Can you identify what made them?
I learned that after the young fledge, osprey families continue to use
the nest site for reunions for weeks before abandoning it entirely.
During the first few days of our stay, there were three of them, all
strong fliers, hanging around the nest, making a lot of noise. (They did
not obey "no more screeching!" in case anyone was wondering.) By our
final day, only one at a time would quietly return, every now and again,
as if to reminisce.
Unbelievable? All of that happened.....but we had to imagine that these
animals were wild. We rented a house just upstream from a wildlife
rehab center, where the howling wolves reside. It was fun to picture a
pack singing joyously to the moon after a fine cervid meal, but such
imaginings were sometimes interrupted by a woman yelling "no more
howling!"...And, so like dogs, the wolves would stop!
I fancied myself a duck whisperer, until we visited the rehab center,
and met a suspiciously similar looking pair of ducks who were so
friendly that I had to be careful not to step on them. They had just
been released, we were told, and keep coming back to the rehab center
looking for food.
The photos are from our final day. We were packing up the car, when I
spotted the kestrel on a branch about 20 feet above us. I was stunned
at how calm and still he was as I frantically snapped photo after photo,
expecting him to vanish at any moment. But then we remembered the rehab
center and noticed that something appeared to be wrong with one leg.
And then a wing didn't look quite right. And then we noticed the little
strap hanging from his leg. And so we were not surprised to see that
his flight wasn't quite normal when he made his way towards a shrub at
the side of the driveway. Initially, however, we were astonished to see
the merlin swoop towards the kestrel and pursue him among the trees.
The merlin gave up and flew up onto the house when the kestrel landed on
the ground a few feet away from us, trembling. I carried the poor
creature down to the rehab center and asked if they were missing a
kestrel. Indeed, he had slipped out that morning when someone went in
to clean his cage.
Finally, our excitement over a close encounter with a merlin was
deflated when the rehabber asked what kind of hawk it was that pursued
the little kestrel. "Was it him?" he asked, pointing to a merlin
perched on the top of his old cage. "We just released him a few days
ago, and he keeps coming back."
I found the roost in the 3rd photo one morning while kayaking the
Ausable River in the Adirondacks of NY. Notice the bird at lower left,
with spread wings. It is said that they do this to dry the wings, warm
the body, and bake off bacteria.
Half Moon Meadow a is several acre field with a stone wall around its
periphery. Both of the photos are of large, unusual stones within the
rock wall surrounding the meadow. If you stand on the stone slab in the
2nd photo, you are perfectly positioned to look across the field and
observe the solstice sunrise through the V shaped notch in the stone in
the 1st photo. This alignment has led to the idea that Half Moon Meadow
may be a sacred, ceremonial Native American site. However, the stones
are part of a stone wall, and we know that colonial farmers built many
miles of those. Were the stones carefully moved and aligned by Native
Americans and then left in place when the stone wall was built by
colonial farmers? Or did colonial farmers intentionally place them for
observation of the solstice sunrise? Or was one or both of them moved
by a glacier, with alignment occurring by chance? (A local geologist
confirmed that neither of them is bedrock: they were indeed moved, but
the mover could have been either human or glacial.)
Sacred or accidental? Consider that there are 250,000 miles of stone
walls in New England, and the position of the sunrise varies by only 50
degrees throughout the year. How improbable would it be for something
like this to occur by chance?
It has also been proposed that the Stone with the V shaped notch
represents a person or animal lying down. Hmm. And then there are the
mounds of small stones located outside the meadow, that have been said
to represent the turtle, an animal thought to be of religious
significance to Native Americans.
I did not get a good photo of the mounds outside of Half Moon Meadow so
I posted one from elsewhere The 3rd photo is a mound of small stones
from Brown Woods conservation area. As you can see, it is right up
against a stone wall. Piles like this can often be found near plots
that were once used as cropland. Tom Wessels suggests that farmers
removed even small stones from soil that was to be plowed every year, to
make it easier to turn the soil. These small stones were sometimes used
with larger ones to build walls, or simply tossed into piles in a corner
or edge of a stone wall, or some other out of the way place. To me,
this is a more appealing explanation for the piles of small stones
around Half Moon Meadow....But you never know...
“The next day [July 9, 1605] Sieur de Monts and I landed to observe their tillage on the bank of the river [Saco river]. We saw their Indian corn, which they raise in gardens. Planting three or four kernels in one place, they then heap about it a quantity of earth with shells of the signoc before mentioned [the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus]. Then three feet distant they plant as much more, and thus in succession. With this corn they put in each hill three or four Brazilian beans [the kidney bean, Phaseolus vulgaris], which are of different colors. When they grow up, they interlace with the corn, which reaches to the height of from five to six feet; and they keep the ground very free from weeds. We saw there many squashes, and pumpkins, and tobacco, which they likewise cultivate. The Indian corn which we saw was at that time about two feet high, some of it as high as three. The beans were beginning to flower, as also the pumpkins and squashes. They plant their corn in May, and gather it in September.” "
I thought you'd like pictures of snow with our impending heat wave. The snow accentuates these remnants of the land.
This is in response to Janet's post of June 27th. These are photos of two related species, Monotropa uniflora ("Indian Pipe") and Monotropa hypopithys ("pinesap"). These photos are from Marble Hill Conservation Area in Stow, MA in 2009. It is unusual to find the less common pinesap. I have found some previously in Estabrook Woods in Concord. I had found two locations in Marble Hill where they grew. I looked for them last summer, but it was too dry. Both species are parasitic, so they grow without chlorophyll and can live in low light. I'll be looking for them again in this season to reemerge.
Learn more at
[url=http://www.thebeatnews.org/07/insects-other-invertebrates-workshops/]BEAT[/url].
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYm6Pxw3jX0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL]
The skull in the above photo was on the forest floor at the base of a
cliff. I noticed the gleaming white brain case from a distance, and
thought it was some kind of mushroom. I'm glad I went over to confirm.
With delicate bones still intact, it may be a rare find, but the species
is not rare. Can you identify it?
You can watch the full video here:
http://stowoutdoors.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/coyote-otters-and-tailless-raccoons/
More recent sightings from Delaney are at
http://stowoutdoors.wordpress.com/
Lars spent the weekend in the Berkshires in Western Mass, in Mt Washington State Park. We went to see Bash Bish Falls and on the way down the trail found an immature Eastern Newt (both pictured above). From a USGS website:
