The Goose And The Hawk

Did a morning run along the canal with Anne, where we saw several families of geese, complete with goslings. The geese get aggressive when they're nesting, but we were all just sort of tolerating each other there on the canal, some sideways looks but mostly "don't mess with me and I won't mess with you"... until one set of parents started with the aggressive displays (opening up their wings, hissing, bobbing their heads) while we were still quite far away. One kept up the display while the other herded the babies into the water and sheltered them against her body, and then we saw the real reason for their behavior: a huge hawk glided over and landed on a tree branch just across the canal from the geese.

We didn't stick around to see the drama, but on our return leg we saw what looked like the whole family swimming along, so the hawk must have left empty-handed.

By the way, we spent Friday and yesterday in Philly with Anne's sister and her husband, sightseeing and window shopping. Drinks at Nodding Head, Tapas at the mid-town Continental, breakfast at the Reading Terminal Market, lunch at the White Dog...

We just had an awesome breakfast, which included dandelion greens and wild onions from the yard, and now we're about to go on a mountain bike ride. It's spring, and it's beautiful out.

Happy Earth Day!

Meanwhile, At The Writer's Workshop

Anne and I did a nature journaling  workshop today, at the Nurture Nature Center in Easton. The class was on writing about, and drawing, clouds, and was run by a very enthusiastic (and competent) woman -- she was a published author, and graphic artist, and her hobby was tornado chasing, so she had all the bases covered.

The drawing part was in the second half of the course: drawing clouds, using graphite pencils and other drawing tools, and was mostly a "how to draw" seminar. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, but it was definitely not my strong suit -- I was there for the words, and that was all in the first half of class. The teacher started with several examples of writing about weather, and ended with a slide show of different types of clouds and interesting things about them -- some of the photos were spectacular, almost unreal -- and in the middle we did a few writing exercises.

Here's my first exercise, a haiku:

Thunder clouds at night:

flashes in a darker dark,

a show from the porch.

This was meant to be something from our lives, some weather that we particularly remember. My example was from when I was a kid: thunderstorms would often concentrate over Freehold, a few miles southeast of our house, and sort of the direction our porch faced. It would be kind of fun to sit on the porch, dry and safe, and watch the faraway flashes. I was thinking after class that the last line was unsatisfactory, and thought it might read better as "I watch from the porch," but now I like it again the way it is.

The other writing exercise was prose, another experience of weather, in one paragraph, and this time we were supposed to make sure we engaged as many of our senses as we could. My story was from a mountain bike ride on Gauley Mountain in West Virginia, though I wrote to deliberately obscure what I was doing there (like maybe I was on a hike), got caught in a storm and almost got hit by lightning.

I was on an old dirt mountain road when the storm came in, warm rain at first but it got colder. I was up just high enough that the rain clouds were bumping the trees around me, then lowered and I was in fog, and then I started to hear the thunder. There was really nothing to do but keep going, until a loud CRACK! and flash to my right sent me scrambling over the embankment. I lay in mud and wet cow-itch, laughing at myself and my bad luck, for the next hour while I waited for the storm to pass.

Anyway, that was my Saturday. How ironic that the day started without a cloud in the sky!

The Call Of The Crows

I go to work at the same time that the crows do.

They winter in Bethlehem and Fountain Hill, millions of them roosting near the river, the leafless trees ominous with their dark rustling forms at night. In the morning they all scatter, to forage in Bethlehem or maybe nearby farm fields and garbage dumps etc -- I'm pretty sure crows are omnivorous, people talk about feeding them corn and I've seen them quarreling over roadkill, there's probably quite a variety for them to eat around here -- and you can see them just at sunrise, flying just over the rooftops and calling to each other. It sort of looks like the flying monkey scene in The Wizard of Oz sometimes, there can be so many of them in the sky, and it's easy to pinpoint where they're coming from, because they all seem to radiate from a single point on the horizon.

As the sun rises earlier and earlier, I'm falling more and more behind my carpool buddies, and lately there are just a few stragglers by the time I go outside. I can hear the cacophony peak and subside outside, and I know I'd better get myself out the door, and by the time I'm outside and it's just me and the stragglers the individual calls can easily be distinguished.

Most of the time I notice a sort of even-numbered grouping of caws, like "caw-caw, caw-caw," i.e. groups of two with a short pause in between.

I've heard as many as six caws together like this, but it's mostly two or four; the other day I heard an unusual set, three caws like this: "caw-caw, caw," repeated back and forth between the stragglers.

What does it all mean? I'd heard that crows are pretty intelligent, and they are obviously social, so the calls must play some role in all that communal living. Strangely, they don't seem to call as much at night, though they're pretty vocal when they gather at dusk and scatter in the morning. Maybe they just converse quietly amongst themselves, with their "indoor voices," once they're roosting.

I tried Googling "crow calls" but found out very little, aside from the fact that different populations of crows have different accents, and possibly different vocabularies. (There seems to be a market for crow call CD's, to be played as decoys when hunting. This is a fairly creepy technique practiced by someone near Sals over loudspeakers, blowing the crows out of the sky and littering the trails with blood and broken birds. It's worst when there's snow on the ground.) Apparently, some sounds are known to be alarms, and some are "gathering" calls, but no one I found distinguished the calls, or their meaning, in terms of number or cadence/inflection of caws.

I guess it will have to remain A Mystery.

Solar Tower

I saw an incredible solar tower on the way to work yesterday. The sun was just up, but below a hill in front of me, and the tower was a bright pink-orange; it looked almost like a searchlight it was so strong, and seemed to be in front of the pink-purple clouds that were a little higher in the sky (the horizon was mostly clear).

Later as the sun got above the horizon, the tower seemed a bit diminished, but there came a time where the sun was mostly blocked by (bare) trees, and the tower again was more pronounced. It was mostly orange by this point, with maybe a bit of yellow-orange mixed in, and looked less like a tower than a steady jet of flame coming out the top of the mostly obscured sun.

It was gone a few minutes later, when the sun was high enough to be yellow instead of of orange.

Pattern Recognition

Morning weigh-in: 187.5#, 14.5% BF

Just put that in there to show where things stand... We did our dumbbell routine this morning, and I ate close to correctly, but when I got home (from the first day back at work in almost a month) I had no interest in riding. So in terms of my resolutions, I'm probably batting about .900 -- for today.

They came in peace, and we ate them.

Anyway, here's something I'd never seen before, until it started showing up in our local supermarket. It's called romanesco broccoli. It looked so perfectly like 80's- era CGI fractals that I had to take a picture in the store, and apparently the flowers have something to offer fans of Fibonacci numbers and logarithmic spirals as well, at least according to Wikipedia. I may get some to try eventually, but right now it looks too good to eat. And probably not from this planet.

A Walk In The Woods: Sals

Hi it's me. I've been off work (from last week through the end of the year), but I just haven't got around to writing anything here -- nothing especially noteworthy has happened, but that's never stopped me before; there were a few things I could have written about, but I just didn't have the motivation...

Then this morning I saw something on Facebook about the Nurture Nature Center having a multi-week workshop in "nature journaling." It sounded interesting, so I Googled "nature journaling" and became even more interested. I may sign up for the workshop, but in the meantime I decided to just dive right in, based on the things I saw online.

I had to run a few errands (Christmas shopping, etc), so as part of the trip I finished at Tulum and got a burrito to go. With that and the coffee I got earlier, I drove up to Dodson Park, and after eating my burrito I took a little walk on the hiking trails east of the "Yellow Trail."

The Start of the Yellow Trail at Dodson Park

First impression -- it was a pleasant day, warm for December but breezy and brisk, maybe 50 degrees: sweater weather, and I was comfortable in my sweater, either sitting in the sun or burning calories hiking in the woods. The sky was deep blue, with a few not-puffy white clouds. The trees were swaying a bit, but it was not all that blustery.

Dodson Park: Ball Field and the Start of the Woods

The colors were mostly the ones you'd associate with late winter or early spring, rather than late fall: yellowish-green wet grass on the playing fields, the gray of the tree trunks and the brown of old leaf cover on the ground. Not much seemed to be going on, unless you knew what to look for in terms of leaf decay or whatnot, and in the woods my eyes were drawn to the few green spots I saw. One of the first things I saw was this half buried, mossy piece of wood.

Mossy Wood At Sals

Just a bit further in, the woods seemed to thin out quite a bit, possibly because so many trees had fallen in the recent hurricanes, but also likely because of attack from vines. These vines are everywhere in some places up there; some are wild grapes and some are poison ivy, and there may even be other kinds, but they all grow and cover the trees and eventually kill them. There didn't seem to be any Japanese stiltgrass (an invasive) in the area, but other places I've seen that growing among the down trees and it contributes to the sense of winter dissolution.

Downed Trees and Branches at Sals

Thin Woods

There was also a sticker bush which I though might have been multiflora rosa, another nightmare of an invasive plant.

Sals: A Sticker Bush in Winter

Eventually I was back in a section where there seemed to be a lot of healthy mature trees. The picture doesn't do this justice, this was a really big and nice looking tree.
 

Sals: Winter Trees

I wasn't familiar with the trail I followed, since it was not one of the official bike trails, but it was wide and well-kept, and easy to follow, so I could let my eyes wander without fear of tripping on roots or rocks as I walked. I saw a few bouts of color (ie green) here and there.

Sals: Scallions in Winter

Sals: Greenery in the Leaf Litter

The plant in the first photo looked like clump of scallions or wild onions; there were a bunch of these clumps scattered in the general area I took that photo. The second plant was nearby, and looked like it might have been wild ginger except the leaves looked crinklier on the tops. These grew a little more spread out, but it seemed to me clustered as if all the leaves in an area were part of the same plant. These plants also seemed to be fairly common in that area.

The trail eventually headed towards the reservoir, so I took a left onto a side trail, which led to an impressive rock.

Sals: The Trail Led to a Rock

Not much further past this, my trail approached the bike trail, and I saw two riders conferring. One continued on, while the other seemed to be having mechanical difficulties. I took a connector over to the bike trail, and the rider turned out to be my buddy Joe, taking his new hardtail out for a shakedown cruise, and he'd just got one pinch flat more than he had spare inner tubes... I walked with him back to the parking lot, and that was my hike.

Postmortem: There were two things, that I saw in that online advice for nature journaling, and that I didn't do, and now I see why they might be important. The first was the advice to take a notebook (they usually had a description of the best kinds to bring), and make notes and drawings of observations in real time. This mainly frees you from trying to remember what happened afterward. The other piece of advice I didn't follow is to budget a big chunk of time for journaling -- I'd been out for about an hour rather than the recommended full day.

I can see both of their importance or practical usefulness, but these, or at least the notebook one, are going to be hard to follow: my plan is to do more of a nature photo-blog when I do this, and if I'm on foot the notebook is fine as a recorder of first impressions, but I also intend to do a lot of this from the bike, stopping now and then; a pocket camera could be handy, but a notebook might be a luxury.