Mallinger's Coop

Photo by Wayne Mallinger

My friend Wayne Mallinger sent me this great photo of a juvenile Cooper's Hawk this week. You can tell it's a first year bird because it still has a brown back. When it matures these feathers will molt gray. The two Accipiters in our area can be hard to tell apart. Is it a Cooper's hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk? 

Cooper's hawks are roughly crow-sized and sharp-shinned hawks are blue-jay size but size is hard to judge in a photo or in the field unless you have something to compare it to.

So what field marking do you look for?

My friend Dr. Cheryl Greenacre at the UT Veterinary Teaching Hospital sees a lot of injured birds up close. She looks in the mouth. Inside a Cooper's is black, a sharp-shinned is pink. But we never see one that closely or that disabled.

Both the Accipiters have extra long tails. The clue for us is the very end of the tail. Cooper's have a rounded tail that ends in a noticeable band of white. Sharpies have a blunt or squared-off tail with so little white it is hard to see. 

I have a program scheduled on Identifying Local Birds of Prey at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge on Wednesday, May 8.

Thanks, Wayne.

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heated bath?

Heated bath, aaaaahhh, sounds so good right now.

You have several feeders out and are attracting lots of birds. Good thing. They need the help in winter. Short days. Long cold nights.  

But don't forget, it is perhaps even harder for your backyard birds to find water on cold days. Then a heated bird bath from Wild Birds Unlimited located at 7240 Kingston Pike is the answer. You'll be surprised at the different species that fly in for a drink and splash. 

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Available online from Target

Well. You have that holiday gift card you have not used yet.

"Bales, a naturalist and author, provides 12 essays about nature in East Tennessee, describing fleeting, short-lived, or transient flora and fauna: the short-eared owl; the jack-in-the-pulpit; the cerulean warbler; the ghost plant, which grows in areas without sunlight; the Appalachian panda, an ancestor of the red panda; the ruby-throated hummingbird; the freshwater jellyfish; the monarch butterfly; the seldom-seen lake sturgeon and its reintroduction into the waters of the Tennessee Valley; the whooping crane; the southern pine beetle; and the coyote-wolf-dog hybrids and their emergence in the eastern states." 

Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR

To order from Target Click: TARGET









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Baskins revisit

My friend Tamera Partin saw my post dated January 1 (Click: Ancestral Headwaters) and emailed me a couple more photographs.

The one above is the misty scene of burnt trees on Piney Ridge east of Cherokee Orchard, she recently hiked the same trail I did on my way into Baskins the last day of 2018. But Tamera went farther and moved on into the Roaring Fork watershed. She took the eerie photo below of the Bales Cemetery where many of my pre-park ancestors where buried. 

Thank you, Tamera!

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howlin' wolf moon eclipse?

Being that it was being billed as a rare partial lunar eclipse during a Wolf Moon and I didn’t even have to leave my driveway to see it, well, I stayed put, sitting very close to where I watched the Queen of the Night bloom last October and the monarch butterflies begin their long journey to Mexico the same month. And who could forget the poor dazed and confused wood thrush in 2017? 

There's a lot that goes on outside if you are just mindful enough to pay attention. 

The first full moon after the New Year is called a “Wolf Moon” after the howling wolves, but since we killed all the wolves and now they have been replaced by yipping coyotes, we should really call it the “Coyote Moon.”

After 9 p.m. clouds started to move in and it became a peek-a-boo partial eclipse Coyote Moon and did I mention it was very cold?

Giving up after 10:30, I went in to soak in a hot tub. Did I mention it was 16 degrees outside?

But luckily I checked one last time before bed and the clouds were gone, so I hung with it until after midnight. Really quite wonderful. The Druids who live in the woods behind me with the coyotes were overcome with ecstasy as was I. 

Not a great photo. Best I could do with cell phone and cold hands.

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eagle spotting

Keep in mind that this is bald eagle courtship season. The peak of egg-laying is in mid-February so January is when established mated pairs reconnect or new pair bonds are formed.

It is astonishing that I am even able to write this. Thirty years ago there were no bald eagles in our part of the world. But due to the efforts of TWRA, TVA and the American Eagle Foundation located in Pigeon Forge, today there is a healthy growing population. Our hats are tipped to the late Bob Hatcher of TWRA who oversaw the eagle introduction into the Tennessee River Valley.  

Naturalist Shelley Conklin took the above photo a few days ago near my hometown. It's the second time she has spotted the eagle there. Is it establishing a territory? Will it attract a mate? Time will tell. 

For the complete story of bald eagles in Tennessee check my first UT Press book: Natural Histories. Available online or stop me in the Kroger parking lot and I'll sell you one out of the trunk of my car.

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clean-up crew

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There they were on duty at their recyclers perch on Old Maryville Pike, keeping watch over the highway for roadkill. When they pronounce a thing dead, it's dead.  

"Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum," in the Mandalorian tongue of "Star Wars" speak, roughly, "I am still alive but you are dead."

Ever vigilant, they're drawn to death; have an eye for it. Yes, that's a black vulture. When a death occurs, they move in like a group of staid morticians, clothed in ebony. Solemn. Nodding their heads in agreement. It's time to do their job. Begin decomposition. Nature's clean up crew, patrolling the highways, removing roadkill. 

Some studies estimate up to one million animals are struck and killed every 24 hours in this country. Dogs. Cats. Raccoons. Opossums. Deers. Squirrels. Groundhogs. All are fair game, so to speak, if they inadvertently venture out onto the asphalt.

Thank goodness we have vultures, or it would get messy out there. 

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Ephemeral by Nature honored

The University of Tennessee Press received "word right before Christmas break that two of our titles had been selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2018. 

Ephemeral by Nature was one of those! This year’s list included only 455 books of the over 4,800 titles they reviewed.

“These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as an important-often the first-treatment of their subject... Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the ‘best of the best.'"

The CHOICE Awards are chosen by the American Library Association. For more about being an Outstanding Academic Title, click: CHOICE

Linsey Sims Perry

Marketing Assistant

The University of Tennessee Press

To buy the book from UT Press go to: utpress.org/title/ephemeral-by-nature

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2018 Christmas Bird Count

The Knoxville Christmas Bird Count (CBC) was held yesterday. The count itself runs midnight to midnight, but we began at sunrise and at least part of us were still active at sunset. For the past 15 years I have overseen the bird tally of Area 12 North: Lakemoor Hills north to Cherokee Farm and kind of know what to expect.

The first CBC was held in 1900 and ever since has been held annually during the holiday season all across the country. One of the reasons is to not only count the number of species in a given area but to perhaps get a sense of shifts in the bird population and ranges.

And I have observed a few changes in recent years. Although, we didn't find a bald eagle this year, we have in several recent years. The presence of eagles is new. While this year Vickie Henderson saw and heard five fish crows which seem to now have a regular presence in this general section of town, most notably near Third Creek as observed by Sayge Smith and Nick Stahlman.

Rachael Barker was the first to find a red-headed woodpecker, a life-bird for her and a newbie to the county. Their numbers seem to be growing here. Dr. Cheryl Greenacre and Dr. Abby Duvall found and photographed a barred owl. It's always fun finding one of these during the day.

This year we tallied 50 species, 973 total birds. Perhaps the biggest surprise to me is that we were not able find any winter wrens, golden-crowned kinglets or brown creepers. Species that are here only in winter and usually findable.

A hugh thank you to all who helped search with me: Dr. Cheryl Greenacre, Dr. Abby Duvall, Nick Stahlman, Sayge Smith, Rachael Barker and Vickie Henderson. 

life finds a way

“It’s not possible. That is the one thing that the history of evolution has taught us, that life will not be contained, it breaks free, it expands into new territories, it crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but...Well, there it is...Life, uh....finds a way, “ said Professor Ian Malcolm in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park.

Nature indeed finds a way. A way to recover, to move on, even after a wildfire that wipes everything out as we saw three days ago on sandy, shaley Piney Ridge in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. 

But, how? Table Mountain pines have serotinous pine cones. They are time capsules waiting for their time, whenever it comes. 

se·rot·i·nous [si-ROT-n-uh-s]

“Serotiny is an ecological adaptation exhibited by some seed plants, in which seed release occurs in response to an environmental trigger, rather than spontaneously at seed maturation.”

In the case of these pines, the trigger is fire. It takes high heat to melt the resin that holds the seeds in place and even if that fire only comes along once in the lifespan of a human, say, my lifespan. Nature finds a way to move on and generate new life. No matter what bad things we do to the planet...life will indeed find a way. Even if it has to leave us behind. 

  

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Ancestral Headwaters

The quandary? What was the best way to end the old year and welcome in the new? What was the best leaf—or in this case—pine needle to turn over and move forward?

I ended up making an emotional leap of faith and hiking into my ancestral headwaters: Baskins Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains NP, having avoided this area since the Firestorm of November 2016. It was just too difficult to think about. But time heals all wounds or that is the conventional wisdom. 

Parking at Cherokee Orchard, I hiked around the edge of Piney Ridge where the wildfire damage is still very obvious and down along Falls Branch to Baskins Creek and the tiered waterfall where Grandma Pearl Bales once took her daily shower. It is only two miles downstream from this location to where I grew up.  

As expected: Nature is reclaiming the ridge. Time does heal, although some wounds more slowly than others. Young table mountain pines grow as thick as grass at the base of their charred parent trees. The new growth was just beautiful. There is a metaphor there somewhere and it's not that difficult to find.

Happy 2019! Let's move forward.  

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