Nature's Call: Adventures in Natural History

Bonatagram #4: Independence Day

2013-07-04T13:06:00.002-05:00

Dawn snared in rain clouds, the daylilies & grass glow from within. Daylight suspended awaiting night's rocket red glare.

Bonata-Nature-Gram #3: Swallowtail

2013-07-02T23:48:00.001-05:00

Green gold panicles top dark green swirls of sumac leaves. A tiger swallowtail lofts up & rest upon the yellow cluster.

Pam Croom © 2013

Bonata-Nature-Gram #2: Yellow Hammer at the Trough

2013-07-01T19:48:00.000-05:00

Yellow shafts and red nape teeter over the water iris trough. Flicker drinks in dawn, irises long ago spent.

Bonata-Nature-Gram #1: Morning Still

2013-01-13T08:26:00.000-06:00

Fog solid, opalescent, stills the air. Droplets, temporary jewels dangle from the twigs. The mocking bird drops to the ground and rows her wings.

Pam Croom © 2013

Refugia

2012-10-27T11:35:00.000-05:00

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The ducks’ hen-scratch tinkled into the dish as my eye just caught a wing tip swing by in the sky. A vulture? No, whoa! My head snapped skyward; I had seen before that wing turned down, ever so slightly, at the wrist! It was an osprey, a very unlikely sight over our lake. He lazily circled the lake, and then dove, half-heartedly, at a fish. He pulled up with empty talons dangling behind him, and lighting ever so carefully in a pine he settled in for the night. He must have been a migrant pushing south. Probably full from hunting in other lakes or rivers, dinner seemed not to be on his mind. He was now more interested in finding a perch for the night which would offer a vantage to spy breakfast in the morning.

His wing tip reminded me of another osprey wing tip I spied once descending a curvy road to Saltville, Virginia. A narrow wrist caught my eye as the owner ascended on the thermals over the wellfields. I was stunned to see an osprey so far from the sea or a large lake. He seemed so out of place to me, but to him, he was right at home. Saltville, aptly named, nestled in the ridge and valley area of Virginia is the site of a brine spring that flows through a few ponds or as they called, the wellfields. The wellfields are one of the few inland salt marshes in North America. The wellfields range from very salty to barely salty like most salt marshes. Ducks and other birds brought seeds from the seashore in on their feathers and halophytic plants colonized this saltwater refugia. The most gorgeous swamp mallows and deposits of reddish salt-like rock ring the wellfields. And the snails! There are the most beautiful, stripped, large, land snails to be found all around the water. I love the snails; they are jewels amongst the mallows.

The salt has attracted critters from Pleistocene mega fauna to present day critters. People, probably attracted to animals first and salt second, showed up about 14,000 years ago. The Spanish came through the area followed later by English colonists. The salt works provided the Confederacy with two thirds of its salt. Salt was so important the North attacked and destroyed the salt works.

The salt marsh has been damaged and reduced by human exploitation of salt and grazing, but a remnant marsh remains. If you are ever in the toe of Virginia, do visit this extremely rare salty refugia.

Girls Gone Wild

2011-11-26T18:06:00.003-06:00

In theory, our city-born mother understood the hold nature held on her country-born daughters, but it was the practice that gave her fits. She did not understand dirt’s affinity for girls’ clothes, nor that shoes were optional accessories. Every pot and pan she owned had, at one time or another housed every creepy-crawly critter that was to be found in the Ozark Mountains and, inexplicably, she took a dim view on such housing. She was raised in a southern city and sent to classes by her parents to be trained in the feminine arts of dance, piano and voice. On Sundays the de rigueur of her upbringing required that her shoes and purse match and that they be coordinated with her dress, hat, and gloves. So you see, it could only be a mystery to her how she managed to spawn her unlikely daughters, and to us it was a cosmic joke.

As a child I loved the woods and all that it sheltered-momma was less enthusiastic. Much to momma’s credit, when I was eight, she bought me my first pair of binoculars and bird book. They were my first grown-up possessions. I suspect she was trying to direct my interests in more genteel directions, away from pursuits like poking through the rabbit guts my cat left. Unfortunately for momma I could manage both.

A two-hundred acre bottomland wood lay between home and school. The landowner was absentee, at least that was the rumor on my elementary school grapevine. Deer trails crisscrossed the forest. Huge trees beckoned. There was real dirt in that bottomland not just red Ozark clay! I’m breathless thinking about that lovely dark dirt even now! Offering such amenities, the place was overrun with children claiming the land for their own wild ways and I was among them.

One day, a mother angry that her snotty-nosed, momma’s boy of a brat had been taunted by older boys, called all the mothers and whinged on about, “do you really know where your children are?” That afternoon on our way home we kids found, milling at the wood’s edge, an embarrassed troupe of mothers who, to their dismay, didn’t really know where their children were. Unfortunately for me my discomfited mother was one of them.

Momma began to brood, “What if there was an emergency, and I needed to find you?”

“Any kid can find me.”

Trying not to scare me, but succeeding in frightening herself, she persisted in her line of thought, “What if, and not saying anything is going to happen, but what if you fell and broke your leg?”

“You, knowing exactly where I was at, would not do anything for my broken leg-it’d still be broken.” No answer pleased her and that one in particular ticked her off there was no way she letting me go out into that wood again until she had seen it for herself. Saturday morning momma drove me to the housing addition that skirted the wood, and at road’s end we trekked out over the abandoned construction site. Bulldozers had left gaping ruts, clay pits abounded and between the woods and us lay a hundred-yard morass.

Three quarters of the way across momma stopped before a mud hole and stared at the distant trees, sighing she considered for me for a moment before speaking, “Don’t break your leg, and be home for dinner.” Even though every fiber of her told her not to let me go, my momma did. What a gift! She trusted me; she was confident of my abilities even if she wasn’t confident that the world at large wouldn’t hurt me. Hours were spent chasing, hiding from, and ambushing other children, forts built, trees climbed, frogs chased, mistakes made, and lessons learned all which gave me a confidence about my own physicality and a self-esteem that no over-protective parent could impart.

I tell you this story, because I don’t see children out on their own much in the woods today. Understandably, parents are scared by 24-hour news fear-mongers, but at some point reason needs to take over…the bogeyman always existed and always will, and some bogeymen are real; fortunately, their numbers are small. Bad things happen to good children no matter how watchful their parents. Learn something from my city-mother: Trust good things do happen and sometimes, just sometimes, you just have to drive your daughters to the end of the road and turn them loose in the woods!

Soon now...soon

2010-03-08T08:13:00.002-06:00

This morning life is pairing outside my window. White-throated sparrows fuss and chase in anticipation of northward flights and pairings while a brown thrasher sits upon a sycamore branch bowed before the sun. The red in the sunlight catches the bird’s back drying and drawing out the russet hues of damp morning feathers. Joined by another, the sun glowing in their yellow eyes, they bask for a time, side by side, but the well-oiled togetherness of parenthood is not quite upon them so one fusses then flees pursed by the other. The thrashers are replaced by two mourning doves on the telephone wires and a robin pair in tree. The robins dispel the morning chill warming their dark backs to the dawn. Their heads slightly cocked upwards, as robins do, catches light, and their yellow beaks look illuminated from within. The leftward bulging crescent moon pales in the blue morning sky and wanes while we all wait for the green to seep out of the sun into the ground bringing on the full waxing glory of spring.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #3: Red

2010-02-23T21:43:00.003-06:00

Gorging cedar waxwings bow down the small holly. The berries red as the birds’ sealing wax spots on their wings disappear down their gorges.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #2: Silhouettes Against the Sky

2010-02-22T01:04:00.003-06:00

Herons tall against the sky on nest of old soon to be new again, spring is on the rise, and soon little heron gullets will rise for food.

The Day Tears Fell on Alabama

2010-02-17T01:55:00.003-06:00

On a stunning and blustery day we decided to paddle up the backwater embayment despite it being the coldest day of the year. Deserted by mankind, the lake was silent but for the occasional swish of wind and the tinkling cries of birds. Unimpeded those small sounds gathered and rolled like thunder over the water demanding notice in the otherwise still day. The cold had stripped the air of haze rendering it to a basic clearness through which all the colors to be found in light bolted and teased the eye with a beauty usually hidden from view.

Joe and I sat in the heated car trying to screw up our courage for the better of a half hour before braving the lake. To avoid the inevitable, we first ate lunch, and then watched a brown creeper spiraling up a large pine delicately prying at bark with his curved beak. The graceful bird disappeared and the day outside could no longer be denied, we awkwardly emerged encased in a half inch of manufactured blubber and prepared the kayaks for launch. Despite the neoprene cocoon, my hands and feet stiffened in the cold, but I wanted to prove that the advantage of living in Alabama is the southern climate allows you to join in outdoor pursuits year round, and today was my test. Little did I know the day would illustrate more than that for me.

Once in the water, the forty-degree lake warmed the kayak, and with the cold taking leave of my bones I looked about. A dark shadow swept across the horizon. I paddled after it tossing across the chop on Minky Creek’s embayment all the while watching the fleeting shadow resolve into a young eagle. The pitiable youngster came away from the lake time after time without a fish in its grasping talons. Behind the eagle’s path the land rose up, and the farm field beyond the lake’s edge was golden and capped by a blue sky. Tall, delicately, wind-sculpted pines studded the shore. Yellow marsh grass and cattail tops swayed in the breeze, but below they were held fast by the thin ice rimming the shore.

Leaving the eagle to its uncertain fate we paddled on up Minky creek. Blackbirds and hardy little kinglets congregated on the thin ice retrieving wind-scattered seeds. My kayak silent, passed unnoticed and within inches of the chattering, banqueting birds. Up stream the cattails thickened and spilled far out into the shallows, and where the cattails met open water, their feet were festooned by green and red baubles reeling about on the choppy waves. Like a grotesque string of Christmas ornaments caught in the bulrushes, hundreds of shotgun shells, left to flounder by duck hunters, floated at the margins of the cattail bed. As I looked about me, I noticed more than bobbing shells, there were landscape pots, old coolers and toys, not to mention the flock of flailing plastic bags caught up in the trees. The trash along the lake was so ubiquitous that I hadn’t even noticed it until the “Christmas ornaments” caught my eye. I hadn’t noticed the trash defacing the landscape because it had become normal seemed so abnormal! A memory flashed through my mind of Chief Iron Eyes Cody crying as he looked out over the littered and polluted land. Clearly, the “People start pollution. People can stop it” seventies ad campaign could not have run on television in Alabama otherwise there wouldn’t be so much garbage! How was this so?

Another memory flashed back to earlier when I took my brother-in-law kayaking up Crow Creek. He was horrified by the refuse in the stream, and the only explanation he could think up was that people where hauling trash to the creek and dumping it. I tried to explain the why and how of the trash to him. I told him some of it was blown out of pickup truck beds, and some washed down the mountain, it simply got away from people there was no malicious dumping involved. None of my assurances satisfied him so I didn’t tell him about the old washing machine sitting out on Bellefonte Island in the main Tennessee River channel-that sucker didn’t wash down from anywhere and it took more than a wee bit of effort to get it out there. That bit of information I let slide. More memories flood by to months later to when I was visiting family in Michigan. The small towns that dot the Kalamazoo River had nature trails beside the river, and as I hiked those trails, I was struck by how clean it was. No plastic grocery bags stuck on branches, no plastic pots floating downstream just plain nature au naturel. I realized then how trashy Alabama must have appeared to my brother-in-law that day on Crow Creek.

Why do people in Alabama litter? Alabamans claim a special connection to the land so why don’t they see the trash they leave behind, and does a TV ad really have to tell us to clean up? We need to do what we do best: No one takes care of their own better than Alabamans. We take care of our families, our friends, and anyone in distress. We need to take care of that which is most fundamentally “our own”… the land, only we can keep tears from falling on Alabama.

Bonta Nature-Gram #1: Silences cools

2010-01-09T18:21:00.002-06:00

One freeze resistant sliver vies with the ice for dominance as the snow silently shrouds the mountain. Cold reigns in southern climes, silent and bitter.

Pam Croom © 2010

Bonta-Nature-Gram #3: child's play in the water

2009-08-14T12:29:00.001-05:00

Hanging-out by the geese; splash, miss, wild jab, miss! Inexperienced, the young great white egret doesn’t know the best food is solitary.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #2: Night sounds from the porch

2009-08-07T10:09:00.005-05:00

Bark! Dog? Yip! Frog? No…yip, far away..yip, farther yet. Yelp! A fox! Of course! I spy the quick fox with my little camera eye!

Bonta-Nature-Gram #1 for 2009: From the back porch

2009-01-03T23:15:00.001-06:00

Robins’ rattles echo in the arborvitae as they settle. Geese honk unsure whether to stay or go while the incoming are sure they’ll stay.

Pam Croom © 2009

Bonta-Nature-Gram #46: view from porch

2008-12-27T23:01:00.002-06:00

73 degrees and sunny, but smoke chokes the throat and wafts across the sky. Alabamans do love to light fires-too bad they don’t watch them.

Pam Croom © 2008

Go See the Eagles

2008-12-26T13:43:00.008-06:00

Bald eagle numbers had dwindled in Alabama. In the Tennessee valley there were none. An effort to bring back the population was started in 1985 with the first release of young birds; the program ran through 1991. It started with four young eagles that were released from the Mud Creek Hacking tower on the Mud Creek embayment of Lake Guntersville in 1985. A total of ninety-one eagles were released in Alabama. In 2007 it was estimated that there were around one hundred nesting pairs in the state! The program exceeded anyone's wildest hopes! It started out slow with several years of unsuccessful nesting starts, but in 1991 two nests succeed in producing fledged offspring! It has been going like gangbusters since.

One of the original hacked birds, a female, nests near the Guntersville dam. She does not seem to mind the proximity to people. Her head is yellowish that is how you can identify her. Older bird's white feathers yellow with age.

There are eagles year round on Guntersville Lake. Many of the nesters stay as residents, but right now is the highest the local population will be for the year with the influx of winter migrants. The migrants are mostly from the Great Lakes regions and they will return there starting in February.

For a great opportunity to see and learn about bald eagles come to Guntersville and stop by the park. Keep an eye out for eagles all along the Tennessee River in Alabama. If you cannot get to Guntersville, Pickwick Lake is another excellent spot to see eagles.

To see the Lake Guntersville State Park's Eagle Awareness 20009 Brochure go to:

www.guntersvillestatepark.com/eaglebrochure1.pdf

Bonta-Nature-Gram #45: view from porch

2008-12-25T23:59:00.002-06:00

A yellow flash and a chase ensues. The maple weeps, but no yellow-bellied sapsucker finds succor-just a defensive yellow-rumped warbler.

Pam Croom © 2008

Christmas Day

2008-12-25T21:18:00.013-06:00

I hope Christmas day has found you in good cheer. Hopefully, Santa has treated you well, because I know all of you were good little boys and girls! Santa did right by me! He brought me, via the husband after I wrote out the brand and number of it, an outdoor camera that will shoot in the infrared. Woo haa!

This afternoon, of course, was spent putting it up and testing it. Here the Stealth Cam is up, and I started trying it out...

and making adjustments...

one less sapling for America! Ah, better...

and down loading pictures...

and whoooaaa hurricane!

What I learned so far is that it takes three to four seconds after the motion detector senses motion for the camera to snap a photograph. After that it is about three seconds between shots. The camera is set in burst mode of nine photos then it waits for one minute before it starts looking for motion and photographing once again. For daylight, the motion sensor detects out to about thirty feet. So moving straight into the camera, me or a similarly paced animal (say deer), would cover almost that full thirty feet in four seconds. Therefore, I think aiming the camera straight down an animal trail will probably net me a partial of the animal coming or going and then eight animal-less photos. I would expect head on shots for bait stations to work well where animals are eating or pausing. I have a salt rock out, and there is the left over duck food to nibble so I hope I will attract some one other than myself! Stay tuned, but do not expect anything too soon for it is raining tonight! Drat it!

Bonta-Nature-Gram #44: view from front porch

2008-12-22T23:21:00.002-06:00

From the smallest magnolia, the chipping sparrows drifted down like brown, falling leaves to the grass to search for seeds in the cold air.

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #43: view from porch

2008-12-20T23:59:00.001-06:00

kingfisher darts, hovers, stalls, dives, and flies away to the snag piscine snack in beak. Whack, whack, against the branch goes the fish, bones broken and glug!

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #42: back yard

2008-12-19T23:30:00.003-06:00

My customer, patiently, waits at the end of the yard by the dish for his appointed dinner: Breckenridge the beautiful.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #41: view from the dock

2008-12-18T23:54:00.003-06:00

Canada geese in a V formation glide through the sky reflected in the water. The birch bejeweled in drops catches the last light.

Pam Croom © 2008

What are your thoughts?

2008-12-18T00:29:00.002-06:00

Dear Readers,

If you would please, would you express your thoughts about a couple of questions?

What is natural in the world? Where is nature or the natural world found?

Thanks

Bonta-Nature-Gram #40: soundscape from the dock

2008-12-17T23:25:00.005-06:00

The tinkle of rain on water.
English house sparrows chatter.
Far away the wail of a siren carries over the rain.
Dim day and bright sounds.

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #39: view from the dock

2008-12-17T01:32:00.003-06:00

Honking geese approach shrouded in the rain and fog. Splash! The sluicing sound of landing incorporeal Canada geese is heard.

Pam Croom © 2008