whooper second fiddle? never

• 

I never, never, never, never, never to the power of 10 never, thought I'd ever be at Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge and a whooping crane—yes Grus americana, world’s rarest crane, only 500 in existence—would be forced to play second fiddle, noticed, observed but not gawked at. And a first year whooper at that, still sporting some of its cinnamon colored plumage of youth, a direct release colt, a young whooper that found its way to Tennessee by following an adoptive parent figure. Brave little cuss.

But, that has been the case this week. The exotic hooded crane from Asia has been garnering all the oohs and ahhs.

Here's an amateur video shot through a spotting scope from the viewing gazebo. It's a bit shaky in the beginning but bear with it. It's a wonderful testament of this week at Hiwassee.

•

lost Asian crane in Tennessee

•

Hooded crane at Hiwassee photo by John Kuehnel.

The rare Asian hooded crane first reported at Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge the Tuesday before Christmas was still there the Monday after. A short 90-mile car trip added it to our life lists, whether it's an ABA-approved listing or not can be sorted out later.

The TWRA managed, 10,000 plus acre refuge shared by Meigs and Rhea counties in southeast Tennessee is already home to thousands of wintering sandhill cranes, a few reintroduced wintering whooping cranes and at least for now, one solo, lost, confused hooded crane, a species listed as endangered...in Asia and non-existent in the Americas. Non-existent in the wild except for this one. Do I hear the mournful strains of Roy Orbison's Only the Lonely?

Sandhill, whooping, hooded: three crane species at one time in North America. That's a day to remember! Historic.

Speculation and teeth chattered throughout Hiwassee's viewing gazebo and the Internet. 

Is it truly a far-flung wild hooded on the wrong continent or an escaped captive on a lark from an American zoo or mac-zillionaire's secret menagerie? The species has only been reported THREE times in North America, all recent: 1) in 2010 at Carey Lake, Idaho, 2) last spring in Nebraska, and now, 3) the Hiwassee refuge in Tennessee Christmas 2011. 

Could it be the same wayward crane going from place-to-place in the company of sandhills? Gallivanting like Gulliver. Meandering like Muir.

Backstory: The Hooded Crane (Grus monacha) is a small, dark crane with white head. It breeds in south-central and south-eastern Siberia and perhaps in Mongolia. (Yes. Siberia and Mongolia. So our Tennessee crane is perhaps most assuredly lost. The other side of the world lost, like me at Saks Fifth Avenue lost.) 

Over 80 percent of its population overwinters in Izumi in southern Japan. Considered as environmentally vulnerable, the major threats to the hooded crane's survival are wetland loss throughout its range and the degradation of its other wintering grounds in China and South Korea as a result of reclamation for development and dam building.

As I post this, John Vanderpoel is headed to Hiwassee in hope of seeing the wayward crane. Vanderpoel is working on a Big Year, trying to break the record of finding 745 species in North America set by Sandy Komito in 1998. Vanderpoel currently has 741 with time running out in the calendar year. For the record, he needs five more species in four days, but in that rarefied air of the 700 Club, even in a field of play that stretches from sea to shining sea, that's a Mt. Everest kind of climb. We're cheering for you John. 

For more details go to his blog: Big Year 2011.


Thanks Bill for giving me the heads up on the hooded at Hiwassee.

Sandhill cranes. Photo by Manjith Kainickara.

•

remember the Furbies?

•

Pygmy tarsier rediscovered on a mountain near Sulawesi, Indonesia 

Since I often write about species that are either very endangered or that have gone extinct, I've been asked are there any species once labeled extinct—either formally or informally—that have been rediscovered.

Yes, my book Ghost Birds is about one such species.

Although the list is short, here's a good article about seven or eight species that have been rediscovered. And just wouldn't you love to see a pygmy tarsier? It's a small, arboreal, nocturnal primate that looks a lot like the must have Christmas toy of the late 1990s: the Furby.


•

Merry Christmas

•

My friend Wayne Mallinger sends Christmas tidings.

And what better bird to convey the sentiments 

than the male cardinal. 

Always dressed for the season.

Photo by Wayne Mallinger.

• 

NS Birdlife review

•

"What an adventure. It started as a four-month, 15,000-mile road trip in 1935 to record bird songs. It led 20-year-old James T. Tanner, a graduate student at Cornell University at the time, on a multi-year quest to document the life history and habitat requirements of rare ivory-billed woodpeckers.

"Fortunately for the ornithological history of the ivory-bill — a species believed by many people to now be extinct — Jim Tanner kept meticulous scientific field notes. He also recorded his personal daily activities.

"Knoxville writer and naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales relied directly on Jim's field notes, diaries, and scientific publications along with the assistance and recollections of Jim's widow, Nancy Sheedy Tanner of Knoxville, to write "Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941" ( University of Tennessee Press). 

Marcia Davis

"Readers can curl up with Bales' book and get a true feel for Jim's daily life, his work, and his adventures as a woodpecker biologist searching remote southern swamps for signs and proof of ivory-bills." 

For the rest of the Knoxville News Sentinel review go to: Marcia Davis. 

Sagan: in memoriam

•

The book The Monsters is about writer Mary Shelley and the creation of her novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Emphasis on the word modern. (What today seems Gothic and geriatric was then cutting-edge.)  

First published in 1818, Shelley was only 19 years old when she began the manuscript and the collecting of body parts was a ghoulish topic of the day, but reassembling them to create an entire new human was rather shocking, even blasphemous, posing the question, “Can science go too far?”

In the 1800s there was a mad rush to collect items of natural history, as though if one could assemble one of everything, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the mystery of life could be solved into one giant picture. “Viola! But of course, now it all makes sense.”

The museums around the world started collecting. Behind the brightly lit areas open to the public—their dark archives filled drawers, shelves and cabinets with bones, skulls and soft tissues floating in formaldehyde.

In Broca’s Brain Carl Sagan writes, “Deeper in the room were more macabre and more disturbing collections. Two shrunken heads reposing on a cabinet, sneering and grimacing, their leathery lips curled to reveal rows of sharp, tiny teeth. Jar upon jar of human embryos and fetuses, pale white, bathed in a murky greenish fluid, each jar completely labeled. Most specimens were normal, but occasionally an anomaly could be glimpsed, a disconcerting teratology—Siamese twins joined at the sternum, say, or a fetus with two heads, the four eyes tightly shut.”

“There was more.” Sagan continues, “An array of large cylindrical bottles containing, to my astonishment, perfectly preserved human heads. A red-mustachioed man, perhaps in his early twenties, originating, so the label said, from Nouvelle Calédonie…his head involuntarily drafted in the cause of science. Except he was not being studied; he was only being neglected, among the other severed heads…Men and women and children of both sexes and many races, decapitated, their heads shipped to France only to moulder—perhaps after some brief initial study—in the Musée de l’Homme.” [Museum of Man in Paris].

A man named Paul Broca, who became quite renowned in the study of the human brain, started the collection. (He had many human brains in jars of formalin, which is where Broca’s own brain ended up after he died in 1880.)

In the end, had science gone too far? Too Victor Frankenstein-ish? We might say no, the pursuit of knowledge knows no bounds; the family of the red-mustachioed man, whose head still floats in formalin, might disagree.

Sagan the scientist queried Sagan the humanitarian. “All inquiries carry with them some element of risk…The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations,” Sagan concludes. This and other musings are found in Broca’s Brain, a collection of essays on the “romance of science,” Carl Sagan’s follow-up to his 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning The Dragons of Eden. During his time on this Pale Blue Dot, perhaps no one did more to popularize science to the television-watching world than the Brooklyn-born, astronomy professor.

Sagan wrote over 600 scientific papers and was author, co-author or editor of twenty books. He died on this date, 20 December 1996, 15 years ago today.

•

all girl lizards

•

A lizard previously unknown and undescribed by science was recently discovered in a restaurant in South Vietnam.

Where? On the menu. The common reptile is a popular Vietnamese entrée but apparently no biologist had ever tried to figure out what he or she was eating. (I normally do not take my field guides into restaurants either.)

But, wait, there's more. It gets even more curious.

Newly named Leiolepis ngovantrii (in the Vietnamese: Nhông cát trinh sản, meaning "parthenogenic sand iguana") is all female. The specific name honors Vietnamese herpetologist Ngo Van Tri. The all-girl lizard reproduces by cloning and do not need males. If this strategy spreads, my gender is in trouble. Better clean up your act boys!

But how can this be? 

In a paper titled "Who's your Mommy?" written by Jesse and Lee Grismer and published in the scientific journal Zootaxa, the Grismers speculate: "Two major pathways that have been proposed for the origin of this reproductive lifestyle within vertebrates are (1) a genetic mutation (usually within a single egg clutch) that creates individuals with the ability to clone themselves and (2) two species (either two sexual species or an asexual and a sexual species) hybridize to create a polyploidal [having more than twice the basic number of chromosomes], all-female population whose members have the ability to clone themselves." 

Just so you know. Every daughter and all of her sisters are a carbon copies of their mother. 

Photo by the paper's co-author Lee Grismer. 

•

my mountain, no really

•

Mt. LeConte

" One of the deeply satisfying things about a mountain—

almost any mountain—is the way it can at the same time 

belong exclusively to so many people."

- From "A Thousand Mile Summer" by Colin Fletcher

•

it likes to watch

•

Brown-marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys)

Stink bugs invade county!

“The brown-marmorated stink bug is a native of Asia and was first collected in the United States in 1998 in Pennsylvania, according to Penn State University. It has caused severe damage to fruit crops like apples and peaches,” reported Rebecca Williams on knoxNews last year.

“But now the bugs are hitting hard in the suburbs of Knoxville, [Neal] Denton said. They have reproduced vigorously during the warm summer and are now looking for warm places to stay as the weather cools, including homes, garages and campers.”

Well they're back.

Now that the weather has turned colder, I’ve had a marmorated (it means having a marbled or streaked appearance) stink bug loitering about my bathroom sink this week. It watches me brush my teeth, dry my hair, trim my graying beard. Like Being There's Chance the gardener, "It likes to watch." A rather nonthreatening voyeur, that seems inordinately interested in me. Are they government drones, should I be paranoid? Although honestly, it's kind of nice having something that actually wants to share my morning curry. It's been rather lonely up to this point.

I wonder if it will be with me all winter?

•

last Labrador duck

•

Pair of Labrador ducks:
painting by John Gerrand Keulemans 

The Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius), was a black and white eider-like sea duck that was probably never common (a recipe for disaster). The rather handsome waterfowl is believed to be the first bird to become extinct in North America after 1500. 

Since the duck itself was considered "bad tasting,"—a pretty good trait to have if you are an easy-to-shoot duck—it is believed that its eggs were over-harvested, which led to its ultimate demise. No eggs, no ducks to make more eggs.

On this dubious date: December 12, 133 years ago today, the last Labrador duck is believed to have been seen at Elmira, New York in 1878; the last preserved specimen was shot in 1875 on Long Island. It was thought to breed in Labrador, although no nests were ever described, and it wintered from Nova Scotia to as far south as Chesapeake Bay.

•

a birthday remembered

•

Poems first edition
published posthumously in 1890
(note the Indian pipe
on the cover)

•


"I hope you love birds too. 

It is economical. 
It saves going to heaven."

The Belle of Amherst,  
American poet Emily Dickinson,

was born on this date 
December 10, 1830

•

turkeys do fly

•

Driving home the other day, three large, dark birds flew low over the road—hillside to hillside—in front of my car. What the heck? I first thought vultures but the girth wasn't right. Too chunky, too heavy in the stern. Their flight was labored, like me flapping my arms trying to get airborne. 
-
As I passed the site, I discovered three wild turkeys strutting up the hill away from the road. 
-
Yes, Virginia, not only is there a Santa Claus, but turkeys indeed do fly, at least the wild ones, the domesticated gobblers can barely even walk, too heavy in the bulbous bow.
-

- Photo by Cody Pope

•

stone or water

•

"It is the nature of stone

to be satisfied.

It is the nature of water

to want to be somewhere else."

- From "The Leaf and the Cloud" by poet Mary Oliver

This begs the question: Are you made of stone or water?

-Photo taken in the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River in the Sugarlands. Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

•

Smoky Mountain Living: Animal Abodes

•

Animal Abodes: Bedding Down in the Wilds of the Mountains


By Don Hendershot


There's a host of furry, feathery, slinky, slimy, big and tiny creatures making their homes in the mountains and with which we share the landscape...


The Smokies are home to a number of wonderful nature centers that showcase native flora and fauna. At Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, Tenn., "bird guy" Stephen Lyn Bales is senior naturalist and author of two books Natural Histories and Ghost Birds. Bales notes that different species of birds nest at different elevations throughout the Smokies. Two of his favorite high-elevation nesters are the Northern saw-whet owl and the winter wren.


"The owl can be found in the forests along the Smokies' crest," Bales says...




For the rest of the article look for the December2011/January2012 issue of Smoky Mountain Living. 


•

sketches for sale

•

While working on the illustration that became the cover for my book Ghost Birds, I produced several sketches of a male ivory-bill. There's really no need for me to keep all of them, so if you'd like to buy one please contact me.

These are not color copies but real pen and ink drawings. I did a series of rough drafts in order to capture just the right Campephilus principalis expression. Intense and statuesque. Character studies, if you will. Not an easy thing to do since I have never seen a live one.

  

•

drop of rain

•

Sometimes it’s funny how nature presents itself; it's often serendipitous as we stumble into insight at the most opportune moment.

Recently, I heard the soft warbler of a bluebird, but try as I might, I could not find it. I looked but the source of the call seemed to come from no place specific. It just floated on the breeze.

I'm not the first to be so puzzled. Within the hour I read a passage in 19th century naturalist John Burroughs' first book “Wake-Robin,” originally published in 1871.

“The [blue]bird at first seems a mere wandering voice in the air: one hears its call or carol...but is uncertain of its source or direction; it falls like a drop of rain when no cloud is visible; one looks and listens, but to no purpose."

•

a towhee by any other name?

•

Eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus)

A towhee by any other name would...the eastern towhee is a large New World sparrow. Yes, sparrow. It doesn't look like one but it certainly acts the part. Hides in the bushes, feeds on the ground, etc. etc. They are more closely related to Old World buntings than Old World sparrows but that is a can or worms, so we'll just talk about towhees. 

If you have an older field guide, this bird was once called the rufous-sided towhee but several years ago it was split from the more western population and what emerged was two species: the eastern (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) and the spotted towhee (Pipilo maculatus). Apparently, they knew the difference all along, it just took us awhile to catch up.


Wayne's photo is of the male eastern, the female is brown in the places that he is black. But, they already know that. I wonder if they know the difference between the New World sparrows and Old World sparrows. Or does it even matter?

N'est-ce pas?


- Photo by Wayne Mallinger

•

thankful for pumkin'

•

Pumpkins have always been a part of our Thanksgiving holiday. The first festival in 1621 brought together the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, the Indian tribe who helped the Plymouth Colonists adapt to their harsh new land. The first feast was composed of fish, duck, geese, wild turkey, venison, cornbread with nuts, succotash—an Algonquian dish of shelled beans and green corn—and for dessert, pumpkin stewed in maple sap. 

This last item interested me. 

What would such a dish taste like? To find out, a few years ago, I bought a locally grown "cooking" pumpkin from a produce vendor. Since maple sap is a little hard to come by at this time of the year, I next purchased a jug of pure, organically grown maple syrup from the local Food Co-Op. To make sap, I diluted the syrup with water which is what producers of maple syrup do, except in reverse.
    
To be authentic, I built a fire in the fireplace and stewed chunks of pumpkin in the maple sap. After about a hour and half the dish was done. The pumpkin dessert had the look and consistency of spiced apples but its color was more orange. It was surprisingly good although somewhat smoky tasting.
    
Now, I wonder what kind of nuts the Pilgrims put in their holiday cornbread.

Happy Thanksgiving.

- Photo by Wayne Mallinger. Thanks.


•

brown-headed anomaly

•

Pines at Louisville Point Park

You look for the anomalies. The things out of place. 


Life's little mysteries. 

Brown-headed nuthatches are not supposed to be in my part of the world. Check the range maps, most of the Southeast but not Tennessee. Not here, the pine forests to the south. They feed on pine nuts, the edible seeds from the genus Pinus. (Genus Pinus. You can write for a lifetime and never use that phrase more than thrice; I've already used it twice in this one post.) 

The first time I saw the active brown-noggin pixies was in South Carolina north of Charleston. Yet, not far from my house as the crow flies, or even walks if it has a mind to, there's a small peninsula—Louisville Point Park—surrounded by Lake Loudoun that has a cluster of pines not that much larger than Uncle Buck's cornfield where you can routinely find the petite nuthatches. Why do they like it, who knows? They are certainly not talking. "No comment," they squeak. 

Cayenne and I found them there on Sunday. Go figure. 

Better yet, go see 'em. 

Nuthatch food

Brown-headed Nuthatch. Photo by Ken Thomas

•

lone leaf

•

Cold. Cold. Wet and rainy. Dreary. Midnight deary. While I pondered weak and weary. The last of the autumn leaves are still clinging to the trees as the first taste of winter has come gently rapping at my chamber door.

And I’m not ready to let go of fall, but when am I ever? Breakin' up is hard to do, but you have to let go of one to welcome the joys of another. You move on, that is life on planet Earth. You simply move on, even when it hurts.

One of the most emotive parts of Stephen Altschuler’s book, Sacred Paths and Muddy Places, comes late.

“Millions of leaves had been falling, but never had I isolated in my awareness any one leaf’s leaving the twig to which it had clung. The importance of this sighting had to do with missing another of nature’s most significant events: the moment of the death of a leaf,” he writes.

“So the watching began, and it lasted a long time, focusing intently on one particular leaf, not knowing how long the release would take. An hour went by, then a second hour—a trance-like hour concentrating on that leaf. At times the distinction between leaf and self blurred. Scary stuff, losing boundaries, but the seeing provided the anchor to reality.”

“Finally, without fanfare, the leaf fell, swirling to the ground. I rose slowly, never losing sight of it, and picked it up: a maple leaf, crinkled and brown, drained of life, dead, but somehow a part of the part of me that sees—the part that understands what it sees not in words but in feelings. That part remained alive regardless of circumstance, for in nature, its death would lead to life.”

•

7 wonders

•

The on-line msnbc website has just posted a new 7 Wonders of Nature as voted on by millions of people from around the world. And surprise, surprise. I've never been to any of them, so I have a lot to look forward to in the next 30 years.


My bags are packed!


For the list go to: New7Wonders.


•

bear jam?

•

Cades Cove in the Smokies

Growing up in the Great Smoky Mountains, I'm somewhat accustomed to bear jams—traffic moving as slowly as preserved fruit because someone up ahead has seen a black bear ambling near the road. 

Last month my Mom and I were driving the one-way scenic loop around Cades Cove when the traffic came to a stop, we then proceeded inches at a time for the next hour. Inches. Bicyclists passed us on the right; a park ranger passed us on foot on the left. Still the traffic snail-paced along. 

Ultimately, we reached the front of the line, and discovered what was causing the slow down: not a bear ambling by the road but three bears up an oak eating green acorns. 

The ranger would not allow me to stop but I did manage to shoot one frame over my left shoulder.

It did occur to me that this was not a typical bear jam, it was much slower, thus prompting me to come up with a new set of nomenclature to describe the "sluggishness" of the traffic as it slows to look at a Smoky Mountain black bear.

     No bear.....................35+ mph

     Bear Beer..................35 mph

     Bear Dark Ale.............25 mph

     Bear Custard..............15 mph

     Bear Jelly....................5 mph

     Bear Jam....................3 mph

     Bear Cheesecake......300 feet per hour

     Bear Pâté................100 feet per hour

     Bear Fruitcake...........50 feet per hour

     Bear Aged Cheddar......Dead Stop

•

the charm of hummers

•

I spoke to Sandra Mouron from Greenback at the height of the hummingbird migration. Now that things have settled down, and the hummers are more or less gone for another year, Sandra had time to mail me a photo. 


It shows the side of her house that had six feeders and, to my count, a charm of 21 ruby-throated hummingbirds. The opposite side of her house had four feeders and roughly the same amount of the feathered pixies. 


The books say that for every one you see (or photograph) there are probably three waiting just out of sight. At the height of migration Sandra was using two gallons of sugar-water every day.


That's two gallons! Yes. It was a good year for hummers. 


• 

at home LeConte

•

Mt LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains

The seasons are beginning to mingle. For weeks, fall colors have flowed with slow restraint down the slopes like the tears of a geisha; while last week, a light snow dusted the higher elevations. The first kiss of winter, as soft as a lover's touch, covered Mt. LeConte above Gatlinburg, my hometown.
 

Thomas Wolfe wrote "you can't go home again." He meant that things change. After you leave, it's never the same. Yet, perhaps he was wrong, Asheville is on the other side of the mountains; here Mt. LeConte still looms.

I grew up in the foothills south of downtown Gatlinburg as did my father Russell, as did his father Homer, as did his father Jim, as did his father Caleb. I come from a long line of hillbillies, mountain men, and the mountain that has loomed over all those lives is Mt. LeConte. 

Its silhouette is recognizable as the mountain with four peaks. At 6,593 feet, High Top, the second peak from the left, is the third highest point in the Smokies, topped only by Clingman's Dome at 6,643 and Mt. Guyot at 6,621. 

Chet Raymo writes in The Path, "If we don't belong somewhere, we belong nowhere. If we are not attached to a particular landscape, we might as well be adrift in space...The place we learn to love can be a windowsill in a New York high-rise, a patch of woods on Walden Pond, or a million acres of the high Sierras. What's important is that we feel at home.

I feel at home at the base of this old mountain.

•

golden drive

•

To every thing there is a season, 

and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; 

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; 

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; 

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, 

and a time to gather stones together; 

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; 

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; 

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; 

a time of war, and a time of peace.

And every year, there's a perfectly golden time 

to drive through the Great Smokies.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 with addendum

•