Maggie's Farm

A like totally cool site, BirdCast, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

We take the fall and spring migrations for granted, but they are in fact miraculous feats and remarkable adaptations to the climate changes of the ice age era (which we are still in today - and have been for 2.6 million years with lulls and expansions of northern hemisphere ice. If you can apply "normal," this planet normally has no ice).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, an important American figure who I find almost impossible to read, took a train out west partly to visit John Muir.

Emerson was Muir's hero. However, the elderly Emerson, the author of Nature, had no interest in going into the woods with Muir. I think nature was an idea for Emerson, not experienced outside of a park or a farm. For Muir, of course, wilderness was religion.

Life – and Emerson – tried to lure the naturalist John Muir back to the world. But his home was always the American wild.

Pic: Muir with Teddy Roosevelt in Yosemite, 1906.

Reader brought up the topic. I've seen patches of what we called Huckleberries growing on field edges in New England. Never tried to eat one and never heard of people picking them. Next time I see some, I'll try them before the grouse get them.

There are several plants around the country which people term Huckleberries.

At some point, Huckleberry became a term of affection.

Wiki on Huckleberries

Where Do Huckleberries Grow?

Get all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum...iPhone pic sent from a BD daughter yesterday from the Muir Woods in Mill Valley. A magnificent country, isn't it?

A Teddy Roosevelt quote: "When I am here in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West."

I will have my Cumberland Island travelogue photos ready soon, but somebody mentioned Little Saint Simons Island to me at a big social event last night, so I thought it might be time for a plug for them. Not that they need it. I posted my own pics etc, previously. LSS does have skeeters, sometimes to an unpleasant extent but not as bad as the Everglades. Bugs there are insane.

You may have heard the recent news that the owners of Little St. Simons Island donated a conservation easement to The Nature Conservancy on the entire 11,000 + acre island. For you, our longtime guests and supporters, we're happy to report that you will be unlikely to notice any changes, but we hope you'll celebrate with us knowing that one of the most significant natural areas on the southeastern coast has been preserved for perpetuity.

Learn more about the announcement here:  http://www.naturelssi.com/?p=2108

Yes, that would be the prosperous Mr. Paulson who just gave a half-billion to Harvard. It's my kind of rustic place with Southern food. These two pics are their own photos.

These little guys are found across the US and southern Canada, mostly in deciduous woodlands.We have a pair nesting somewhere nearby, but you never see their nests, which are high and in small holes.

They pretty much always walk headfirst down a tree.

White-breasted Nuthatch

Here in New England, the spring migration is underway. Blackbirds came a month ago, and are still passing through, but the hardy songbirds are beginning to show up despite yesterday's light snow.

The Juncos headed north a couple of weeks ago, and now most of the White Throats have left too. I heard the first Towhee of the Spring this morning.

How quick can bird migration be? Brazil to Pennsylvania in 13 days.

Photo is our Eastern Towhee. Unmistakable, loud call, "Drink your teeeee." Saw my first of the season yesterday, scratching under my feeder. Love those guys.

Here's a chilly male Cardinal. Due to global warming, it was a wicked winter and a cold early Spring this year.

Usually we begin to see the first flocks of northward-headed blackbirds in New England around Feb 15, but in recent years their arrivals are later and later. This year, the first wave arrived here yesterday.

"Blackbird" isn't a species - it's a category. Around here, it is mainly Red Wing Blackbirds and Common Grackle, who have spent their winter in the southern US and are headed for the marshy breeding grounds in the northern US and Canada. Very early migrators, they don't seem to mind nasty weather as long as it does not persist. (In the midwest and west, there are other species of Blackbirds.)

Photo below of male Red Wings. The females are an inconspicuous brown. In spring, the males get up on a branch, flash their red epaulets, and crow, in their territorial ritual, while the drab females skulk around and build nests in the rushes.

I was thrilled and surprised to see one pass by this week, low over my garden. Must be cold up north. I am sure he or she is hurrying north to nest in the snow.

Reposted -

The Snowy Owl breeds around the world at the northern edge of the tundra. Depending on food supply (lemmings and similar rodents), they regularly migrate further south during the winter.

I have only seen a handful of them in New England although they are regular visitors to tundra-like, wide-open places in New England and other areas of the northern US: golf courses, marshes, beaches, large fields and meadows. The last one I saw was sitting on a snow-covered sand dune in Montauk, L.I., but I have seen them perched on farmhouse roofs. They are diurnal owls, and usually perch on a high spot to watch for the movement of little critters.

You can read more about the Snowy Owl here.

Mostly old friends:

Tree Sparrow
Cardinal
Slate-Colored Junco
Mockingbird
Song Sparrow
Blue Jay
Downy Woodpecker
damn English Sparrows
White Throated Sparrow
Great Horned Owl (heard early)
Mourning Doves
Chipping Sparrow
Chickadee
Carolina Wren

and a new friend, a Brown Thrasher, one of my favorite birds. He's a little early to be here, but using his strong beak to punch holes in the snow to find birdseed.

The Oyster Shell Game:

 After seven years of political and legal battles that have grown into one of the ugliest environmental fights in the country, this was the end of the line for Lunny’s oyster farm. "It's been a terrible time," said Lunny, who still lives on the nearby cattle ranch where he grew up and where his grandfather started a dairy farm in 1947. The forced closure of the oyster company marks the end, after almost 80 years, of modern shellfish farming in Drakes Estero, the tidal estuary that lies at the center of the dispute...

One good guy vs the government. Guy loses.

Often, as my Mom taught me, the best way to observe nature is just to sit in the woods or meadows silently and inconspicuously for an hour or two. Things will happen. A Box Turtle will wobble past. An upwind fawn will walk ten feet from you. A Redtail will dive on a mouse. A Blacksnake will slither over your warm Wellies. Dragonflies and butterflies will perch on your hat. A Marsh Hawk will pass just over your head, startling you.

A lot of quiet outdoor sitting takes place on deer stands, in duck blinds, etc.

Yesterday, I watched from my office window, a Sharpie attacking sparrows 5 or 10 feet from my window. That's not unusual. What I had never seen before was the frustrated Sharpie just settle on the ground and to begin stalking the sparrows on foot through the hollies where they had fled for safety. He walked with a long slow stride, very alert, just like a Velociraptor.

Have you ever seen that?

After a few minutes of stalking, he somehow flushed a flock of about ten sparrows from a holly and tore off after one. I couldn't see whether he was successful. Wish I had taken a photo.

Around here, there are three bird species which annoy the heck out of me. They especially annoy me in winter, because they eat most of the bird food I put out to attract native winter visitors from Canada.

The three are The English Sparrow, aka House Sparrow (really a finch), imported from England

The House Finch (not to be confused with the Purple Finch), imported from southern California and Mexico

and the European Starling, imported from England - no photo needed I am sure. The only good use for these three species is to feed migrating falcons and Sharpies, and to provide target practice for kids with BB guns and .22s.

Not many interesting birds around thus far this winter, but a Red Tail Hawk has been screaming at me all day from the top of a Sugar Maple. I've been hauling firewood, which seems to annoy. My regular Great Horned Owls are of course hooting each morning at 4:30.

Which reminds me that on Christmas afternoon a Bald Eagle flew right over my roof. Not an everyday occurrence here. I mentioned it to Mrs. BD and she said "Oh yeah, they have been nesting down on --- Road this summer. Watched them raising their chicks every morning on my morning exercise walk with friends."

Sheesh. Could have mentioned that to me. I, the Bird Dog, would have been interested.

Wonderful to see those big fish eagles coming back. I didn't think it could happen, but then I never expected the Ospreys to come back so strongly either. Or, God knows, the Wild Turkeys. The resilience of nature is a wonder.

A final batch of my pal's pics from his trip to Zambia in August. I requested some pics from town and city but he says they spent their entire trip in tents in wilderness with native guides.

 More below the fold -

My pal who returned from a couple of weeks in Zambia is quite the wildlife photographer.

Wish he had included photos of the people, town life, etc., but these are wonderful.

More pics below the fold - 

At Aeon, Earth is not a garden - Some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They are making a big mistake. A quote:

 The garden metaphor is particularly loaded. A garden is not an ethical place. Life and death occurs at a gardener’s caprice. Plant or cut, tend or kill, include or exclude: it’s an exercise of morally unconstrained will, fine in a backyard but requiring boundaries both literal and philosophical. ‘Once we shift to a gardener’s mindset, it gives us too much freedom to do whatever we want,’ says the bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick. ‘And I’m speaking as an avid gardener.’

In a garden, there isn’t necessarily a sense that life has any value apart from what we assign. Neither individual beings nor larger entities – populations, communities, species, ecological processes – are intrinsically worthy of respect. The gardener ethic can’t account for that. What Leopold so eloquently advised, that we think of ourselves not as conquerors of life’s communities but as ‘plain members and citizens’, goes out the window.

Nature's alterations to the landscape never end, and mankind gets in the way.

Billingsgate Island, once the site of a lighthouse, a school, and over 30 houses, is now Billingsgate Shoal. It used to be a popular picnic destination, big clambakes.

Some of it is above water now, during low tides. Best explanation I've heard is that destroying the salt marshes that protected it from Cape Cod Bay (for salt hay to feed the critters) is what destroyed it. 

This photo shows what agriculture and deforestation (by the Indians and then by the Europeans with their farms and cattle) did to the soil of the outer Cape: it's down to sand and sweet-smelling scrub now:

Interesting piece on the topic below the fold -

Readers know the BD is a lover of marshes and swamps. They are full of life - more than any other form of habitat.

When a dike was built across the Herring River in the late 1800s, the tidal flow was interrupted and the river began silting up and turning into fresh water. A few years ago, the bridge was reconstructed to permit a full tidal exchange without removing the road dike.

The phragmites is dying out, spartina is returning, and the tidal flow is vigorous. Environmental successes usually come in small pieces.

Deep in town, a railroad dike was built in the late 1800s to carry vacationers and mail to Wellfleet - and to carry fish and oysters to NYC. This dike also impeded free tidal flow and caused the inner harbor to silt up. Tall ships used to dock in there. The pilings of the railroad bridge on the dike remain:

I doubt that the village would spend any $ to remove the old dike.

Here's my challenge to the town of Wellfleet: re-open the dike between the marina and the marsh behind it - the marsh that begins behind Capt. Higgins Pearl and used to stretch back for several 100 acres until the harbor construction closed the salt flow to a tiny trickle destroying a large salt marsh. I'll donate.

All it needs is a simple 30-40' bridge there to de-silt and salinate the old marsh.

Addendum: Thanks to commenters for some corrections.

Took this pic of a clamming boat coming into dock in Wellfleet in September a couple of years ago. The refrigerated truck will arrive just as he ties up.

Those are Sea Clams which are harvested along the Northeast coast by dredging, from deeper water than the Quahog of the tidal flats but much shallower waters than those inhabited by the deep-sea Ocean Clam. Here are Sea Clams up close:

Sea Clams are the main processed clam in the US, and their shells are commonly used as ashtrays.

The hard-shelled clam, the Quahog (Mercenaria mercenaria - why that name?) is the clam of Atlantic US estuaries and tidal flats. It tastes better, in my opinion, than the Sea Clam - especially when you dig them yourself. Unlike the Sea Clam, you eat the Quahog feathers and all: Littlenecks and Cherrystones - and the chowder-sized Quahogs.

This is from Thoreau's Cape Cod:

We found some large clams, of the species Mactra solidissima, which the storm had torn up from the bottom, and cast ashore. I selected one of the largest, about six inches in length, and carried it along, thinking to try an experiment on it. We soon after met a wrecker, with a grapple and a rope, who said that he was looking for tow cloth, which had made part of the cargo of the ship Franklin,(17) which was wrecked here in the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost. The reader may remember this wreck, from the circumstance that a letter was found in the captain's valise, which washed ashore, directing him to wreck the vessel before he got to America, and from the trial which took place in consequence.(18) The wrecker said that tow cloth was still cast up in such storms as this. He also told us that the clam which I had was the sea-clam, or hen, and was good to eat. We took our nooning under a sand-hill, covered with beach-grass, in a dreary little hollow, on the top of the bank, while it alternately rained and shined. There, having reduced some damp drift-wood, which I had picked up on the shore, to shavings with my knife, I kindled a fire with a match and some paper, and cooked my clam on the embers for my dinner; for breakfast was commonly the only meal which I took in a house on this excursion. When the clam was done, one valve held the meat and the other the liquor. Though it was very tough, I found it sweet and savory, and ate the whole with a relish. Indeed, with the addition of a cracker or two, it would have been a bountiful dinner. I noticed that the shells were such as I had seen in the sugar-kit at home. Tied to a stick, they formerly made the Indian's hoe hereabouts.

The entirety of Thoreau's report of his amusing 1849-1867 ramblings, Cape Cod, can be read here.

They do love my Trumpet Vines. I have a red one too.