The New Year, 2018, Begins in Vinegar Hollow

January 3, 2018 By winpen in farm, Highland County, Highland County, VA, Ithaca, landscape, natural history, naturalist, Uncategorized, Vinegar Hollow Tags: Ithaca, Louis Macneice, Mustoe, snow, vinegar hollow 1 Comment

It looks like my New Year’s post from Vinegar Hollow is going to be an annual event. What new is there to say one might ask? I am different, the land is different, the weather is different–more wear and tear in general–not that these are necessarily bad things. Some wear-and-tear is simply polishing. In the hollow I never tire of looking at the trees

View from apple orchard to old barn (center) at the Big Meadow.

and the hills and the play of light, and I always see new designs and colors in the landscape. The snow illuminates the hoof-marked cow trails, while Mike’s tractor, which delivers hay morning and afternoon to the

This, the old locust grove, is where the cows prefer their hay. The little barn is more visible.

cows, uncovers grass still green. Yesterday Mike and I had a talk about the cows’ preference for the locust grove this time of year. He is surprised they are not out in full sun on these cold days and observes that this is their favorite spot. They are reluctant to move around when he delivers hay elsewhere, which is fine with him because when he leaves hay near the barn, they stomp around and unplug the automatic timer to his tractor. Which is not good, because then on these cold mornings, some below zero, he can’t get the tractor started. (The timer activates the heating of the engine oil so it is not too sludgy on a bitter cold morning.) He thinks the cows prefer the locust grove because it is their shady home place of summer.

Tractor ready to distribute hay bales for the next feeding.

Cows have memories he says. When it is time for a twice-bred cow to go into the barn to calve, he just opens the door and she heads straight into the stall she had the year before. If there is a cow in there already, there is sure to be a terrible fight. On the other hand, getting first-time mothers into the barn presents a problem. Mike has tender feelings for his cows in the winter when he is out feeding no matter the weather and his bad knee. Cows can withstand the cold if all their several stomachs are full. The gut bacteria create a literal fire in the belly. It’s freezing rain that causes Mike to tighten his lips and shake his head about the suffering of domesticated animals.

On a clear day when the sun reflects off a layer of snow, it’s hard to notice anything but a beautiful dazzle.

Looking south to Stark’s Ridge.

Farms have a lot of fences and gates that create intersecting shadows. Because of some construction going on at the old house, there is provisional wire fencing adding to the complexity of the design above.

The fence in the center divides the orchard (very few trees left) from the orchard meadow. A few small sinkholes are visible in the ground that rises to the hillside.

On a day when the sun is wan, the colors of a winter landscape become subtle. I notice the soft brown of frozen mud, the pale russet of dried sage grass, and snow poked through with a thousand blades of grass. Tree branches are witchy, twitchy, sometimes ungainly, and always beautiful against the sky.

The side of Stark’s Ridge with tree branches against a wan sky.

I walk around the farm looking at everything, trying to understand placement of objects, natural and unnatural, how a landscape becomes what it is.

Layers of limestone that have heaved and broken apart provide dens for foxes.

A cattle chute with rusty chains.

Maybe I have a memory like the cow going into the stall where she has been before. Since brought home to the farm at birth, I always return, amazed at how much more there is to see and think about. When I visit Roy, my neighbor, who will be 94 on January 24 of this new year, we deconstruct the history of the hollow, no moment or detail too small for discussion. He lives alone with his cat Big Red, who for the first time deigned to sit in my lap before jumping, somewhat gracefully for a big cat, from the kitchen counter to a perch on top of the refrigerator. Mike checks on Roy every morning and the driver of the woman who cleans his trailer brings two apples each week for his old, long-legged donkey.

Roy’s mailbox. The road at the upper right winds around to his home. Cow in front of the old barn seen from a distance in the first photo.

Roy only needs one meal a day now he says–two fried eggs, two pieces of toast, a rasher of sausage, and a cup of coffee. He fixes it himself even though his hands are almost curled shut with arthritis. I took him two bite-size mincemeat pies made by my English friend who makes wonderful pie crust. That’ll be dinner he said as I set them by his easy chair. The thing I puzzle about is that Roy even in midwinter, when he can’t sit outside on the top step to his trailer, seems to know what is going on in the hollow. It’s as if he is now not bounded by walls and poor vision (he lost sight in one eye as a child) because he is so attuned to the hollow. “You should see Mike’s dog running after the tractor. Down the road and back up the road these cold mornings. You should see that,” he tells me. I have seen that but I wonder when he has.

A paper wasp nest dangles from the copper beech branches in the foreground; Stark’s Ridge in the background.

On the long drive from Ithaca to Mustoe, we listened to the audio version of La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. As a frontispiece he quotes a few lines from Irish poet Louis Macneice’s “Snow” , a poem about how much lays before our view– how “the world is suddener than we fancy it.” The hollow has always looked “sudden” to me. Now it’s time to say good-bye again; I have had my reset for the New Year!

A New Year Begins in Vinegar Hollow

January 12, 2017 By winpen in botany, farm, fieldwork, Highland County, VA, landscape, naturalist, Uncategorized Tags: apple trees, Back Creek Mountain, British Soldiers lichen, Calostoma lutescens, Haute Savoie, John Berger, lattice puffball, Michael Kuo, MushroomExpert.com, Project Noah, The Guardian, vinegar hollow, water sprouts, yellow-stalked puffball 5 Comments

Looking to the north end of Vinegar Hollow.

The long drive from Ithaca to Mustoe completed, we arrived just after dark on New Year’s Eve to a howling wind, snow-covered hills, and an icy terrace. By morning the melt was on, the ice turned to puddles and the snow just feathery patches. But there had been prolonged cold so, while the primrose that flowered last January 1^st looked bright green, its buds remained tight. The melt brought mist and drizzle and for a few days we were in a fog bank.

Despite a few injuries, the old collapsed ankle, the new broken wrist, and the sudden onset of a stupefying upper respiratory virus, I took walks with my husband and Belle the dog.

Looking to the south end of Vinegar Hollow.

Trees in winter tell such different stories than those of their summer selves. The old apple trees in the orchard that haven’t been pruned for decades reveal the thicket of watersprouts jutting vertically from almost every horizantal branch. Shoots that spring from the base of a tree are called suckers. They are an important source of regeneration. Arising from latent buds and the result of “weather and other damage” (old age?), watersprouts, on the other hand, make a mess of the interior life of a tree, blocking light and air flow, which in turn decrease the quality of fruit. I remember my mother telling me that the apple tree in the orchard was an old variety called the Northern Spy. I loved the name. Trees do make perfect spies. No one notices them. There are only six left now, each uniquely misshapen.

Two old apple trees join branches, heavy with waterspouts.

Another walk takes us up Back Creek Mountain on one of the old logging roads. It’s misty. These woods were logged about 10 years ago. The giants are gone, and the slender trees that remain reach for the sky from the steep hillsides, a maze of toothpicks tilted slightly off vertical. Pale grey green lichens cover their trunks, a contrast to the deep green leaves of the mountain laurel thickets forming the understory. These are Appalachian colors, muted.

Lichen-and-moss garden along logging road. British soldier lichens are red topped.

There have been other travelers on this road. We notice coyote scat, blunt at one end and pointed at the other, a pale grey brown that blends with the fallen leaves. The British soldiers do not blend in. They are bright and bold, in lime green uniforms and orange red helmets. This seems to be their season as they look fresh and new. Large patches, like miniature gardens, occur frequently along the sides of the trail. The mosses look prosperous also at this time of the year, their green rich and glowing.

We walk up to a large bend and then turn around, retracing our steps. I am thinking about how I love these woods, and that, though they do not have the diversity and flamboyance of a tropical rain forest, there are surprises, like the British soldiers, and undoubtedly there are very beautiful mosses, lichens, and liverworts that have never been named, when I hear a loud “Wow!” I race to catch up with my husband. He is staring at the ground. Even when almost upon him I do not see anything under his gaze. On bended knee, however, I come face to face with a strange life form. As we walk down the trail, we find more and more of them in various stages of development, all of which we had missed on the way up.

Stage 1 of the yellow-stalked puffball.

The first stage looked like a very small yellow star-like flower flattened on the ground. Next a balloon-like orb appeared underneath the “flower” whose “petals” became a reddish collar around a “mouth” atop the balloon. Tapping the balloon produced a cloud of white dust.

Stage 2 of yellow-stalked puffball: balloon (spore case) has “mushroomed.”

It was so bizarre that I couldn’t see it belonging to any of the five kingdoms of living organisms. But it had to be a mushroom, perhaps related to an earthstar. An Alice-in-Wonderland Google search through the world of bizarre mushrooms led to dead ends until I stumbled on the phrase “stalked puffball,” and then I found it—the yellow-stalked puffball, Calostoma lutescens. It is also called the lattice puffball, apparently for the mesh-like consistency of the stalk.

Stage 3 of yellow-stalked puffball: net-like, fibrous stalk elevates “balloon” for spore dispersal.

Michael Kuo of MushroomExpert.com writes that

This distinctive, funky fungus is fairly common in the southern Appalachians, but has been reported from Arkansas to Massachusetts. It looks like a little yellow globe with puckered red lips, sporting a tattered collar, held aloft by an odd pedestal of half-digested pasta. It’s hard to imagine mistaking Calostoma lutescens for anything else.

My Internet search reminded me of Project Noah. It is a site where ordinary people, or citizen scientists, can upload photos for sharing and identification. Someone posted a photo of the yellow-stalked puffball found in North Carolina about a year ago.

For some reason I have always felt the role of reporter or recorder of the hollow’s news, whether about a puffball or water-sprouted old apple trees, as my calling. Why? Why do some people have certain inclinations that seem necessary, like a cosmic job, despite how difficult to honor along with all one’s other responsibilities?

These first few days of January, while thinking determinedly about the yellow-stalked puffball, I read obituaries of John Berger (b. November 5, 1926; d. January 2, 2017), the English writer who spent 43 years living in a small village in the Haute Savoie of the French Alps, in part to chronicle the peasant way of life (he preferred the word peasant to describe the rural worker). In an essay for The Guardian in 2014, he wrote:

What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told, and that if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told. I picture myself as a stop-gap man rather than a consequential, professional writer.

I take heart from that. One can be a stop-gap writer of or for almost anything. Most would say that Berger was a pretty high-level, stop-gap writer. I think he would affirm that it is ok to be a low-level, stop-gap writer like me. He also said, even when nearing 90, that writing never got any easier for him, though drawing did.

Berger had been an influential art critic, author of Ways of Seeing, but from Quincy in the Haute Savoie, he wrote about the people and their down-to-earth work, making hay, shepherding, and the like. In his essay about the yearly cleaning of his outhouse, “Muck and its Entanglements: Cleaning the Outhouse,” he describes a local schoolroom story of a conversation between a cowpat and a fallen apple. The fallen apple is too pristine to speak to the friendly cowpat. This is his point of departure for seeking meaning in “shit” and the nature of cows:

Perhaps the insouciance with which cows shit is part of their peacefulness, part of the patience that allows them to be thought of in certain cultures as sacred.

Berger also made the observation that cows walk as if on high heels. Their hooves do seem extremely dainty for their ponderous bodies, and I have often wondered that they don’t just topple over on the steep hillsides of Vinegar Hollow. I blame the breeders for their ungainly, top heavy bodies.

They are waiting.

Every time I am here I do some cow watching. Mike, owner of the cows, comes up twice a day with giant hay bales skewered onto the front and back of his John Deere tractor, which he spreads in different parts of the farm, leaving swirling, Celtic patterns, figure-eights of uneaten hay all over the farm.

The cows may seem to vaguely follow his whereabouts, but their attention is not vague. They came up the road more or less single file and stop on the part of the road between the barn and the granary. They stop moving and stand still as statues, no flick of a tail or turning of a head, noses to the north, tails to the south, single file (they are chewing however, as I can make out a rhythmic movement of their jaws), not moving for up to an hour or until they hear a vehicle and then they bound towards the sound, practically scampering. It’s comical, though, if they are in error (if it’s not Mike with their hay bales) because they return to their positions on the road, single file, and wait, chewing, as if they have not been caught dancing about on their high heels to watch the approach of the bales.

It is good for me to start the new year by fitting into the rhythms of Vinegar Hollow. Too soon it will be time to go. I have ordered Pig Earth, the first book in John Berger’s trilogy (Into their Labours) about working with the fiercely independent people who farm the French Alps, in order to understand the rhythms in places where people have worked the land for centuries.

Looking south, through the branches of a young black cherry, on the day of departure.

P.S. Pictures of the puffball were taken by my husband David Fernandez.

Autumn: “the small gnats mourn”

October 7, 2015 By winpen in birds, books, botany, landscape, natural history, naturalist, people, place, writing Tags: " autumn, " Carol Rumens, " ode, "Sunlight and Shadow, "To Autumn, ants, autumn crocus, beechdrops, bur cucumber, Charles Darwin, E. O. Wilson, Helianthus, Ithaca College, John Keats, Jonathan Bate, Martin Johnson Heade, Romantic poetry, The Green Studies Reader, The Guardian, weather, Winslow Homer's "Autumn, Writing as a Naturalist 1 Comment

“Sunlight and Shadow” by Martin Johnson Heade (American 1819-1904, National Gallery, Washington, D. C.). The artist depicts “the tides, meteorological phenomena, and other natural forces that shaped the appearance of the swamp and showed how the land was used for hunting, fishing, and the harvesting of naturally occurring salt hay” (quote from National Gallery description). The apple tree is full of fruit and the haystack half in sun and half in shadow. I saw this painting a few weeks ago at the National Gallery and felt it captured the warmth of the harvest season portrayed in Keats’ ‘To Autumn.’ (This photograph is courtesy of wiki commons. My photograph cut off the apple tree.)

Autumn: it’s time again to walk the long good-bye among the fallen leaves and the last flowers of summer and think about Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn,’ a poem I cannot forget. For a number of years on an especially fine October day I would take my Writing as a Naturalist class at Ithaca College outside. We would read Keats’ poem aloud together and then I would ask them to choose their favorite line. Though many students of the 21^st century seem to be occasionally more interested in science fiction and epic fantasy, they responded wholeheartedly to this classic Romantic poem. It never failed to awaken their notice and appreciation of the day and the season. Every line had a champion.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats’ “Autumn” has been called by some the most perfect poem in the English language, and many readers and critics have observed that it is a celebration of our ecosystem and interconnectedness. Which is perhaps the reason for its perfection, in that its many references to nonhuman species awaken a remembrance of how our own biology connects us to all the fruits and birds and insects and weather of the Earth. We feel nourished after reading the poem, more aware of the blessings of harvest. Keats composed the poem, in 1819, two years before his death. Scholar Jonathan Bate writes in his essay “The Ode ‘To Autumn’ as Ecosystem” that when doctors in Rome opened up his body after death “they thought it was the worst possible Consumption—the lungs were intirely destroyed—the cells were quite gone’” (p. 258 in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism). Keats died when he was 26.

My copy of Keats’ Letters.

Bates quotes from one of Keats’ famous letters about a walk he took in 1819:

How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—that struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it. (p. 258)

Bates says that “To Autumn” is a weather poem, as were many other major Romantic poems. Weather has always influenced our moods and especially now, in this time of climate change, our sense of the fragility of life. Keats in his letter talks about the stubble appearing warm to him, and in the poem he shows it turning rosy in the setting sun. Bates writes:

… the poem itself is an image of ecological wholeness which may grant to the attentive and receptive reader a sense of being-at-home-in-the-world….the movement through the poem…is not one which divides the culture from the nature. There is no sense of river, hill, and sky as the opposite of house and garden. Rather, what Keats seems to be saying is that to achieve being-at-home-in-the-world you have to begin from your own dwelling-place. Think globally, act locally….

Bates sees the “thee” in the poem as thoroughly female, and I have always imagined the person with “soft-lifted hair” as a woman, though much older than Winslow Homer’s “Autumn,” but perhaps with red hair as well, while Carol Rumens in her rumination on the poem, which she writes is “marked by sensuous profusion and artistic control,” sees a male Dionysian figure becoming at some points androgynous. The students always end our Keats’ Autumn class talking about how they love Ithaca’s Apple Festival and drinking cider and eating apple cider donuts, where they connect with farmers and growers and craftspeople, many distant from academic circles the rest of the year, through the sharing of harvest.

Winslow Homer’s “Autumn” seen at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago.

I also walk in autumn, saying a good-bye to the ecosystem before its winter’s nap. Devoid of the kind of “artistic control” that Keats possessed, I wish to include here all that I see.

Wild apples:

Wild apple (Enfield, Ithaca, NY). So delicious!

Autumn crocus, always a surprise when it pops up unexpectedly because you forget that its leaves were ever there in the spring:

Autumn crocus arising out of myrtle. The large (some call them ungainly) leaves of the autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnal) appear in the spring. After the leaves have died down, the flowers appear in the fall.

Autumn crocus and myrtle. The large (some call them ungainly) leaves of the autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale) appear in the spring. After the leaves have died down, and much later the flowers appear in the fall.

Beechdrops:

Beechdrop (a parasitic plant, Epifagus virginiana) arising out of leaf litter. It carpets the forest floor at this time of year in Enfield, NY.

A view looking down at the whorled form of a beechdrop, showing the reddish purple flower. The beechdrop lacks chlorophyll and so must gain its sustenance from the roots of beech trees.

Delicate grasses:

The grace of grasses.

Dewdrops find the fine hairs of these soft grasses.

Dewdrops and fall-flowering grass.

Some plants only become exuberant in fall, like the bur cucumber:

Bur cucumber: flowers, fruit, and tendrils.

Where is the bird now who nested here in the spring?

An empty nest dangles in my path.

As Keats’ suggests, the bees have their own harvesting to do:

Apple and bees or are they wasps that look like bees? I must consult my cousin for an identification.

I have my own “later flowers for the bees” —Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’:

Helianthus (perennial sunflower) and butterfly.

The autumn day portrayed in Keats’ poem is gracious and benevolent, but we know there are also days of cool mists and grey skies and shriveled plants. Yet, they are beautiful too:

Horse browsing in Keats’ “mellow mists” (Enfield, NY).

The only descriptive word Keats repeats in the poem is “soft” as in “thy hair soft-lifted” and “soft-dying day.” He’s right. When the sun shines, autumn days are so soft, because some mists are warm.

My favorite line is “Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn.” It’s a line that is both romantic and unromantic. I find it moving that Keats gives the burden and honor of mourning, the short good-bye because gnats do not live very long, to the insignificant gnat.

Every day that I walk I find new autumn stories. The hedgerows of my husband’s tree nursery are blessed with hickories–particularly shagbark hickories. The nuts cause my feet to bobble. Soon I pick up the offending spheres, sniff them, and put them in my pocket for further aromatherapy. Sometimes I see an ecosystem story, like this one about the hickories and ants.

A shagbark hickory awaiting an herbivore caught my attention.

Ants investigate the inside of a hickory shell.

Ants in close contact as they explore the inside of the shell.

I am sure this is a story that E. O. Wilson, the great ant biologist, could decipher, or perhaps Darwin had notes on such an interaction because he observed almost everything. It seems that Autumn is a time when members of an Ecosystem exhibit their last behaviors of interconnectedness before the Big Rest.

The golden and the grey: goldenrod ornamenting woodpile constructed by busy human.

“It Was Blowing a Blizzard.”

March 4, 2015 By winpen in birds, books, farm, fieldwork, Highland County, landscape, natural history, naturalist, place, Uncategorized, VA, Vinegar Hollow, writing Tags: blizzard, Highland County, Ithaca, R. F. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, tufted titmouse, vinegar hollow, Virginia 4 Comments

Setting sun gilds the icicles hanging outside the bathroom window. These are relatively small.

The mantra of the naturalist is “Pursue direct experience outside every day.” I have been struggling to keep faith with the mantra, in the coldest February on record in Ithaca, New York. The temperature at 7 am a few days ago was -20 degrees F without a wind chill factored in. Houses all over town look like jails as enormous, life-threatening icicles hang from gutters. It’s a little grim, from the inside looking out.

However, throughout the prolonged deep cold a tufted titmouse has been singing at dawn every morning in the apple tree outside my bedroom window. This particular individual’s whistle-like call is an insistent reminder: Go out, go out, go out. Breathe the bracing air, rejoice, and shiver to acclimate and become one with the outside.

Tufted titmouse, slighting to the right and up from center, in the branches of the apple tree. Only the buff belly is visible.

However, sometimes it is easier to be pulled out than to go out. My husband and I took leave of the bitter cold here in Ithaca and made a dash south to Vinegar Hollow in Mustoe, Virginia, to be with family at our homeplace. We were not expecting it to be much warmer because the Allegheny Mountains of western Virginia usually report very similar temperatures to those of upstate New York.

The end of Vinegar Hollow, cold but calm.

It was bitter. A brief warming trend lightened our spirits, melting much of the snow, but then a blizzard roared up from the south, filling the hollow with whirling, horizantal streams of snow. One by one the locusts, maples, and cucumber trees on top of Stark’s Ridge became ghostly, as did the hills and meadows and fence posts. In the yard the big yew and the big boxwood fluffed out like giant white owls. The cottage seemed to spin inside the whirl winding snowflakes.

The colors of winter: white on gray.

My husband loves inclement weather. He was out there somewhere in the forest chopping wood. When poor visibility made chain sawing a hazard, I presume, he came to the sliding glass door. “Come out for a walk!” he said. “You don’t want to miss this!” I looked at the fire. I looked outside. “A walk?” The double sliding glass doors gave a full view of the white out conditions. I was no naturalist if I chose sitting by the glowing fire instead of going outside to be inside a small blizzard.

Author poses in blizzard for husband.

It was glorious. I could not see very far in front of my feet, but we walked on known land, around the Pine Tree Hill where the family cemetery awaits me. Yes, the sounds of the blizzard in the forest and the whizzing motions of the thousands of snowflakes stinging my face, ping, ping, ping, hypnotized my thoughts, commanding my attention to just one thing. Being there outside.

Trees polished to pewter by wind and snowflakes.

The next day I found an old paperback in my parents’ library room over the root cellar. There it was, an appropriate choice for the season–Scott’s Last Expedition: The Personal Journals of Captain R. E. Scott, CVO, RN. Found next to his frozen body, the diary is compelling reading even though we know the tragic outcome. One can read it over and over, trying to comprehend the predicament of this small group of men. Scott and his team are very near the South Pole traveling under extreme conditions when they find a black flag and sledge and dog tracks indicating that the Norwegians had made it there first. They had lost “priority.” Scott writes, “Many thoughts and much discussion have we had. To-morrow we must march on to the Pole and then hasten home with all the speed we can compass. All the day dreams must go….”

Published by Tandem Books, in the Great Ventures Series.

“All the day dreams must go….” The poignancy of this comment haunts me. But they must walk on, though emaciated and frostbitten. They do leave their mark at the North Pole proper, but then turn around in the worst blizzard they have yet encountered to head to the closest storage depot. They die just 11 miles away. But in what manner should they compose themselves for the end?

Scott makes a number of entries about his subordinate Titus Oates:

Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates’ last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to talk about outside subjects. He did not—would not—give up hope till the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning—yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.

Scott himself at the time of writing has one foot so badly frostbitten that he knows it will have to be amputated should he live. The temperatures are -40 degrees F day after day. On March 22/23 he writes:

Blizzard as bad as ever–Wilson and Bowers unable to start–to-morrow last chance–no fuel and only one or two of food left–must be near the end. Have decided it shall be natural–we shall march for the depot with or without our effects and die in our tracks.

The reader hopes this is the end of the text and a merciful ending to their lives. But there is one more entry on March 29th. The last line of the diary is “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” Roland Huntford in his book The Last Place on Earth gives an account of the interval between March 22/23 and March 29. Scott and his two remaining subordinates, too debilitated to move, stayed in the tent in their sleeping bags writing letters to loved ones, documents that have become the subject of scrutiny by historians. Scott’s reputation as heroic explorer has been the subject of controversy.

Modern Library Edition of Roland Huntford's account of "Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole."

Modern Library Edition of Roland Huntford’s account of the race to the South Pole: Britain’s Robert Scott vs. Norway’s Roald Amundsen. His critique has been challenged by subsequent historians. The photo of Castle Rock on the book cover was taken on 17 September 1911.

Huntford critiques Scott as inept, but recent evidence indicates that Scott faced harsher than usual weather and one of his orders that could have saved him was never carried out. Despite getting to the South Pole first, Amundsen lost the battle for renown, in part, Huntford says, because Scott was the better writer.

My blizzard was small. I was not at the North or South Pole, suffering the Homeric conditions that plagued the famous Arctic and Antarctic explorers, who fought their way to the poles for nation and glory. I knew exactly where I was, and it was not far from a fire, so I was no heroine. My reward was exhilaration, not renown, as I went outside to feel the weather, rather than look at it from the inside. The naturalist has a different temperament than the polar explorer, happily from my point of view, but the polar explorers have left us with diaries that exemplify heroic aspects of human beings, inept or not, under duress in the great outdoors.

I am back in Ithaca, the tufted titmouse still singing in the apple tree at 1º F.

Tufted titmouse slightly up from center in the apple tree. Profile view.

Today I decided to stand at the window observing. I stood and the tufted titmouse sat, silent for once. This went on for quite a while. Sometimes the branches of the apple tree distracted me. That’s when I noticed the second tufted titmouse. There she/he was, higher up in the tree. So, silence because mission accomplished? The mate has acquiesced? I don’t know, but I will be looking into the habits and psychology of this hardy little bird.

The second tufted titmouse almost dead center in the photo.

So, have I rambled? What do the tufted titmouse and the blizzard have in common? As John Muir said “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Finding the Lonesome Pine

August 17, 2014 By winpen in botany, farm, fieldwork, Highland County, landscape, natural history, naturalist, place, plants, VA Tags: Alleghany Mountains, Appalachian Mountains, Chinese Wilson, John Fox, Jr., lichen, lonesome pine, pink earth lichen, Pinus pungens, Pinus pungent, prickly pine, Project Noah, Reginald Farrer, table mountain pine, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine 1 Comment

Vinegar Hollow. Stark’s Ridge is the farthest bare mountain top (left of center). Back Creek Mountain stretches off on far top right.

Trekking abandoned logging roads by ATV with a chainsaw in the back of the vehicle is a new experience for me, but happily so. As a young girl I wanted to be a plant explorer in the great tradition of “Chinese” Wilson and Reginald Farrer, who brought back garden treasures from the remotest parts of lands still foreign to westerners at the time. Farrer roamed craggy mountains and misty valleys in Burma, China, and Tibet in life-threatening conditions armed with whiskey and a set of Jane Austen. So here I am, exploring remote mountain tops and glens of the Allegheny Mountains, fulfilling youthful dreams. I am home and do not need to carry whiskey and Austen.

Back Creek Mountain meets the sky above Vinegar Hollow.

The folds of Back Creek Mountain, which forms one of the north-south borders of Vinegar Hollow, looks impenetrable and pristine from Stark’s Ridge, the highest point directly opposite on the other side of the hollow. The wooded undulations of the mountain range reveal little of the history of human use of the landscape. In fact, it has been logged and relogged for the last several hundred years. Rough trails criss-cross the forest floor in a maze of switchbacks and curlicues. The forest giants are long gone, but secret gardens remain and a hoary pine native to the Appalachian Mountains.

Younger son on older son’s ATV.

ATVs are bumpy, noisy, and smelly, but they aid enormously in botanizing and can be turned off while one explores on foot. My husband and I had driven up this part of the logging trail maybe half a dozen times, but never stopped to get out at this particular turn in the road. Maybe it was the morning light shining on an expanse of silvery pale green lichens that caught our eyes, but soon enough we were trying to hop about on delicate feet, in thrall to the wonders underfoot in what I am calling the pine cone garden.

Lichened branches and pine cones.

Pine cone and lichens.

Whether nesting in lichens or pine needles, each cone seemed to be at home. Like sunflowers, pine cones have a deeply satisfying architectural form, the scales overlapping in an arrangement reflecting a sequence of numbers called the Fibonacci series. These cones are striking for their silvery gray brown shading and the curving, decorative prickles at the end of each scale.

Pine cone.

The cones are stalkless, seemingly having sprouted out of stout branches.

Fallen branch with cones.

But where was the parent tree? I looked up finally.

Parent tree.

The morning light shone on its lichened, outstretched arms. One branch lay blasted on the ground.

Branch of parent tree bent to the ground.

Lichens covered the bark exuberantly.

“Lacy lichen” on parent tree.

“Hoary lichen” on parent tree.

Further walking on this rocky slope by the side of the logging road revealed some dainty lichens displaying a lovely pastel, slightly orange-pink coloration, something that forest fairies might have planned.

Pink earth lichen.

The extremely photogenic pink earth lichen again.

I know I wrote in my last blog about the importance of identifying small life forms, but I decided not to pursue lichen identification here (it would be like Alice falling into a wonderland of splendid but strange forms and vocabulary) because my primary goal now is to honor the pine and its cones. “Hoary lichen” and “lacy lichen” are just my own bland names, not proper common names. It turns out (courtesy of my husband’s research) that the lichen with the pink knobs is easy to identify via Google images. It is known by a lovely common name–the pink earth lichen. Its scientific name, Dibaeis baeomyces, is not at all user friendly. Project Noah offers a photo with a description offering the information that the knobs are filled with “cottony fibers.”

My husband and I got busy taking measurements and assessing characteristics that would identify the pine.

Pine cone display technician David Fernandez.

A 2 (-3) needle pine! Apparently the number of needles per bundle is not totally constant.

One thing that makes pines fairly easy to identify is that there are not many different species of them in the world. Further, pine needles are arranged in little bundles bound in a common sheath, and the number of needles in the bundle (fascicle) is distinctive for each species. The familiar white pine, distinctive for its long, graceful needles, has five needles per bundle, for example. So, it’s pretty easy to count the number of needles per bundle on a pine sample–we found two needles per bundle in this pine–and look up a list of 2-needle pines in North America. The list is not that long. Also, the pine cones of our pine were unusually prickly, which proved an excellent identifying characteristic. First we settled on Pinus echinata, the shortleaf pine, because it has prickle-tipped cones and it’s native, but its growth habit (overall shape) wasn’t right. We moved on through the list of 2-needle pines.

Voila Pinus pungens, commonly known as the prickly pine, table mountain pine, and hickory pine! Prickly pine is certainly a suitable common name because of the cone, and table mountain because of the high elevation at which it likes to grow, but hickory pine? A hickory tree is in a completely different family and order and is known for its shaggy bark and edible nuts. I love it when the common names of life forms become interesting metaphors, connecting the unlike through some hint of likeness, so I puzzle over its derivation. Hickory trees are often gaunt and gangly in shape, which is perhaps the likeness that inspired the common name of hickory pine because Pinus pungens is described as having a “rounded, irregular shape.” Another possibility is that the common name recognizes the fact that Pinus pungens likes to grow with hickories. However, there were no hickories on this rocky hillside.

It is a lonesome pine. Unlike most species of pines, this pine is known for growing as scattered individuals, rather than in large groves. Lonesome but not unsung. John Fox Jr. made this species famous in his book The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a top-ten bestseller of 1908-1909, and a book still dramatized in yearly pageants in Big Stone Gap, Virginia where John Fox died in 1919. Fox’s book beautifully describes the Appalachian mountain culture and landscape, and the confusion and disruption that occur when modern civilization arrives, here in the form of the train and coal mining. Fox describes the lonesome pine repeatedly so that it becomes a character in its own right, representing the isolated individual struggling to retain identity. The main human protagonist is a young man from “civilization” who arrives to bring change to the area but is nevertheless sensitive to the value of what he finds there. Fox writes from the point of view of this character:

He had seen the big pine when he first came to those hills—one morning, at daybreak, when the valley was a sea of mist that threw soft clinging spray to the very mountain tops: for even above the mists, that morning, its mighty head arose—sole visible proof that the earth still slept beneath. Straightaway, he wondered how it had ever got there, so far above the few of its kind that haunted the green dark ravines far below. Some whirlwind, doubtless, had sent a tiny cone circling heavenward and dropped it there. It had sent others, too, no doubt, but how had this tree faced wind and storm alone and alone lived to defy both so proudly? Some day he would learn.

–John Fox, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

He suggests a parallel and a connection between the plight of the lonesome pine and the human being. Defiance in the face of unaccountable whirlwinds, like World War II. My parents loved this book for its description of the mountains they settled in post my father’s service in the war. With all their hearts they aspired to be mountain folk, fierce individuals never at peace when far from lichen-covered trees and forested vistas. Their grandson has now purchased some of this mountain land to protect–from the “green dark ravines far below” to the rocky slopes of the ridge tops where the lonesome pine survives, casting its prickly cones into a garden of fantastical lichen, both tender and tough.

Trees rising from one of the deep, green glens of Back Creek Mountain.

A walk on the wild side: Highland County, Virginia

May 28, 2014 By winpen in birds, botany, Highland County, VA, landscape, natural history, place, plants, Vinegar Hollow Tags: bluets, false hellebore, Highland County VA, Joseph E. Harned, mountain lettuce, pinxter flower 1 Comment

View of Vanderpool Gap, Highland County, Virginia, looking west into Blue Grass Valley.

I am back, in Highland County, Virginia, exploring again, starting off a few feet from these cows. We are headed east in jeep and on foot into a parcel of land that was once cleared, but is growing back into the wild in places. As is usual here, we have to go through several gates before we are into the parcel.

My walking companions.

We are trying to get a sense of the entire topography of this 700-some acre parcel. It’s varied, rarely flat. We surprise a golden eagle and a bevy of vultures. They scatter in a leisurely fashion, in no hurry to leave the carrion they have found. When we have passed along, they will be back. I am not quick enough to capture the golden eagle with my iPhone, even though it is huge and moving so slowly.

Halfway to the top.

We arrive at a little glen with a beautiful stream. It’s sparkling and luxuriant with vegetation.

Mountain stream.

Here I find a notable Appalachian wildflower: Saxifraga micranthidifolia, commonly known as branch lettuce or mountain lettuce. Native to the Great Smoky Mountains, it flourishes in cold, fast-moving mountain streams and is one of the first plants to show itself in early spring. The early settlers found it palatable and a welcome salad green after a long winter.

Mountain lettuce (Saxifraga micranthidifolia).

It is not in Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny’s A Field Guide to Wildflowers, so when I discovered it as a young girl in Vinegar Hollow I felt like a genuine plant explorer. I finally tracked it down in Joseph E. Harned’s Wildflowers of the Alleghanies, a book I found by chance at a second-hand bookstore. It has been called “a monumental book,” and there is no doubt that it is–written with grace and comprehensive in scope. “Micranthidifolia” remains one of my favorite botanical tongue twisters.

The mountain lettuce are abundant and so is the plant shown below, which is new to me.

False hellebore (Veratrum viride).

It takes several hours of searching online to find the name because for once Peterson and McKenny’s A Field Guide to Wildflowers fails to give me an identification, probably because it was such a big presence there in the stream, but quite small, practically hidden in the top right corner of p. 370 among the “6-part flowers, lengthwise leaf veins, Lily Family (Liliaceae).” Peterson and McKenny instruct through arrows, using them to point to distinctive, often little-noticed features. They do have an arrow to the “heavily ribbed” leaves. I should have noticed that arrow, but I missed it.

Drawing of false hellebore (shown left of center on top) from Roger Tory Peterson and Virginia McKenny’s A Fieldguide to Wildflowers (pp. 369-379).

False Hellebore is also known by a host of other names, including Poor Annie, Tickleweed, and Devils Bite. This plant is not palatable, in fact just the reverse. According to one website, it is highly toxic and can cause “birth defects, gastrointestinal distress, salivation, prostration, general paralysis, spasms, irregular heart beat, difficulties breathing, and death.” That sounds like just about enough results for its toxicity. Large patches of bluets carpet the path the follows the stream up the glen.

Bluets or Quaker Ladies (Houstonea caerulea).

Bluets, also known as Quaker Ladies, Innocence, and Little Washerwoman (Houstonia caerulea).

Bluets go by many names as well and are extremely photogenic. It is certainly a pleasure to walk along a path so blue, though I am hopping because I do not wish to crush a bluet or a Quaker lady or a little washerwoman. They are in the bedstraw or madder family (Rubiaceae). The settlers are said to have stuffed their mattresses with the common bedstraw (Galium sp.), which grows in hay meadows and has a sandpapery feel. Probably because I am so dazzled by the mountain lettuce, the false hellebore, and the bluets, I fail to notice two species that we see on our way back through this part of the parcel: the pink lady’s slipper and the pinxter flower, a kind of rhododendron.

Lady’s slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule).

Flame azalea nestled into trunk of tree with fern.

Pinxter flower nestled into trunk of tree with hayscented fern.

I was dazzled, but now I am delirious. These Appalachian plants touch me deeply. Pinxter flower has had several scientific names, from Rhododendron nudiflorum to the current Rhododendron periclymenoides. Nudiflorum makes perfect sense (flowering without leaves), but I will have to do further research to understand how periclymenoides adds to an understanding of the biology of this species.

We trek on, discovering an old friend from Vinegar Hollow, hound’s tongue, a member of the forget-me-not family–“downy, with a mousy odor; maroon flowers …embraced by velvety calyx scales” according to the description by Peterson and McKenny.

Hound’s tongue (Cynoglossum officinale).

I think I have caught its downiness in my photograph (enhanced by the slight out of focus). This is limestone country. One of my companions has worked with stone. He points to a rock with a lot of character and shows us where bear have overturned rocks to get at ants.

Limestone rock showing fossil creatures.

We lock gaze with a deer.

A deer.

We reach the top of the parcel.

At the top of the parcel.

The Vanderpool gap is still visible. Two stick-like black locusts stand in the center of view. The locusts are very late leafing out this year. One hopes that a blight or new pathogen is not attacking this very valuable and beautiful species. As we walk back down to the jeep, ticks, rather large ticks, attach themselves conspicuously to our pants and soon appear on our arms. My youngest companion, wearing medium-weight blue jeans, shoos away more than 30 ticks, while my companion with camouflage pants has less than half that amount, and I, with rubber wellies, only attract 10 or so. We speculate about the relative merits of what we are wearing with regard to attracting ticks, but are most preoccupied with just getting the ticks off of our clothing and bodies. One of my companions describes a nature program that showed a moose in Canada driven mad by blood-engorged ticks covering its body. We lament how hard it is to feel charitable towards this particular species. A superfluous hostility, however, should be avoided. Basically little arachnids, ticks are an old species, having been found in fossil amber dating back to sometime in the Cretaceous (65 to 146 million years ago), according to some researchers. They make their living in an unsavory way, but then so do some humans.

The pinxter flower, the mountain lettuce, the false hellebore, a golden eagle, a deer, vultures, and ticks. These species and many more we have encountered on our walk. We are fortunate to have had this opportunity to walk in the Appalachian mountains of western Virginia in Highland County.

Upon returning to where we started, I find horses by the barn near where the cattle grazed, and a view through a window of that barn.

Back to the beginning. A horse grazes. Vanderpool gap visible through window in barn.

Our walk is like a view through the keyhole. We have seen so much, but not everything. A parcel of land on the wild side is immense. The diversity of life forms, from bluets to ticks, inspires in me wonder and happiness.

P.S. An excellent article on the topography, biodiversity, and habitat loss of this area, titled “Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests” is available on the World Wildlife website.

Falconress: A Facebook Avatar

April 15, 2014 By winpen in Highland County, VA, landscape, natural history, people, place, plants, Uncategorized, Vinegar Hollow Tags: falconress, falconry, Falkland Palace, Old Course, Rachel Dickinson, St. Andrews, T. H. White, Trevor Leat, vinegar hollow, willow sculpture 4 Comments

Trevor Leat’s sculpture of a falconress (perhaps meant to be Mary Queen of Scots) at Falkland Palace, Kingdom of Fife, Scotland.

My friend and professional mentor Jill Swenson had reminded me once again—“no egg heads on Facebook.” I figured it was time to take action. I have been slow to join Facebook because I struggle with reticence, but having found Twitter a treasure trove of interesting associations and even new windows into the natural world, I decided to dive into Facebook and solve the egg head problem.

But, what image should signify my presence in the world of Facebook? Myself? A photograph of me taken 30 years ago recently turned up. I could photograph that with my iphone and use it, but it seemed so vain to use my youthful unblemished self. On the other hand, my newer, older, self is less pleasing—the neck wrinkles, the liver splotches, the creases around the eyes. I love old faces, but mine is in transition, a work in progress, not fully perfected. When I have, hopefully, reached the fullness of true old age, I intend to love my wrinkles.

Salamander on fall leaves.

I started looking through my digital photos, quickly, because the whole idea of choosing an image, the opposite of an egg head, made me nervous. A lovely salamander appeared, coiled like a rune or a Buddhist symbol on overlapping, damp leaves. So lovely, but perhaps indecipherable when reduced in size. I stopped at a beautiful purpley red sunset. A cliché?

Sunset in Vinegar Hollow, Highland County, Virginia.

A sunset should never be taken for cliché, but, out of context, brought into Facebook as avatar, no, I would not want to reduce the beauty of any sunset to the level of cliche–the danger of representation at the hands of an inept human. Then the pond at Seven Fields appeared. Countless times I have tried to catch reflections in this pond: the crooked tree, the branches, the necks of the geese. I love this tree and this pond, but reduced, perhaps not the tribute I would most wish.

Pond, trees, and geese at spring-fed pond, Seven Fields, Enfield, Ithaca, New York.

Then I moved into photos taken on a recent trip to Scotland to see younger son, the golfer, who was studying at St. Andrews, Scotland for a semester.

The historic golfing landscape of the Old Course at St. Andrew. (Photo credit: David Fernandez)

The Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland. (Photo credit: David Fernandez)

While the golfer was studying, writing gobbets, my husband and I roamed the Kingdom of Fife, happening upon Falkland Palace, and there she was, the one I am calling the Falconress, the work of Scottish sculptor Trevor Leat, who creates large, expressive sculptures made from many varieties of willow that he grows organically. Some of his large pieces are burned at festivals, like Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebration.

Trevor Leat’s willow falconress.

Mary Queen of Scots spent a few happy years at the palace as a young woman. We saw her tennis court (she was an avid player) and her ornately carved bed. However, after seeing her death mask, it was a relief to go outside, though it was a rainy, misty day in mid-October. Tall dark-brown stalks of giant delphiniums tilted against a long stonewall. Giant cedars towered luminously, blue-green in the mist. A small greenhouse glowed with climbing geraniums in all shades of red. Two large garden beds were entirely planted with pale lavender-grey phacelia, a species good for soil improvement the sign said. Falkland has received awards for being one of the most floriferous villages in Scotland. The perennial beds of Falkland Palace must be one its glories in summer.

The many hues of the sculpture’s weathered willow branches.

The gallery of sculptures, posted on Leat’s website and available elsewhere, shows that he is drawn to archetypal forms, like the stag and the human female. Leat’s female figures have flowing lines and generous proportions, and their earthen colors, golden browns, beiges, and greens, glow in an outdoor landscape. Although his women are tall and robust, their arms taper to delicate wisps. Apparently some of the sculptures bud out in spring, I suppose because some of the willow branches are still green enough or root into the ground a bit. Willow sculptures in the outdoors transform gradually, broken down by sun and rain, often just lasting five years.

The falconress leaves a verdant train in her wake.

A history of Falkland Palace states that the Stewart monarchs used the palace to practice falconry, so it is fitting that Leat’s sculpture of the Queen shows her in the attitude of falconress. A brief perusal of the life of Mary Queen of Scots is enough to put one off a royal life for an eternity. The intrigue, the double dealings, the difficult men, it was all dastardly and over the top. She handled the beheading, apparently, with equanimity and grace, thankful perhaps that her life was finally over. During her imprisonment she was allowed to fly a merlin in and out her window. This must have been a pleasure, being so close to a wild creature, a vicarious experience of freedom. One can imagine her listening to the swoosh of feathers through the air at take off and her watching the bird disappear into the sky.

I have never been attracted to falconry, though I am a great fan of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, where the art of falconry figures, and The Goshawk, an account of White’s tempestuous relationship with a young hawk he tried to “tame,” his first, and last, attempt at being a falconer. For a current account of falconry practiced in North America, see Rachel Dickinson’s book Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West. White’s Merlyn is a great fictional character. He advised (my paraphrase): when you are sad, learn something. This is good advice.

Some historians speculate that falconry began between 4000 and 6000 BC. A Japanese historical narrative of 355 AD, Nihon-shoki, states the first falconer in Japan was a woman, whose daughter followed in her footsteps. Women in 19th century England were said to outshine men in proficiency. The word “falconress” is not in the OED, however. The only use of the word I have come across is in a poem by Robert Duncan called “My Mother Would Be a Falconress.” The poet compares the relationship between mother and child to that of the falconress and her falcon. It’s a dark, moody poem reflecting some of the strangeness of the relationship at the heart of falconry–and at the heart of parenting. Nevertheless, Leat’s sculpture appeals to me. Both bird and woman appear poised for flight. She is both sinew and grace. How lovely to be made of willow!

A final view of Trevor Leat's falconers.

A final view of Trevor Leat’s falconress.

Tending foxes: real and imaginary

March 7, 2014 By winpen in books, landscape, natural history, place, plants, writing Tags: "The Thought-Fox", Becca Barnet, Charles Darwin, Digitalis, extinction, foxgloves, gray fox, John Edmonstone, rewilding, taxidermy, Ted Hughes 5 Comments

A few days ago I drove past a dead fox on a road I travel frequently. I stopped and backed up carefully. I feared it was my fox.

The tail of my fox.

The fox lay a short distance from the entrance to a small parcel of land, 9/10ths of an acre that my husband and I recently purchased from a Ms. Fox (a real person) as a writing/gardening retreat (this writer needs to be close to the land in order to write). Ms. Fox told me that a fox was living under the garden shed and that she would block the entrance because of the musty smell. I could see the scooped out place at the entrance to the shed and imagined a fluffy red tail disappearing into a safe hiding place under my writing desk. I said that I didn’t mind the smell (because in fact I couldn’t smell anything unusual) and I would like to share the shed with the fox, and I came to think of Ms. Fox’s fox as my fox. Ms. Fox told me that the garden “wants to be wild” but she had wrested, with her pruning shears, weed wacker, and true grit, sinuous beds for hardy, tough perennials. My husband and I planted three different kinds of foxgloves (Digitalis) (the woolly foxglove, the salmon-pink Foxglove ‘Glory of Roundway,’ and the golden-apricot Foxglove ‘Goldcrest’) to attract pollinators and glove the fox.

So when I saw the dead fox near the entrance to the secret garden, I felt a sense of loss and a need to take responsibility for the body. I got out of the car, put on my gloves, and went to the fox. She (he?) was in perfect condition. There was no blood nor any visible external blemish. I picked her up, she had stiffened in rigor mortis, and brought her inside the entrance, set her on a patch of clean snow behind the gate, and admired her beauty. The tail was magnificent, bushy, long, and full. The ears were lovely, delicate, pointed, furry. The tip of a pink tongue peaked out from her mouth. Dainty feet! What whiskers! Gray or red fox? I thought gray because each tawny hair was white tipped. From a distance it looked like a dusting of snow covered the body. A perfect way to be gray.

The fur of my fox.

Ithaca was in the grips of another polar vortex, so the body remained frozen, and the ground as well, so that we could not bury her. My husband and I decided that nature’s way was best, that letting vultures or coyotes nourish themselves upon her body was beneficial to the ecosystem. That was the decision—but nothing happened. I kept visiting my fox. After 48 hours she lay there as pristine as ever, though I had seen signs of winter creatures eating other winter creatures everywhere.

Still life of blood, fur, and pawprint: a meal has been eaten in the forest.

At Seven Fields my husband and I observed a frozen deer carcass be eaten to the bone over several days. I worried about my dog becoming interested in my fox if a thaw set in and decomposers had not found the body.

Deer carcass at Seven Fields, Enfield, Ithaca, NY.

Deer carcass at Seven Fields cleaned by scavengers (scat of scavenger visible on ribs).

Meanwhile, at the same time, on a completely different tangent, hunting for a poem to memorize, I opened Ted Hughes: Selected Poems 1957-1994.

Botanical illustration of foxgloves on cover of Ted Hughes: Selected Poems 1957-1994 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2002).

The first poem in the volume is “The Thought-Fox,” which I read many times with my writing-as-a-naturalist students in a different book, Hughes’ superb Poetry in the Making: An Anthology. It is a collection of informal talks he gave for the BBC designed for interesting children in poetry. In the essay called “Capturing Animals,” he describes his youthful interest in animals, how sometimes as a boy he stuffed 30-40 live mice in his pocket that he had plucked from sheaves at threshing time, and the genesis of his poem “The Thought-Fox.”

TED HUGHES Poetry in the Making: An Anthology ( Faber and Faber, 1967)

Hughes writes: “An animal I never succeeded in keeping alive is the fox. I was always frustrated: twice by a farmer, who killed cubs I had caught before I could get to them, and once by a poultry keeper who freed my cub while his dog waited. Years after these events I was sitting up late one snowy night in dreary lodgings in London. I had written nothing for a year or so but that night I got the idea I might write something and I wrote in a few minutes the following poem: the first ‘animal’ poem I ever wrote. ”

So as I was visiting my fox I was thinking of Ted Hughes’ “thought-fox.” I completely agree with Hughes that immortalizing an animal in a poem has many advantages, but I had a body to think about.

My fox as I found her.

I agonized, checked the yellow pages, made a phone call, and then made a decision on the third day. I drove back out to the secret garden a few hours after my morning visit, wrapped my fox in a blanket, put her in the back of my car, and took her to a taxidermist.

My fox behind the gate in the secret garden.

I was apprehensive about my decision, but happily a positive adventure ensued. I handed my fox over to a lovely couple in their ‘70s who run a retirement business in taxidermy. He, tall, bright-blue-eyed, youthful baseball cap on his head, and she, beautiful, gracious, and friendly, gave me a complete explanation of the processes involved in taxidermy, which I will omit here for the sake of brevity. Their ranch house looked unremarkable from the outside, but soon my head whirled, as I found myself nose-to-nose with several elk, a turkey vulture, crow, huge mountain goat, and numerous deer. These taxidermists work terribly hard. After a career in construction he retired to taxidermy and championship archery, and she, after 39 years working for the local trust company retired to be his indispensable helpmate and companion in the taxidermy business. They know a lot about animals of all kinds, well, mostly the furred and feathered. He told me that the grey fox (Urocyron cinereoargenteus) is a creature of the brush and has the footprint of a cat. Coyotes tolerate this most ancient member of the dog family (Canidae), which can climb trees to escape predators. He said the red fox has the footprint of a small dog and favors wooded areas.

Taxidermy was a critical job skill that helped Charles Darwin gain his position as naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle. In Edinburgh, when he was studying (unhappily) as a medical student at the university, Darwin had lodgings two doors away from those of a freed Guyanan slave named John Edmonstone, whom Darwin hired for a guinea a week to teach him the art of taxidermy. Darwin and Edmonstone formed a congenial friendship, based on mutual natural history interests, that Darwin remembered all his life (see his Autobiography). In the process of rewilding, a movement whose aim is to bring extinct animals back to life (see Nathaniel Rich’s “The Mammoth Commeth” in the New York Times, Feb. 27^th, 2014), taxidermied specimens may offer the DNA fragments that will allow geneticists to reconstruct the original genome of the extinct animal. Thus, Darwin’s specimen of the now-extinct Floreana mockingbird may sire descendents one day.

In his BBC talk, Hughes tells children, “in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it.” Hughes wanted children to understand that poets are pacifists, but there is a paradox in his words. There would never have been a thought-fox without the real fox, which first appeared 3.6 million years ago.

Taxidermy has been called the art of death. I cannot offer a rational explanation for why I took my fox to the taxidermists. However, in a few months, a fox, more than a thought but less than real, will keep me company in the shed as I think about the lovely taxidermists and the poet, thought-foxes and real foxes, and mortality and extinction.

I want lots of foxes and foxgloves in my garden, all real. I want to see fluffy tails disappearing into tangles and thickets, and spires of speckled peach and rose colored foxglove flowers. Like Hughes, I want foxes of all kinds to live forever. One problem with extinction is how barren human imaginations will become if we destroy all the models for our flights of fancy.

Oak leaf on snow, holding out against decomposition.

A Winter’s Day in Vinegar Hollow

February 20, 2014 By winpen in birds, Highland County, VA, landscape, natural history, place Tags: vinegar hollow 4 Comments

The night before had been snowy.

As the sky lightens in the east, toothpick trees standing like steadfast tin soldiers row upon row take shape, straight and thin. Rosy pink gives way to layers of pale gold and pale gray blue. The scene is still, perfect in its way, but a calf died in the barn in the early morning.

Light appears in the east.

During calving season Mike checks the barn at regular intervals. He had checked at 3 am, despite his flu, the cold, and the fresh snow that made the road slick into Vinegar Hollow from his house on Route 220. When he came back at 7 am, a calf lay dead on the hay in the stall with its mother. The death of a calf is both an economic and an emotional loss.

Cow-and-calf shelters to the left, yearling sheep near center

Cow-and-calf shelters to the left, and yearling sheep near center with straw barn behind.

“I can’t sleep beside them all night,” Mike says, his voice roughened by flu and tiredness. The cow could have stepped on its calf by mistake, or failed to lick the sac off fast enough, or maybe it was born dead, or…. There is no way of knowing what happened in those few hours as the cow and calf enacted this farm tragedy. The cow will feel her loss for some time in the pain of swollen udders. Sometimes there is a solution. It may be able to take on one of a set of twins.

Cow and calf enjoying the noonday sun.

Young California Red (has some fat-tailed, red-faced Tunis in his background).

Alert young California Red (has some fat-tailed, red-faced Tunis in his heritage).

A few hours later, two crows appear in the blasted walnut tree in the sinkhole. One crow leaves. One remains. Lovely, simple math. Now there are two again. One flashes away, then the other. Back and forth they go. If they left contrails like planes, it would be quite a tangle in the sky. By midday the juncos are visiting the cows and yearling sheep in the pen by the old house picking up hayseed. They are very busy. The crows take an interest as well. Two cows and their calves sit soaking up the sun. Occasionally one rises to spray steaming manure or lick the face of her calf, but mostly they sit, face to the sun, soaking up heat, to balance those minus 15-degree nights of the week before. Black crow on white snow. Black Angus on brown hay on white snow. Juncos gray and white. Butterscotch barn cat lolls along in the sled tracks, confident that the dogs are worn out, asleep.

Lichened bark of the copper beech.

Tree trunks in the garden become art objects, their surfaces intricately sculpted. No doubt much is going on beneath the lichened bark of the beech and the owl eyes of the red spruce as the juncos visit the bare ground at their base. Days like this in late February set in motion the whirring cogs of spring. Snow and ground are melting. A large bluejay floats from branch to branch of the beech tree.

“Owl eye” of the red spruce.

The hollow, like a reflecting pool, shimmers with each movement of the sun and clouds. Mid-afternoon is a time of shine and shadow.

Trees on flank of Stark’s Ridge cast shadows. Top of hill is Lawson’s Knob (named after John S. Lawson).

Calves have only a day or two in the barn before they must face the elements to release space for the next cow near birth. The cows and their new calves may take to the shelters Mike has made for them or they will remain embedded in the hay close together.

Sky to the north becomes turquoise in later afternoon.

The day begins to fold in for the night. Shadows grow darker and bigger. Juncos take shelter in the overgrown boxwood and yew.

View to the south in later afternoon..

Where the hollow tapers, to the south, the sky colors in hues of apricot, lavender, chocolate. I rush out to catch them but they have gone. It is all happening so fast. Night comes, and it will snow again.

Cows headed to the barn in the early morning.

Cows headed away from the barn meadow the next morning.

After a day here, hollowed, I feel as if I have been spinning around the entire world. There are no places I am not part of when I plant my feet in Vinegar Hollow. Oh, little calf that never even experienced a day!

An Encomium* to Trees in Winter!

February 9, 2014 By winpen in landscape, natural history, place, plants Tags: beech bark blight, cold hardiness, Dr. Roger Spanswick, Michael Snyder, Northern Woodlands, Paul Schaberg 3 Comments

Winter silhouette of a tree with vines nearing the top.

I am snowshoeing slowly through the deep snow of a forested hilltop in Enfield outside Ithaca, New York, following a circuitous path behind my dog and my husband, pondering the nature of trees and my understanding of them. Puffs of snow drift down occasionally, a woodpecker drills, and beech leaves tremble in a breeze that I cannot feel.

My daughter asked me a few weeks ago over lunch why trees don’t freeze in winter. She was thinking about cold hardiness. A special herb from the West Coast had arrived blackened, nearly dead, after transit through airports during the Polar Vortex. A grown woman now, Charlotte still asks questions with the same intensity she had as a child. Now, since becoming interested in mind-body therapies, herbalism, and shamanism, she has taken a great interest in all the life forms around her, educating me about some aspects of plant life of which I have been ignorant. I should have been able to answer her question in a snap.

Looking up at a yellow poplar (tulip tree, Liriodendron) in Enfield.

Yes, back in 1979 I took Water Relations with Professor Roger Spanswick at Cornell as part of my PhD studies. I received an A in the course, which I was very proud about, because I had to shepherd two of us through the class. On January 9^th I had delivered my first child and on January 20^th or so I sat at 9 am MWF in a classroom in the basement of the Plant Science Building in the front row with Jack in a Snugli. Dr. Spanswick, always entirely gracious about Jack’s presence, often told me he would be happy if I took Jack out of the Snugli, implying that he was worried that Jack might be getting smothered. I dared not do so because Jack was a very active infant, except in the Snugli. I could feel his heart beating so I was not worried. (Jack and I successfully TAed Phycology, the study of algae, together that semester as well.) I want to make clear that Dr. Spanswick made Water Relations fascinating, his lectures were brilliant and comprehensive, and it is just the passage of time that has made retrieval of the pertinent information difficult.

The coils of wild grape vines that overgrow and pull down forest trees.

The coils of wild grape vines threatening young beech trees.

The cold hardiness of trees in winter. The question lurked in my mind. Although I found one of my water relations textbooks, it dwelled solely on Plant and Soil Water Relationships (the title of the text), and did not include cold hardiness. Not surprisingly, one of my favorite magazines, Northern Woodlands, gave me good information. An article in the December 2013 issue, which I unaccountably missed, titled “ How Do Trees Survive Winter Cold” by Michael Snyder, forester and Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, provides answers.

A light snow covers every branch of forest trees (doubleclick to see detail).

The basic facts are these. Trees are about 50% water so the danger of freezing in winter is great. Although many cells in a tree are dead, forming important structural elements, like bark, and these do freeze, there are important “tissues” of living cells that must not be allowed to freeze. A threefold system for minimizing the formation of ice crystals is in place: (1) the composition of the cellular membrane changes in order to force more water out of the cell; (2) the contents of the living cells become sweeter as starch is turned to sugar (“sweet antifreeze”); and (3) as a result of the first two changes, the remaining contents of the living cells go into a supercooled or “glass phase” (“suspended animation”) that disallows the formation of ice crystals in the interior of the cell, though ice crystals may form outside the cell.

Woodsman (alias husband or forest troll) warming up at campfire on top of Seven Fields.

Snyder says that not all the details of these processes are understood. Mystery and magic remain. The “magic” is that a tree survives winter as a community of living (nonfrozen) and dead (frozen) cells living side by side at the same temperature. Snyder cites research plant physiologist Paul Schaberg of the USDA Forest Service’s Aiken Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Burlington, Vermont, as a source of ongoing research.

Rosette pattern of beech bark blight (fungal disease) and ensuing wounds (right of center) that will kill an older beech tree.

I love trees in winter. I see their structure, the strength of the main trunks tapering to ever greater points of delicacy. I see their wounds. Almost every tree bears a sign of mutilation. The forest is a place of constant turmoil, losses and gains as trees must outgrow heavy grape vines, survive bark blights, deer antlers rubbing great gashes, and crashes caused by lightning. It’s only in winter when I see them “naked” that I understand so much more about their lives.

Tree standing dead, but revisited multiple times by woodpeckers.

Beech tree showing the long, oval excavations characteristic of the pileated woodpecker.

Trees in winter have become friends that I miss in summer when leafiness distracts my eye from the “inner” lives I have come to know during the cold. Our woods, about 10 acres on a hilltop on a piece of land we call Seven Fields, is a sugar maple-beech climax forest that includes white ash, black cherry, and red oaks in the upperstory, and hophornbeam, spice bush, and carpinus in the lower story. As I snowshoe through the forest in the deep cold, I think about disturbance and suspended animation, how the forest is a lesson in the splendid survival of life forms that cannot run away. I am thinking also of the questions we ask and how and why we ask them, and the answers we find and how and when we find them.

Hedgerow at Seven Fields (Enfield, Ithaca, NY) in winter photographed in a light snow (triple click to see the snow flakes) .

* I realize that encomium is a strange word in this context, but I wasn’t satisfied with “tribute” or “appreciation.” Encomium, a Latin word derived from a Greek one meaning “laudatory ode,” carries the sense of a eulogy. A few years ago the New York Times carried a headline on the front page, something like “Forests Dying Around the World.” A forest remnant of 10 acres deserves a big word.

Sugar maple finding blue sky.

elizabeth winpenny lawson …writing as a naturalist

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