Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / March 2024

Enough Already?

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Had Enough Snow?

It’s the end of February, so the coldest part of winter is behind us, there’s only a few inches of snow left in the fields, and the finches are camouflaged as they rummage around the bare ground under the feeder for sunflower seeds. And we complain. About the lack of snow, the repeated thaws that turn our gravel roads to mush, and the lack of the cold snaps that we (claim) to have enjoyed so much in the past.  

Has it really been warmer than usual, with less snow? Well, I’ve been keeping track of temperature at Post Road Farm for nearly twenty years, and this winter (so far) rates as the least cold during that period. I keep track of the average high and low temperatures for each half of the cold months. According to this measure, the coldest period since 2008 was the first half of January in 2022, when the average low was minus two degrees and the average high was 20 degrees, for an average temperature of 9 degrees. The coldest half-month so far this year was the second half of January when the average low was 20 and the average high was 29 for an average temperature of 24.5. This is the first time in the last 17 years that the average temperature never dropped below 23 degrees the first or second half of January or February. Avoiding a cold snap is good for our heating bills, but most of us prefer the cold to the mud. When I looked at the weather records for Sugar Hill, I found that the total snowfall so far was pretty much the same as the historical average. The reason the ground is peeping through under the trees is not that there has been too little snow, but that there has been too much melting.  

I suspect that most of us are hoping that March will revert to the norm for late winter.   After all, if we didn’t like winter, we wouldn’t be here. So be optimistic. The snowiest and coldest days may still be ahead of us, just as they were back in 2016.

March 15, 2016, steady snow, windy at times, 15 inches of snow, gusts up to 40mph. A deer came to both the front and back doors during the night.

 March 18, 2016. This was the coldest night of the year. Since there was no moon and since there was no water vapor left in the air, the night was brilliant. The Big Dipper was nearly straight overhead, something I don’t recall ever noticing before. Jupiter could be seen large and bright through the big maple. The day continued cold and clear, and we set a one-day record generating 46.4 kwh from our solar array even with only 12 hours of daylight.

February 26, 2024.  No snow under the big trees, and the little that’s left on the lawn is likely to melt when the temperatures rise close to or above 50 today and tomorrow.

March 12, 2022. The same view out my kitchen window in mid-March two years ago shows that there is still plenty of time for a good snow storm!

Enjoy the Birds

Relatively mild weather may bring more birds to our feeder. Last March, after four days with highs near 40, we not only had an excellent showing from the regulars, a small flock of pine grosbeaks came to the feeder. I had only seen these once before, more than twenty years ago, and this was my first sighting confirmed with both a close look at a bird book and photos.  

March 5, 2023, 30 degrees, cloudy, 1145.   Great day for the feeder. First, the usual suspects: Eight chickadees, seven starlings, two male and a female cardinal, a white-breasted nuthatch, hairy woodpecker, and a titmouse. But then about seven pine grosbeaks stopped by, staying long enough for a photo session.  

February 22, 2024. Sunny, high of 36 degrees. Two dozen small birds active at the feeder today. At least 14 goldfinches, five pine siskins, four chickadees, a pair of purple finches, several blue jays, and a couple of tufted titmice at the feeder or foraging under it. Hairy and downy woodpeckers, which have been around regularly, were finally joined by their smaller cousin, a white-breasted nuthatch.

Last week, on the 23rd, a half dozen or so robins took a short rest on the tall trees seen in the above photos. I only managed a poor photo of one sitting atop the big pine, worth saving only to document their early arrival at Post Road Farm.  

Take A Walk in the Woods

Friends from away probably don’t understand our disdain for warm days and melting snow. Haven’t you had enough snow already, and aren’t you sick of huddling by the wood stove sipping hot tea every day after the sun sets? No, I would tell them, this is the time of year that is best for getting the snowshoes and taking a walk in the woods. A layer of snow, especially recent snow that still clings to the branches, transforms the woods into a magical setting. I can put on my snowshoes and head out into the silence, carrying a mug of coffee to enjoy while sitting at Two Stump, Carl’s Seat or one of the other secret places where I love to sit still, listening for the woodpeckers, and hoping to see one of the deer, foxes, or hares that have left their tracks here and there across my trails.       

March 17, 2016, 18 degrees warming to 26 degrees in mid-afternoon, pristine! When I stepped outside, two blue jays flew directly overhead, their white and light blue feathers contrasting wonderfully against the deep blue sky. I snowshoed through the Back 80 to the Big Rock, then cut across the frozen swamp to Carl’s Loop. I heard some crows cawing, a pileated woodpecker calling, and several other woodpeckers pecking, but only sporadically. Mostly it was very quiet, except for the snow falling off the boughs of the evergreens.

March 17, 2017. Snowshoe tracks by the pond head out to Foss Woods.

January 30, 2005. “Two Stump” is my favorite resting place in the Lower 40.  

Even if the birds are quiet and tracks have been covered by fresh snow, there is plenty to make a walk in the woods enjoyable.

Scraggly bark peeling off a yellow birch, birch seeds littering the snow, a babbling brook breaking the silence, and the long shadows cast over the hillside contribute to memorable afternoons.

  • Right and below center:  Foss Woods, 3/19/18

  • Below left:  Back 4, 3/13/22

  • Below right: Sugar Hill Town Forest, 3/26/20

Opening Day

Opening Day at Fenway, always a big event for any New England baseball fan, will this year be on April 9th when the Red Sox return home against the Baltimore Orioles. When we lived in Boston, Opening Day was one of the rites of spring. But now, having lived in the North Country for nearly two decades, I find it difficult to include baseball, Baltimore Orioles, or rites of spring in the same sentence with “early April.” The earliest I’ve ever seen a Baltimore Oriole up here was way back in 2009, on April 28th. Nowadays, as winter drags on through early April, my thoughts about “Opening Day” concern “Ice Out” - the eagerly anticipated, but totally unscheduled return of the wood frogs to the pond.

April 24, 2018, 62 degrees and sunny at 10am!  The ice was a third out at 8am, but it was rapidly dissolving, turning from pure white in the morning to grey by noon, to translucent by mid-afternoon, and finally disappearing before the sun went down. We took advantage of this unusually warm and beautiful day to have breakfast on the patio.  While sitting there, we heard faint calls of wood frogs from the other side of Pearl Lake Road, from what Nancy suggested might be a vernal pool lost in the woods.   

Now, I don’t even think of watching a baseball game until late April, when the ice and the snow have finally disappeared. By then, we’re ready for spring, we no longer complain about the lack of snow, and we hope that there won’t be another frost like the one in mid-May last year. If it snows at this time of the year, even the most devoted winter enthusiasts are finally ready to say:

Enough Already!

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / February 2024

Pheeder Birds

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

If you fill it, they will come

Nancy and I returned to Sugar Hill in mid-January after spending the holidays with our son and his family in Terre Haute.  We soon had our bird feeder hanging from a pole placed so as to provide optimal viewing from our kitchen window.  As usual, it only took a few hours for a chickadee to drop in.  They seem to know every location that has ever had a feeder, and they apparently send out scouts every day to see if we, or any other of the slackards, have finally gotten around to doing our duty.  Within two days, a small flock of chickadees and tufted titmice were flouncing into the feeder, taking a seed, and flouncing back to the spruce tree.  Within a week, the word of the restaurant re-opening had spread to our local woodpeckers, blue jays, finches, and juncos. The day before yesterday, January 26th, was the best day so far this year at the feeder, as two waves of birds stopped by in mid-morning.  Several chickadees and a couple of titmice flew back and forth between the feeder and nearby trees, usually only spending the few seconds needed to grab a seed.  A blue jay foraged under the feeder, and a woodpecker spent a few minutes pecking at the suet.  After five or ten minutes, these birds departed and all was quiet again around the feeder.  But after a few more minutes, three juncos flew down to pick at seeds under the feeder.  I called to Nancy “There are three juncos …. no, four … no six …” Soon there were 13 of them spread out under the feeder picking seeds from the snow.  Within another minute or two, they were joined on the ground by a female purple finch and two gold finches while a white breasted nuthatch was at the feeder. 

Nuthatches are frequent visitors to our feeder:

 March 30, 2022.  A pair of elegant red-breasted nuthatches at the feeder.  (above)

 January 26, 2024, 32 degrees, foggy, 10-1030am.  The first nuthatch of the year kept checking for trouble while getting seeds at the feeder.  (right)

Count’em 

For decades, the NH Audubon Society has been soliciting volunteers to assist in their annual bird counts.  Using the data their volunteers have collected, they are able to determine whether different groups of birds are increasing, holding their own, or decreasing.  Their results, which show that about half of all groups of birds are decreasing in New Hampshire, are available on line (About the Birds - NH Audubon).

NH Audubon’s Backyard Winter Bird Survey is scheduled for the weekend of February 10-11.  Originated long ago as their annual cardinal/titmouse survey, NH Audubon has been seeking information on all birds since 1987.  Anyone with a feeder or another place to watch birds in their backyard is encouraged to participate.  What they are looking for is the maximum number of each species that you observe at one time.  Audubon provides a form that lists a couple of dozen species that you might see at the feeder or in your backyard (Backyard Winter Bird Survey - NH Audubon).

All you need to do is look out the window, identify and count the birds, record the maximum number that you see, and then report the results on line. 

Which one is it?

No one needs a guidebook to identify a chickadee, a cardinal, or a gold finch, but many will need a guidebook to identify less well-known visitors, such as red polls and pine siskins. A good photo will capture the male siskins yellow wing bars or the red poll male’s little red cap, yellow bill, pink chest, but the juveniles and females of both species are less easily distinguished.  Since siskins and red polls both travel in small flocks, you often can use the males to identify the species and then count the number of birds in the flock.

February 26, 2022.  A pair of pine siskins dines at the feeder, and we can see some yellow on the male’s wings.

February 5, 2023.  The red poll’s red cap is barely visible in this photo.  Why don’t they stay still in a better pose for a photo?

 Nearly everyone needs a guidebook to distinguish between some very similar species.   For example, I always require a good photo and a guidebook to figure out whether I’ve seen a male house finch or a male purple finch, both of which have pretty much the same wonderful colors. 

Purple Finch, February 5, 2022.  This finch has very extensive colors and less prominent chest stripes.

House Finch, April 6, 2022.  This finch has less extensive colors and very prominent chest stripes.

I have even more trouble with downy and hairy woodpeckers. The guidebook tells me that the hairy has a longer bill, and, at 9.25 inches, is much longer that the 6.75 inch downy.  Unfortunately, while it is easy to remember which bird is largest, how can we tell how big a bird is?    A few times, a photo will include something that can be used as a ruler.  For example, one of my favorite feeder photos (or should that be “phavorite pheeder photos?”) shows a chickadee photo-bombing a woodpecker.  Using a ruler against the screen, I measured – and you can verify - that the ratio of their lengths is about “Nine to Five” (in capital letters to remind everyone of a movie well worth another viewing).  Mr. Sibley tells me that chickadees are just over 5.25 inches long, so this woodpecker must have been more than 9 inches long – a hairy woodpecker.

January 8. 2021.  A chickadee flew in just after a woodpecker landed on the feeder. 

However, this photo-bombed portrait is the only one of my many dozens of woodpecker photos that allowed such a neat comparison.  This morning, by happenstance, I came up with a simple solution to the problem of measuring the length of a woodpecker.  When a woodpecker flew up to the suet, I took several photos, one of which showed the bird on the pole, looking straight at the bird house.  Aha!  I quickly got a ruler, went out to the feeder, and found that the side board of the feeder is 8.75 inches tall, slightly less than the 9.25" length of a hairy woodpecker.  Since the woodpecker on the pole was only two thirds the height of the feeder, it clearly was a downy. 

January 28, 2024.  The photo on the left inspired me to use the feeder itself as a ruler that can be used to distinguish downy from the much larger hairy woodpeckers.

Some News is Good News

Cardinals and tufted titmice, the original focus of the Audubon survey are both moving their ranges northward.  The first cardinal I saw as a kid, when I lived in Rhode Island, was when we visited my cousins in southern Connecticut in the early fifties.  Thirty years later, the cardinals had moved at least as far north as Boston, and we regularly had cardinals in the yard.  But it was only about ten years ago that we saw our first cardinal above the notch, and that one was flying behind the Dairy Bar in Franconia on a nice summer day.  For the past few years, we not only have seen cardinals in the summer, but they have been regular visitors to our feeder. 


February 28, 2023.  A pair of cardinals seeking sunflower seeds below the feeder

In the last two weeks, I have at one time or another seen a murder of crows, thirteen juncos, six goldfinches, six blue jays, five chickadees, three tufted titmice, two purple finches and a single white-breasted nuthatch, downy woodpecker, and hairy woodpecker.  I hope soon to see some grosbeaks, redpolls, cardinals, turkeys, grouse, and even some of the rarer visitors.  How many to expect on the second weekend in February, who knows?  In the spirit of that holiday weekend, I can only close by saying:

Happy Washington’s Bird Day!

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / January 2024

A Virtual Caribbean Vacation

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

A Winter Vacation

As winter drags on, week after week, many in the North Country begin to think about a vacation, somewhere where it is warm, where there are beaches, and life proceeds at a slower pace. Well, to be honest, it is hard to proceed at a slower pace than my winter life in Sugar Hill, where an hour or so cutting firewood is followed by twice as much time reading, sipping hot tea in the warmth of the wood stove, eating leftovers, and enjoying Father Brown or one of our other favorite streaming series. 

Still, however much I claim to love the warmth by the wood stove, I know that people are sitting on the beach in the Virgin Islands, listening to the waves, and watching sea birds flying high overhead. That is why this month I have prepared a virtual birdwatching vacation for you.

The best sites were located close to the 50-foot bluff that rose nearly straight up from the Bay.

Birds by the Tent-Cottage

Each site had a tent-cottage that covered three quarters of a 16’ x 16’ platform, leaving one corner open where we could take a shower, enjoy a cold drink, watch the iguanas in the cacti, and chat with the fearless little banaquits that looked for sugar that we sprinkled along the railing.

 

April 10, 2010. A banaquit looks for sugar amid the cracks on the railing of our tent-cottage.

Pearly eyed thrashers and mourning doves would walk along the top of our tent, waking us up in the morning and amusing us as they perched on the rails of our porch during the day. These thrashers stay in the Carribean throughout the year, while the doves, like us, only come for the winter. These birds would join the banaquits and Bahamian bullfinches on the deck railings.

1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


The well-named “Pearly-Eyed Thrasher”is always on the lookout for food.

Female Bahamian bullfinch on the railing of our tent cottage. Notice the cacti in the background.

Magnificent Birds High Overhead

One of the most interesting birds along the coast is the magnificent frigatebird (fregata magnificens) which we frequently watched circling high above Maho Bay, sometimes flying low over the water looking for fish close to the shore. My National Geographic Field Guide shows this bird’s North American range as the warm waters of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico, not including any of the mainland or the islands. As their name suggests, frigatebirds are most often seen from the deck of a ship, whether by 18th century Spanish sailors hoping to bring silver back to Spain, English pirates hoping to wreck the Spaniards’ plans, or 21st century tourists enjoying a week-long cruise from Florida to the islands. We, not having access to the deck of a frigate or a cruise ship, had to be content watching these birds from the deck of our tent cottage.

This bird is nearly twice the size of a seagull, and you notice its bright white chest, its long, forked tail and its impressive wingspan as it soars high over the Bay. It certainly is a “magnificent” bird, even if you don’t know about the male’s red little throat patch that is barely visible to the naked eye. During mating season, this nondescript throat patch balloons to a brilliant red chest display that proves to be irresistible to the females of the species. 

I only learned about this bird’s range and mating behavior when doing some research for this essay, so I didn’t realize why it was called “frigatebird” and underestimated its “magnificence” as well as its size. It is 40 inches long and has a wingspan of 90 inches.  By comparison, the turkey vulture, a much bulkier bird that we commonly see soaring over the hills and fields of the North Country, is only 27 inches long with a wingspan of 69 inches. In fact, the magnificent frigatebird has the largest wingspan relative to its weight of any bird. (Long-time Celtics fans will remember Kevin McHale as a human being with a similarly impressive ratio of “wingspan” to weight.)

Big Birds by the Shore

To get from our tent-cottage to the closest beach, we had to walk a quarter mile or so along the boardwalk, then down about fifty steps to Little Maho Bay, a wonderful beach about two hundred yards long where you could rent a kayak or a paddleboard or buy a snack. We usually continued past this beach, scrambling over a couple of rocky outcroppings, to reach the much longer, wilder beach along Francis Bay. Along the way we would nearly always get close-up views of a couple of brown pelicans. Some would just sit at the shoreline, letting the little wavelets trickle over their feet; others would soar high above the bay; and usually one or two would be flying close to the water, looking for lunch, before suddenly diving down to catch an unsuspecting fish. One day, a pelican was hunting right next to the outcropping that we had to cross on our way to Francis Bay, and I managed to capture the instant when it struck the water with the tip of its beak.

We all know the key fact about pelican anatomy as described by that famous naturalist, Ogden Nash:

A wonderful bird is the pelican.

  Its beak can hold more than its belly can.

Very true, and as we walked along the beaches, we would often see a pelican catch a fish, open its beak slightly to allow any water to drain out, then raise its head straight up and gulp down its lunch. One day, when the sun was at the right angle, I took a photo showing how amazingly far the beak could stretch. This bird’s beautiful white head and neck indicate that this was a mature male.

April 17, 2011. A mature pelican has just caught a small fish, which it is holding in the tip of its beak.

The pelicans were certainly a major attraction by the beach, but they weren’t the only large avian visitors. Egrets and herons would also drop in and take up a position along the shoreline waiting for whatever snacks might be brought in by the waves. Great blue heron spend their summers as far north as southern Canada, and they only make it to the Virgin Island in the middle of winter. As the great blue heron can commonly be seen in the North Country, we were more excited to see the great egret and the little blue heron that only migrate as far north as the New Hampshire coast. Although one of these is called “great” and the other is called “little,” they are both nearly as large as the great blue heron. They certainly are very large compared to other egrets and smaller herons that spend their winters in the Caribbean islands.

Great Egret

Francis Bay, April 20, 2013

Little Blue Heron

Francis Bay, April 4, 2009

Birds Feeding in the Lagoon

For me, one of the best features of Maho Bay was the shallow brackish lagoon that was a couple of hundred yards behind the mangroves and palm trees that provided shade next to the beach. A trail led through a tropical forest to a boardwalk parallel to the edge of the lagoon, and there were several locations where a side-boardwalk led right to the edge of the lagoon. When the lagoon was low, thousands of tiny crabs could be seen scurrying in and around the little holes where they lived in the mud flat. These proved to be a great attraction for migratory shore birds.


April 10, 2012. Thousands of inch-long crabs covered the mud flat at the edge of the lagoon behind Francis Bay. Shorebirds feeding on them included lesser yellowlegs (below right) and sandpipers (below left).

Various ducks, egrets, and heron would look for fish in the shallow water of the lagoon, and songbirds flitted about the surrounding woods.  The photo below shows a typical view across the greenish water of the lagoon toward some piles of weathered driftwood and the reeds lining the far side of the lagoon. This photo, taken in 2012, included what I first thought was just another pair of drab ducks.  Back then, perhaps under the influence of my granddaughter, I apparently was happy to consider this a photo of “lagoon with ducks.” Karoline began her study of birds as a toddler, classifying them into two categories: “duck” and “not a duck.” Today, however, when I zoomed in with my guidebook in hand, I discovered that the two closest birds were white-cheeked pintails, birds of Central and South America that almost never stray as far north as Florida.

April 11, 2012. A pair of white-cheeked pintails feeding in the lagoon behind Francis Bay.

Birds by the Trails

I would almost always see pearly-eyed thrashers, Bahamian bullfinches, doves, and hummingbirds every time I took a walk along the trails and boardwalks near Maho Bay, and always hoped to see something new. One day, as I walked along a trail behind the lagoon, I chanced to see an unknown songbird sitting on a branch over the trail, unwilling to take the effort to fly away as I zoomed in to take its picture (see below). The bold white patches on its tail and its buffy breast turned out to be the classic field marks for mangrove cuckoos, which reside in the Caribbean and central America and only reach the states if blown off course by a storm. Its cousin, the yellow-billed cuckoo, breeds throughout the eastern and central states, and I have heard as well as seen one in Sugar Hill.

April 17, 2011, a mangrove cuckoo has found a fine spot to sit in the middle of a tangle of branches of a mangrove tree near the lagoon behind Francis Bay. This bird clearly is acting properly, as my National Geographic Field Guide says these cuckoos are “found chiefly in mangrove swamps … perching quietly near the center of tree.”

Birds Seen from the Boardwalk

Following a day in the hot sun at the beach, Nancy and I would return to our tent cottage, knowing that some of the deck was now in the shade. We’d get a cold drink and some chips, sit in the shade, and perhaps mull over the life style of an iguana that was sitting in the same position on the same cactus that he had been sitting on when we left for the beach many hours earlier. Someone happening to pass by along the boardwalk, after noticing us sitting motionless and staring at the iguana, could have muttered to themselves, “what a bunch of lazy birds!”

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / November 2023

Changing of the Guard

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Bye, Bye Birdie

By the beginning of November, the last of the summer birds have departed. The bluebirds that nested in our back yard and the redwings that raised such a ruckus around the pond were gone by mid-August. The warblers and the hummingbirds now search for their meals in Cape Cod or the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We might see a few mergansers in our pond or down at Coffin Pond, but they too will be far south before Veterans Day.

November 7, 2022, 72 degrees (!). At least three hooded mergansers, including one pair, were on the dam the last two days. Today, one that was floating in the pond flew to the other end and hid in the reeds when I approached.

November 7, 2020. Several common mergansers could be seen preening, scratching, and floating along on the other side of Coffin Pond.

November 1, 2009. There are 21 robins in the back yard and one in the front, who needs to get with the program.

Robins are the most cooperative migrant for the photographer. They travel in a flock of a dozen or two, and they frequently decide to spend a half hour or more foraging in the back yard. There is always plenty of time to get my camera, and if I’m in a rush, I know they’ll be back in a day or two. 

1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Keeping the camera right at hand near the kitchen window is critical for those rare occasions when a woodcock or a snipe strays from the protection of the fields. They seldom stay very long on the lawn, and they can easily be spooked.


November 6, 2020, 4:45pm. When I went to the kitchen for a late afternoon snack, a woodcock was outside on the lawn doing the exact same thing.

Sometimes, all I can do is to make a note in my journal, either because the birds are too far away or too jittery.

November 8-9, 2011. There were two bluebirds in the trees by Post Road, across from our driveway.

Out of the Woods

Not all of our summer residents depart for sunnier climes. Turkeys, blue jays, woodpeckers, grouse and chickadees are here year-round, but they are easier to see once the leaves have fallen, and they are less reclusive once their youngsters can pretty much fend for themselves. Turkeys are commonly seen along the highways in the late fall, and a couple of times we have seen owls:

November 21, 2020. We saw two flocks of about a dozen turkeys each along Pearl Lake Road.

December 10-13, 1999. We went to the Lower 45 after lunch. The highlight was seeing a barred owl sitting in a pine tree, looking first at Nancy, then at me, and then flying lugubriously across the field. Its wing span was about 5 feet.

December 25, 2010. After hearing a pileated woodpecker, I went deeper into the woods and found two of the woodpeckers, one high on a snag and the other way up on a 100-foot poplar tree. After about ten minutes, one flew off to a nearby tree and made several of its raucous calls.

Often when I take my walk out by the pond, a half dozen or so chickadees gather around, perching on branches only ten or fifteen feet away, chirping all the time. I don’t know if they are happy to see me or if their chatter is intended to warn everyone else that a big, bad guy is approaching.


December 1, 2020. Since the leaves are off the trees, I was able to get a photo of one of the little groups of chickadees that made a racket as I approached the Point.

Winter Residents

Eventually, the migrating robins and bluebirds have all made it past Sugar Hill, and we begin to look for the finches, redpolls, juncos and the others that spend their winters with us. At first, we see them resting or flitting about in the trees by the roadside or at the edge of the meadows.

November 11, 2018. A flock of redpolls flitted about in the bare branches of the willows and birches in the Lower Meadow.

Once the feeder is out, these winter birds begin to stop by. It usually takes only an hour or two for the ever-observant chickadees to spot the feeder, and their chatter attracts their allies.

Thanksgiving, November 26, 2020. We put out the feeder today. Within an hour, three chickadees showed up, soon joined by two blue jays and a nuthatch.

November 27, 2020.A goldfinch and a nuthatch shared the ledge on the birdfeeder. The goldfinch was just starting to show some yellow.


By the end of the year, the changing of the guard is complete. The robins, bluebirds, redwings, and mergansers have long since departed. The migrants have had their rest and continued on to who knows where. The red polls that flocked high above the Lower Meadow a month or so ago still drop by the feeder from time to time, perhaps in a flock of a dozen or more. The chickadees, finches, juncos, and nuthatches are regulars, and the downy and hairy woodpeckers split their time between the feeder and the big willow.

January 15, 2018, 12 degrees, 3pm. All the local birds came to the feeder for breakfast: five gold finches, a half dozen juncos, a brilliant purple finch, a couple of chickadees, a blue jay, and a white-breasted nuthatch.

Best take some time right now to top up your wood pile, buy a big bag of bird seed, and put the pole for the feeder out before the ground freezes. Then, have your camera ready to catch these beauties in the snow, by the feeder or, even better, on a branch surrounded by a clear, blue sky.

December 23, 2017. A female purple finch showed up just before Christmas. They’re usually not here until after the New Year.

January 15, 2018. A downy woodpecker has been going back and forth between the big willow and the feeder for the past few days.

During the COVID year, I had a lot of time to spend looking out the window at the feeder. One day in mid-December, I was surprised to see a starling that should have been gone a month or two earlier together with a new arrival that we all yearn to see. At first you may think this evening grosbeak is scowling at me for interrupting its meal, but I believe we’re seeing a wry smile communicating something like “Hiya, matey, good to see you again – and thanks for the grub!”

December 16, 2020, 10 degrees. A last, lonely starling showed up at the feeder, probably wishing he’d stayed with the flock that had long ago left the frozen north. I was much more interested in watching the season’s first Evening Grosbeak as he foraged for sunflower seeds under the feeder.

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / October 2023

The Other Colors

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Fall Foliage

Last year, at the end of a long, dry summer, I often wondered “Will the foliage be any good this year?” Probably not, I thought, remembering the ugly, blackened maple leaves that littered our driveway at the height of the drought. But I was wrong, the foliage colors were great, and the hillsides of Sugar Hill continued their brazen display through the middle of October.

October 22, 2022, 65 degrees, partly cloudy, warm & wonderful! The high hills are devoid of color, but the local hills still have a lot of yellow and orange and a tiny bit of red; the larches are turning. …

Tourists driving through the notches would have been disappointed by the lack of color on the peaks, and those on the tour buses would have hoped for more reds, but those lucky enough to live in the North Country simply appreciated the lingering yellows and oranges.

My journal entry for October 22nd continues:

 … On the dam, I found three meadowhawks, two bluets, and one bee, but no butterflies.

In other words, even at the end of October, I was out looking for the insects and flowers that still brightened my daily walks along the dam and through the meadows.

Whatever the status of the foliage seen across the mountain ranges, we can take the time to enjoy what may be called “the other colors” that can be found right at our footsteps and all around us. Look closely and you will see all the colors of the rainbow.

Red Maples

Though the red maples have a few days of glory at the end of September, their fallen leaves brighten the trails for a few more weeks. Red maples provide a blaze of glory in early fall, and individual leaves merit our attention long afterwards.

September 29, 2015. A brilliant red maple!

October 9, 2015. A fallen maple leaf creates a spot of color on my trail through the Back 4.

1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Orange Moon

Not all the “other colors” are in the trees or on the ground. If we’re lucky, the skies may be clear when the harvest moon rises above the mountains, which was the case last year (and which may be the case in about two hours, since I’m writing this on September 28th, the night of the harvest moon in 2023.)


September 10, 2022. The Harvest Moon rises, an orange orb above the Kinsmans.


Of courses, there are other glimpses of orange worth a photo just as exhilarating as the ones that captured the orange moon or the entire hillside of Sugar Hill.

October 15, 2022. The afternoon sun highlighted the remaining orange leaves along Pearl Lake Road, an especially captivating sight when viewed through the silvered limbs of the large maple at the corner of Post and Pearl Lake Roads.

Yellow-Legged Meadowhawk

Meadowhawks are the little red dragonflies that emerge from small ponds in late summer and frolic around any body of water through the beginning of October. Several species are common in our region, and unlike most insects, they are each aptly named for their distinguishing characteristic. The white-faced meadowhawk is the first to arrive in early August, and it is the most numerous around our pond. The yellow-legged meadowhawk arrives in mid-August, while the less common cherry-faced and saffron-winged meadowhawks often wait until mid-September. They all love to land on goldenrod and cattails, often forming a wheel, a contorted position that enables a pair to fertilize her eggs.


August 18, 2016. This juvenile yellow-legged meadowhawk was one of the first I’ve seen this year.


September 19, 2018. A pair of yellow-legged meadowhawks formed a wheel. Soon afterwards, they flew over to the pond to lay her eggs.

Green Frog

Green frogs begin their life as tadpoles, and they spend much of their early days under the ice, waiting along with us for the end of the long winter. It is the end of the summer, when they are more than a year old, before they are finally ready to give up their carefree swimming with their buddies and settle down to a solemn, solitary life by the side of the pond. In late summer and early fall, I sometimes find a dozen or more of them sitting along the shore in an opening amidst the reeds. Usually, I am more interested in the dragonflies, because these frogs almost never move.

September 24, 2015. There are still some dragonflies (variable darners and meadowhawks) and damsel flies pairing off. Recently, I’ve seen quite a few small green frogs sunning at the edge of the pond.

Apparently, these small green frogs are also interested in the meadowhawks, but not from my aesthetic or phenological perspectives:

October 6, 2017, 60 degrees, cloudy, still, 330pm. A green frog sat motionless at the water’s edge at a place where meadowhawks were flying in and out, up and down. I focused my camera, but before I could snap a picture, the small frog leaped straight up, trying to snag a meadowhawk that fortunately (for the dragonfly) did not land on the bit of reed that was two inches above the frog. I’ve seen frogs do this before, sometimes successfully, but very infrequently, maybe just a dozen times in 20 years of watching. They must be able to get plenty to eat by sitting still and letting dinner come to them.


October 5, 2017. I took a photo of one of the small green frogs sitting patiently by the edge of the pond. I can’t tell if it was eating something or if it just had an air bubble at the side of its mouth.

Bluebirds

By early October, the fall migration is well underway, and we’re likely to see flickers, bluebirds and a half dozen or more other birds on the lawn, over the meadows, or by the pond.

October 9, 2020, 34 degrees, 930-1030am. A pair of woodcock were feeding in the back lawn, staying in the shade on frost-bejeweled grass. In the movies I took while listening to Patsy Cline, they seemed to bob and bounce in time with the music. I also took a movie of a yellow-bellied sapsucker in the big willow, as well as pictures of the frost coating the wildflowers in the Upper Meadow. In the afternoon, a yellow-rumped warbler, a pine siskin, and a half dozen robins simultaneously foraged across the front yard.

Nancy loves to see the little flocks of flickers when they stop by for a fall forage, but I most enjoy seeing the return of the bluebirds. Although bluebirds were common where I grew up in Rhode Island, we seldom if ever saw them when we lived in Boston. Now a pair often nests in what we call the “Front House,” and others stop by in small groups as they head south for the winter.


October 9, 2020, 2pm.

In the afternoon, after it had warmed up, a half dozen bluebirds enjoyed the bird bath and inspected the “Front House.”


Purple Gentians

Bottle gentians bloom in mid-September, a time when asters and goldenrods dominate the fields and most other wildflowers have gone to seed. Sometimes you can find several clumps beside a rail trail or along a trail made by deer or bears crossing through a field.


 September 13, 2014. Gentians bloom in small clumps atop stalks that rise a foot or two off the ground.


I think deer or bears nip these lovely blossoms as a little treat as they prepare for the winter by eating bushels of apples. After finishing off the gentians with a few quick bites, they amble on toward the apple trees.

September 12, 2007 64 degrees, partly cloudy. At 3pm, the fields under the power lines were bright with fall colors: asters (white and light violet), goldenrod, red leaves on small trees, and bronzed ferns. … About 25 bottle gentians were in peak bloom near the end of the path.

September 18, 2007. When I found bear scat under the power lines near where I had seen the gentians last week, I suspected that the flowers had been planted by bears or other animals using this trail.

Since my discovery of gentians under the power lines back in 2007, I try to remember to look for them soon after Labor Day. For a while, we had some right by our pond:

September 14, 2013. For several years, we had some nice clumps of gentians next to the pond by Larch Meadow, but no longer. Since we have evidence of bears using my trail along the pond, perhaps they were eating the flowers and destroying the plants.

Although I miss having gentians by the pond, I have enjoyed finding a great many new clumps along some of my other trails:

September 13, 2019, 66 degrees, breeze, all sun! I followed my old Creamery Pond trail down from Pearl Lake Road through the woods to the brook, where I saw a few white-faced meadowhawks and many crickets and grasshoppers. Coming out to the fields under the power lines, I didn’t see any butterflies or any more dragonflies, but I did find a nice batch of gentians and some pretty golden ferns. Under the power lines on the other side of the road, I saw two monarchs and a mosaic darner flying near more golden ferns and an even larger batch of gentians.

Look for the “Other Colors”

I could go on a great length, but the point I am trying to make is simple. The peak foliage only lasts a week or so, but you can get nearly as much enjoyment from the “other colors” for pretty much all of September and October.  As I said in the introduction, “Look closely, and you will see all the colors of the rainbow.”

Of course, I can’t deny the appeal of the mountainsides of fall foliage that pulls the leaf peepers up I93. After all, when autumn leaves begin to call,

EVERYONE LONGS TO BE IN THE NORTH COUNTRY!

October 5, 2009. The end of a brilliant rainbow seemed to lie somewhere in the field on the other side of Post Road. I didn’t check for the pot of gold, figuring that one of the neighbors was already out there looking for it.

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / September 2023

Summer’s End

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Labor Day

When you’re young, the beginning and end of summer are clearly defined. Summer begins about 3pm on the last day of school and ends when you have to get up early, dress nicely, and go out to wait for the bus. Whether or not these definitions make any sense depends upon where you go to school. In Indiana, summer starts reasonably when school ends in early June, but 90-degree days may still be viewed as relatively cool when kids are forced back to school well before the end of August. The school calendar in NH is more closely aligned with what a rational person would consider to be summer. School lets out in early June, which still is spring, and by the end of August, when school opens up, we already have had to use extra blankets more than once, and the birches are showing some color. In neither place does the school calendar or common sense align with the meteorological definition of summer. June 22 to September 22 is too short an interval for summer in Terre Haute, but it is too long in Sugar Hill. I went to school in Rhode Island, where school ended on or about June 22nd, depending upon the number of snow days, and didn’t start up again until the week after Labor Day. I spent most of the next 45 years working to an academic calendar in Boston.  Throughout this long period, summer for me began on Memorial Day and ended on Labor Day. After Labor Day, I was much too busy to worry about the changing seasons.

But all that is in the past. Labor Day no longer serves me as a convenient, consistent marker of the end of summer. Being retired, we’re no longer constrained by any calendar, whether defined by a school board or by the timing of the solstices and equinoxes. We simply notice nature’s signals that summer is coming to an end. There are many such signals, but I’ll just highlight the four Fs: “Flowers, Fruits, Flickers and Foliage.”

Flowers

In early spring, we find delicate flowers popping up in forest floors, taking advantage of the light available before the trees leaf out. In late spring, we’re astonished at how fast everything grows, and we’re delighted with the daisies, buttercups, hawkweed, lupine and so many other wildflowers that adorn our roadsides and fill our fields. As summer proceeds, we look for iris, turtlehead, black-eyed Susans and other beautiful, elegant flowers, each blossom calling for our attention and each plant worthy of closer inspection. These flowers have to standout to attract the bees and other insects seeking their nectar.

In August there is a change along the roadsides and in the fields that is impossible to miss or to ignore. The early summer flowers give way to the onslaught of goldenrods and asters, families of flowers noted for their diversity and their abundance of blossoms. By the end of August, banks of these flowers cover the fields and hang over the trails, as if these plants sense that time is short, that fall is on the way.  


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


September 5, 2023. The wet summer has resulted in massive displays of asters. The New England asters form masses of color on the dam and in the Upper Meadow.

When I go out by the pond on Labor Day weekend, everywhere I look I see asters and goldenrod. Flat-topped white asters have grown to be more than five feet tall, and many have fallen under their own weight, as they are not designed to reach so high. New England and New York asters compete for my attention, the former being more common, but the latter being a deeper violet. A half dozen species of goldenrod may have quite distinct shapes, stems, and leaves, but it is their combined effort to color the landscape that attracts me and the butterflies.

September 4, 2023. A white admiral flits from one branch to another within an opening in a large patch of goldenrod.

Fruits

Blueberries start to ripen in the middle of July, a sure sign that summer is here. By the end of the month, I’m spending an hour or so every other morning just trying to pick the blueberries before the birds get them or bears find them. Then I have to wash them, figure out where to put them, decide whether or not to make jam, and wonder if there is still room in the freezer for more berries. By the end of the first week in August, the blueberries are pretty much done, and that is a sign that the ‘lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer” won’t last forever.

But that’s not the end of the fruits. Blackberries and raspberries may last through the end of August, prolonging the feeling of summer, even though the nighttime temperatures may have dipped into the 40s. Another week passes, and I’m happy to have more free time now that the blackberries have also been harvested. It may take a couple of days, but soon I will notice branches weighted down with apples suddenly grown to full size and beginning to turn color. We have a dozen or so wild apple trees, some of which need to be picked around Labor Day before they fall and attract the deer and bears that have been waiting for the chance to get a real meal from these large, tasty fruits. So that is a clear signal that summer is coming to an end. I now have to be ready to pick the apples, and I have to get the implements ready to make apple sauce, apple pies, or dried apples.

September 19, 2014: A massive crop of apples weighs down the upper branches of one of the wild apple trees in the Back 4.

Sometime in September, we also notice the rose hips, often obscured by the aster and goldenrod that have grown over the pasture roses whose pink flowers were so lovely a month earlier. Some of the neighbors make jelly out of these fruits, a task that I am happy to leave to them.

September 5, 2023. I didn’t at first notice the rose hips hidden amidst and below the overhanging goldenrod and asters.

Flickers

Migrating birds start coming through in the latter half of August. Some of these, the robins and redwings that gather on our lawn or by the pond most likely have been living nearby. Their arrival at best sparks a mild statement such as “Hey, did you notice the robins on the lawn? They’re the first I’ve seen in a week or two.” The same goes for any merganser that shows up at the pond about this time; we wonder if it is one that was raised on our pond, but after watching a family of them in July, seeing one or two in September is hardly a remarkable sight.

Sparrows and warblers trickle in, but they are of greater interest to real birders than they are to the casual observer sitting on the porch enjoying a morning coffee. A creature that requires a special effort to see and identify doesn’t qualify as one of nature’s best signs of summer’s end.

No, a true signal that fall is on the way is when a bird well-known for its size, colors and habits returns to amuse itself on the lawn right in front of your picture window. For us, that bird is the flicker, because these birds arrive, sometimes in small flocks, and spend hours hunting for insects in the lawn. I first observed this behavior more than twenty years ago:  

July 15, 2002. There were two flickers in the front yard this morning and another below the power lines in the Lower 40. At 3pm, one was in the front yard digging a hole with its bill and getting ants. It would have its head down for 10-15 seconds at a time, then look up quickly and just as quickly return to the feast. I went over to have a look: the hole was a perfect cone, about a half inch in diameter at the top and about two feet deep, with three ants scurrying around the sides. I also saw a pair by the pond about 630pm. [I didn’t see any on the 17th, but saw one on the 18th; I then didn’t note any more until I saw four or five in Pearl Lake Road when we drove up at dusk.]

Most years, we only see flickers when they are migrating, which is why we’re excited to see them when they return in the fall. They typically show up some time in mid-September, and they are a sure sign that the season is changing.

 

September 9, 2020. A flicker foraged freely on the front lawn

 

Flickers, of course, are only one of the many species of birds that migrate through our region at the end of summer. The first year that we were in Sugar Hill in mid-September, I was excited to see so many migrating birds:

September 16-18, 2007. On the 16th, we saw flickers on Hadley Road. Yesterday, chickadees, blue jays, crows, and phoebes were active in our yard. Today, bluebirds were scavenging in the driveway, the first time we’ve seen them this fall. We also saw a phoebe, a red-breasted merganser, mourning doves and grouse in or around the Pond.

I could have added one of these migrants to the title of this section, but I was worried that some readers would react with a groan. However, I can’t resist at least mentioning this bird. Although it lacks the distinctive size and colors that I just emphasized as important criteria, its tail-wagging is always interesting, and its name certainly fits in with the alliterative theme to my list of summer-ending signals. Phoebe’s often nest in one of the nooks under the eaves of our house, so we frequently seen them in the summer posing and wagging their tails as they sit on one of their favorite perches on the patio or by the pond.

September 25, 2019. A phoebe landed in one of the trees next to the pond. Was it one of the ones the nested under our eaves?

Foliage

The title of this section is simply “Foliage,” not “Fall Foliage,” because this section refers to the first glimpses of reds and yellows that signal the approaching end of summer. Young maples often turn bright red in August, as do certain vines. In swamps and around swamps, maples and birches turn colors before any reds or yellows are visible in the forests. So, when we take a walk in August or early September, we take notice of any bits of color and remark “fall is on the way.”

September 5, 2023. Sure signs that summer is coming to an end: the bird house by the blueberry patch is empty; the asters and goldenrod are in full bloom; apples have ripened on one tree in the Upper Meadow, and many vines have turned a bright red.

An Alternative Title for this Essay

The idea of writing about the end of summer came to me as we chatted with Chuck and Betsey before going in to see Mama Mia! at the Weathervane Theatre.  Nancy and Betsey were both proud to be wearing white pants on Labor Day, and they had to remind Chuck and me that “One cannot wear white after Labor Day!”  I thought about the similar dictum whereby the US Army required me to wear my winter dress uniform one 90-degree day in early May back in 1971, because the approved date for switching to summer uniforms was still a week or two away.  Using specific dates to mark the season for certain types of clothes reminded me of the foolishness of using specific dates to mark the beginning or end of any season. 

I therefore began thinking about what to put it his essay.  I asked Nancy what she thought of “Flowers, Fruits, Flickers, and Foliage” as a title.  She expressed some interest, especially my highlighting of one of her favorite birds.  But then her background as a gardener took over, and she remarked quite happily about the garden flower that flourishes at the end of the summer.  She therefore suggested another title: 

“Mum’s the Word.”

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / August 2023

These Are a Few of My Favorite Wings

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

My Favorite Wings: Birds

When I was twelve, I had a chance to spend several weeks with my best friend and his family in an unusual campground on a hillside overlooking Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. In my experience, and I expect also in yours, this campground was unique. But back in 1958, thousands of men my father’s age would have immediately recognized it, because it consisted solely of World War II surplus squad tents laid out evenly in rows on either side of a well-maintained, straight dirt road. Each tent had the shape of a pyramid atop a 16-foot square, and they were divided into three bedrooms and a kitchen by canvas hanging from cross beams. Each morning, Cap and I would pull up the shades, have breakfast, and follow a path for a half mile or so through a field, above rocky cliffs, eventually emerging at the end of Bonnet Shores, a private beach where we swam, body-surfed, played catch, and played various sorts of handball.

So how does this relate to an essay that is supposed to have something to do with phenology? Well, walking down to the beach day after day on that long ago but never forgotten summer, I saw my first goldfinch. I immediately recognized this bird, because it graced the cover of my first little bird book. Ever since, even though I rarely encountered goldfinches at home, whether in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, I have never failed to be amazed by this bird’s brilliant yellow body and its highly contrasting black cap and black wings.

Of course, now that we live in Sugar Hill, we have gold finches at the feeder in late winter, and we have them nesting in the Upper Meadow or flitting about the gardens throughout the summer. So, I think it quite appropriate to begin my list of “My favorite wings” with this bird that I have known and loved for nearly seventy years.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.



April 22, 2018, A male goldfinch has nearly come into his full courting plumage as it sits at our feeder.

Many birds have interesting wings, but to be included among my winged favorites, a bird requires something special. Evening grosbeaks certainly have lovely wings, but they are at best infrequent visitors, and their outsized beaks demand as much attention as their wings. The scarlet tanager has wings as delightful as the goldfinches – but when do you ever see one of them?

My second winged favorite, avian category, is therefore a well-known bird with proper phenological and behavioral characteristics. Known to authors of guidebooks as “redwinged blackbirds,” they are known to everyone else in New England as “redwings.” The first males are likely to show up while there is still snow on the ground:

March 22, 2023, 36 degrees, light clouds. The first redwing flew into the big spruce, its red patches brilliant in the morning sun! The ground is still 95% snow-covered and the pond is still iced over, but the ice is softening.

Within a week or so, the first female stops by, and soon flocks of redwings join their cousins foraging around the feeder:

April 4, 2023, cloudy, 11:00 to noon. Now that the females have arrived, the flock of blackbirds using our feeder has doubled in size. Today, there are at least seventy of them, including at least 30 redwings, 15 grackles, and a half dozen cowbirds.

The males then go to work establishing territories around the pond. These birds will eventually build nests in the cattails that line the pond, and a half-dozen or more are resident most summers. So, the males have two big tasks: first stake out and defend a territory and then attract a female. And this is where those red patches lined with a thin yellow stripe become important:

April 29, 2020, 42 degrees, sunny, beautiful! Two redwing blackbirds faced off high in the tops of two naked larch trees on the Point. They seemed to be working on boundary lines, as they fluttered about each other. Then they landed, one in each of the larch trees. The one in the highest perch looked down on the other and flashed its red stripes – take that! The other meekly sat still, showing only yellow and, after a silent minute or two, flew off.

By early June, redwings are busy feeding their hatchlings and chasing away me and any other intruders:

June 5, 2010.  The redwings didn’t like my getting too close to their nests. First they called – “tsi – tsi- tsi – tsi” – from the tops of trees by the pond. Then they hovered over my head, still calling. Finally, they buzzed me.

When I walk out along the dam in July, I enjoy watching and listening to the proud males uttering their strange calls from the tops of the little clumps of willows and birches. They flash their reddest at me, not knowing that I merely want to see their colors, not to steal their babies. With luck, I have been able to get a couple of photos showing the angry male in flight.

 

June 3, 2015. An angry redwing almost flew into me as I walked along the dam.

 

 My Favorite Wings: Dragonflies

If you sit by a pond on a sunny afternoon, you almost certainly see dragonflies patrolling the shoreline or resting on low vegetation near the shore. Many species have spots or splotches of color that are quite beautiful, but my two favorites are ones that a) I see every summer by the pond and b) frequently pose for a photo.

The 12-spotted skimmer is nearly three inches long, and the twelve black and white spots on each pair of wings make it one of the most photogenic dragonflies. Although I seldom find more than a couple around the pond at any given time, I usually see one or two of them at least once a week during mid-summer.

July 8, 2018, 85 degrees, nice breeze, perfect! The first D-Day skimmer flew by right as I was sitting on the frog bench starting this entry in my journal. Yes, I know it’s a 12-spotted skimmer, but I like to use the name that Nancy gave it twenty years ago. She said their wing stripes reminded her of the easily recognizable black and white stripes the allies painted on the wings and gliders that took part in the D-Day Invasion back in 1944.

July 9, 2022. 12-spotted skimmer perched on a twig at the edge of the pond.

The male widow skimmer, which is about the same size as the 12-spotted, also has black and white bands on its wings. Each male will define a territory perhaps a dozen yards long along the dam. He will fly back and forth a few times, then land for a minute or more just to see if any competitors might try to horn in. Unlike the 12-spotted, he is just as likely to land on wildflowers or grass as well as on twigs overhanging the pond.

Males of both species will aggressively defend their territories against other males, creating an exciting blur of color as they circle each other until one of them gives up and flies away.

July 16, 2019, 75 degrees, late morning, some sun, breeze, great day for me and the dragonflies! Two 12-spotted skimmers engaged in a long-lasting dog fight over the reeds, back and forth all along the dam. Perhaps like me, they’ve only seen one female 12-spotted this year. Two widow skimmer males also dogfighting along the dam, flying out over the dam and then in and out of the cattails.

July 9, 2019, 100pm, partly cloudy, warm, dry. I spent a happy hour and a half taking photos of insects, including a widow skimmer that repeatedly returned to pose on the top of the lupine after flying around its territory midway down the dam. Later, a 12-spotted skimmer flew in and out of the opening at our end of the pond.

I know that my fascination with dragonflies is unusual, and I am happy that my wife views this as one of my interesting eccentricities rather than an indication that I should seek professional help. Since this is an essay about “MY favorite wings,” it probably doesn’t matter whether or not she or my other readers will be familiar with MY selections. Perhaps my photos will encourage some to spend a few hours out by a pond some sunny afternoon in the hopes of seeing these skimmers.  Good places to look include Coffin Pond, the pond by the parking lot for the trails in Bretzfelder Park, and the ponds you come across in the Sugar Hill Town Forest or the Scotland Brook Audubon Sanctuary in Landaff.

My Favorite Wings: Butterflies

As was the case with dragonflies, my favorite butterflies need to be common and willing to pose. I could include the monarch in this category, but then I would be highlighting what is likely the most popular butterfly in America. Instead, I’ll choose the silver-spotted skipper and the white admiral, two butterflies that are commonly seen on our lawn, by the pond, over our gardens and in the meadows. 

There is a back story that makes the silver-spotted skipper one of my favorites. Back more than twenty years ago, I spent a couple of weeks painting the trim on our house, a task that involved a great deal of scraping. In order to keep bits of old paint out of the lawn, I would spread a drop cloth below the ladder before going to work. One day, when I came down, I was distressed to see that somehow flakes of old paint had ended up stuck on the wings of a poor butterfly. I regretted scraping right next to wet paint, and I hoped that I hadn’t doomed the poor creature. At least it was able to fly off. It was only days later, when I saw several more of these butterflies, that I realized what I had taken to be a paint chip was in fact an irregular white marking on the underside of its wings. These butterflies especially love to get nectar from Joe Pye Weed, and they usually sit with their wings up, thereby highlighting the white spots.

August 2, 2019, 80 degrees, sunny, not so humid. At 230, bullfrogs gave a brief rumbling chorus. Dragonflies and Damselflies are very active. I took photos of silver-spotted skippers and other butterflies on the Joe Pye Weed.

White admirals are large, dark butterflies easily identified by the contrasting white band across the top side of its wings. From a distance, they hardly look like a nominee for “My favorite wings.” However, up close, you can see brilliant blue and orange spots as well as variations on the dark blacks and browns.  I have seen them as early as mid-April, but they are more commonly seen in mid-summer. Like the silver-spotted skipper, they love the Joe Pye Weed, and I often see both species in our large patch of this voluminous wildflower late summer.

July 3, 2020. White admiral, showing blues and oranges of wing tops.

July 8, 2019. White admiral, showing orange and bits of blues on the underside of its wings.

Keep your eyes open, and you may come across one or both of these butterflies when you walk through a field or along a rural road bordered by wildflowers. Maybe you’ll come across a different butterfly with even more beautiful colors that you could choose to be “one of YOUR favorite wings!”

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / July 2023

Frog and Toad at the Pond

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Frog Waits

Frog sits at the edge of the pond, his legs splayed out to either side, only his head out of the water. Motionless and silent for minutes at a time, looking straight at the shore, he waits patiently – for what? Lunch? Probably not, as he had feasted the last several days on black flies, mayflies and other insects suddenly so numerous at the edge of the pond.

Perhaps he’s thinking of the day last year when one of the little yellow snails slithered right up his belly, nearly to his mouth. Fortunately for the snail, Frog had never developed a taste for food that requires a can opener. 

More likely, he’s wondering what’s delaying his long-time friend Toad, who joins him every year when Toad and his relatives came to the pond for what they call their “family reunion.”  Toad always was one for the first to make it to the pond, because he so much wanted to see his friend Frog.

After a while, Frog gives his special call: instead of the single “plonk” that he and the other green frogs normally make, Frog goes “plonk – plonk - - - PLONK.” If Toad were anywhere nearby, he would recognize the call and head directly toward Frog.

Frog ignores the mayfly nymph that crawled up beside him, gives another of his special calls, and continues to wait.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.




June 16, 2018. Green frog with mayfly nymph at the edge of the pond.

 

Toad Hears the Call

 It was just a week or two ago that Toad had been rudely awakened from his long winter slumber by something totally unexpected and unknown. Was it an earthquake? Was it the end of the world? Why was the ground shaking? And why was a huge hand coming down into the damp soil, wrapping around him, and then dropping him off to the side of the nice open area where he’d buried himself to sleep through the long winter?

Toad had managed to stumble a few feet into the tall grass, where he quivered for several minutes before realizing that he was unhurt and in no danger. Had he understood English, he would have understood what had happened, for Nancy had shouted out to Carl:

Wow! I’ve been turning over the garden, and I came across a buried toad! Fortunately, I missed hitting it with my trowel, and was able to lift it out, brush off some of the dirt, and place it at the edge of the meadow.”

Today, Toad is finally starting to feel himself. He’d been able to regain his strength by resting under a brushpile, where he’d easily been able to find plenty to eat. Now it is time to head for the Pond for the big family gathering. Probably Frog is already there.

As one of the family elders, Toad is responsible for knowing how to get to the Pond and when to begin the journey.  Before starting, he has to be sure that everyone is awake and able to proceed, and he wants to be sure that it is warm and wet enough for a comfortable trip. Who wants to be crawling through rough, cold, dry leaves and sticks for hours or days?

Today might be the day to start, but until he hears Frog’s special call, he won’t know exactly where to go. An hour passes, then another hour. Then suddenly, he hears Frog’s call, not just once but twice!

So now it is time to start. He gives his first trill of the season, a long, 15-second staccato trill, proud that his call is much longer and more remarkable than the feeble, throaty trills of the tree frogs. His trill is soon echoed by the other elders, and everyone realizes it’s time to head depart. 

Toad, having over-wintered nearby, is one of the first to reach the pond. After hopping onto a little mat made of fallen, floating cattails, he gives an exceptionally long and loud trill to let Frog know that he is back in town.

 

June 2, 2018. A toad trills from his perch on a clump of last year’s cattail fronds.

 

 

By the end of the day, a few others have joined Toad at the pond. They continue to trill, long after dusk, and more and more of their relatives join in. To be more precise, more and more of their male relatives join in, for the males are always the first to reach the Pond.  Therefore, it will take two or three days for everyone to gather at the Pond. Progress is also slow, because some of the toads are still groggy, others are unsure of where to go, and the youngest have yet to learn the wonders awaiting them.

Frog and Toad at the Pond

Who really knows how Frog and Toad communicate? Can Frog vary his “plonk” or Toad his trilling to convey their emotions? Can they communicate via subtle changes in expression? Or is eye contact enough? I have no idea how they do it, but do it they do![1]

When they meet in early June, Frog and Toad, like any old friends, presumably talk about their families, their adventures, their favorite food, and their acquaintances. Some of Frog’s children have grown up and acquired prime footage on the other side of the Pond. The youngest are still tadpoles that spent the winter under the ice, and Frog undoubtedly points them out to Toad when one of them happens to swim by.

June 17, 2018. One of the nearly three-inch long green frog tadpoles that overwintered in the Pond.

Frog fondly remembers his year as a tadpole, when all he had to do was swim around the pond with his pals, easily finding enough to eat simply by opening his mouth and too young and naïve to worry about the great blue herons or snapping turtles that periodically stop by for a meal.

Toad remembers nothing of what was barely a month that he spent as a tadpole. When hardly an inch long, he had to climb out of the pond along with hundreds of his cousins, cross the trail, and head off into the woods, unaware of the many dangers lurking there. Now, as an adult, he admits to Frog that he has no idea how or why he was one of the few that survived.

[1] For documentation of interactions between frogs and toads, see the excellent series of reports published by Arnold Lobel, beginning with Frog and Toad are Friends, Harpers & Row, 1970.

Toad Joins the Party

The next morning, Frog and Toad swap tales about encounters (actual, enhanced, and totally made-up) with turtles, trout, heron, kingfishers, and otters. But the trilling builds as more and more toads reach the pond, and Toad finally must tend to his duties. At least that is what Toad tells Frog. What he describes as a family reunion is more accurately described as a “party” and what will certainly appear to Frog and any other observers to be rather a wild one. Frog smiles, because he knows why Toad leaped so quickly and so excitedly into the water.

He watches Toad swim out to the middle of the pond, then back to a spot a few yards from the shore where he just hangs in the water, waiting. Waiting for what? Well, it doesn’t take much of a naturalist to answer that question, because he and all the other trilling males are waiting for the females to arrive. Toad has taken up a position as a sentry, hoping to be the first to see a female swimming in from the other side of the Pond. 



June 2, 2018, 75 degrees, partly cloudy. Toads trilled some yesterday, but much more today. There were many males, but only a few females, which may explain why their energy was so devoted to their loud trilling.


Although a few other males take up sentry positions across the cove, many more sit at the shoreline, trilling again and again. Frog sits in his usual spot, willing to stay close to the unruly mass of trilling toads in order to watch the courting drama unfolding all around him.

Finally, a female shows up. Toad knows it is a female, because she is so much larger than he is. She swims by, lets Toad approach, apparently likes what she sees in Toad, and accepts him as a mate. Toad settles on her broad back, wraps his arms around her, and waits for her to start laying eggs. They remain in this position for many minutes, and eventually she emits her eggs, which appear to be tiny dots along a pair of slim strands that are several feet long. From his position on her back, Toad emits a cloudy spray that will fertilize the eggs. Another male toad climbs on her back, but Toad doesn’t care – he hardly even notices when a third male grabs one of Toad’s legs as well as one of hers. With the weight of three males on her back, the clump of toads sinks two feet to the bottom of the pond. The males don’t even notice that they’re under water, but she has had enough. Since she is so much bigger and stronger, she simply pushes them all up for a gulp of air.

All around them, other couples and clumps of mating toads are madly circling in the water, while unattached males look for a chance to join in. The churning and the trilling continue until the pond finally falls silent around midnight.

June 19, 2006, hot, hazy and humid. The toads were partying today. One or more males would glom onto a female, and dozens of clumps of toads would roil the water all along the shore.

The next morning, the party continues, but Toad has had enough. He stops by for a final hour with Frog, then heads slowly back into the forest. They won’t meet again until next spring. Toad is exhausted, but happy to have spent time with Frog both before and after the “family reunion.”

Frog Watches and Waits

Frog is happy to have had time with Toad, but he is also happy that the rowdy toad family has gone.  The noise and turmoil of their parties is too much of a disruption to his quiet life at the edge of the pond. He is glad that frog families are less numerous and much more decorous than those of toads. He will have plenty of chances to find a mate over the next month or so, and meanwhile he can keep a watch over the tadpoles, which now are losing their tails and growing arms and legs.

June 22, 2018. A green frog sits at the edge of the pond, pondering who knows what?

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / May 2023

Thrice Willing Warbler

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

What’s in a Name? 

The warbler shown in the above photo, which is one of the most widely distributed warblers in North America, was once known as the Myrtle Warbler.  That name referred to its ability to eat the hard waxy fruits of crepe myrtle trees, giving these warblers a reliable food source for starting their northward migration. When they get to New England, they won’t find any crepe myrtle trees, but they will be able to eat similar fruits of the bayberry bushes found along the coast (fruits that we thought were useful only for making candles!).  Fortunately for its ability to enjoy its meals, its diet may be better once it reaches the tall spruces where it will spend the summer, as its Latin name setophagus coronata translates to something like “crowned moth-eater.”  

Myrtle warblers were once thought to be eastern cousins of the Audubon warblers found mostly in the western US.  However, observers discovered that the Myrtle and Audubon warblers interbreed where their ranges overlap, so scientists decided to classify them as varieties of a single species.  Well, fine and good; let the scientists do their job.  If two supposedly distinct species interbreed, then they cannot be separate species.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


But who decided that “yellow-rumped warbler” would be their new name?  I admit that the yellow rump is diagnostic, but the photographs suggest that yellow-winged, white-throated, or black-masked warbler would have been nearly as descriptive and much more appropriate in polite company.   



May 9, 2015.  The bird formerly known as the “Myrtle Warbler” shows off its fine yellow wings, white throat, and black mask.   

 

 



Unfortunately, I must admit that I quite like names that help me identify birds that fly into the yard.  All warblers are small and flighty, and quite a few have black & white stripes broken up here and there with bits of yellow, but only the Myrtle and Audubon warblers have the yellow rump.  That much I can remember, and that is the only sure way that I can identify a yellow-rumped warbler without using a guidebook.  For example, the above photo shows an extraordinarily beautiful bird, but only a close comparison to the pictures in the guidebook convinced me that it was indeed a yellow-rumped warbler.  On the other hand, as soon as I managed to take the photo below, I knew that I was looking at a yellow-rumped warbler, albeit from a rather embarrassing perspective. 

October 5, 2016.  Is this how a bird wants to be remembered?  Probably not, but this is the view that confirms that it is a yellow-rumped warbler. 

Females and juveniles are always less colorful than the males that we see during the spring migration, so the butt photo is even more necessary to identify these warblers in the fall. 

October 19, 2020.  I took several pictures and a video of a yellow-rumped warbler foraging in the leaves on the front lawn.  When it poked its head down into the grass, its wings rose up, clearly exposing the yellow rump that is barely visible in this photo. 

Thrice Willing Warbler  

In May, birdwatchers in New England look forward to the spring migration of warblers.  In Boston, they – the birdwatchers and the warblers – flock to places like Mount Auburn Cemetery.  The warblers flit about high in the trees, while the birdwatchers crane their necks as they scan the emerging foliage hoping for a glimpse through their binoculars of the birds that they can hear singing.  Serious birdwatchers can identify the species just by hearing the song, and they seem to be happy just to hear the music and capture a few glimpses of the birds.    

The other day, my neighbor Rebecca Brown said that she had heard two types of warblers singing in the woods by the beginning of May: black-throated greens and black-throated blues.  I probably will hear one or both of them if I spend some time in the woods, but I certainly don’t expect to see any of them.  Why not?  Because I haven’t seen either of these two species more than a few times in 25 years in Sugar Hill.  Although they are willing to stop by on their way to Canada, they usually stay hidden high in the trees.  

Yellow-rumped warblers are not only willing to stop by, they are willing to be seen, and they are willing to pose for the photographer.   I have frequently seen them amidst a tangle of branches in a clump of alders, willows, or birches.  If I stay still, they may stay in one place long enough to get a photo, possibly even one where the bird is only partially obscured by the branches. 

 


May 12, 2017.  A yellow-rumped warbler landed in the hedge and stayed there long enough for me to take a photo.   

 

 

 

What is unusual about yellow-rumped warblers is that they also will perch in the open, perhaps on some cattails by the pond, on a roof, or on the lawn.   Look for them through mid-May, but don’t expect to see them in the summer.  By the end of May, they will be raising their young deep in the spruce/fir forests of Canada, and they won’t be back around here until late summer.  

May 4, 2019.  A yellow-rumped warbler perched on the cattails at the edge of the pond, and it stayed there long enough for me to take this photo. 

Final Note 

Before checking this little essay for the usual errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar, I discovered that I may actually have learned something from my literary efforts: 

May 5, 2023.  A warbler rustled about in the willow clump by the edge of the pond, looking exactly like one of the photos I had just included in my most recent PPP draft.  If I hadn’t just pontificated on the yellow-rumped warbler’s beautiful colors, I never would have imagined that I was looking at one of these poorly named birds.

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / April 2023

Spying on Sparrows

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

The snow finally disappeared after three straight days of brilliant sunshine. Rising temperatures and strong winds dried out most of the yard and the meadows. The ice is gone from the pond, and the bird feeders must now be taken in at night. Robins and redwings are here, neighbors have heard woodcock, and new birds arrive every day.

The first tree sparrow showed up this year on April 3rd, and several song sparrows stopped by a day later.  Unlike chickadees and titmice, these sparrows ignored the feeders and foraged beside a couple of juncos, searching for the seeds on the ground.  Of course, since this is the North Country, I need to remind you that spring may not fully arrive until late April or even the first week of May. Tree sparrows and song sparrows won’t mind the snow, so long as they can still find some seeds.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


April 16, 2018.  Song Sparrows have stripes converging to a spot on their breast, their beaks are dark, and they have white stripes above their eyes.

April 16, 2018.  Tree Sparrows have breast spots on a clear breast, cinnamon-colored caps, and bi-colored beaks.

The song sparrows particularly like the area right below the feeder, because that is where the most seeds piled up over the winter.  Of course, the husks of the sunflower seeds far outnumber the remaining unopened seeds, and that is probably why the chickadees and titmice prefer to go to the feeder, where there is always a fresh supply of seeds.  I don’t know why the sparrows don’t follow suit.  Perhaps they prefer something other than sunflower seeds, perhaps they avoid crowded lunchrooms, or perhaps they can’t stand the smell of red squirrels that surely lingers about the feeder.

In any case, the song sparrows stay on the ground.  Although I have watched the birds at and below the feeder for nearly 25 years, I just this week noticed an unusual behavior. Most birds peck among the grass with their beaks, searching for an unopened sunflower seed or for one of the smaller, round seeds that the winter regulars discard. The song sparrows have a more effective method. They rapidly scratch with their feet for half a second, spraying the detritus about, and allowing them to pick out the best seeds. That is just another example of why bird-watching is much more than compiling a life list of the birds you have seen.


Sparrows Month by Month

Tree sparrows are the only sparrows that I have seen here in the middle of winter.  However, this is the northernmost part of their winter range, and they may not be regular visitors until late March.

December 16, 2017.  I took a photo of a tree sparrow at the feeder.  [This is the only photo I have taken of a tree sparrow between mid-April and mid-December.]

January 6, 2016.  A pair of tree sparrows and a pair of juncos were enjoying the sunflower seeds spread out under the feeder. [I took more photos of tree sparrows on 1/7, 2/9, and 2/11/16.]

March 28, 2016.  Tree sparrows are the only sparrows that visit our feeder in winter, and they will be in Canada by the end of April.

Song sparrows are the next to arrive.  I have seen them for the first time as early as March 11th and as late as mid-April. When they first arrive, they sometimes seem rather sluggish:

April 3, 2022, 50 degrees at 4 pm. The first song sparrow of the year stood motionless by the feeder for more than five minutes, allowing me to take several photos. Finally, it managed to take one step to the right and snatch a seed. Then it walked and pecked its way toward the pole that holds up the feeder, where it chased another sparrow away.

At about the same time that tree sparrows depart for Canada, chipping sparrows and white-throated sparrows show up looking for seeds and insects. Some of them will be summer residents, and they will soon join the song sparrows in looking for places to build their nests.

April 21, 2003. Today was our first sighting of many birds:  a flicker, tree swallows (who immediately checked out the house by the pond), a white-throated sparrow, a chipping sparrow, and an eastern kingbird.

May 4, 2019. Out past the birches behind the screen house, a white-throated sparrow foraged in the weeds. I heard its easily identifiable call but only managed one picture in which the bird was mostly obscured by grass and protected by its standard-issue sparrow camouflage.

I’m always excited to see the spectacular colors of a mature white-throated sparrow. Yellow spots just behind its bill provide a striking contrast to its crisp white, black and grey stripes.

 

White Throated Sparrow,
April 28, 2016

Although I only see them briefly as they migrate in the spring and the fall, I frequently hear them all summer calling loudly and clearly what Roger Tory Petersen characterized as “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.”

June 28, 2005, 85 degrees, hot hazy, and humid. Walking through the Lower 40, I heard hermit thrush, white-throated sparrows, and winter wrens singing their spectacular and easily recognized songs, but I only saw phoebes and crows.

July 12, 2000, (partly cloudy, 70 degrees). I followed the power lines down to a spot where a large rock provided a seat and a chance to enjoy the view over a field filled with daisies and buttercups toward the green slopes of Garnet Hill.  On the way back, I heard a white-throated sparrow singing his “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody” song from the top of a 15-foot snag – very loud and triumphant, like something out of Aida.

Although chipping sparrows do nest in Sugar Hill, we’re most likely to see them when they arrive in the spring or when they’re getting ready to migrate in the summer. Like tree sparrows, they have a rufous crown and a chest spot, but the chipping sparrows are smaller and lack the breast stripes. I most commonly see them searching for insects on the patio or along the edge of our driveway.

June 27, 2022, 80 degrees, partly cloudy after morning rain. A chipping sparrow foraged on the patio, either unaware or not bothered by the kestrel sitting in one of its usual perches on a dead branch at the top of the large maple at the corner of Post and Pearl Lake Roads.

August 15, 2015. Chipping Sparrows often patrol the edge of our gravel driveway, which appears to offer a tasty variety of fast foods.

The resident sparrows make their nests in May, and by the end of June, they can be seen flying around with food for their brood.

June 24, 2018, 65 degrees, cloudy, still, noon. …At 1:35 pm, while sitting on the steps of the screen house, I managed to get a photo of a song sparrow with a winged insect in its beak. It sat in one spot for several minutes, allowing me time to find it in the camera, no small feat since the bird was 80 feet away amidst leaves.

 

June 16, 2016.  I took a photo of a song sparrow that had found a morsel for lunch.  This bird was kind enough to pose for me on a dead branch not too far away.

By the first week of July, the young sparrows have fledged, so now they and their parents are much more likely to be seen.  For a while, the youngsters are sluggish and very vulnerable, because it takes a while to learn to fly and to realize the dangers that they face.

July 6, 2001. 64 degrees high! Cloudy. A juvenile song sparrow was sitting listlessly – petrified of being out? It didn’t move more than once every 2-3 minutes, and then only about 6 inches.

July 7, 2006. In the afternoon, I worked clearing a trail on the Pearl Lake Road side of Creamery Pond. While sitting on rocks at the edge of the marsh, I saw song sparrows in front of me, white-throated sparrows singing in trees off to my right, and two sparrows coming right to a little clearing just a few feet away. They were as surprised to see me as I was to see them!

July 10, 2018. …When I swam up to the Point, a song sparrow flitting about in the nearby alder clump ignored me, though I was less than ten feet away! Apparently, the bird doesn’t expect and therefore doesn’t respond to a potential threat coming from the pond.

One year, I actually found a song sparrow’s nest, so I was able to record the entire sequence of events:

July 11, 2004, 75 degrees, partly cloudy, beautiful. I found a nest 1.5 feet off the ground in dense brush; it had a 3-inch hemispherical opening that was lined with fine grass.  There were three light brown eggs with dark brown spots, approximately ½ inch long.  On the 14th, there were only two eggs left. A sparrow-sized bird was sitting on the nest on July 15th, and there were still two eggs left. I think it was a song sparrow that was defending an area about 20 feet around its nest. At one point it chased a common yellowthroat away and looked over at the nest to make sure all was OK.  It didn’t go back to its nest while I watched, nor did it fly at me.

July 22, 2004, 80 degrees, humid. There are three bluebird babies in the front house.  Song sparrows have a nest by the black raspberries. Mom is in the nest with two recently hatched youngsters.

July 29, 2004, 80 degrees, partly cloudy, beautiful. The baby song sparrows are starting to get feathers. The baby bluebirds are much larger, and they are starting to show some blue.

August 1, 2004. The baby sparrows are alive and covered with down.

That was my last record of that family, but I’ll close out with a couple of subsequent observations of what these sparrows might have been doing for the next couple of weeks:

August 11, 2009. Two song sparrows were feeding on the lawn in the backyard. The adult would catch a bug, while junior begged for food. When Mom (Dad?) caught one, junior would walk over, tilt his (her?) head back, open wide – and Mom would stick the bug in his beak.

August 19, 2018, 76 degrees, partly cloudy, light breeze, beautiful! This morning I took photos and a video of a juvenile savannah sparrow preening with its notched tail spread as it sat in an apple tree in the Upper Meadow.

August 19, 2018. Song sparrows and savannah sparrows both nest in our region, and their young are similar in appearance. Another photo confirmed that this was a savannah sparrow because it had a notched tail. This youngster was just grooming itself, neither looking for insects nor seeking a bite of the apple.

By the end of August, the summer residents have departed, and we start to see the migrating sparrows returning from Canada, but that story can better be told when the asters are blooming, and the leaves are falling.

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / March 2023

Hear that? It’s a woodpecker!

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

On a winter day, while walking through the woods, the sounds and worries of civilized life drift away. With the leaves gone, you can see hundreds of trees rising up the hillsides, and the snow dampens whatever noises are made by an occasional gust of wind. Most of the birds have retreated, if not to the south, then to the vicinity of their favorite feeders. A crow may call in the distance, but that really doesn’t qualify as bird song. Turkeys may well have crossed the trail here and there, but probably you won’t see them, and you certainly won’t hear them making any kind of sound that would be mistaken for singing. We trudge through the snow in silence, admiring the bark of the birches and beeches, searching for animal tracks – not at all bothered by the stillness. And then, we hear the distinctive rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker. Maybe just one short sequence, maybe prolonged tapping repeated again and again. At first, the sound may be indistinct, and you’re not even sure that you heard it. You stop, you listen, then it’s repeated, and you say “Did you hear that? It’s a woodpecker!”

But where is it? You stay still, hear it again, and move closer to where it is pecking. You stop, look up toward the top of that tall poplar – no, not there; is it on a different tree, or is it just hiding on the other side? Ah, there it is!

March 18, 2016. I snowshoed into Foss Woods to the trunk of a fallen poplar that I call Carl’s Seat, only to find that it fails as a seat in two feet of snow. I had to go a little further to find a higher log over the trail where I could eat lunch and, for at least a half hour, listen to a pileated woodpecker knocking very loudly once or twice a minute, first from a perch by the landing and then from a closer perch by the spring houses. I didn’t see it except when it twice flew from one tree to another, its feathers brilliant against the clear blue sky.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Big Brother or the Twins?

In the North Country, three species of woodpecker are common. The largest, of course, is the magnificent pileated woodpecker, the largest remaining woodpecker after the disgraceful extermination of the even more spectacular ivory-billed woodpecker more than a century ago.

March 9, 2022. A week ago, Jim Keefe asked me if I’d seen the pileated woodpecker drilling holes into a dead tree near the end of Post Road. I hadn’t, but today, I couldn’t miss the loud pecking of what likely was that very bird as it expanded a large hole in the maple at our end of Post Road. It ignored me as I took photos and a video showing chips flying as it ducked its head in and out.

January 31, 2022, 15 degrees, clear. The snow was only 8-12 inches deep, so I just wore my high boots, skipped the snow shoes, and headed out to Foss Woods. I heard three woodpeckers and took a photo of clippings scattered by a pileated, but didn’t see any. The fresh snow was quite beautiful.

This woodpecker’s call must have been the model for the Woody Woodpecker call recognized by all of us who once watched the Saturday morning comics. I know, I know. kids no longer have to wait until Saturday morning to watch the comics, fearing that their father will command them to “Turn off the TV and go outside and play.” They can watch whatever they want, whenever they want, so long as they can get online. However, I’m leaving this sentence as it is, because it will be well understood by anyone who qualifies for Medicare.

The other two common species appear to be twins. Both downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers have similar black & white markings, and the males of both species have a distinctive red spot on their heads. The guidebooks tell us that the best way to distinguish them is by size, for the hairy is much larger than the downy (9.25 inches long versus 6.75 inches). That fact may help if one of them poses at the feeder while another hungry bird agrees to serve as a point of comparison. However, relative size is pretty much useless if you’re craning your neck to look up toward a single bird pounding away at a dead branch near the top of an 80-foot poplar that’s just the other side of the brook!

January 8, 2021. One of the woodpecker twins flew into the feeder, and at first I wasn’t sure which one. However, since it wasn’t too much larger than the chickadee that conveniently flew in as I took this photo, I figured it must be a downy rather than a hairy.

Each of the twins has pretty much the same pattern of colors, although the downy usually has more white showing on its wings. The main distinguishing feature for the hairy is its longer bill, while the main distinguishing feature for the downy is the bristly tuft of yellow hair by the end of its bill. If the bird is close, you may be able to see one of these features, but I find I need a good photo to be sure.

February 2, 2018, 20 degrees, partly cloudy and clearing. Five inches of snow last night, making a total of a foot of soft snow atop the frozen remnants of January’s. A downy woodpecker perched, fluffed out against the cold next to my trail out to the Lower Meadow. I took a photo that showed the yellow tuft by its bill.


April 28, 2021. A female hairy woodpecker made a rare landing on our back lawn today. I knew it was a female, because it lacked the red spot on its head, and I knew it wasn’t a downy, because it was almost as large as a blue jay that foraged about ten feet away. The photo also shows the absence of a yellow tuft at the base of the bill.

New Neighbors?

New Hampshire is just past the usual range of the two other woodpeckers that are common in the northeast: the red-headed woodpecker and the red-bellied woodpecker. Both of these are colorful, easily identified as woodpeckers, and similar in size to the hairy woodpecker. I have never seen a red-bellied woodpecker anywhere in our region, and I have seen only one red-headed woodpecker that happened to sit on a granite fence post by the end of the driveway nearly twenty years ago. In Indiana, I’ve often seen them both, usually by the feeders at a Nature Center or along one of the trails in a state park. I decided to include these two birds in this photo essay because they could soon become common in the North Country. According to my 2003 edition of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds, the red-headed woodpecker is common as far east as western Vermont, less than a hundred miles away. The red-bellied is even closer to the North Country, as the same guide shows it to be common below the notches and rare in the northernmost parts of New Hampshire.

March 27, 2019, McCormick’s Creek State Park, Indiana. The red-bellied woodpecker certainly has a red spot on its head, but at most a hint of red on its belly. So much for being a well-named bird!

November 29, 2015, Shakamak State Park, Indiana. The red-headed woodpecker certainly displays our patriotic colors, but in France, whose flag is so much simpler than ours, this would be the national bird.

These two species are not only close, they have been getting closer and closer for decades. Before David Sibley became the most trusted name in birds, that honor went to Roger Tory Peterson, whose Field Guide to the Birds was first published in 1934. When I was growing up, my family had the 45th printing of the guide, which is what I still use to keep track of my life list. That guide, which had only been updated through 1947, showed the red-bellied coming only as far north as Delaware and the red-headed coming only as close as western New York and Massachusetts. If their expansion into northern New England continues, we may soon hear that they have made it to the North Country. Until then, enjoy Big Brother and the Twins, even if we can’t always tell which twin we’re looking at!

February 6, 2021. Hairy or Downy? Who cares?

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / February 2023

Finches at Your Feeder

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

The Finch Families

Even small children know about goldfinches, and anyone with a bird feeder in the north country knows about purple finches and house finches. But did you know that the much larger evening grosbeaks are also finches? Or that, in addition to the small birds willing to be so named, the finch family also includes the similarly sized pine siskins and redpolls?

I have previously written about grosbeaks, so now I’ll focus on the smaller ones, which are the ones we are most apt to see at our feeders. Goldfinches, pine siskins and redpolls are member of the genus Carduelis, while the purple and house finches are members of the genus Carpodacus. All of these, along with the grosbeaks, are part of the Fringillidae family that most of us refer to simply as the “finch family”, being careful not to drift into a discussion of the Atticus branch of the altogether different Finch family featured in To Kill a Mockingbird.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Feeder Favorites

Watching birds at the feeder is one of the things that define North County winters for me. I start every cold day by pulling on my fleece-lined jeans, and I start every evening sipping a hot drink by the wood stove. I enjoy the clear views of the mountains, the swirling snows blowing over frozen field, and moon shadows cast over the snow-covered landscape. But, what is most relevant to this series of ramblings about phenological phenomena, is that I enjoy watching the activity at the bird feeder while eating my breakfast or getting a second cup of coffee:

January 29, 2015, minus 6 degrees at 715am, brilliant sunshine! Today was the first day this year that I’ve seen gold finches at the feeder – four males in their winter plumage. Also the usual half dozen chickadees, a lone and perhaps lonely redpoll, and a blue jay. After preparing my breakfast of blueberries and home-made granola, I sat by the window for twenty minutes looking at the feeder, enjoying eating my “bird food” while the birds ate theirs.

As I look through my journals, I see that the finches generally don’t come to the feeder until mid- to late-January. Goldfinches are usually the first, then the purple finches and still later for siskins and redpolls:

January 15, 2018, 12 degrees, 3pm. All of the local birds came to the feeder for breakfast: five gold finches, a half dozen juncos, a brilliant purple finch, a couple of chickadees, a blue jay and a white-breasted nuthatch. Still no pine siskins this year.

Some days are notable for the arrival of a flock that includes dozens of small birds that take turns at the feeder, bounce back and forth between the feeder and the nearby trees, and scavenge for the seeds that I’ve thrown out on the snow. Is there any reason for this? I don’t know, but the following entry seems relevant, since right now I’m sitting by the wood stove, trying to stay warm on this day when the temperature started out at 23 below:

February 15, 2016, minus 14 at 9am. The best group of finches we have yet seen gathered today at the feeder. A dozen goldfinches, a dozen purple finches, plus a couple of chickadees and a white-breasted nuthatch. I got a photo showing 26 birds on and around the feeder. Yesterday was the coldest day of the winter (minus 21 in the morning; high of minus 4), so I wondered if the large assemblage of small birds was related to the cold.

I think I’ll make sure the feeder is full tomorrow morning!



February 15, 2016, minus 14 at 9am. The best group of finches we have yet seen gathered today at the feeder. A dozen goldfinches, a dozen purple finches, plus a couple of chickadees and a white-breasted nuthatch.





Which Finch is That?

Male goldfinches and redpolls are easy to identify. Goldfinches have their ostentatious yellow and black coloring and redpolls have their distinctive yellow bill and red cap.

Male Goldfinch, February 5, 2022

Male Redpoll, January 27, 2015

Female goldfinches are also readily identified since they, like Victorian ladies, generally appear for dinner with their well-dressed male escort.

The other finches can be difficult to distinguish. I have always had the most trouble with purple finches and house finches, which seem very similar to the naked eye, and I have even confused them with red polls:

April 28, 2015. I wondered if this "purple finch" was a red poll because of what appeared to be a red cap – but after looking more closely at the photo and checking the guidebook, I realized it was a house finch!


February 8, 2022. The male house finch certainly appears to sport the same brilliant colors of the purple finch, but a good photo will show that he has larger brown areas on his head and brown stripes rather than continued rosy colors on his undersides.




February 5, 2022. The male purple finch is clearly more colorful than his house finch cousin, especially when you have a good look at its rosy breast.




Although the males of these two species may easily be mistaken for each other, at least you know they are most likely to be either a purple finch or a house finch. The females are harder to identify. Not only are similar to each other, they are similar to sparrows and other small brown birds that my friend Tony refers to as “Little Brown Jobs.”

Pine Siskins, February 26, 2022. The yellow tinged wings are the best identification for the male, but the colors are not always easy to see. The female is pretty inconspicuous, with only her white wing bars to offset her otherwise drab appearance.

Female Purple Finch, March 18, 2022. Her bold, white head stripes and short, well-defined dark streaks distinguish her from her drabber house finch cousin who lacks the head streaks and whose breast has blurred, gray streaks.

The purple finch is the state bird of New Hampshire, and I would have no quarrel with that selection even if I only knew about its remarkable coloration. However, as I learned more than twenty years ago, this bird can really sing:

April 7-8, 2001. The snow was almost to my knees in the backyard when I filled the feeders. I went snowshoeing in the Lower 40, which was very tough in spots where the corn snow gave no support and I’d sink in 12-14 inches – too tiring to be pleasant. A few birds were around, including a purple finch whose song was so splendid and so varied that I mistook it for an entire flock of songbirds.

(Please forgive this reminder that we could well be tromping through two feet of snow for another two months.)

Finch Behavior

Birds, like the rest of us in the North Country, can be classified into various categories for planning purposes. Turkeys, like some of our more reclusive neighbors, wander around through their own haunts, too proud to be seen scavenging food at what they perhaps view as a tourist traps. Chickadees, titmice and blue jays seem to drop in for the season, perhaps securing their winter residence through the avian equivalent of AirBnB. I see these birds nearly every day, flying between the feeder and the nearby “Big Willow”, tall spruce, or alder clumps. Woodpeckers and nuthatches also seem to stay for the season, but they are more likely to be seen in the trees than at the feeder. A few birds, notably cardinals, drop in for a few days, never staying very long by the feeder, and often alone, like someone who came north only to cross off another 4000-footer before heading back to Boston. And then there’s the avian equivalent of leaf-peepers on tour buses, the flocks of hungry birds that drop in from time to time, flitting here and there, eating up everything in sight, and then, summoned by their tour guide, suddenly rising up and disappearing. Who knows where they go next? Who knows when the next busload will show up? Bohemian Waxwings are the most extreme example of the tour bus bird: they travel through the North Country in the dead of winter in flocks of a dozen or more – but I have only ever seen a couple of such flocks in Sugar Hill.

Goldfinches frequently are winter residents, often seen in pairs at the feeder, and some may stay year-round. Purple finches are more apt to travel in small flocks of less than a dozen birds, and they are likely to hang around only for a couple of weeks in late winter. According to the guidebooks, house finches, which also travel in small flocks, are supposed to be more common than their purple cousins. However, in my experience, purple finches drop by for a week or two most winters, whereas house finches are rarely seen.

Redpolls are clearly among the tour bus birds, as they are seldom seen alone, they don’t show up every year, and sometimes they travel in huge flocks:

March 22, 2011: yesterday a flock of sixty redpolls was in the back yard by the feeder and the “Big Willow”. Today, the flock was more than twice that big.

March 21, 2022: a flock of fifty redpolls was active in the back yard today.

Pine siskins, like redpolls, don’t show up every year, and when they do, it’s generally just a pair or two that are travelling along with a larger group of the other small finches. If you don’t look closely, you may not even know that they are there.

March 7, 2022. A pair of pine siskins has joined a flock of gold finches seeking bird seed amid the leaf litter below the feeder. The female siskin is in the upper left of the photo; note her nondescript brown head and her clear white wingbars. The male tried to escape this photo op, but his blurred image can’t hide the yellow coloring in its wings. On the right, a couple of female or juvenile goldfinches have found some seeds.

According to my records, the best time to see flocks of finches is between mid-February and mid-March, so fill the feeders full of fine finch food and keep an eye on the feeder!

February 5, 2022. Finches by the feeder – a common sight every winter!

Postscript: I finished this essay yesterday, sitting for hours in the warmth of the wood stove on the day that began at 23 below and ended with a high of minus three degrees. I followed my own advice by filling the feeders and keeping close watch at the kitchen window. Sure enough, just as described above in my journal entry following a bitterly cold day in February 2016, today was the best bird day of the year. This year’s first redpoll, the first goldfinch, and the first two male cardinals joined six chickadees, four titmice, a female cardinal, a couple of white-breasted nuthatches, and a downy woodpecker at the feeder.

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / October 2022

Turkey Vultures - or Liver Birds???

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Turkey Vultures 

Thirty or forty years ago, turkey vultures were rare in New England, and I remember being excited the first time I saw one in Massachusetts. My son and I were sitting atop a huge glacial erratic in a scout camp just south of Boston, sometime in the late 1980s. As we enjoyed the views over the forested valleys north of Great Blue Hill, a lone turkey vulture glided not too high overhead. We had seen many turkey vultures in our trips out

west, but this was the first we had seen one so close to home, and we were very pleased to have this unexpected view of such a large bird.

Since then, turkey vultures have steadily expanded northward, no doubt helped by the wide corridors opened up by the Interstate Highway System. Today, they are often seen soaring high over fields or highways with their wings tilted up in what is known to guidebooks and mathematicians as a “dihedral angle.” When you see one circling in the distance or above a thin layer of broken clouds, you watch closely until you see its angled

wings and its typical jerky, side-to-side movements. At that point, you know darn well that it is a turkey vulture, and, if you are like me, you will probably say something like “Damn, not a hawk, just another turkey vulture.” And a little deeper inside you have to admit that you had hoped this large, black bird might even have been an eagle.


1 Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


If I were restricting this little essay to the North Country, that is about all that I could say and the above photo of a turkey vulture circling pretty low over Toad Hill Road in Sugar Hill would be my best of just a handful of photos of them. However, I haven’t been in Sugar Hill since before Thanksgiving, and out here in Indiana, turkey vultures are much more common and vastly more interesting to watch.

For example, in my experience in the North Country, these birds almost never do anything but soar in wide circles, high overhead, presumably looking for lunch. I may have seen one or two along I93 pecking at road kill – not exactly an everyday experience since I’ve been up and down that road on a regular basis for more than 20 years. And I’ve never seen even one of them roosting in a tree or sitting on a cliff anywhere near New Hampshire.

Coming Home to Roost

Any suspicion I might have had that these birds eat, drink, and sleep as they’re floating with the clouds was dispelled a few years ago when we spent a couple of days at Turkey Run State Park, which is 35 miles north of Terre Haute. During our day trips to this park, we had of course seen numerous turkey vultures, but we were more excited by a sight of a large hawk, an eagle, or a great blue heron flying along the river or over the canyons that make this park such a great place to take a hike. In the summer, even if we stayed at the park for dinner, it was still light before we headed back to Terre Haute. So, when we stayed at the park for a couple of nights in March 2019, that was the first time that we were there as the sun was setting. One evening, as we walked back to the Inn where we would be staying, we looked across a narrow field toward a group of large trees to see a bunch of turkey vultures returning to where they would be staying. A couple dozen were already settled down high in the bare branches, while another dozen or so circled warily around the trees like a bunch of tenth-graders trying to figure out who to sit with and who to avoid in their high school cafeteria.



March 23, 2019, 6:20pm. Dozens of turkey vultures decided to roost right next to where we parked by the Inn in Turkey Run State Park in Indiana.





The vultures were totally unconcerned with us, so I was able to take all the photos I wanted. We were close enough to get good shots of various groups, which included both adults with their typical bare, red heads, and juveniles whose heads were still gray.

March 23, 2019. This a closeup of three of the nearly two dozen turkey vultures roosting by the Inn in Turkey Run State Park. The one in the center is a juvenile, easily identifiable because its head has not yet turned red.


Liver Birds???

Yes, I am now going to explain why this little essay is entitled “Turkey Vultures – or Liver Birds???” Liver Birds (pronounced to rhyme with “diver birds”) were large birds that allegedly inhabited the little bay whose role as a harbor on the Mersey River would provide the economic impetus that made Liverpool one of the major cities of England. If you have ever been to Liverpool, then you have probably heard about these ancient birds and the local belief that Liverpool will survive only as long as the Liver Birds remain. If you walked along the waterfront, you will have seen the Liver Birds sitting atop the towers of one of the majestic buildings facing the river. To be sure, these are statues rather than living birds, but thus far they have been sufficiently real to ensure the longevity of the city.

April 15, 2014. Liver Birds sitting atop the Royal Liver Building on the Liverpool Waterfront


As shown in the photos, Liver Birds perch with their wings spread, causing some to speculate that they are actually overgrown cormorants, which are commonly seen sitting on rocks or buoys with their wings spread. However, after a recent trip to the College of St. Mary-in-the-Woods in Terre Haute, we found a group of turkey vultures sitting atop all of the spires of the college’s chapel, very much like the Liver Birds posing on the towers of the Royal Liver Building.

December 31, 2022. Turkey vultures on the spires of the cathedral at St. Mary’s in the

Woods College in Terred Haute, Indiana. Couldn’t these be modern Liver Birds?

Could these have been the inspiration for the Liver Birds? I’m not the one to make such a momentous judgment; I’ll leave that to you.

Turkey Vulture?

Or Liver Bird?

And just one final thought. That magnificent turkey vulture sitting nobly on a cross at the highest point of the cathedral seems to be much more than a bird of prey. Could it also be a bird of PRAY?

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / November 2022

Northern Red Oaks

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Growing Up with Oak Trees 

I have loved oak trees as long as I can remember.  When I was a kid growing up in Rhode Island, we lived in a Cape Cod house on a quarter-acre lot that, like all of the other lots in our little village, had a half dozen or so oak trees.  The large ones in the front yard produced mammoth crops of acorns, and in the fall, we raked their fallen leaves into large piles so we could run through and roll over in them.  These stately specimens, without any branches lower than ten feet off the ground, were too big to climb.  The ones in our back yard were tall enough to provide summer shade, but too small to climb.  Since my friends and I preferred climbing trees to raking leaves or gazing at the noble, inaccessible limbs of an aged oak, we had to venture further afield to have some fun.


[1] Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountains. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Fortunately, we had many choices in our neighborhood.  Several proper climbing oaks were at the end of a vacant lot just down the street.  We could jump up, grab the lowest branch, and hoist ourselves up to a spot where we could reach other branches and work our way up into the canopy, visible only to the resident robins and squirrels.  When we were old enough to explore the other side of the school yard, we found a spot where a half dozen medium-sized oaks ringed a hole about eight feet across.  We could easily climb any one of them, then go from branch to branch all around the little circle.  Naturally, we called this delightful place “Monkey Tree Island.”

One of the few pictures I remember drawing in elementary school showed a robin sitting in its nest in a crook of a branch of an oak tree.  When we vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard or visited Cape Cod, I discovered many different kinds of oaks, some well-suited for the sandy soils close to the water and some better off on the hillsides.  When I joined boy scouts, we camped and hiked through forests dominated by oaks, and I probably figured that was what forests were supposed to be like.  When I went to college in Cambridge, Mass, I walked to class under a row of immense oaks that lined Memorial Drive.  After we were married, we lived next to Arnold Arboretum, where majestic pin oaks lined the road that we followed to the top of Peter’s Hill for its splendid view of the city. 

In short, for most of my life, I have lived, gone to school, or worked in places where I was never more than a few feet from the nearest oak tree. 

Are There Oaks in Foss Woods? 

We bought an old farm house in Sugar Hill in 1997, and I soon made a rough trail into the nearby woods, which were filled with vast amounts of pine, fir, maple, poplar, birch, ash, and beech.  I was too busy exploring this fascinatingly diverse forest to notice or comment upon any shortage of oaks.   

A couple of years later, when an 80-acre parcel within this forest was surveyed for house lots, we joined our neighbors in an effort that eventually conserved this land, now known as Foss Woods, as the first property acquired by the newly-formed Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust (ACT).    

When ACT hired a forester to plan a series of patch cuts in Foss Woods, our neighbor Harry Reid was surprised to find that the forester included northern red oaks in his pre-cut inventory.  Harry and I had, by that time, created rough trails leading from our yards out into and through the woods, and we had each spent a lot of time along these trails.  Harry asked me, “Did you ever see any oaks out there?”  I hadn’t, and we both wondered what the forester was talking about.   

That was enough impetus for me to take a closer look.  I soon learned that finding oaks requires considerable time and effort when there are only a few of them dispersed here and there amidst the other trees.  The youngest seedlings will be covered by the underbrush, which is often so thick that you really don’t want to press too far off the trail.  A lone oak sapling doesn’t stand out much in a forest that is densely filled with other green-leaved trees.  Even the largest trees can be hard to spot, because they rise for ten or twenty or more feet before they have any branches.  Unless you look straight up, you won’t even notice that you’re walking under just what you’re looking for. 



October 7, 2006.  An oak sapling stands out in an opening in a blow-down area in the Lower 40.  Dozens of downed trees covered this opening with what seemed to be a giant’s set of pick-up sticks.  Neither the deer, the moose, nor I had any interest in making a trail through this chaos – which let oaks like this grow with no fear of browsing. 

 


The late fall is the best time – and the only good time - to find oaks that are just starting to gain a foothold in a forest like Foss Woods.  After the colorful foliage has mostly fallen, the woods open up, and the leaf-laden oaks and beeches can easily be seen from a distance of fifty or more yards.  The oaks can be distinguished from the beech trees, because their leaves are generally larger, darker and redder than the more delicate, lighter, yellowish beech leaves.



October 26, 2009:  Is that an oak?  Can I zoom in for a photo that shows the leaves standing out against the sky?  Yes! So take the photo. And yes - those are indeed the reddish-brown leaves of an oak doing its best to add to the late fall foliage.

 


For several years, I crisscrossed Foss Woods each fall, wandering up and down the hillsides hoping to find more oaks.  This took quite a bit of time, but time spent in the woods is always time well spent, and I eventually documented the size and location of more than 250 trees.  A majority of these were seedlings less than 30 inches tall, but more than a dozen large, acorn-bearing oaks were found on the north slopes of Bronson Hill.   

So I eventually was able to answer Harry’s question.  “Yes, there are oaks in Foss Woods, but not very many.”

October 7, 2006:  When the light is right, oak leaves can be quite beautiful, especially in the fall.  Since Foss Woods and most other nearby forests have so few oaks, I am always quite excited by a chance to capture the unexpected shades of greens and reds just emerging in the leaves of a young oak.     

 

Foss Woods, a Typical North Country Forest 

In a classic oak forest, the ground will be covered by acorns, not every year, but in the best years.  There will be so many that all of the squirrels and blue jays and little boys and girls will never pick all of them up to hide for winter food or to make little pipes.  In those areas, little oaks thrive, and you can find dozens of two-foot oaks within a few square yards.

There are some such forests in the North Country.  I can recall walking through one of them near the beginning of the trail up Blueberry Mountain, which is a couple of miles south of Long Pond in Benton.  Friends in Shelburne tell me that oaks dominate the forests and mountainsides on the north side of the Androscoggin, and there likely are many similar bands of oaks found throughout the White Mountains.   

However, we are close to the northern edge of the range for northern red oaks, so what I have found in Foss Woods is probably typical of many forests in the North Country.  While you will find a few oaks wherever you walk, most of them will be small, and nearly all of them too young to have any acorns.   

From Acorn to Sapling 

Oak trees are in no rush to produce any acorns.  Twenty years ago, when I spent a lot of time in the Lower 40 documenting the locations of the largest firs and pines, I also looked for oaks.  While I did come across several dozen, I only found two oaks that were at least six inches in diameter and at least twenty feet tall, and they were too young to produce acorns.  Since the nearest mature oak is probably a quarter mile away, all of the oaks in the Lower 40 have emerged from acorns brought in by blue jays, other birds, or by me.  I haven’t managed to convince any squirrels that they should spend more time spreading acorns, and even if I had, I suspect they’d be too lazy to bring them a quarter mile from the nearest mature oak down to the Lower 40.

October 16, 2022. These are the two largest oaks in the Lower 40. The dark leaves of the closest tree have the characteristic shape of a red oak. The brilliant sunshine highlights the yellows and reds of the leaves of the distant oak, which is doing the best it can to emulate the fall foliage of the maples. This moment of color won’t last, as all the leaves will soon turn brown. 

 Gaining a Foothold

What we see in and around Sugar Hill is the vanguard of oaks pushing north as they adapt to the warming climate.  Since you and I are much more mobile than squirrels and blue jays, we can perhaps speed up their advance.  So, when I do happen upon an oak-dominated forest, I pick up some acorns for distribution along trails through places like Foss Woods and the Lower 40. 

I now recognize that the tiny oaks I come across are much more than an inconsequential few of the thousands of small trees found in the woods.  They are young pioneers pushing northward, and I am happy whenever I across one, no matter how small.  Oaks are not known for their colors or their beauty, but in early spring or late fall, if the sun is right, you may get a chance to take a fine “baby picture” for what will become, long after we’re all gone, a mature grove of northern red oaks.

October 16, 2022. I came across this lovely, tiny oak while walking along one of my trails in the Lower 40. Will this tree mature as part of a majestic grove of northern red oaks?

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / October 2022

Mushroom Crowds

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

The Foggy, Damp Days of Early Autumn 

Sometimes the early autumn mists are so thick they not only erase the distant peaks and the nearby hills, they impart an impressionistic fuzziness to what remains.  Perhaps a warming sun will burn off the fog to reveal a crisp, cloudless sky by mid-morning, but it’s more likely that we’re in for a day, or two days, or nearly a week of drizzle, constant dripping and unending dampness.  Simply perfect weather!


[1] Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountains. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


OK, not perfect weather for you and me, but the best possible weather for mushrooms.   Last year, after four days of just such damp and gloomy weather, we happened across an unbelievable number of mushrooms as we enjoyed a walk through the Littleton Dells.  We hadn’t ever seen so many there before, and we hadn’t seen anything like that by the Pond or in the Back 4.  However, the local mushrooms were just a day behind those in the Dells, for hundreds had popped up by the next morning when I went out for my usual walk around the Pond.    

October 1-4, 2021. Many different kinds of mushrooms found by the Point.  One was a brownish purple with a white fringe (left).  Others, more than five inches in diameter, were a shiny, dark brown. A third variety was smaller, light brown, and growing in a tight clump. Some animal has been nibbling at them. 

Mushroom Hunters

Now, I confess that I know next to nothing about mushrooms.  I’m not like my student Victor, who foraged for mushrooms with his family back in Poland before he came to this country for grad school.  However, those seeking morels in the spring may have no interest in mushrooms beyond their usefulness in the kitchen.  Nor am I to be confused with my friend Tony, who actually wrote the book on “Mushrooms of the Eastern Shore of Virginia.” When Tony comes across a clump of unusual mushroom, he treats it like a crime scene – taking photos from all angles of even the smallest beauties before bagging one up for microscopic analysis back at his lab.

October 19, 2014.  Tony takes a photo of exquisitely colored mushrooms, so small they could be overlooked by a chipmunk.

My interests are less complicated than Victor’s or Tony’s.  I have never trusted myself to forage for mushrooms, nor have I had any interest in (or a lab suitable for) Tony’s forensic analysis. What appeals to me are the photo ops – the surprising variety of sizes, colors, and shapes of mushrooms when they make their sudden appearance in the fall.  

October 7, 2016, 70 degrees, clear, beautiful. Many beautiful mushrooms have sprouted at the Point, including a half dozen clumps of various sizes right in front of my chair.

· Golden brown, 3.5 to 6.5 inches in diameter, five in one clump.

· Yellow, 3.5 inch maximum, six in a clump.

· Pinkish/white, 3 inches diameter, two in a clump.

So, the purpose of this photo essay is to encourage you to keep an eye out for interesting mushrooms when you take a walk through the woods on a sunny day in October.  Many people like to walk through the woods on such a day, claiming they are only out to view the foliage, but I suspect there are a few who – like me – are really hoping to find many, many clumps of mushrooms. 

Mushroom Crowds

Sometimes dozens of small mushrooms are crowded into what must be extremely fertile soil.  Don’t expect me to figure out what they are; even Tony refers to them as “LBJs” – Little Brown Jobs. 

October 5, 2018.  I found a clump of tiny mushrooms and what looks like a mushroom umbrella emerging from one of ACT’s trails in the Cooley-Jericho Forest.

October 5, 2019.  I came upon clump of two dozen tiny mushroom on a moss-covered log in Foss Woods.

One day last October, I even found two dozen tiny mushroom that had crowded together in a rotted cavity in a birch tree that had succumbed to age and wind a decade or more ago. 

When I decided to work on this photo essay on mushrooms, I knew I had plenty of colorful photos to choose from.  I also assumed that I would search through my journals to find a description of the surprise and wonder that I felt when coming across crowds of mushrooms that had pushed up through the forest floor, seemingly overnight.

Unfortunately, I found no such entry.  But I was soon rescued by a well-known steamboat pilot’s description of what he found in the Black Forest in Germany.  After a diatribe against what he felt were mindless attempts by ants to move their heavy loads, he added this little gem concerning mushrooms: 

“The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing, where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular power before.  A toadstool – that vegetable which springs to full growth in a single night – had torn loose and lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice its only bulk into the air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed.  Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.  But what good would it do?”

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Volume 1, Chapter XXII

October 19, 2014.  A mushroom pushes up a “matted mass of pine needles and dirt”

Renewal of ACT’s National Land Trust Accreditation: Comment Period Now Open

On or before November 30th, ACT will apply for renewal of its accreditation, a process conducted by the national Land Trust Accreditation Commission (LTAC), an independent program of the Land Trust Alliance. The land trust accreditation program recognizes land conservation organizations that meet national standards for protecting important natural places and working lands forever. ACT was initially accredited ten years ago. This is our second renewal of accredited status. A public comment period on ACT’s application is now open.

The LTAC conducts an extensive review of each applicant’s policies and programs. “ACT is proud to be recognized as an accredited land trust. Initially accredited in 2012, our staff and board work tirelessly to operate within the highest standards and practices and maintain the trust of the communities we serve and the many landowners who have partnered with us over the last 20 years to protect over 5,000 acres in our region permanently,” said Marilyn Booth, President of the Board of Trustees.

The Commission invites public input and accepts signed, written comments on pending applications. Comments must relate to how Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust complies with national quality standards. These standards address the ethical and technical operation of a land trust. For the full list of standards, see www.landtrustaccreditation.org/help-and-resources/indicator-practices.

To learn more about the accreditation program and to submit a comment, visit www.landtrustaccreditation.org, or email your comment to [email protected]. Comments may also be faxed or mailed to the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, Attn: Public Comments: (fax) 518-587-3183; (mail) 36 Phila Street, Suite 2, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866.

ACT application comments will be most useful by October 15, 2022.

Founded in 1999, the Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust (ACT) provides conservation resources and expertise to help permanently protect working farms and forests, clean air and water, wildlife habitats, trails, and scenic landscapes in New Hampshire’s North Country. We currently work in a 13-town region of the Ammonoosuc watershed. Alongside community members, local conservation commissions, and volunteer groups, we identify and prioritize land conservation opportunities. We provide conservation options and technical assistance to landowners to protect lands our communities love forever.

For more information, contact: Marilyn Booth
President – Board of Trustees

Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust
297 Main Street – Unit 1
Franconia, NH 03580
[email protected]

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / September 2022

Bees, Blossoms, and Butterflies

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Abundance of Asters and Goldenrods

As summer comes to a close, a couple of diverse families of flowers decide that it’s finally time to burst out in bloom.  By late August in the North Country, temperatures are dropping into the 50s, not just at night, but even on some sunny afternoons.  There’s not much time left, so asters and goldenrods have to make the most of it. 

August 25, 2017, 65 degrees, mostly cloudy, seems like early autumn.  White flat-topped asters and goldenrod are at their peak; Joe Pye Weed is past its peak; blue asters are coming along, and apples are reddening

Unlike lady slippers, trillium and so many other flowers of early summer, asters and goldenrods cannot depend upon having a few fragrant or colorful blossoms that are carefully constructed to attract a particular insect.  No, it is too late for such a refined strategy.  Now, the fields are full, and sunlight is blocked by leaves of trees and shrubs before it can reach the ground where flowers first bloomed in May and June.  So asters and goldenrods follow a simpler approach:  produce hundreds and thousands of flowers on tall plants that can quickly fill up any open field or neglected roadside.  Rather than creating a carefully designed flower, asters and goldenrods create mounds of color that cannot be missed, even at a distance of a hundred yards or more. 


[1] Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Everyone Loves Asters

While asters and goldenrods are equally diverse, equally widespread, and equally attractive to a variety of insects, only asters are loved by almost everyone.  Goldenrod suffers from a bad rap because of a mistaken notion that it causes hay fever.  Not true!  The real culprit is ragweed, a non-descript plant whose multitudinous, tiny, inconspicuous green (!) flowers carry the yellow pollen that causes misery for so many. Furthermore, while a mass of goldenrod is certainly visible at a distance, the individual flowers are too tiny to notice unless you, for some odd reason, enjoy carrying a magnifying glass and seeking detail where detail is pretty much irrelevant. 

Asters not only produce a wall of color, they produce blossoms that are easily seen and enjoyed, whether they are an inch-and-a half-inch wide or merely a half-inch, whether they are white or variety of shades of blue, whether they cap a shrub-like jumble of intersecting plants or sit on top of a stalk that reaches up to our eye-level. 

Bees, of course, are attracted to asters.  If you watch a clump of asters on a sunny September day, you will very likely see a number of different types of bees flitting from flower to flower, entertaining you with a constant buzzing.  Fans of the “Spelling Bee” are well acquainted with photos such as these.

September 13, 2019, 66 degrees, all sun!

September 26, 2018, 70 degrees, cloudy, some sprinkles, 130-3pm…Only purple asters in peak bloom; flat white-topped asters have gone by.

Magnets for Butterflies

No one needs to plan a long excursion to see asters. If you walk along any of our rural roads, you cannot fail to see asters at this time of the year, because they are just about the last, most abundant and most conspicuous of the many wildflowers that prosper in roadside drainage ditches.  And it’s not just people out for a walk who are attracted to the asters, nor is it just the bees.  Asters are particularly attractive to butterflies, so wherever you come across clumps of asters, you are apt to any of a variety of butterflies, including monarchs, our largest and most famous butterfly. 

September 3, 2019, 1145, 64 degrees, 4pm. I went out again. It was now mostly sunny and absolutely calm, so that the pond was a mirror, great conditions for what were the best butterflies of the year, and perhaps of our 22 years. At least four monarchs were on asters at the far end of the dam, two or three at our end, and four or more on Joe Pye Hill, which adds up to more than a dozen around the pond. 


Fritillaries form another colorful family of large butterflies that are attracted to asters.  The most likely species to be found in our area are, in decreasing order of size, the great spangled fritillary, the Atlantis fritillary, and the Aphrodite fritillary.  Viewed from above, each of these species has the same tawny orange/brown colors broken by black veins and spots, making it easy to identify a butterfly as a fritillary, even if it is difficult to get the close view necessary to figure out the species. Fortunately for us, they may pose long enough on an aster for you to take a photo sufficient to estimate their size.  In the two photos of fritillaries, you can see that the Atlantis is much larger relative to the aster blossoms than the Aphrodite.  

September 7, 2017. This view from below shows the markings that identify this as an Aphrodite fritillary.  

September 1, 2019.  The black border on its wings identifies this as an Atlantic Fritillary.

Fritillaries are seldom seen after the first week of September, but white admirals and clouded sulphurs will still be around for another week or so.  White Admirals are readily recognized because of the broad white stripes on their upper wings, and they land frequently on flowers or on the ground.  If they land on an aster, you have a chance to see the underside of their surprisingly colorful wings.

September 3, 2019.  White admiral on New England asters.

September 12, 2018.  White admiral on flat, white-topped asters. 

Cloudy sulphurs are one of the most commonly seen butterflies in late summer.  Their size and color make them easily identified as they fly from flower to flower across a meadow – but they seem unwilling to stop for more than a second or two. My guidebook describes the upper side of the male’s wings as “clear yellow with solid black outer margins.”  Very nice – but try to see that black margin as these critters cruise about a meadow or pose with their wings closed, thereby usually concealing what really is a beautiful border.  My guidebook also says that the sulphur family “may be responsible for the name ‘butterfly’, but I prefer to suspect some early adept at what became Cockney rhyming slang to have come up with this name after watching so many of them “flutter by” as he enjoyed an afternoon in an English garden with a fine border of asters.


September 13, 2018, 75 degrees, partly cloudy, beautiful. I finally managed to get a photo showing the black margin of a clouded sulphur that rested a few seconds on some asters.


Asters will persist through the end of summer, and they will continue to attract the few butterflies that remain in the area.  I only have photos of a few butterflies that were taken in late September or October, and one of them was a Milbert’s tortoiseshell sitting on a New York aster, the last of the aster family still in bloom. 

October 12, 2015, 65 degrees.  A glorious fall day, sunny with high cirrus clouds, and a nice breeze from time to time…After lunch, I grabbed my camera, because I thought I saw a red admiral on the New York asters by the front porch.  After examining my photos, I realized it was a Milbert’s tortoiseshell – a lifer for me (although my friend Tony later told me he once took a picture of one in our front yard). 

Much as I hate to say what is very difficult for a life-long Red Sox fan, I have to admit that the blossoms of the New York aster are larger, deeper purple, and more attractive than the similar, but definitely second-place New England aster.  At least I can say that the beauty of the New England aster is much closer to that of the New York aster than the success of our New England baseball team is this year to that of that unnamed team in New York.  On the other hand, the Red Sox have from time to time bested the Yankees, whereas the New England asters will always be a few games behind. 

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / August 2022

A Weekend in Mid-August

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

A Long Weekend in August

It’s mid-August.  That awful week-long stretch of hot, humid weather has finally ended, monarchs and common wood nymphs are fluttering all over the yard and the gardens, and birds are everywhere. You can’t wait to find out what else is going on by the pond and in the meadows.  You’re excited about having the chance to explore further afield without risking heat exhaustion, and you hope to spend the evenings watching the setting sun while sipping cold drinks out by the pond. 

But then you get the dreaded email from the guests who are arriving on the 11th for a long weekend:  “We’re really looking forward to having you take us out to see the moose!”  We once responded to such a suggestion by saying “Great! We’ll take a drive up to the Connecticut Lakes, which is where everyone goes to see moose.”  As a result, the first day of that visit was pretty much ruined by the aches and pains suffered from driving for hours and hours over rough or hilly roads in a fruitless search for moose.  We returned home after dark, tired, hungry, and upset that we had missed both the cocktail hour and the sunset over the pond.


[1] Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


I highly recommend that you don’t make the same mistake!  Instead, tell your guests that mid-August in the North Country is the best time to see how summer changes into fall.  Tell them that that all kinds of things are happening, that they can see exotic creatures that they would never see in the city, and that they can observe interesting behavior that they wouldn’t even know to look for if you weren’t there to serve as their expert guide.  If necessary, make something up - tell them that moose are hiding for the next few weeks, waiting for cooler nights and fewer ticks.

To help you become an expert guide, I have gone through my photos and my journals to figure out exactly what you might see if you take your guests out for a walk through a meadow next to a pond or other wetlands.  All of the photos and all of the journal entries included in this essay refer to what I have seen over past several years between August 10th and August 13th, so now you and I both know what to look for in the upcoming weekend.

August 10

As so well documented in “Blueberries for Sal”, vast quantities of blueberries attract bears to the meadows in early August.  As the berry crops wane, some of the wild apples begin to ripen, giving the bears another way to prepare for the winter.  When you go out to pick berries or collect apples, you are now likely to see grasshoppers and hear crickets, whose emergence seems timed to provide food for the many fledging songbirds.

August 10, 2021.  Today we heard the first crickets.  As a bear foraged at the bottom of Rufus’s field, we heard a raven squawking and then saw it fly overhead and down the field.  Maybe it was the one that I photographed yesterday on a dead limb on top of the big maple at the corner of Post and Pearl Lake Roads.

Tadpoles turn into frogs in mid-August.  Young green frogs are content to sit within a few inches either side of the shore line; the smaller leopard and pickerel frogs venture a little further inland, but jump back to the pond if anyone approaches too quickly.

August 10, 2001, 86 degrees, hot, hazy, and humid. A half dozen small frogs jumped into the pond as I approached.  Just at dusk, when it was difficult to see, five mergansers flew into the pond.  A little later, as it darkened, two bats flew in to feast on the suddenly numerous mosquitos and other insects hovering over the water. Green frogs and northern leopard frogs gave a few croaks.    

August 11, 2015. A young pickerel frog sits a few feet from the pond.

August 12, 2017. A green frog still has a bit of its tadpole tail.

August 11

An abundance of small, unwary frogs attracts predators.  It probably is not by chance that great blue herons fledge in mid-August, just when a short flight will bring them to lunch, nor is it mere chance that mid-August is when bitterns are likely to be seen or heard, as they also wait patiently in the reeds for another bite to eat.

August 11, 1999.  A great blue heron was at the end of the pond, on a rock, croaking (like a frog?).  He did this for five minutes, then jumped into the water and picked out something small.  I walked out along the dam to get a closer look, and made it directly across from the heron.  I didn’t notice the bittern, who flew out of the reeds, surprising both me and the heron, who also took flight.

August 10, 2020.  A great blue heron enjoyed its perch upon a rubber raft floating at the far end of the pond (photo).

By early August, the red-wings and the tree swallows and wrens have departed, and it is quieter around the pond.  However, recently fledged birds and early migrators add to the activity in the yard and in the meadows.  Many of the juveniles are still learning how to find a meal: 

August 11, 2009.  Two song sparrows were feeding on the lawn in the back yard.  The adult would catch a bug, while junior begged for food.  When Mom caught one, junior would walk over, tilt its head back, open wide – and Mom would stick the bug in its beak.

A new group of dragonflies will soon take over from the whitefaces, corporals, skimmers and clubtails that were so common in July.  But there’s still time to see the colorful 12-spotted skimmers and the widow skimmers, and you may even be lucky enough, as I was in 2017, to see one of our infrequent visitors.

August 11, 2017, 78 degrees, cloudy, by the pond about 1:45.  I finally managed to take my first photo of the green dragonfly I’d been seeing around the pond the last few days.  It had posed on a leaf, and I estimated its length as about 2”.  This beautiful spring-green dragonfly turned out to be a female eastern pondhawk. 

Now is the time for flying insects to be extremely wary, not only of the influx of young birds, but also of other dangers.  For example, spiders are preparing for the new groups of dragonflies and damselflies by building their webs across the places they know to be most attractive to the newcomers

August 11, 2019, cool, 66 degrees, 3pm.  A monarch caterpillar stretched across a milkweed pod at the bottom of Joe Pye Hill (below left).  Only a few feet away, an unusual spider had captured something in its web.  Just after I took a photo featuring its large red ball spotted with white dots (below right), it suddenly dropped down with its prey and disappeared.

August 12

Out by a pond or a wetland, you will likely see a few of the red meadowhawks and mosaic darners that will be the most numerous and liveliest dragonflies through early October.  The male meadowhawks are less than two inches long, but their bright red colors make up for what they lack in size.  The mosaic darners, which are much larger and appear to be mostly blue in flight, are named for the triangular patterns on their abdomens. There are several species of both families that are common in our region, but you’ll need a good zoom lens for your camera and a guidebook for accurate identification.  Unless you are as eccentric as I am, you’ll do fine by referring to them simply as meadowhawks and mosaic darners.  White-faced meadowhawks and black-tipped darner females are the most willing to pose for a photograph. 

August 12, 2019, 2:59 pm.  The male white-faced meadowhawk has a white face and a red abdomen with black, triangular markings. Females are yellow, so this pair provided a colorful photo when they formed a wheel.  

August 12, 2019, 3:48pm. The first black-tipped darners are flying in and out of the reeds in front of my chair at the Point.  I managed a photo of a female slowly descending a cattail so she can deposit her eggs in the pond. 

This is also a good time to look for warblers and other recently fledged birds that are now old enough to venture forth at least to the edge of the open lawns and meadows.  They need to be careful, because the young hawks are also eager to test their skills.

August 12, 2016. A young common yellowthroat perches on a shrub, looking for insects in the undergrowth.

August 13, 2017.  After dinner, as I walked out along the path to the solar array, a kestrel flew overhead and disappeared – until I looked high up at the top of the tall red pines on the other side of Pearl Lake Road and saw not one, but two juveniles.

The Main Event

While this essay focuses on just a few days in mid-August, I really can’t say that these three days are likely to be much different from those a little earlier or later in the month, as annual changes in the weather can easily shift the phenological calendar a few days either way.  However, certain natural events actually are known to be strictly governed by the calendar, and that I why I have focused on August 11-13.

For me, these three days encompass one of the most highly anticipated events of the phenological year.  Perhaps you already know what I mean.  Perhaps you too wait for these days, hoping and praying for clear skies and warm nights.  Perhaps you put out the lawn chairs a day or two before the big event and make sure you have a couple of blankets in case it turns cold.  Then, if the night sky really is clear, you prepare a mug of hot chocolate, grab a blanket, head out to the lawn, and settle down into your chair facing the northeastern sky.  Waiting and watching – maybe only for a few seconds, maybe for a few minutes, but – there! There’s one!  There’s another one!  Wow, did you see that one blaze a trail! 

No, not fireflies.  Shooting stars.  The annual Perseid meteor shower peaks on or about August 12th, which is when the earth passes through a band of space debris that results in the year’s best display of shooting stars.  In 1972, Nancy and I set up camp on the side of a lake in Lassen Volcanic National Park on what turned out to be a remarkably clear night.  After dinner, as we sat by our campfire, enjoying the view of the stars, we were astounded to see first one, then another, and then many fireballs as meteors flamed through the atmosphere leaving a brilliant sparkling trail halfway across the sky.  This went on hour after hour before we finally went to bed.     

Every year since then, when at least some of the sky was not obscured by clouds, I’ve found a spot to spend an hour or more looking for shooting stars and hoping for fireballs.     

August 12-13, 2015.  I saw two pretty good fireballs as I walked out to the front lawn to view the Perseids meteor shower.  I saw another dozen over the next twenty minutes, but no more fireballs. …  On the 13th, I saw another nine, including a nice fireball that split into two, each leaving a split-second trail sparkling in its wake.  So the show was OK, but nothing like the dazzling display Nancy and I enjoyed forty years earlier in Lassen National Park – and have yet to experience again.

August 12, 2020.  Just an OK couple of nights for the Perseids.  Eight shooting stars in 45 minutes on the 12th (one pretty good); nine in an hour on the 13th (one almost a fireball, another quite good, five OK and one very short).

In short, I’ve enjoyed some pretty good nights, but nothing as breath-taking as what we saw that long ago night in California.  However, as a seasoned 20th century Red Sox fan, I am always willing to “wait until next year.” 

Now I’ll just head out to the Upper Meadow to enjoy the sight of monarchs, fritillaries, silver-spotted skippers, and other butterflies frolicking over the amazing flowers of the Joe Pye Weed that covers the little hill out by the pond.

Phenological Phacts and Photos w/ Carl Martland / July 2022

Merganser Family

Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”

Mergansers

Mergansers are crested, thin-billed diving ducks, and the males are among our most colorful and beautiful birds, only slightly less entrancing than wood ducks and harlequin ducks.  Red-breasted and common mergansers are about the size of a mallard; the hooded mergansers are a little smaller.

Three species of mergansers can be seen in New England.  Red-breasted mergansers are common along the coasts, while common mergansers are mostly found on large, clear lakes and rivers.  Hooded mergansers prefer small, wooded ponds with nearby dead trees that provide nesting cavities.  You’ll need to travel a hundred miles to York or Portsmouth before you’ll have much chance to see the red-breasted mergansers, but you can see common mergansers in Coffin Pond and the Connecticut River, and you can see hooded mergansers in many of the small ponds found in the North Country.


[1] Photos and text by Carl D. Martland, founding member of ACT, long-time resident of Sugar Hill, and author of Sugar Hill Days: What’s Happening in the Fields, Wetlands, and Forests of a Small New Hampshire Town on the Western Edge of the White Mountain. Quotations from his book and his journals indicate the dates of and the situations depicted in the photos.


Mergansers in the Pond

Hooded mergansers have successfully raised families in our one-acre pond nine times in the last twenty years.  They arrive at the pond soon after the ice begins to break up.  One year, two pairs flew in, and another year two males accompanied a single female, but usually it’s just a pair.  If they decide to stay, the pair will be seen many times for a week or two, and then the male departs, leaving the female alone with her eggs and her dreams.

Let’s follow the family that made the pond their home during the spring and summer of 2019.  In mid-April of that year, when the pond was still almost completely covered with ice, a pair of mergansers landed in a tiny opening only a few yards wide:

April 19, 2019, 70 degrees, mostly cloudy.  The pond is only 10% ice-free, but 80% of the ice is rotten grey.  A pair of hooded mergansers are having no trouble breaking through.

Over the next three weeks, I would often see the pair swimming, preening or simply floating in the pond.  On May 9th, I saw the pair fly off, and that was the last time I saw the male in 2019.  This was not unexpected, as May 13th is the latest date that I have ever seen a male merganser in our pond in the spring.

April 25, 2019, 3:51pm.  I took a photo of a male hooded merganser preening in the pond. 

May 9, 2019.  A pair of hooded mergansers flew off when I approached the pond this morning.

During May and early June, the female merganser could be seen most afternoons swimming slowly around the pond, diving from time to time, possibly to snag one of the wood frog tadpoles from the swarm that slowly moves along the shallow waters not too far from shore.  I didn’t discover the tree cavity where she might have made her nest, and I wondered whether or not she even had a nest full of eggs.

Ducklings

Then one day, in my routine walk to the Pond, I was happy find mom taking her new brood for a trip around the pond.  For their first swim, the little ducklings stayed bunched together, never more than a yard or two from their mother.

June 11, 2019.  The hooded merganser has taken her seven ducklings for a swim in the Pond.

The ducklings followed close to their mother as she slowly swam from the far end of the pond to the large rock at the tip of the Point that my grandson named “Rock Island”.  She croaked, and they struggled out of the water, up the gentle slope of Rock Island, and cuddled together in a fuzzy ball no more than a foot wide.

Within just one or two days, the ducklings gain the strength and confidence to stray a little further from their mother.  Within a week, mom might be in the center of the pond with three or four of the ducklings, while the others are exploring the cattails maybe ten or twenty yards away.  If she senses danger, i.e. if I approach too closely, she begins her rough call, a cross between a quack and a cough, and she continues until her entire brood has joined her.

Unfortunately for the ducklings, predators much more dangerous than me may be nearby, and predation could come from the ground or the air.  Otters and weasels visit the pond from time to time, and hawks can be seen circling high in the sky.  In 2019, the number of ducklings dropped from seven to three in less than a week.  A neighborhood harrier was never indicted, but its behavior certainly made him a prime suspect:

June 21, 2019, 68 degrees, cloudy, 3pm. At 5:15pm, a harrier flew low over the house as we sat on the porch.  I went out to the pond, worrying about the merganser family, which turned out to be safe in the center of the pond.  However, I heard some cries from the reeds and shrubs at the right of our end, and the harrier flew off holding a small bird in its claws, being chased by several redwing blackbirds.

The drab, splotched colors of the young mergansers and their mother help them disappear from view as soon as they reach the reeds.  When they rest in the warmth of Rock Island, the ducklings are unconcerned, but mom keeps a close watch.

June 15, 2019. Mom keeps watch while her three ducklings hide in the reeds.

June 28, 2019.  Two ducklings take a break on Rock Island while mom keeps watch over the one still swimming in the Pond.

Within a few weeks, the ducklings start flexing their wings, building up strength and perhaps yearning to fly around like the other birds they see around the Pond.  Mom stays with them for a while longer in July, but they are getting big enough to live on their own.

July 5, 2019. The young mergansers have created comfortable depressions where they can sit at the edge of the reeds. Now they are strong enough to try out their wings.

“Make Way for Ducklings”

Once the ducklings are strong enough to walk a quarter mile or so, their mother may lead them off to a different pond.  I say this, not only because we have all read “Make Way for Ducklings”, but also because I once saw a wood duck with a train of ducklings walk across our front lawn and on to our pond, presumably coming up from the small pond that is not too far down Pearl Lake Road.  I think that a couple of our families of hooded mergansers have completed the opposite trip in recent years.  In 2019, however, only the mother departed, and her three young hooded mergansers stayed around the pond until the middle of September.

August 25, 2019. The three young hooded mergansers are now nearly full-size, and they are on their own in the pond.

The mergansers gather together for their fall migration sometime in October. As in the spring, they are most likely to be seen in small flocks at Coffin Pond or Pearl Lake, but once in a while, a few drop in at our small pond. As in the early spring, the males show off their fancy crests and their contrasting patches of color, but now we know that it was the females who stayed around and did what was necessary to help her ducklings learn to live on their own.

October 19, 2018.  Two males and a female showed up today at the pond.

ACT Volunteers Get Chainsaw Safety Certified!

Volunteers learned plenty about properly maintaining saws and safety gear, as well as some gear advice from the pros!

On May 14th, a group of ACT staff and stewardship volunteers took part in a chainsaw use and safety training instructed by a professional forester. This training was put on in partnership with the NH Timberland Owners Association (NHTOA) and UNH Cooperative Extension. While these organizations have partnered for years in putting on safety trainings for professional loggers, this opportunity has just recently become available to non-professionals and organizations such as our own. Chainsaw use is often necessary for keeping our trails in good shape, and we are fortunate to have volunteers who regularly lend a hand with this important work. In spite of heat, ticks, and blackflies, it was a great day!  In addition to new skills, knowledge, and practice, all attendees received certifications after the course.

Ernst Kling demonstrated various techniques before guiding each volunteer through different processes.

We are so grateful NHTOA, UNH Extension, and instructor Ernst Kling for helping us to access this valuable training opportunity that will help keep our volunteers vigilant and safe. Thanks is also owed to the Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund, funding from which helped to cover the cost of this course. In February, ACT was awarded a Tillotson DASH grant amounting to $2,000. In addition to helping to significantly lower the cost of this course for our volunteers, these funds have been put towards the acquisition of hand tools and personal protective equipment which will be a huge asset for ongoing trail maintenance efforts.  

Interested in helping keep trails clear? Head over to our volunteer page or contact Rose, our Trails Program Manger, at [email protected].