Rose Glen 2017

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The eighth annual Rose Glen Literary Festival was held last Saturday in Sevierville at the Convention Center on Gists Creek Road off Hwy 66.

Rose Glen is designed as a vehicle for local authors to come together once a year and talk about and sell their books. The fest also features lectures, workshops and book signings by authors from the Smoky Mountains and Appalachian region. I've been a part of Rose Glen since the beginning, even serving as the initial keynote speaker at the luncheon. 

This year’s featured authors were Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson, June Hall McCash and Jim Stokely who discovered an unpublished manuscript after the death of his mother, author Wilma Dykeman, entitled Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood which has since been published. 

Ben Montgomery who wrote Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail, which won the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography served as the keynote speaker.

After the luncheon, Dr. Lin Stepp, Bill Landry, Sam Venable and I took part in a panel discussion on the topic "The Ups and Downs of an East Tennessee Author." Knoxville native and WVLT-TV news anchor Alan Williams served as moderator. 

For me, Rose Glen is a homecoming. I was born in Sevierville about four miles from the convention center and grew up in Gatlinburg. I enjoy seeing all my friends—both young and older—every year at Rose Glen. 

Special thanks to Carroll McMahan, Amanda Marr, Chad Branton, director Brenda McCroskey and the rest of the staff of the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce for organizing Rose Glen.

Excellent job!

J.L. and Dr. Lin Stepp

Author Shawne Cline

Three of my newer friends: Luke Copas, the youngest author at Rose Glen, and his sisters, 2014 and 2017

Author and publishing guru Betty Shreffler

Artist and now biology major in college Jordan Roberts, 2014 and 2017

Photo by Betty Powell

Alan Williams, Dr. Lin Stepp, moi, Bill Landry and Sam Venable. 

I wonder how many words these four local authors and WVLT anchor Williams (who is also a Knoxville native and writes his broadcast stories) have put to paper? Is a zillion a real number? 

And perhaps the real surprise, surprise: three of these notables went to Mooreland Heights Elementary and another one only lives 3.1 road miles from the same 
South Knoxville school. 
Can you guess which have the Mooreland connections?

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home-schooled geology

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February was geology month at the nature center for the Ed-Ventures@Ijams home-schooled students. Bright, bright, wonderful young minds! 

We held three sessions last week, learning the difference between rocks and minerals, the three basic kinds of rocks and the lay of the land in the Tennessee Valley indoors, then took a long outdoor adventure hike with the students and their parents/homeroom teachers.

Ijams has been connecting children with nature since the 1920s. Old school? Yep. And we are proud of it!

For more info, click: Ijams homeschool.

- Photos by teacher/moms Hope Turner and Linda Knott

This is a rock! (Yep. We covered the basics.)

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thank you Dr. Littmann

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Thank you Dr. Mark Littmann for inviting me to chat with the students taking your environmental science writing class at the University of Tennessee. And there has never been a time more needful than today for science writers. We live in an era in which scientists are announcing new discoveries daily, yet our country's leaders deny the validity of science. AND science is the one thing that is real because it is peer reviewed and testable.

We discussed the writing process, where ideas come from plus the importance of reading good science writing. Whatever you put into your brain, is what your mind thinks about, so be good stewards and feed your brain the best!

Turn off that TV and read a good science book. My personal bellwether moment came with "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," by Annie Dillard. Sorry John le Carré, spy novels are summer reading. If you want to be a good writer, dedicate yourself to your craft and learn from the best. A good writer can make the "History of Tarpaper" compelling to read. 

We also talked about the creation of my UT Press book Ghost Birds and ivory-billed woodpeckers in general. Are they extinct or not? Ghost Birds is set in the 1930s when the conservation movement was just beginning in this country and the question of the day was: Should we try to save a vanishing species or not?

Luckily, the answer then was "YES!"

Great discussion.  

As always, thank you Rachael Eliot!

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Possible NEW ivorybill footage

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"Sonny Boy," nestling ivory-billed woodpecker on the arm of J.J. Kuhn, 1938.  Photo by James T. Tanner. Used by permission of his estate.

Ghosts. They come and they go. The eerie thing about said phantoms is that they are capricious. Such is true with the legendary Ghost Bird of the South—the ivory-billed woodpecker. Is it still with us? Or is it extinct? The jury has been out on that conundrum since the 1980s. And it's going to stay out because every few years a new sighting is announced by a totally reliable source.

Photo to the right is of ivory-billed woodpecker specimens located at Ijams Nature Center.

The problem with identifying an ivorybill is that it looks a lot like a pileated woodpecker, especially from a distance. And the two species can both be found in the same swampy environs of the Gulf Coast. But anyone trained, who knows the field markings to look for and their very different vocalizations, can tell the difference between the two species. 

Ivorybills are birds of the swamps that prefer the lofty canopy, nesting and roosting as high as 80 to 100 feet off the ground. Like with any ghost, any sighting is usually quick and fleeting. And you simply cannot chase them swiftly in the swamp. Pileateds occur over a much wider range. I have them in my backyard in the mountains of East Tennessee, but I live hundreds of miles from any possible ivorybill location.

Three weeks ago, Audubon and other media outlets announced that Michael Collins had been searching for the elusive ivorybill in ideal habitat for years and had made several sightings. It was reported that Collins is "an intrepid birder and a mathematician and acoustics researcher with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory." He is thorough, detail oriented and knows what he is looking for, so his account cannot be brushed aside lightly. And as Audubon also reported that, "after 500 visits and 1,500 total hours of observation, Collins produced two videos from the Pearl River in 2006 and 2008, and a third from 2007 in the Choctawhatchee River swamp in Florida." We have to applaud Collins for his single-minded dedication. 

 

In 2010, the University of Tennessee Press published my second book: Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker 1935-1941. It detailed the ivorybill research of another dedicated scientist, Dr. James T. Tanner who also spent long hours in the southern swamps for three years under the guidance of his mentor Arthur Allen, the founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The Audubon Society funded Jim Tanner's fieldwork from 1937-1940. It took me three years to write the book with the help of Tanner's handwritten journals, papers, photographs and his widow Nancy who last saw ivorybills with Jim in December 1941 in the Singer Tract in Louisiana. 

Smithsonian magazine also published an article I penned that same year about Tanner and a nestling ivorybill he banded and named "Sonny Boy." For the Smithsonian article, click: A Close Encounter. 

For Audubon's review of my book, click: The Long Goodbye. 

For last week's Audubon report about the new research by Michael Collins, click: New ivorybill sightings.

Speaking of the capriciousness of the natural world, watch for my new UT Press book, Ephemeral by Nature scheduled to be published later this year.

And as the X-Files' Fox Mulder was apt to say, "The truth is out there."

Thank you Karen Suzy, Mac and Donna R. for bringing the new Audubon report to my attention. 

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thank you Beta Sigma Phi

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Special thanks to Susie Treis for inviting me to be the luncheon speaker at the Beta Sigma Phi annual meeting at the Jubilee Banquet Hall on Callahan Road last Saturday.

Being so close to Valentine's Day our topic was Bird Romance: courtship, pair bonding, nest building and raising a family. We chatted about several common backyard species with each having different life histories and since I looked out on a sea of crimson, I naturally began the talk with our own redbird, the Northern cardinal.

Female birds choose their mates. Each species has different criteria. Plumage color, song quality, claimed territory and attentiveness all come into play. In the photo above right, the male cardinal offers food to the female as if to say, I'll provide for you when you are nest bound with our clutch. And he does because if he doesn't she will not stick around for a second brood.

Thank you to all.

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Myth Buster #1: Robins

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American Robin. Photo Wiki by Dakota Lynch

Every year, usually in late February or early March, I get a phone call or two about robins. The caller says "Spring is coming soon, the robins are back."

Myth: Robins are the harbinger of spring.

Truth is: We have American robins (Turdus migratorius) year round. Some of our nesting robins may migrate a little to the south and are replaced by more northern robins that migrate here. But we have them all the time and their population is booming because, it is assumed, we keep making short grassed lawns for them to feed in.

Case in point: The Audubon Christmas Bird Count in Knoxville was held the last day of 2016. My group only counts a small portion of the 15-mile diameter count circle. Yet, my group of six counters—Patty Ford, Eddy Whitson, Vickie Henderson, Cheryl Greenacre, Rachael Eliot, moi—tallied a total of 130 robins. It was the third most numerous species behind ring-billed gulls and crows. It was a big day for crows. And I would strongly suspect that we under-counted robins because they are very active in loose flocks. Truthfully, at one point I grew tired of counting robins and longed for a single diminutive winter wren, which sadly we did not find.

So. We have robins all winter. 

Bonus myth buster: American robins are not true robins. They were mislabeled centuries ago. They are actually thrushes, in the genus Turdus, Latin for thrush. A better name would have been rust-breasted thrush, but it's too late for that.

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Groundhog day?

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WBIR Live@5@4 roving reporter Emily Stroud

Groundhogs (Marmota monax) are rather chunky large rodents, actually grouped with the ground squirrels like chipmunks and prairie dogs. They live underground in burrows where they hibernate during the winter. Mostly the nearsighted mammals are herbivorous primarily eating wild grasses and other vegetation, including berries and agricultural crops. 

Locally they eat oodles of kudzu. That's a good thing because we have more than enough of the highly invasive non-native plant that takes over entire fields, abandoned cars and buildings, even roadsigns. I think we once had a Blue Circle Drive-in here on Chapman Highway and now it's completely gone. The vine grows faster than groundhogs can really eat it, so we could use an army of robust kudzu-ivores.

But do East Tennessee groundhogs really poke their heads out of their burrows on this day to prognosticate the weather? Really? Isn't that meteorologist Todd Howell's job? WBIR reporter Emily Stroud and videographer Tim Dale came to the nature center today to check on our resident marmota. 

Did they find a groundhog? Did it see its shadow? Ask Emily.

Or go online to her report: Groundhog Day with Emily  

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