A trip up Hawk Mountain

The beautiful, rustic visitor's center at Hawk Mountain in Kempton, Pennsylvania. Countless thousands of raptor enthusiasts have passed through these doors. Raptors, conservation, and Hawk Mountain are synonymous, and no place has become more steeped in legend than has the 2,600 acres that comprise this sanctuary.

Hawk mountain was an ENORMOUS gap in my list of travels, and it was indeed fulfilling to finally get there last weekend. As I usually do, I dug into the place, looking high and low, talking to staff, learning about the operation, and of course hawk-watched. It is a very impressive operation, completely privately funded, and their outreach work is amazing. I was inspired enough to join, and become one of the nearly 9,000 members.

The view from below, looking up at the main ridge at Hawk Mountain. We'll eventually work our way up to the second-highest hump, just right of center: the North Lookout.

But before climbing aloft, we've got to stop in at the visitor's center. It's a stunning building and filled with raptor-related goodies and exhibits. I do want to give kudos to the staff and volunteers - Hawk Mountain runs like a well-oiled machine, and this is entirely due to the seventeen staff members and their legion of volunteers. Everyone is unfailing polite and helpful; they make you want to support the place. It's a lot of work, too. A nice fall day in the peak of raptor migration might bring a thousand people or more, and managing everything is a handful.

This is a gruesome visual of the need for conservation, and the reason that Hawk Mountain Sanctuary came to be. Rows upon rows of raptors of many species, all shot from the skies from Kittatinny Ridge lookouts. Scores of men and boys would hike to the summits, and train their weapons on hawks streaming south along the crests of the mountains.

These slaughters became so prolific that some authorities estimate that as many as 30-40% of the birds that were attempting to migrate long the Kittatinny were gunned down in especially bad years. This carnage took place in the early 20th century, a time when raptors were widely regarded as vermin, and their importance in ecosystems was poorly understood.

Enter the human dynamo, Rosalie Edge. Singlehandedly at first, she labored tirelessly to stop the shooting of raptors, and eventually her efforts gained traction and support. Edge's work led to the establishment of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in 1934, which not ironically was the same year that the Duck Stamp was created. The early half of the last century was a tough time for birds, and out of the gloom and doom of dust bowl era wetland losses and raptor persecution were spawned two of North America's most iconic conservation success stories.

Well, it's time to hit the trail, and we'll begin a 2/3rd mile long, 300 foot ascent up the path to the highest, best lookout. And learn a lot about geology along the way, whether we want to or not. These 500 million year old mountain crests are liberally strewn with ankle-breaker rocks and boulders. They lend enormous charm to the habitat, but also force one to watch their step.

My eye was frequently drawn to the artistically arrayed greenish blotches that adorned many of the stones. Perhaps to many they are just crusts of some sort, but I found that most were the elegant Rock Greenshield Lichen, Flavoparmelia baltimorensis.

The woods that cloak the Kittatinny ridges are lush Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests, filled with Tulip Tree, Yellow Birch, White and Red Oaks, underlain with Great Rhododendron and Mountain-laurel in places. The summits are dominated by tough Chestnut Oaks. I was delighted to notice a great many American Chestnut sprouts, still thrusting forth from old rootstock.

Historically, American Chestnut dominated in Appalachian forests, and its summertime blooming would turn mountain slopes whitish. An imported fungus known as Chestnut Blight was first found in New York in 1904, and the floodgates soon opened. By 1950, billions of trees had succumbed, and towering giants are almost unknown today. Sprouts, such as the one above, reach a certain height and are attacked, girdled, and killed by the blight.

Another botanical goodie that I was quite pleased to see was Striped Maple, Acer pensylvanicum, sometimes known as "Moosewood". It's quite the stunner, with big boston ivy-shaped leaves and that glorious green bark, liberally striped with cream. Striped Maple is endangered in Ohio, barely nipping into the northeast corner of the state, so for me it was like finding a treasure.

Anyway, we are just about to the rocky embattlements of the North Lookout, where one can see for seventeen miles across ridge and valley on blue days. I'll be back with big birds soon.

Drew Wheelan and the Gulf Gusher

The Ohio Ornithological Society's annual meeting looms this weekend in Eastlake, Ohio, just east of Cleveland. Things look good - nice crowd, lots of cool field trips, great talks, etc.

We are especially pleased to have Drew Wheelan in the house, all the way from the bayous of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Few if any were as frontline during the BP-caused catastrophe as Drew was, and he documented the disaster as it unfolded with words and photos.

He'll be our Saturday night keynote speaker (October 9th), and there's plenty of space in the meeting hall at the Radisson. If you are in the hood - or would like to come from some far-flung hood - to hear Drew and his experiences, we would welcome you with open arms.

Price: $15.00 for OOS members; $25.00 if not. Just show up at the door. Talk starts at 7 pm.

All of the details about the conference are RIGHT HERE.

Jeff Gordon: New ABA President

Jeff Gordon (NOT the NASCAR guy), on the left, with your blogger on right. The guy who looks like the cowboy from the Village People is Bill Thompson, editor of Bird Watcher's Digest. This photo dates from 2003, and we were a short distance north of the Mexican border, doing a 24-hour Big Sit in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Interestingly, it was within the confines of our 15-foot diameter Big Sit circle on this remote Texas Road where Jeff met his wife Liz. Bill had set up the gig - we were part of a valley-wide Great Texas Birding Classic event - and somehow a lovely young lady named Elizabeth DeLuna became part of our team (I think she had a thing for Jeff). Anyway, they hit off instantly, and she is now Liz Gordon.

This was the first occasion that I had met Jeff, but I've crossed paths with him many times since. And gotten to know him fairly well; well enough that I was delighted to hear the news that he had been picked to lead the American Birding Association as their new president.

The American Birding Association, which founded in 1969 through the efforts and vision of Jim Tucker, is the only nationwide organization that represents birders specifically. Through the years, nearly all of North America's uber-birders have been active in the ABA in some way, as well as scores of other birders of every stripe.

That's Jeff, on the far right, leading a group at the New River Birding Festival in West Virginia. Gordon is , by any reckoning, one of the top field birders in the Americas. His skills are phenomenal; the sort of talent that one is essentially born with, and is probably impossible to attain without the luck of good birthright. Fortunately for the rest of us, Jeff is exceedingly gracious about sharing his knowledge and helping others - that's what he's doing in this photo.

In recent years, the ABA has been sliding downward, in spite of some truly outstanding staff, and committed board members. The last president really whalloped the organization hard, and had to be removed. The upshot is that the ABA finds itself in a hole, but with a lot of birders wanting to help resuscitate the group. Many eyes were watching to see who would be selected as its next leader.

Jeff and your blogger pose - briefly! - in front of an army ant column crossing a road in Guatemala a few years back. Jeff's tropical birding skills blew me away. The man has major, unassailable street cred as a field birder and ornithologist. To me, that's important. I've watched too many conservation and environmental organizations drift down a path of politicism - selecting leaders with no real background or roots in the community that they are supposed to be serving. It then becomes hard to for the leader to cast good visions for the group, and make smart decisions.

That won't be a problem for Jeff and the ABA. In addition to being an A-list birder, Gordon has an extensive background in ecotourism, technology, speaking, writing, publishing and more. Not ony that, but he knows - and is known - by scads of birders around the country. Jeff also brings another important asset to a leadership role: he is a people-person. Many people in our field - especially those who have his level of expertise - are not.

American birders represent an enormous potential constituency for the environment, and it seems to me that the ABA is well-suited to capitalize on this. With the right leader. I think that Jeff, who by all accounts has a creative and fertile mind, will guide the organization to new heights and help it begin to reach its potential. I think that the ABA board and everyone involved with selecting the new president made the right choice.

If you like birds, whether it be peregrinating to Hawk Mountain to bask on windswept rocks to watch raptors pass by, or you just enjoy feeding songbirds in the backyard, please consider becoming an ABA member. It's high time that those of us who are birders join together and present a unified front. And the American Birding Association is the logical place to meet.

Other than being part of a growing constituency of people united on behalf of the feathered crowd, there are other perks to ABA membership. Their publications, Birding, North American Birds, and Winging It, are stellar, and the conferences are great. The Birder's Exchange program has become perhaps the most successful outreach effort to support researchers working in the Neotropics - where many of "our" birds winter.

Anyway, you get my drift. I think Jeff Gordon is the man for this job, and I look forward to seeing him officially take the ABA reins in hand on November 1st. I hope that you'll support him as well, and also beome an ABA member. And spread the word. JOIN HERE.

Hawks in the mist

I just returned from a whirlwind tour of some of eastern Pennsylvania's best hawk-watching sites, capped by quality time spent on the rocks of Hawk Mountain.

Today, it was a quick sortie down to Waggoner's Gap, which can be a stellar lookout for birds of prey that are winging their way south.

Fall is a gorgeous time to be in the rugged mountains of Pennsylvania. The leaves are beginning to change, especially the brilliant scarlet foliage of Blackgum, Nyssa sylvatica.

However, lovely as the forests are at Waggoner's Gap, this was the view from the summit. Your blogger stands in light rain, enshrouded by mist that cut visibility to 100 feet or so. Raptors? Zero. Was not the day for it; they wouldn't have been flying and even if they were, it wouldn't have been possible to see them. Ah, well - at least I got to see the place, and get a feel for it. There'll be another time.

The weather was far superior for sky-watching yesterday, and the day before. Here, I perch on a rocky promontory known as Bake Oven Knob, yesterday. The view is stupendous, and raptors often wing by practically at arm's length. Upon arrival at the knob, a subadult Bald Eagle appeared and traced a few languid circles about 40 feet up and directly overhead.

I'll soon return with some photos of Hawk Mountain and raptors.

Hawk Mountain

I am at one of North America's most iconic birding locales, and one of the most important places in the history of American bird conservation.

Yesterday was decent atop this eastern Pennsylvania mountain, and I'm just about to head out the door for more. Got lots of neat photos, and more comprehensive posts will follow.

Those crazy gentians

A cluster of odd saclike flowers bristles from the summit of a robust Yellowish Gentian, Gentiana alba. A few weekends back, while plumbing the depths of Adams County in southernmost Ohio for rare flora, the inimitable Daniel Boone showed us this station of gentians. Yellowish Gentian is quite the rarity here - listed as an Ohio threatened species - and I'd seen it only a few times prior.

I'd concede that Yellowish Gentian is rather bland in coloration, but that's no reason to refer to it as the "Plain Gentian", as the USDA Plant Database does. Any deficiency of bright hues is more than compensated for by the outrageous floral structure. I mean, this is it - the flowers don't open. They are like little paper bags, and this strange morphology serves them well in weeding out unwanted pollinators, as we shall see.

Sometimes Yellowish Gentian flowers do open a bit, and I helped tease this one apart a bit so we could cast a look inside into the pollinary chamber. We can now clearly see the bowling pin-like carpels capped with their stigmas - the pollen receptacles. Off to the sides of the carpels and not really visible are the stamens and anthers, which contain the pollen.

If you are this flower, the whole idea is to get someone to bring you new pollen - pollen from another plant. Those lime-green stripes on the interior of the petals - petals are known as plaits in gentian-speak - help to lure in the pollen-delivering insect version of the UPS man.

This is another fall-blooming gentian, and it's looking good right now. Bottle Gentian, Gentiana andrewsii, is considerably brighter than the aforementioned species, and has a higher WOW factor. The blue stripes, or nectar guides, are much bolder on this species, but again, they are on the INTERIOR of the flower.

Bottle Gentian is a truly gorgeous species, and I can't imagine anyone not fawning over it for at least a few seconds if they were lucky enough to happen into some. The flowers in this photo are perfectly mature. Note how the flower's summit is tightly closed, and the blue nectar guides so clearly visible on the dissected flower can't really even be discerned, by our eyes at least.

But we don't have the eye-power of a bumblebee.

Bottle-type gentians have evolved an intimate relationship with large, fuzzy bumblebees of the genus Bombus, and these insects have vision that transcends ours in some respects. The bumbles undoubtedly see through the flower, a la Superman X-ray vision, and those showy-looking blue stripes jump out to them. And once a bumble has spotted those lovely azure strips, it must have them, at all costs!

The photo above and the next two were taken by my friend Ethan Kistler, and show the process of a bumblebee invading a Closed Gentian, Gentiana clausa. In the first shot, the bee desperately seeks a path of entry into the flower, and quickly realizes that it must push itself into the tiny gap at the flower's summit. These are brutish, powerful insects, and that's what it takes to penetrate the gentian's defenses.

A bit of prying and prodding, and it's in. This is an outstanding example of a botanical lure - an immobile piece of vegetation that is able to successfully pull in an animal, and make it complete the plant's reproductive cycle.

One just couldn't design a more effective pollinator system than has this gentian. The bumblebee is now completely inside the flower, and what we've got here is the equivalent of a fuzzy pipecleaner tightly shoved into a tube and being twisted about. Not only is the bee thoroughly dousing the stigmas with pollen it has brought over from the last gentian visited, thus cross-pollinating this plant, its fuzzy body is also getting totally dusted with fresh pollen to take to yet another gentian.

Just another of the scores of fascinating plant-insect relationships.

All about owls

Tiny but furious, a Northern Saw-whet Owl makes his feelings known. "Be off, you dumb blithering human", he seems to be saying.

For anyone in the vicinity of Lima - not Peru, Ohio! - next Tuesday night, October 5th, I'll be giving a program about owls at the Tri-Moraine Audubon Society meeting. It's a PowerPoint with lots of cool images and audio, starring all of the nocturnal hooters that visit the Buckeye State, plus some others.


The group surprised me by whipping up this cool poster, and it has all of the necessary factoids should you wish to drop by.

Sleepy Barred Owl dozes in a gnarly Swamp White Oak.

Owls. An appropriate subject for the Halloween season.