what does the fox say...?

"ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding"--and it runs fast! while riding to canaan tuesday, i surprised a fox thinking about crossing route 4. i saw it dash out of the woods the same time it saw me and instead of crossing in front of me, it turned and ran parallel, leaping and bounding through the tall grass, its white tipped tail flagging behind. it was going about the same speed i was and it kept with me for about ten or twenty yards, finally ducking back into the woods and disappearing. i was making up words to 'that' pop song the rest of the way to school.

for three days last week i took the third graders on mini-field trips across the stream bordering the northwest side of the ballfields. while we observed plenty of plants and fungi, stopping frequently for question and discussion sessions,  it was pretty clear that being still was hard to maintain. i had introduced them to the 'edge' effect when we measured dandelion roots and tops and now we were back in that zone between 'field' and 'woods'. there is always a lot to talk about in these dense growth areas. at a fallen birch tree, where as soon as we stopped students started peeling the bark, i gave them the LNT, leave no trace, talk and pointed out three different plants growing on the trunk's bark. focusing an entire class--15-17 eight year olds-- is not easy even in the classroom, out in a woody area, it is all but impossible.

that being said, on monday we listened to a half-dozen different bird species singing or pecking away just out of sight. a good many of the students were even able to see a common yellowthroat  skulking about in the brush and witchety-witchety-witchety-ing away. once one student saw the 'little bandit', they actually got really still and hoped they would too. the same thing happened on tuesday, only with a "huge beaver", which turned out to be a woodchuck.

it was like a huge game of red light-green light with every student standing stock still as the woodchuck speed-waddled towards us then stopped to eat some grass. as soon as it stopped and was eating, the whole class would take three giant steps and refreeze, whereupon it would move towards us. the third time we shared this little exchange, 'chucky' was within twenty feet and the kids looked at me wide-eyed...a few giggling or drawing in huge breaths of disbelief. that got the groundhog's attention and it stood, gave us a good look and dove off into the bushes, disappearing much like the fox had done with me that morning.

wednesday's group was not impressed with any of their classmate's stories and as one youngster put it to his teacher when we got back in, "all we saw was a squirrel!" maybe it was the day or maybe the class makeup, i can't really say, but the last day didn't turn out to be the best. not only was it the last trip out that week, it was the last time i would be with the grade school for this year. it would have been more fun if they had gotten something more 'special' than what they did. but, the kids seemed to have picked up a lot the semester i was on for STEM and always perked up when i came into the classroom. any outdoor activity really excited them. they also loved the computer programing we did, along with their work in google docs. we had a blast building the 1 square meter and trying to fit everybody in. there never seemed to be a dull moment. from my experience as a teacher, new and different was always healthy, and i guess i was definitely that.

carrying on the animal sitings into the weekend, pam and i were on the look out for red efts , the juvenile, land stage of the eastern newt, as we stepped through the woods, up and over town hill. saturday's rain brought out a bunch of what pam refered to as "FLF's" or frail little friends. at one point, she grabbed my arm for balance and was asking if i was stopped for another one. when i made a little squish sound a very young fawn popped up out of the leaves less than step away from us. it tottered off, so well camouflaged, that it was not too long or far away when it too disappeared. it had been snuggled down into a little bed, not moving at all. had it not sprung up and taken off, i might have walked within inches of it and not seen it.

it is not everyday i almost step on a deer and i do love seeing the animal life in the woods but...last weekend pam an i went over to the AT next to the skiway to see the lady slippers in bloom. about halfway up to the ledges, there are dozens of plants. a heavy 1/2 inch of rain over just 10 minutes on friday scoured the trail, and gave some much needed water to the plants.

it was a really grand show!  plus as i was getting back on the trail, i met diane riley, ben silberfarb's wife. ben is always excited about 'koby sitings' as i tend to hike in bare feet. sure enough i was shoeless, but diane was ben-less so we just talked flowers. she had just been to the eshqua bog over near woodstock vt. and seen the yellow lady slippers. as we ambled up the path we saw several interesting species, including an indian cucumber plant!





such was my week outside. things got a bit exciting inside too. on saturday, lenny came over and had me cut away a bunch of his cast that he got for a spiral fracture of one of his metacarpals. (turns out he may have to have it operated on by diane riley who just happens to be the go-to hand surgeon in the area--when she is not chasing wildflowers...) he was having trouble putting the geotrackers on the canada warblers he and christian were mist-netting. i offered to help and expect to get a call soon on that front. we are also due to take a 6th grade class out to the town forest next thursday. all that, and some trail work with MOC plus out the environmental science class should keep my string of outdoor adventures going. all i have to say to that is "fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!"

go outside and play...

and while you are there, share some learning! lenny, christian, kevin, mike, and i spent three mornings with canaan elementary school classes out in the canaan town forest on the trails about the nature hut. leading groups of 15-20, kindergartners-forth graders, was a lesson in engaging curiosities and harnessing energies.

before we even got the kids into the woods, i had to grit my way through a barrage of logistics involved with moving school children off campus. getting the word out to teachers--after developing a 'word' to actually get out--arranging bussing, permission slips for parents, bus forms for teachers, special medical issues for students, all individually important in making field trips work, together almost overwhelmed me. i don't do well coordinating what i reflexively put in the 'bureaucracy' bucket. but with clear direction and help from kamala, it was all done without leaving any scars.


while these logistical ducks were being arranged in tidy rows, lenny and i were creating curriculum. given the site's environment, three focus areas stood out and would match perfectly with three classes with each busload: forested wetlands, animals, and plants. our individual expertise also matched, christian and kevin took the wetlands, lenny  got animals, and i plants. we took some umbrella terms and objectives for each and discussed possible schemes to address them across the different age levels. intellectual exchange is almost as much fun for me as being with the kids and doesn't get any better than designing and generating with someone like lenny.

wednesday, thursday, and friday, from 8:30 to just past 12:00, about 250 children came out and took in what we arranged...




lenny and christian had brought a few buckets of pond life, along with a 'small' collection of lenny's animal artifacts and set them up in the hut.







each group spent two half of their animal and wetland sessions in the hut discovering all sorts of things at each table...

the plant group started with a leave no trace lesson, gathered around a lone lady slipper just behind the hut. amazingly the plant lasted all three days with only one 'semi-trampling' under the foot of an eager kinder in the very last group, on the very last day. leave as small a trace as you can...





when groups weren't at the hut, they were slowly filing along the trails, observing: looking, hearing, smelling, and feeling--which often included resisting the urge to pick, maybe even taste. while there were challenges to walking single file along a rather narrow trail, imagine how hard it would be for a youngster not to jump off into the woods to point out or just touch some way cool thing they just spotted.

staying on the trail was fairly imperative when the groups got to the old beaver damn. len and i had come out the weekend before and built a few sections of boardwalk across the wettest of spots. even with the 'bridge' more than a foot wide, we were hoping we didn't lose anybody into the wet and muck. the damn was no longer active as the beavers had built a newer one further north.

in the picture above, one of 4th grade lad gets precariously close to at least one wet foot, and dr reitsma looks like an owl! over the three days one student fell in--but not above their knees--and one child left a sneaker 'suctioned' into the mud. while there were students who would have welcomed a dip into the 'pond', there were a few of the youngest that seemed a bit anxious, even of walking through the dry parts of the forest.

all in all, it was a fine week and feedback from teachers, staff, students, even a grandparent, only made it finer. getting all those classes out into the local woods worked so well we agreed that we will definitely do it again next year.

more early birding...

doing point, species counts with dr. reitsma! it was another "just like christmas, only different," morning--i woke up a quarter to four and decided i would pedal over to the town forest and meet lenny. first breakfast in the tank and tea in the thermos, i switched on the bike lights and strobed away. i made it to the back entrance on switch road before lenny and christian so i ducked through the gate and watched a few birds on my own. a huge splash announced a 'monster' beaver at the same time the professor pulled up. christian got out and i got in; he was headed into the nature area and we were going back to lenny and denise's acres for the point count.

point counts are pretty straight forward, what happens is you go out and stand in an established spot, look and listen*--but mostly listen. len does back to back five minute stints, recording bird species and location--direction the call came from. it sounds a bit ho-hum for a non-birder wishing they were back in bed considering it was before 6:00 on a saturday morning. surprisingly, there is quite a flurry of activity in the short time you stand still with your ears 'perked' up. here is a series of lenny, counting at six of the different points we visited.

having spent time in my youth working at a factory printing sears catalogue, i have lost hearing range and can barely detect the higher buzzes, chips, and chirps of many of the warbler species that len works with and was now hearing--black throated blue, nashville, magnolia, canada, blackburnian were all notes on a page rather than in my ears. i did hear a woodpecker, a sapsucker because it's the only peck, peck, peck that slows down as it goes. american robin, phoebe, blue jay, common yellow throat, red eyed vireo, crow, morning dove, a turkey's gobbles, and an oven bird's teacher, teacher, teacher. i actually see one of those little brown forest thrushes as we are about to leave site #1. less than ten feet away lenny stops and points to the ground at a small mound of leaves with a hole about the size of a golf ball through which i can see at least three eggs. it looks just like a little beehive oven, no wonder the bird got that name.


now and again i leave lenny standing and counting as i go off listening and looking at what i can hear and things i can see. i hunt up the super bright scarlet tanager,  singing away at the tippy top of a large pine tree. i photograph some lady slipper orchids and an interesting line of mushrooms growing along where a large oak limb had fallen. i look into a vernal pool with a mass of wood frog tadpoles wriggling just under the surface. lenny sends me off to find the clutch of woodpecker young he hears peeping away in a nearby tree cavity. we walk past a sheep skeleton with dozens of sow or pill bugs (thank you hannah broadley for looking at them closely) foraging over the vertebrae and skull for the last scraps of cartilage.





there is so much going on in a forest. even though i am not able to hear it all and i am certain i only see a fraction, it makes me feel rich to be out here observing what i can. being aware of ones environment is something i have long pushed in school and out. as i type, i take a binocular break to watch a red squirrel scramble about the trees along the stone wall beyond the screen door. outdoor things seem to encourage my tendency toward adhd...there is so much going on period.


*speaking of listening, the front door was open to the porch and as i sipped my tea and typed, i heard a lot more chirping than usual from the active robin nest up in the rafters. through the window over the kitchen cutting board i saw why. a broadwing hawk landed on the rafter plate over on the wood shed with the male robin harassing it. it didn't stay too long before being chased off down the drive. i thought it might land in a tree out front so i got up to look. no such 'luck' today, at least for the hawk, the robins had successfully protected the eggs in the nest from being broadwing breakfast.

which reminds me, i could go for a 2nd breakfast...

the early bird...

catches something, but it was far too wet for worms. just before i headed off to bed thursday night, i called lenny to tell him the latest on running school field trips out to the bear pond natural area. i thought it might be possible to get together with him on friday. he suggested i meet him and christian and do a bit of bird banding. "meet us at the pull off at 5:30!"

the decoy...

like i have said before, i get up early, so i agreed right off. when i pulled over, with my bike lights strobing, he and his grad student, christian, were a bit surprised. i changed into boots and followed them into the foggy, dim woods. we put up our first set, a few hundred yards along the path. almost as soon as lenny walked away from turning on his i pod to play the canada warbler call beneath a decoy warbler he had fastened onto a bush, an unbanded male flew into the mist net. (pam says, "that's so sneaky!") before we were even done banding the first male and taking down the biometrics, we had a female in the net. things went fairly smoothly and quickly given we had three pairs of hands to operate with.

lenny, male canada warbler, and me

canada warbler and christian

we set the net up about four more times with equally pleasing results, capturing four more unbanded CAWA--ornithologist code for canada warblers--and two special prizes, warblers with geolocator devices (this site shows an example of those devices) on their backs! the trick with these miniature electronic trackers is the birds they ride on have to be recaptured to retrieve the tracker and read the data. attached to the bird one year, when caught again the a year later, the migratory history of that bird is captured. the canada warbler is a long distance migrator, wintering in the southern most regions of central america and the northern most parts of south america.






chasing the last 'geo' bird, we splashed across the beaver dam and through the drainage area several more times. we ended up netting one more unbanded male CAWA, but not red over yellow. it was getting sunny out and on toward 9:00 so we pulled in a last set without getting a bird and headed out toward rt 4. at one point we passed a really cool burl that had started to be hollowed out by something. christian snapped this picture for me a few days later. turns out he and lenny tried fairly hard to get the male with the locator they had spotted earlier, but ended up only capturing several more unbanded males.

i like to think that somewhere out there, a male CAWA with a geolocator is laughing at us! "ha ha ha"

bug season...

in western maine--headnet recommended! i fastened my front fork to the mount in the back of the truck and made a quick check to be sure i had packed my bike shoes. the last time i drove off for a ride i had to turn around and fetch them. all in, i set off for kevin's over in west brownfield maine. what i didn't notice, were bugs. a couple hours later as i pulled into kevin and mariel's driveway, a cloud of black flies wafted through the window and gathered about my head. i had to close the window to even attempt to gather things for the dash inside.

mariel was home mixing up a wheelbarrow full of potting soil and moo-doo to start dividing her transplants. it was pretty obvious that working outside was going to be way too buggy without a headnet. so, like any dedicated maine gardener, she filled a five gallon bucket with her mix, headed inside, and emptied half of it into the kitchen sink! "...we'll have to clean this up before kevin gets home to make dinner..." with an attitude like that, how could i not pitch in and help.

we were basically ready and a pizza dinner was prepped, cooked, and set on the table in fine fashion. i got in a visit with 4/5 of the feider-sullivans, all save for seamus, who lives and works out in san francisco. owen has grown two or three feet since i saw him at popham beach last july. clayton has found a yurt to live in while he works landscaping and plans his next long trek--he has now finished both the appalachian trail and pacific crest trail--that's just shy of 5000 miles, on foot! mariel is growing plants like mad and wants to actually set up a nursery in a green house. kevin is working three days a week at a bike shop in n. conway. life seems pretty good.

friday morning, the dishes done and our panniers packed, kevin and i set off to pedal to the amc cold river camp up in chatham new hampshire. we headed north towards fryeburg where we would pick up 113 and continue north towards evan's notch. the road actually crosses back and forth from maine into new hampshire several times as it winds its way toward gilead me on rt 2, just east of shelburne nh. it was a great day to be riding, with little wind and somewhere in the 60's temperature wise. i tried to keep up kevin's faster cadence, but for some reason found myself pushing higher gears at lower rpms most of the way. old habits die hard--i just hope my knees don't give out early.

we pulled into the amc camp about twenty five miles and two hours after leaving kevin's. after arranging for a cabin kevin and i pitched right in to helping schlep dinning hall tables and chairs. the whole reason we were there was to open the camp for the season. moving everything out of storage, scrubbing walls, clearing paths, putting up fixtures--even a play structure--gave us plenty to do for right through sat, about 2 o'clock. there was a bit of time for fun and the pinkham crew took advantage of it, atop some of the bikes we rolled out of the rec center...

after working in the sun for a bit of the afternoon, three of us took off down to the cold river for a dip. i snapped a picture of billy buffum resting up on a rock.

after a bit of rest we decided to hike up to the ledges on little deer hill just east of the river. i forgot i had my camera until after we passed a really cool stone wall climbing up along the ledge trail. we stopped to look out once and i got an expanded 'selfie'...

the smiles on our faces are genuine and attest to billy's talk as we hiked about the 'being present in the moment' philosophy of eckhart tolle.  some moments in life remind me how privileged i am to have dear friends, my health, all the stuff that makes for moments like these. i have been reading joe kurmaskie's biking book riding outside the lines and keep coming back to one particular story, "you make your own luck". my friend ken and i talked about this just the other day and he is convinced, as kurmaskie comes to be, that this is not at all the case. in fact he finishes the story with the line "luck's what happens when god has his back turned." the story is a good one. so was this hike.

not that you can tell, but the trail was quite steep, complete with signs 'not recommended for decent'. i got a sweet vision of a foot of snow on the ground making for one hell of a fine ski run! maybe i was just lamenting the lack of skiing this past season. seriously though, there seemed to be some hot potential, if we just got lots of snow. that is possible in the north country, and when that happens i told kevin i would pick him up and we would give it a shot. it was in the plan for last winter for us to ski the 4000 footers in new hampshire--maybe next year...i can only hope.







we got to bed at a decent hour after hanging out on the porch and reminiscing about our pinkham days and life after. one of the reasons we came to cold river was to surprise ed parson's--the fourth 'pinkham weenie' from back in '75. ed had spent sometime in nepal and showed a slide show of his trip to the pinkham crowd. billy had seen those pictures and decided he needed to see the beauty for himself. he ended spending 10 years in nepal and 5 more in bhutan--ed had changed his life. on a sadder note, the guy running this cold river opening, bill waste, was the brother of connie who had also been on our pinkham crew. connie died in october '75 of a heart complication while the crew had been playing touch football down at the auto road. ed had been playing that day and i had gotten the news when i came back to pinkham to wash my clothes (i used the hobart--once a week whether i needed it or not). it was a reunion packed with quite a few emotional memories as well as work.

true to form for me, i woke very early, probably because it was raining and i was puzzling how i could get kevin home without getting wet. i tried to get back to sleep but didn't have much luck. around 4:30 i got out of bed and started packing. turns out both kevin and billy were awake too. when i greeted them a bit too enthusiastically for the hour, kevin pegged the moment, "it's like christmas, only it's raining!" we packed and wheeled the bikes over to the lodge, turned on the lights and raided the kitchen for breakfast. billy came with us and ed showed up after my second bowl of cereal and cup of tea. it had been a celebration of friends and i wish i had a better camera...nancy, ed's friend, took a final shot as we prepared to head down the road. (in a sweet coincidence, nancy also took the picture of ed and i up in tuckerman ravine when MOC met them over our annual april vacation trip!)

somehow it stopped raining as we pedaled away from our friends and ed 'rang us out.' at before six in the am a porch bell can be pretty loud in a quiet place. bill waste told me later that indeed he had "heard it!" we made it back to kevin's mostly dry and very happy to have shared the weekend. as i drove back to canaan to meet another set of dear friends for lunch and another hike, i wondered if like joe kurmaskie noted, "god had his back turned."