woods to themselves. And they'd crash off through the trees, probably little better able to see and avoid sharp sticks than I would be in those conditions. And I wonder how any deer makes it to old age, as Ellen did, without running a twig through an eye. 

I stick to the wide trails at night. Deer don't have that luxury when an unknown mammal startles them. Off they crash and bound, and I fear for their eyes. I felt bad about that. I wondered if I should be in the woods at all at night. Maybe I was putting them at risk. We need to think these thoughts, to wonder whether we belong in their world, such a disruptive element as we are. But it was so lovely to walk slowly in silence, with the cold misty snowflakes hitting my face, knowing that nobody else in their right mind would be out and heading deeper into the woods, well after dark on a Sunday night. 

I stopped, thinking, "It's about time for coywolves." And I faced to the north, where I often hear them. As if on command, they started to bark, yip and howl, and I grinned at such a joyous breaking of the silence I'd come looking for.

It's things like this that put me back into my right mind. 

Looking for Morels, Which We Didn't Find

Oh, the things you find when you go into the woods.

Looking for morels, which we didn't find

We found other things.
A whole new patch of pawpaws in a place I hadn't looked


Dangling bloody blossoms, calling flies to tickle and play



So that from this strange bell a fruit will form



Banana custard, pulp and seeds in a soft yellow skin.

We'll come back in September.

Looking for morels, which we didn't find

I stopped on a hillside to watch a cardinal build her nest

Followed her to a honeysuckle tangle
And there found a butterfly
never before seen on our land

The round rings on its wings rang a distant bell.
And there in the woods I combed the books of memory
Found the answer waiting, struggling up through the pages and the hard cover of time



A Harvester! Fenisecus tarquinius
Only the second seen in a life of looking for butterflies
And here! on our land, not one but two.


Its caterpillar, the only predaceous one, spurning leaves for aphids.

Number 73 for the property.

But I digress. Numbers are not poetry.

Walking a little farther along, the first turtle of spring
Frozen, watchful



I pretended not to see him. He never pulled in his head.
A victory, however small.

And farther along the same slope
I stop, become still
A crunch of leaves, almost inaudible
I focus like an owl on a spot yards away



Where the second turtle of spring
has drawn in its foot

That sound enough to betray its presence.



Its eye an angry garnet
Discovered but resolute.



Looking for morels, which we didn't find.



Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company--Wikipedia

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." Louis Pasteur

Harvester, Fenisecus tarquinus, #73 for Indigo Hill, Whipple, Ohio, April 26, 2009

Deer Story

I have given this Canon Rebel XTi quite a workout in the five months I've had it. I've worn it so often over my shoulder that I no longer even notice its weight. It lies against my hip, always ready, always on, asleep, but ready to awakened in an instant. I keep a spare battery in my pocket all the time; I live in fear of laundering it.

I was immersed in warblers when something moved in the corner of my vision field. A big doe was coming out of the woods just across the road from me. A strong breeze was blowing from the east, bringing her scent to me, though I couldn't discern it. She could smell nothing of me, and being a doe, she moved closer to investigate.


An old deer hunter once told me that a buck won't do that, and I have found it to be true, even in fawns. Bucks who move closer to a strange object often get shot for their curiosity. Does let it all hang out, the desire to know what they're seeing overpowering their fear. They are Science Chimps, too.

She moved on an oblique angle toward me as she continued to cross the road. She couldn't make out the details of my face, covered as it was by a camera. She hesitated, and watched me.

Over her head, I could see a couple approaching, walking the road near their cabin. They had a Norwegian elkhound with them, and the man, sizing up the situation, stopped to put her on a lead. Thank you. The doe still hadn't perceived them. Oh, this was good.



She tilted an ear back. Someone was coming!Tearing those curious eyes away, she turned to look. Ruh-roh. No curiosity about this! She made up her mind quickly.
I was gratified to see her choose me as the lesser threat, as she wheeled and ran toward and past me and into the safety of the woods. I felt I had done something right. Stillness is to be desired in the pursuit of beauty.

I'm writing from North Dakota, where we spent most of the day on unbroken prairie, watching upland sandpipers, vesper sparrows, soras, and magnificent bison rolling like dark boulders over the hummocked hills. I was overcome by emotion several times, thinking that this is how it all looked before we broke it. I'm grateful to be here, to show it to my children, to be able to play music with my husband, to share what I can with everyone here. I love North Dakota, and the strong, self-effacing people who hang through her winters and bask in her short, ravishing summers. Thanks for all your good wishes. I'm feeling fine and soaking it all up.