Jody decided to close up her law office for a long weekend and spent Friday at Crystal Lake State Park. I picked her up after school and we came back to my house (one mile away) for more bug hunting. She got some magnificent photos on that iPhone of hers. She found these dragonflies hanging together under a branch of a pine tree. They allowed her to carry them down to where I was inspecting a leafroller larva. And as soon as Jody got to me, they flew away still coupled together. It was a memorable sight.
The darners in the tree.
I was not as fortunate yesterday. I found my leafroller larva, some type of moth, and unrolled it. When touched with a piece of grass, it wriggled very violently. I thought I had a video of that action but I didn't press the right button. I have found more of these larvae and will be sleeving the dogwood branch where they are maturing.
The tiny caterpillar inside the leaf that it had rolled up.
Outside of the leaf.
Other creatures that we found:
Another Swamp Milkweed Leaf Beetle (Labidomera clivicollis)
Revisiting our jagged ambush bugs at the end of the season.
They wear different colors now. Here, the male has the brown face and the female has a yellow face.
But then . . .
😱😱😱
Jody found bear scat full of cherry pits not 20 feet from my back door. Lucy was calm so we knew that the bear was not close by, but our wanderings were now at an end. Bears scarf down so many cherries it is totally ridiculous. And at this time of year, it seems that all my trees are cherries. They are everywhere. In fact, I have read that my Black cherry trees (Prunus serotina) are the most populous tree in New England forests. Cherry picking time is when Jody and I stay out of the woods.
We retired to Orleans to a restaurant for supper and swapped photos and stories of our day. It was a wonderful day.
I am in the northeast corner of Vermont, near the Canadian border. We are the largest, yet the least populated, county of Vermont. There are few stores, few jobs, and bitter winters. And every child grows up knowing about bears in the woods. They are frequently sighted. Behind my house is Barton Mountain with cliffs and caves where bears, bobcats, and even lynx will stay. I am extremely careful about the bears and never go deep into the woods alone.
Black cherry trees are the most populous tree in the northeast of the US, and I have plenty. I also have chokecherry, pin cherry, and an apple orchard. These are all the fruits bears love to fatten up on for their winter hibernation. Here are photos of bears enjoying cherries. They often just plop down on their rear, like in cartoons, with their big bellies popping out, and just pull the tree branches down to them and strip them of fruit.
Every year we are required to read up-to-date research on social emotional health for our children at school. We are a trauma-centered day treatment private school that works closely with the public school districts. We have been doing trauma-centered care for at least ten years. In fact, all Vermont schools now train for trauma-centered care and are more or less familiar with this information. But we have to repeat and repeat for it to become internalized and second nature to us all and to be better for our kids. This year, we are watching for the bear not being in the woods, but coming inside with the children and with us. Monday Sparks allows me to review and digest the information and to hear feedback from you.
On our property there is a right of way (ROW) up to the ridegeline of Barton Mountain for electricity and cables to the cell towers up top. This past September, Fairpoint put in fiber optic cables on those poles. I wrote about this invasion in an earlier post. Because of our concern about the Fairpoint activity we saw from the house, we decided to climb up the ROW to see what damage had been done to the land. We saw plenty. Unfortunately, I didn't take photographs of the damage, but it is still visible and will be visible for years. I will return after mud season to document the damage better. The photos here in this multipart photographic essay are of our activity on the hike — of John, me and the cats Buddy and Oscar. Despite our anger at the invasion, we had a wonderful afternoon. I took only my 70-250mm lens, which was inadequate for most of the macro photos here. Next time I'll take the whole kit and caboodle.
Looking down the ROW. Our home is through the woods to the left.
Looking up the ROW. All trails end at the bottom of those cliffs, which is where bear and bobcat live.
Buddy wanted to rest here. He actually wanted to turn back and go home, but continued on with us.
A couple of chickadees kept a close eye on us the entire hike.
We found even more apple trees from the orchard a century ago!
This beaver dam used to be a mill. The old millhouse is still there, as is the human dam. The beaver no maintain the dam. I walked over there in April to get photographs of spring and to see how the beaver and the bog were doing. An lodge that was in the side of the pond was destroyed, perhaps by fisher cats. There were new trees chewed and down. But otherwise, all was calm and quiet as before. I'm thinking I should drop by the town clerk office and see exactly what this area is called. I call it Dam 5 because it is the fifth dam on May Pond Brook that Amelia and I counted when we hiked the brook years ago. Dam 4 is across the road from the house and Dams 1 through 3 are upstream of Stone Flume.
Our home, 1/2 mile away, as seen from the dam.
Shortly after I took the photo of the goldenrod gall (above), I found some fresh bear scat. I finished up the photos and left soon thereafter, making sure I stayed in wide open spaces with lots of room to run to the road.
It is April 1. Today is the day we are supposed to take our bird feeders down so the bears don't come and eat the feeders. They are, or will be, waking up. We know where the bears on the mountain hibernate in the winter. We know they come down to the house to see how careless we were about leaving food about (or kitties about). Click here and here for the story. We see their tracks and scat all summer long in our apple orchard, the woods and under the choke cherry trees. So bring in your feeders today.
Raccoons are a huge problem in spring, too.
But bears aren't the only problem. The raccoons destroy more of my feeders than bears do. And we have had recorded outbreaks of raccoon rabies in Orleans County in the past five years. Minks and fisher cats will be by, also (as happened to me last week when a big mink ran right by me under the feeders when I was photographing birds). So get your feeders in today!
I will be taking the feeders in as soon as they are empty. Probably tomorrow or Sunday. I put out the last of the sunflower and thistle today because of this snowstorm we are having. The redpolls were crazy happy that I filled the little thistle socks and the chickadees were irritated at my slowness, as always. The woodpeckers are back because the others are back and the robins, doves. blue jays and red-winged blackbirds stop by to take a look now and then. It's been another great photography season with the birds and squirrels. The photos are not all posted yet, though, so you will see more!
We have dozens of chokecherry trees in the woods and fields; even by the road. They ripen at the end of July and during August. That is, I found, the best birding time. As I learned to photograph birds outdoors, I would loiter at the chokecherry trees as the birds ate breakfast.
Above and below: a song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) hidden in the chokecherry tree.
Abovce and below: a Nashville warbler (Vermivora ruficapilla) hidden in a tree.
Below is a photograph of the chokecherry blossoms from the spring.
When the cherries were ripe enough to pick, Nate, the kids and I picked five gallons of them for jelly. It is easy to pick them — you just start at the top of the bunch and pull them down with your hand. The problem is the high branches. I used a metal garden rake to gently bring the branches down so that we could reach them. Another problem was bears.
Bears love chokecherries and there was evidence of them everywhere under the trees. They had broken branches and flattened the grasses. And pooped. Everywhere we went there was bear poop (see above)!
Above, you can see the granny smith apples from the apple orchard. They were almost ripe in August. We made plans to pick them, also, as soon as they were ready.
And the chokecherry jelly? John and I forgot to follow the directions for our altitude. The jelly jelled in the pot but did not jell in the jars. We are going to re-cook it as soon as we can. I found a great article on chokecherries that you should read if you want to harvest them (click here). There are lots of other things you can do with chokecherries besides jelly.
Matt was wandering about the house tonight talking on the phone when he saw this bear in the back dooryard, very close to the house. I was shooting with the Canon XSi, he was doing video with the Canon Power Shot. She was there longer than the video shows. I am processing the still shots now and will post them as soon as possible. As Matt says, she was cute, but not something you want to go out and play with. You can hear a wood thrush singing in the woods at the end of the video. The bird feeders were taken down and destroyed by the raccoons a month ago, so the bear was not coming for the feeders. John says the average size for black bear is 125 lbs and that this bear is around 250 lbs. She seems to be timid as if looking for food for her cubs.
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