Silence Of The Woods - Royal Ferns

A colony of
Royal ferns, Osmunda regalis on a streamside in the woods, Phippsburg, Maine

The Still Cover

I'm deep in green

where the blue newts move

between wet leaves,

smooth, so cool.

Only sounds of dripping,

circles form on dark pools,

fronds, ferns unfurling, 

moss absorbing,

then the waterthrush's

fluted chortling

amidst the trees

leaves me settled serene

and deep,

deep within the green,

still cover.

............................................................................

    Since I was a little kid, I've loved these wet, secret places in the woods. Some people would find the enveloping stillness unnerving, but I have always been drawn by it. The quiet stirs a notion of promise and magic. When I breathe in the rich, pungent smell of decaying wood, I can conjure a fairy's life. The near absence of sound makes me listen harder for what might be there, rustling under the leaves, moving along the banks of the stream, or tip toeing through the mud. Did I see a deer pause, ears twitching through the leaves, then gone in a flash? Is there a giant, Spotted salamander snorkeling in the gloame? I could wish a golem in the gloom. The quiet seems filled with possibilities.

    My sister and I got lost in such a place when we were young. We followed a path, or so it seemed, until suddenly, there wasn't a path anymore. We looked around us and didn't know where to go. Everything looked the same: trees, bottomless pools of black water, mushrooms and tall ferns. Barely any light filtered through the trees. Looking upward, there were only cracks of sky. And it was silent.

     The greenery seemed to suck up all sound. We listened hoping to hear familiar, distant sounds - our dog barking, a lawnmower, a truck on a road, anything. But there was nothing. Even the sound of our own panicky breathing died around us.
     My father used to tell us that moss grew on the north sides of trees. If you looked for the moss, you’d know which way to go. North? What did north mean to an eight year old? There was moss on the trees; there was moss everywhere, matting every rock and fallen log in velvet green. No moss was going to tell us where to go. The moss did not speak. I thought about my plastic, Cracker Jack compass at home.
     Once, from a place like that, I captured a dozen Red-spotted newts. I put them in an aquarium with pads of moss I had peeled from rocks. I put in some stones and made a little pool in a bottle cap. I put in some tiny, emerald colored ferns and rotted sticks. I put in a Shelf mushroom making an ample roof, a sort of salamander pavilion. It seemed like a perfect home for the newts. I imagined a whole life for them in their microhabitat, or glass prison. It was a veritable village of newts, which I called salamanders.
     Newts and salamanders are basically the same thing. What they each came to be called has more to do with history and language than science. Newts are a subgroup of salamanders. All newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts. A salamander is called a “newt” if it belongs to specific genera (I won’t bore you with the list). Generally, newts spend more of their lives in the water than salamanders; they have more distinctive differences between genders, and they have more complicated aquatic courtships. Now, wasn’t that a visual!
    There are 550 species of salamander in the world. The North American continent has more species of salamanders, including newts, than any other continent on earth. Maine has eight species. For those of you who say “I don’t like lizards,” salamanders are not lizards. On their front feet, they only have four toes; lizards have five.  Though there are no “blue newts” as in my poem, there is a Blue-spotted salamander in Maine. Most salamanders are lungless. They breathe through their skin which requires that their skin stay moist. For this reason, they are usually nocturnal and live under leaves and places where it’s damp. Many of them are vernal pool and wetland dwellers, places such as the photos above.
     After a while, I forgot about my salamanders. My father found my aquarium prison dried up and abandoned, for which he beat the shit out of me. That was fifty years ago and I still carry the guilt. The bulging eyes, tender toes and wide smiles of a newt give me pangs of pain. But, that dark little episode of my history is part of what lead me to become an amateur naturalist and nature photographer. The dark, damp places in the woods always makes me think of the brilliant, orange salamanders I tortured. I have a lot to make up for. Maybe they are what I listen for in the penetrating silence - signs of life.
     When my sister and I couldn’t find our way out of the woods, she started to cry. I was scared. I didn’t want her to know how scared I was too, terrified, in fact. So, I told her to shut up and quit crying. I knew that we had to figure it out on our own, that no one was going to help us. I knew that I had to figure it out, because I was the oldest. I listened hard for some sign, some sound that would guide us, but there was nothing. I smelled the air. Nothing.
    My sister was sitting on a pad of moss, sniffling. She had a trickle of blood oozing from a knee where she had fallen. A Blackfly had left a rude, purple welt in the corner of her eye and more were gathering. “Come on. Get up and get walking,” I ordered. It probably wasn’t long, though it seemed like eternity, when one of our family dogs showed up. Though we felt far, far away, we probably weren’t very far from home. It took some scrambling to keep up, but we followed the dog home.
     Decades later, I would hear on the news that a four year old boy was lost in the Maine woods to the north (August, 1975, Kurt Newton, Coburn Gorge, Maine). The biggest manhunt in the history of the State ensued to search for him. I was one of the searchers. I had to go. I couldn’t get my sister out of my head, her bloody knee, her bug bites, her futile crying. It was brutal, hot, hard hunting. Hundreds of searchers were all fly-bitten and bramble scratched. In the dense, damp woods searchers found bottle caps, cigarette butts and a wallet, all dropped by searchers who had gone before. And I saw a few salamanders, significant to only me. But, no little boy, and to this day, his disappearance has remained a mystery. I think every one of us wanted to be the one to find him and believed he would be found.
     I will remain forever haunted by that search, by the not finding. I’ve since had children of my own, whom I’ve raised safely to adulthood. I know that if I was that little boy’s mother, for the rest of my life, I would listen very closely when in the silent woods. 

Red-striped salamander, Phippsburg, Maine

Spotted Red newt

For more information on salamanders and newts, visit these sites.

http://www.maineherp.org/index.php?display=native_species&show=all

http://www.naturehaven.com/Frog/salamander.html

http://www.caudata.org/cc/faq/FAQgen.shtml

I am please to announce and honored that this post recieved the

OPEN SALON READER'S PICK AWARD ! For more, click on that link or the one below.

http://open.salon.com/blog/os_readers_picks/2012/06/03/os_readers_picks_third_awards#

"KIWI!!!!" Or Maybe a Woodcock

American Woodcock April 7, 2011 Phippsburg, Maine

This wasn't a rush, because it was  lone woodcock. One is a woodcock, two or more are still woodcock, like deer are still deer.  A group of woodcock is called a "rush," "fall", "flight", "plump," or "cord." Don't let anyone cheat you; a cord of woodcock measures 4 by 4 by eight feet.

Look closely at the back end of this bird. Naughty, naughty, naughty!

      My sainted husband is not a birder, but he does know what makes his little wifey happy - BIRDS!  Though he isn't good at identifying birds, he has developed a pretty good eye for the weird, odd, curious and standouts. That is why he is married to me, after all. He recently called me at home from his cell phone yelling "KIWI! There's a kiwi on Popham Road, come quick!" I didn't ask questions because that would slow me down. I jumped into the car and sped in pursuit. On the way, I pondered, "Kiwi?" What the hell was he talking about?

     The American Woodcock and the kiwi don't even reside on the same continents, so I was pretty sure that he was looking at a woodcock. But, an exciting thing about birding is, as the saying goes, "You just never know!" Distributions of species of birds changes as the environment changes (I'm trying not to say "global warming"), birds get blown around by weather events, and people obtain and release foreign species. So, most anything could be possible and is at least worth consideration. Birding allows every one of us to morph from the tweedy Professor Henry Jones, Jr. into Indiana Jones. That is, if you're willing to drop everything and take off in the pursuit of the living artifacts.

This is me hot on the hunt for the Phippsburg kiwi

      Of course, when I got there, the kiwi was gone. But, I could hear two of them in the woods. Body snatched by the spirit of Indiana Jones, I raced silently through the forest. My heart pounding, with breath quick, I could almost feel the coveted golden idol in my hands! My ancient Temple Of Trees was filled with booby traps entangling my feet. I stepped  unwittingly into a snare and was lurched by my ankles high into the canopy. But! From my boot tops, I grabbed my Bowie knife and cut the line, swinging from the end to the ground. Now, camouflaged in leaves and mud, I continued. "I must retrieve the golden idol before my arch rival, French ornithologist, Michuad Fahaydue!" Twice, I flushed them but was left with a ghostly whirring of wings through the branches. Light failing me, I would have to return to my University in Indiana, to search another day.
   Of course, I went back the very next day. Sure enough, it was an American woodcock. I do understand why my husband thought "kiwi."  The birds are not dissimilar in appearance to the untrained eye, the eye of one whose birding knowledge does not go beyond a can of shoe polish and his wife's undying gratitude for the effort. The kiwi and the woodcock have vaguely similar morphology, but that's where all similarities end.

Kiwis lay the largest eggs relative to body size of all living bird species on earth.

    Kiwis, are from New Zealand and not even remotely related to woodcocks. The kiwi is flightless, while the woodcock is not and the kiwi is endangered. American woodcock, sometimes called "Timberdoodles,"  are not endangered. However, their numbers have been steadily decreasing by about one percent a year since the 1960s. When young forest was plentiful, woodcock were abundant. But many brushy areas have grown into mature forest, where woodcock do not live. And human development has destroyed much of the birds' former habitat. In true action movie form, The National Fish And Wildlife Foundation has a "Woodcock Task Force" which targets woodcock populations for conservation. "Save the woodcock!" Do you suppose they wear camo. to their meetings?
     Like the snipes they are related to, the woodcock are a popular game bird. They present a particular challenge to hunters because they are so hard to see on the ground. They are elusive targets; when startled into flight, they bely their portly shape, quickly zigzagging through the trees. Some species, especially those endemic to islands,  have been hunted to near extinction. Artists value the woodcocks' pin feathers used for fine painting work. The woodcock are a group of seven or eight very similar living species. But, there are only two woodcock that are widespread, most of them found in the Northern Hemisphere. Indiana Jones would groove on the notion that eight species of woodcock are known only from their fossil records.
     As the name implies, woodcock are woodland birds that live near wetlands, streams and rivers. Oddly, they are actually a sandpiper, and a wading bird! They are unusual in this group (sandpipers, dunlins, curlews, etc.) of birds as the only members that live, nest and breed in the woods. They are one of the few shorebirds widely hunted for sport.
     Like all wading birds, they have a very long middle toe. For wading birds, the middle toe acts like a snow shoe, distributing the bird's weight over a greater area so they don't sink into the mud. They have eyes set wide apart on their heads which gives them 360 degree vision. With their long, slender bill they poke around in the dirt for worms. Unlike most birds, the top of their bill is flexible at the tip. The guess is that they actually feel the worms underground with their tongue and bill tip. But, no one really knows what's going on under the earth. A woodcock rocks its body back and forth without moving its head as it slowly walks around, stepping heavily with its front foot. This action may make worms move around in the soil, making them easier to detect. The woodcock in these photographs was doing just that while maintaining a sideways eye on me.
     I waited a long time, hoping that the bird would do something a little more interesting than humping along the ground, walking like an Egyptian in search of supper. Suddenly, it hunched up, extended its neck, then ruffled its feathers. Camera trained and ready, I squealed, "Oh yeah!, It's gonna do something and I'm ready!" It arched its back slightly then shot out a load of poo, as you can see in the second photo. Oh, well, action is action in the wildlife world. Be careful what you ask for. Woodcock are mostly nocturnal wandering around in the wooded dark looking for food. In the day time, they rest like the one you see here.
     Though they are a common bird, they are often hard to find because of their cryptic plumage. They blend into their surroundings of usually fallen leaves. You may actually nearly step on one in the woods or, as is the case, on the grass and never know they are there. Had I not been on a quest for this particular bird, I would have  missed it entirely.

     Woodcocks in North America are migratory. In Maine, they start appearing in mid March.

A spring freshet, Phippsburg, Maine April 2011

This is the very sort of habitat woodcocks love!

     My earliest sighting was February 12th here in Phippsburg a couple of years ago, but that's early. They become conspicuous when they begin to mate. In the spring, they often begin mating on lingering patches of snow. Where the woodcock displays is called a "singing ground." In the elaborate display called "roding," the males begin to call on the ground, "peent! peent! peent!" It's a high, nasal sound with a slight buzz that you might have heard and mistaken for spring frogs or insects. One of my gardening customers has a solar powered gizmo for warding rodents from his stone walls. It emits an electronic peenting buzz every fifteen seconds which sounds exactly like a woodcock. I've been foiled more than once skulking around his property looking for the hiding bird.

     Once peenting, the bird  flies upward in an ever widening spiral for two to three hundred feet! As he rises, his wings begin to twitter. Once descending, he chirps and starts a zigzagging, diving pattern to the ground. Nearing the ground he silently lands near a female if there is one. On the ground, he starts peenting again. The displays are usually at dawn and dusk and can go on all summer, long after mating is finished, but they're most common in spring. 

     Having completed this doctoral disertation, I must be be off in search of an emu reported to be near, or was that the fog horn on Seguin I heard? Now, if only I can find my bullwhip..........

For some of the information, thanks to:

wikipedia.com

allaboutbirds. org

whatbird.com

Elphick, J. in The Golden Age Of Lithography: 1850-1890, BIRDS - The Art Of Ornithology 2008, Scriptum: London (2004), pp 241

Tudge, C., 2008. In The Bird - A Natural History Of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From And How They Live, Tudge, C. PLOVERS AND LAPWINGS, SANDPIPERS, SNIPES, CURLEWS, DOWITCHERS, PHALAROPES, AVOCETS AND STILTS, JACANAS, PAINTED SNIPES OYSTERCATCHERS, THE CRAB PLOVER, STONE CULEWS, PRATINCOLES AND COUSERS, SEED SNIPES, THE PLAINS WANDERER, SHEATHBILLS, GULLS, TERNS, SKUAS AND JAEGERS, SKIMMERS AND AUKS: ORDER CHARADRIIFORMES, Crown Publishers: New York (2008), pp 136-37

Sibley, D.A., The Sibley Guide To Birds, 2000, Knopf: New York (2001), pp 192

Keppie, D. M., and R. M. Whiting, Jr. 1994. American Woodcock (Scolopax minor). In The Birds of North America, No. 100 (A. Poole, and F. Gill, eds.). The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, and The American Ornithologists' Union, Washington, D.C.