Woods
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Odds and Ends
These two are photos of a veery — more often heard than seen!
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Northeastern jungle
It was like the greenwood of a fairy tale in the marsh we visited yesterday. Everything was bursting out and greening up and singing and chittering and croaking.
We were greeted by a yellow warbler at the entrance to the trail.
He stood out pretty well, perched at the highest vantage point he could find.
But when he turned his back, he looked just like one of the leaves.
The May apples always bloom in this spot first, and they were everywhere. We found them when we spooked a rabbit and I bent over to look beneath the canopy of leaves for a nest.
No nest, but… blooming May apples!
You have to bend the stem back a little to make the drooping flower face front for a picture. It always reminds me of a hold-up: “Don’t shoot!”
There were ferns rolling out their fiddleheads everywhere.
Not everything was colorful, though. My daughter spotted (somehow!) this leaflike butterfly.
Tiny plants are emerging on the forest floor. (I got some better, more diverse photos last year around this time.) These are some of my favorites, though I never noticed them till last year.
“Gaywing” 
The whole place has a primeval feeling about it.
Though it’s surrounded by noisy highway, I heard lots of birds — warblers I never got my eye on. But one of the reasons I like the place is that in spring there are so many blooming trees and plants.
Even though it was in the 60’s, there was no way we could forget that the green carpet is rolled out to stay.
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Glen
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Waterfall
This is a favorite picnic spot. I was able to get in close for the first time the other day; it’s been a steep and icy descent until now.
Another welcome sign of spring: water. Most of these streams have been silent, but now the woods are full of the sound of rushing water. It corresponds to the freedom I feel as winter releases its grip.
Always I am reminded that we are only the most recent of a long line of visitors here.
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Best Kept Secrets of the Woods
The woods were full of them today: soft, high-pitched peepings and flashes of bark-colored movement. There’s one on this tree. See it? It’s a brown creeper.
I love these tiny birds with their amazing protective coloration.
I have no idea how many there were; I saw one at a time. But they seemed to cover a wide area. There must have been quite a few.
I watched them hop up the trunks, checking under each flake of bark or lichen for insects.
They would hop to the top, then drop back down to the base and start back up again.
For them, the wood full of trees must have been an absolute delight — kind of like I’d feel in a chocolate factory acres wide.
They are always a treat to see, and seeing them feels like an accomplishment — so tiny, quick, and camouflaged.
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Bridge to Spring?
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Deer season
The deer were everywhere in the nature preserve where the girls and I took our walk yesterday…
Inquisitive, but not especially easy to spook. It’s bow season right now, and I know some hunters who would have been glad to see them. No hunting in the preserve, though. I think the deer must know.
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Chipmunk
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Tanglewood Trails
We hustled through our schoolwork in the morning and drove to the Tanglewood Nature Center in Elmira yesterday. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we took the trail up to an overlook over the Chemung River Valley.
We spotted two redtails circling over the river, but by the time I got my camera back out, they were high above us.
We ate our lunch there, and I enjoyed reading about Mark Twain’s thoughts on such an experience, posted nearby:
On the way back down we paused at this lower point, and a juvenile eagle soared past at eye level. No pics — but a grand sight.
Of course there were many beautiful perspectives on the trail. We passed through yellow sections, red sections, and conifer sections. I was partial to the golden yesterday — even though “nothing gold can stay.”
The reds were lovely too.
I commented on these bi-colored yellow/red maple leaves, and the kids proceeded to gather specimens.
There were apple trees, and faded pearl crescent butterflies.
We enjoyed the many fossils seen along the trail, too.
When we got back to the bottom, we rested a bit…
…and saw several bluebirds. They were perching in a walnut tree, then swooping down to hawk insects near the ground. It’s always a treat to see our state bird.
I was surprised to see red-winged blackbirds too, plucking and eating the keys from this tree.
On the whole it was a grand way to drink in the sights and smells of autumn.
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Sabbath
Wendell Berry has a whole series of poems called Sabbaths. Accumulated over several decades, they represent his forays into the woods on Sundays — not every Sunday, but a portion of them. Usually we’re in church, but today we went into the woods instead. There is a particular kind of rest, a particular settling and composure, in the solitude of a walk in that setting.The first “wildlife” sighting happened before we even got out of the house: this Carolina wren, who had apparently spent the night in our garage. It was a confident little bird. Maybe it enjoyed the warmth, and whatever bugs it found on the window sills. But when we opened the doors, it paused only to give us a considering glance before flying gracefully away.
Off to the woods, on a morning blanketed in mist.
The moisture in the air made certain usually hidden things visible.
We saw a few deer, but for the most part, it was a time to look closely at the microworlds of mosses and bracket fungus, ferns in their fall stripes, woodpecker work and chipmunks.
My husband was surrounded at one point by small, alarmed rodents, filling the woods with their squeaking.
We were near this stream, a favorite spot, when the sun came out.
It’s interesting to me that although our bird feeding station at home was swarming with birds, the ones in the woods take longer to get up and moving. Maybe they wait for their prey to wake up — not being a welfare state, like our back yard. There were quite a few cardinals, chickadees, robins, nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers, cedar waxwings, Eastern towhees and other birds coming alive and chattering in the trees as we came back out. The gnats were certainly awake as well.
At last — all things come to her who waits — I saw a Tennessee warbler, who scolded me roundly and flew away.
