Morning Kisses

I have shown you the all-out party at Opossum Creek. I wish I could convey how much fun it was to have most of our band there. Not to mention the fabulous Flock. Here I am with my beloved Timmo Ryan, who blogs beautifully at From the Faraway, Nearby.

We think we might be cosmic twins.

Photo by Mary's View.

The aftermath of the gig... Here's Chet, wearing the ChetCam, completely done in after partying until midnight with all the revelers.


I am sorry to say that the ChetCam, which is featured in this photo along with the lovely and talented Katdoc, has spontaneously crapped out through no fault of the photographer. I think the manufacturer is counting on the thing falling off the dog's collar and getting lost before it craps out, so tenuous is the clip. (He's shaken it off five times, and somehow we've found it each time). You'll have to put up with my lousy photography until I can get it replaced (I doubt there's much fixing it). Anybody know of a better dogcam out there? It was such a tantalizing little taste of what he could do with his new art form...

It was kind of a tight squeeze in our cabin, El Gordo. Lots of bodies, air mattresses, people strewn about. Just exactly what Chet Baker loves. He bedhopped starting at the first wood thrush song, just as light was creeping under the shades.

Andy and Clay are trying to deflate an air mattress by applying their manweight.
Enter Chet Baker.
I will kiss you and kiss you and kiss you again.

And then I will kiss you some more. There is no getting away from me, Chet Baker. I am the kissing bandit. I kiss girls, boys, children, bass players, drummers, singers, guitarists, the infirm and the elderly alike.


Now you know you have been kissed, Andy Hall. I am sorry about your glasses, but I have to roo now.

Clay donned protective gear, a stuffsack toque.

And fended Chet off with a chewbone and a mummy bag.

But Vinnie didn't seem to mind a few Baker kisses.

Just a quick poll--was there anyone who attended the New River Swinging Orangutangs party who did not get a kiss from Chet Baker? I think he hit everyone, but you never know...We can try to remedy that next year. There will be a sign-up sheet at registration.

Muddlety's Butterflies

We had very little butterfly weather in West Virginia. Butterfly weather is warm and sunny. When it rains and is cool and misty, butterflies hide away. When the sun peeks out, so do they--it's like magic, like suddenly walking into the movie "Snow White," with butterflies parting in front of you.

I managed to snap a few butterflies in the hour or so of sunshine we enjoyed. Pipevine swallowtails were the most obvious about.
They're distinguished by that bewitching iridescent teal-blue hindwing. Beyond that, the iridescence suffuses the forewing and body. The pipevine swallowtail is one elegant bug.

So we're watching these butterflies puddling (imbibing phosphates and other essential minerals in mud), and this thing that looks like a flying crawfish shows up.
Eek! It's walking on the pipevine! What is it?

Ah. It's a Nessus Sphinx, a kind of hawkmoth, Amphion floridensis. Its brood plant (what the caterpillars eat) is Virginia creeper, grape, or porcelainberry. Lovely.

And exceedingly weird. Here, its forewings are blurred and nearly invisible, enhancing the crawfish similarity.


Not only that, but there's a little bitty microlep, another moth that looks like a miniature. See it just to the left of the giant sphinx? With a dandelion seed for scale? Teeny. Maybe somebody will know what it is, but I'm not holding my breath. All I know about it is: it likes skunkdoo.

On to more wholesome things. Here's Swamp Blue Violet, Viola cucullata. I like the common name of cuckoopint.
A Juvenal's duskywing, dark harbinger of spring. You can tell it from Horace's by the two pale dots on the upper rim of the hindwing.

And for me, the prize of the day (other than spending part of it with Tim Ryan) was a lovely West Virginia White. How appropriate for this rarish little butterfly to show up, nectaring on foamflower, Tiarella cordifolia, at the end of our Muddlety trip.


This lovely little thing is distinguished by its grayish shading on the veins of the underwing. It's a Pieris, like the cabbage white P. rapae, but it's P. virginiensis.

Ahhh. What a nice find.

Rockin' the New River Festival

photo by Mary

I guess I've been working nature festivals for about 18 years now--as long as I've been with Bill of the Birds. My first was the Bosque del Apache Festival of the Cranes in 1991. Yikes, that was a long time ago. It's a niche, made more fun and interesting by the inclusion of music. Bill has added that dimension to my life. Without him, I'd probably be singing krokey or trying out for Elderly Idol. Since he was in high school, Bill has always headed up a band, because he's a natural bandleader.

Just like he's a natural field trip leader, even with half his pants off.

Generally, Bill and I play a duo,

adding in musicians like master fiddler/violinist Jessie Munson or singer/guitarist Ernie Hoffert whenever we can. For most bird festivals, folky acoustic stuff works. This time, we tried something different. Fayetteville is only about 2 1/2 hours from The Swinging Orangutang's home base of Marietta, Ohio. We promised the boys in the band a great time (Jessica had another commitment, waah!) and they agreed to come down on Saturday afternoon for a real blowout that night. Bill and I have done a lot of festivals, but we've never seen a rock band and a private club atmosphere at a bird festival before. We wanted something completely different to honor the festival attendees, including the fun-loving Flock of bloggers.

The Meadow House at Opossum Creek Resort was transformed into a speakeasy.

Five-sixths of The Swinging Orangutangs: from left, Bill Thompson III, Clay Paschal, Andy Hall, JZ, and Vincenzo Mele. We're all missing Jessica Baldwin.

I admit to a touch of apprehension as we worked on the set list. Would birders cover their ears and flee if we really blew it out? OK, let's strike Brick House from the set list. Probably won't do Don't Fear the Reaper, either. Hmm. But there was plenty of material just this side of coo-coo that we thought birders would like. In the end, we wound up throwing in Blister in the Sun and Take Me to the River and Get Down Tonight, along with a couple of hours' worth of mixy favorites. Still wish we'd done Burning Down the House. Oh well. Next year.

As it turned out, it got coo-coo anyway. Bloggers know how to boogie. These people were up for a great time, having birded their brains out for an entire week. You can tell Susan's a blogger 'cuz she's got a beer in one hand...a camera in the other. I shudder to think what photos she captured that night. You'll have to go to Susan Gets Native and see. I believe that's Kathie of Sycamore Canyon in lavender. Laura from Somewhere in New Jersey and Lynne from Hasty Brook were partying, too. Nina from Nature Remains and Kathi from KatDoc's World and Beth from My Life With Birds and Kathleen from A Glorious Life and Barb from My Bird Tales and Jane from Jaylynn's Window on Nature ... Kathy (Denapple) from Life, Birding, Photos and Everything...really entrancing photography in those last three, and all of them wonderful people.. it just went on and on. Just keeping the Kath-people straight was a job in itself.

By my count, there were no less than 17 nature bloggers in attendance and snapping away at New River 2009. This will be the best-documented festival that has ever happened.

Huh-oh. We did Love Shack and it got even crazier, with guide and Orang alum drummer Steve McCarthy taking the male vocal lead. I'm doin' the Belinda Carlisle, serving it up oldschool with a shared mic. Mary's View gettin' DOWN with Jane of Wrennaissance Reflections. What a total thrill it was to meet them! And then to play for them all, really show them a good time.

Maybe that's an understatement. If the Solid Gold Bloggers had half as much fun as the Orangs did, it was a fabulous time.

News flash: The Bump did not die in 1978. It is alive and well with Tim (From the Faraway, Nearby) and Mary (Mary's View). Oh my goodness.

When he wasn't hangin' with his buddy Cameron, Liam was doin' the Schroeder on the dance floor. Our son has some truly fancy footwork.


The uproarious highlight of the evening was when Tim Ryan joined us to play cowbell on Low Rider. I doubt there was a person in the room who wasn't on their feet by then. Our beloved honorary Orangutang.

This group of bloggers is so generous--everyone showed up with arms overflowing with handmade gifts--pins and pottery and jewelry and bacon-flavored jellybeans and other Minnesota favorites from sweet Lynne at Hasty Brook--there was even a care package of handmade Peruvian crafts from Mel at Teach Me About Birdwatching, sent from South America, just because.

I didn't bring anything you could hold in your hand, but singing for our beloved friends felt just right.
Vincenzo Serafino charmed with his velvet voice and nimble guitar.


Jeff Gordon, fabulous trip leader and nature blogger, heated up the place with a dangerous rendition of Secret Agent Man. Too bad nature blogger and walking encyclopedia Jim McCormac wasn't there to see it, but after leading field trips in the first part of the week, he was getting the Ludlow Griscom award from the American Birding Association in Texas!


Many thanks to the incomparable Jen Sauter for grabbing my camera and documenting the night so splendidly. For she's a jolly good bombshell!

Many thanks to the people who know how to laugh and dance and live life large. You know who you are! Many thanks to Bill, for making it all happen, to Geoff Heeter and Keith Richardson of Opossum Creek, and to the Swinging Orangutangs for giving themselves to make Saturday, May 2, 2009 a night to remember, a delightful anomaly in the heretofore rather sedate world of nature festival entertainment.

And if it weren't enough...what about tomorrow?

art by Andy Hall, who is also our drummer, how lovely!

Misty Morning Birding, Teardrop in My Eye

It usually rains at the end of April and beginning of May in West Virginia. When I was corresponding with other members of the nature blogging Flock about the trip, I advised raingear, lots of it. And this turned out to be a very wet festival.

Which was something to deal with, but not a problem. People who love warblers are happy folks. They kept their sunny attitude.

The flowers were still lovely. Golden ragwort and cranesbill (wild geranium).
The magnificent large tree, Fraser magnolia, Magnolia fraseri.

The birds' colors were a bit compromised by the fog and rain. In sunlight, cerulean warblers are sky blue.


They still sang, if a little less persistently. Their black necklaces were all that distinguished them; their stunning blue backs would have to wait for better light, better days.


It was all very ricepaper and watercolor, very Japanese. Even a male scarlet tanager looked grayish in this light.

Well, it's shaped like a tanager... Photo by Nina.

The direction of light became paramount in getting a decent look at a bird. This northern parula cooperated for a nanosecond, showing his sunny breast.

As we walked, I noticed a female eastern towhee as she burst frantically from the ground. She appeared to have been trying to stay still, then lost her nerve. I knew that meant she was on eggs somewhere nearby. I split from the group and walked carefully along the foot of the bank.

And found the nest, using a laser pointer to show it to the festival participants. Photo by Nina.

Four white eggs, speckled with rust, well hidden in a grassy nest tucked into the bank, under a big multiflora rose. I wish her well.


Some black rat snake eggs were less fortunate. Examining these, I decided that they had been washed out after having been buried by the female snake last summer. The eggshells were unpunctured, but there was nothing inside. So it wasn't a predation event--it was a dessication event.


Red efts (the wandering, terrestrial, juvenile form of the red-spotted newt) were easier subjects than birds.

The smallest red eft I'd ever seen enchanted Nina. I'm sure he'll make an appearance on her blog, Nature Remains.

Katdoc joined her in the photoquest. Katdoc is geared out, full birding plumage.

Nina has ferocious focus. She folded up like a tripod and became one with the newt.


One of Nina's many gifts is looking very closely, and waiting.


Everyone moved on, which is just what Nina needed.

And she became a rock in the road, and captured the eft without touching it.


As Nina and I walked the last bit of Spruce Run Road, loosely known at the festival as Muddlety, we marveled at the abundant life all around us--prairie and blue-winged warblers, chat after yellow-breasted chat, redstarts and hooded warblers, the federally threatened cerulean warbler, scarlet tanagers, and everywhere the flutes of wood thrushes. A tear coursed down Nina's cheek, then another. We had both seen the coal company permit sign about halfway up the road, that, to those who know its significance, means that this entire woodland--all this habitat, all this mountain--is about to be blown up, never to be woodland habitat again.

When you flip a light switch on, there's a 50 percent chance that the energy you're using comes out of what used to be a mountain in West Virginia. Blowing up the richest and most diverse forest in the US--leveling these mountains-- to get the coal underneath it is not a sustainable way to get energy. It is insanity itself. It buries the streams, chokes the rivers and poisons the people. Please, please watch this five-minute video. Maria Gunnoe says it so much better than I ever could. And if you're moved to action, go to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition web site and see what you can do to stop this abomination. Muddlety probably won't survive, but there are so many more equally beautiful mountains--and communities, streams, rivers and lives-- the coal companies are planning to destroy.

Watch, then go. Keep spending your ecotourism dollars in West Virginia. All profits from the New River Birding Festival go to environmental education in local schools--a slow but, we hope, ultimately effective way to shout STOP THIS MADNESS!! Thank you.

And thank you, Cassandra.

New River Birding Festival

Thank goodness it rained, that's all I can say, because I started downloading photos from West Virginia's New River Birding and Nature Festival this morning at 9 AM, and it's 2:30 PM, and I just finished sorting and editing them. Because I am hopelessly ADD in spring, or anytime, actually, that isn't all I've been doing. I feel really bad for all the other nature bloggers who attended, who had their cameras out and were snapping away constantly, because I barely took mine out from under my slicker, and I'm still overwhelmed. Don't expect to hear much from The Flock for awhile. They're editing.

This is a great festival. One of our very favorites. I've been speaking and leading field trips at it for every one of its seven years; Bill joined me and has been even more heavily involved for the last six. I just checked my list and it has 90 species on it for only three days of birding. Twenty-three of them are warblers. You see the attraction. Fayetteville, WV, is the place to go if you like eastern wood warblers.

It's a small festival, but it was at capacity this year, and that's no surprise, because it's extremely well-run and homey. At this point it really feels more like a reunion than a festival. So many great people, both organizers, leaders and participants. So much fun.Dave Pollard, one of the festival's masterminds, far left, does the Life Bird Stomp. Happy birders watch a prairie warbler strut his stuff.

I'm going to try to give you a taste of it, and it really will be just the tip of the whole diverse particolored iceberg, because I was otherwise occupied for most of the time, running around like a beetle, trying to fulfill all my commitments.

Basically, what happens is you get up at 5:30 every morning and head to a central meeting place, where all the field trips depart. You climb on a long white van with your guides and drive 1 1/2 hr. or less (usually less) to a great birdwatching destination. It might be a mountain road or a high spruce bog or a national forest or a meadow popping with bobolinks. Wherever you go, it drips with birds. Your guides call birds in and set you up with stunning looks in the scope and you rack up the life birds.Me and Whipple Bird Club Royal Meteorologist Steve McCarthy, bristling with tripods, ready to show bird. Photo by Nina.

You get back around 3 pm and kind of lay around, alternately moaning, rubbing your warbler neck and sipping your beverages of choice or, if you're lucky enough to stay at Opossum Creek Resort, sinking into your hot tub until you're served a delicious dinner at 6 pm, capped by a program of some kind. So it's a week of all-day field trips and evening programs. Bill and I do both, and there are many other talented presenters.

Here's a typical New River festival experience. You're walking down a beautiful wooded road with about 15 other birdwatchers, and your guide stops and says, "Prairie warbler. Let's try for that."
And Jeff Gordon, a peerless field guide, whips out his iPod and plays a few prairie warbler songs. A minute or two later a tiny yellow bird darts in and everyone gasps and scrambles to get binoculars on it as it mounts to the top of a sapling and sings a challenge to the vanishing iBird.
And when it whirls off, not to be bothered by a recording of its song for another year, you lower your binocs and sigh happily, exhilarated because you've just seen your life prairie warbler, and it was so beautiful, and almost best of all there are a bunch of other birders standing right there who feel exactly like you do.

Note: People who like warblers are very nice people.


Leslie can't help doin' the Life Bird Wiggle. It was my honor to be there when she saw a number of life birds this weekend. What a feeling!

In case you think field trip leaders only want to guide people who already know their birds, nothing could be further from the truth. It's a blast to show people life birds, to watch them see something rare and precious that they've never seen before. It makes you see them afresh, with brand new eyes, all over again.
photo by Nina

My deepest thanks to Nina of Nature Remains, who sent me these pictures of Science Chimp in display mode.

Parula Interlude

Six years ago, I gave the inaugural keynote at the very first New River Neotropicals Festival, which has now evolved into the New River Birding and Nature Festival. The talk was about the natural history of wood warblers, with details about their lives, their foraging behavior, and their habitat use on the wintering grounds. Having given a talk every year since, I finally ran out of talks, and had to recycle this one. Whereas I'd used a Carousel slide projector in 1992, this time I had slick new photos in a Keynote presentation. And this year, I had a whole new section on threats to warblers, culminating in mountaintop removal mining. It wasn't fun to talk about such a thing at this festival. But a lot of people thanked me for making them aware of it, and I felt better when it was over.

Bill and I give talks at this festival, and we also lead field trips. Most of these convene at 6 AM with a very nice hot breakfast (eggs, bacon, the whole works) under a picnic shelter, and then everyone loads into those long church vans (most of them borrowed from the Baptist church in Oak Hill) to go to different warbler watching sites.

You can see 23 different species of warblers around Fayetteville, West Virginia. Not migrating, but breeding, on territory. These rumpled mountains hold the highest diversity of plant and animal species outside the tropical rainforest. Sometimes, well a lot of the time, it IS rainforest.

It rained this year, started raining the minute I got out of my car on Thursday night, and it stopped raining as I got out of my van at the very end of the last field trip on Saturday afternoon. Of course, it had been beautiful the whole week before I got there, and everyone had enjoyed field trips in sunshine in this week-long festival.

So I don't have as many pictures as I usually would, and many of them were taken in pouring rain. But rain or no rain, when there are so many warblers around, it's hard to have a bad time.
The northern parula is the smallest North American warbler, smaller than a chickadee, hovering around kinglet size.
But the parula packs a lot of beauty into its tiny body. White eye crescents give it a quizzical look, and chestnut and blue bands adorn its breast. A peculiar olive-yellow patch marks its back. I love this head-on look.
The parula's song is a buzzy, ascending trill: zzzzzzziiiiiiiip!--hard to mistake for anything else. Soon enough, the session was over, and the little parula headed for a spruce top.
It's hard to believe such things are tucked into these mountains, but they are. If only more people realized it. If you get a chance to go to this festival, grab it. If you've got holes on the warbler section of your life list, holes like golden-winged warbler and the elusive Swainson's warbler, parula, black-throated blue or Blackburnian warbler, it's the place to go. Shoot for April 27-May 2, 2009. We'll show the birds to you, serve them up on a silver platter, and your money will go toward nature education in local schools. Which I believe is the only hope for changing West Virginia's appallingly short-sighted giveaway of its very soul--its mountains--to huge international coal companies. Take down the mountains, and what will be left of "Almost Heaven?" Will people still come to hike, fish, camp, hunt and watch wildlife on exhausted, hydroseeded barrens? Will ginseng grow, or thrushes sing at twilight on what remains of SugarTree Road?

West Virginians have to come to believe there's a better way to live than by the rape and pillage that is the modus operandi of the coal companies many of them work for. Enlightenment will have to start with their children. Go to this festival. Find out what's there to save. Help fund nature education in West Virginia schools. It's a win-win deal.

And write your Federal representatives. Tell them this horrendous pillage of Appalachia must stop. Tell them to support the reinstatement of the Clean Water Act that the Bush Administration so insidiously gutted. Tell them that mine tailings are poisonous WASTE, not "fill." Tell them to call it like it is. And tell your friends. Click here to find out how.

Every time I start to write about what's so wonderful about West Virginia, every time I look at my pictures of these lovely birds in their sheltering trees, this is what comes out. We have to do something about it. Thank you for your help.

Scenes from the Mountain State

An empty coal train rumbles along the New River.

From Thursday until Saturday of last week, we were in Fayetteville, WV, in and around the stunning New River Gorge. This river has cut one deep gash down West Virginia's wooded flank. Something about the gorge scares me; the dizzying heights and fast water don't feel like my natural habitat. It's hard to see the sky. You see little bits and pieces of it. I'm used to big ol' friendly Ohio, with its gently rolling hills and open vistas. But there is an undeniable pull to this place, and it's largely because it's so stuffed with great birds, plants, butterflies and animals. And the people are top-notch, too.
I've worked at the New River Neotropicals Birding and Nature Festival every year for the past five. Gave the first keynote, brought Bill the next year, and we keep coming back. The organizers are old friends by now and we love them dearly. Our kids love their kids and it's like falling off a log to bring them along--they just disappear in a little pack. This festival attracts a really discerning cut of birdwatchers, people who know what they like and know how to find it. They're a blast to bird with. So leading the trips is pretty easy. We just use our ears and eyes and put the scope on as many birds as we can. Easier said than done when you're talking about coy, flitty warblers and 25 participants, but we do our best.An ovenbird cooperates for a moment. Bill puts everyone in the shade when it comes to getting the scope on warblers. I'm like the wife who never learned to drive because her husband does it for her. It takes me Forever to get a warbler in the scope, and it's always gone by the time the next person peeks in.
Chet Baker gets to come, because Opossum Creek Resort is pet-friendly. We gave our little doggie the run of the place, and he went cabin to cabin, checking on people and giving kisses and stumptailed wags wherever he went. When we were out birding, he sat atop the hot tub cover, watching chipmunks by the hour.Catdog. He walks on windowsills and the backs of couches; he leaps lightly atop tables and pads softly on ledges. Baker got to meet Katdoc, and I finally got to spend some time with my online buddy. What fun it was! She's the coolest, and rumor has it she will be starting her own blog before too long. I'm ready!We took the kids along on field trips on Friday, and they were terrific, amusing themselves for swix hours without a whine.With things like masses of puddling pipevine swallowtails to watch, who couldn't be happy?
Probably the sexiest bird in the Gorge is the one most birders have yet to add to their life lists: the Swainson's warbler. It's limited to the great laurel thickets along streams, where its clear, ringing whistle sings, "Screw you! Screw the world!" It's darned hard to see, and it seems to be taunting you as you peer into the dark tangles. Pretty much the only way to get 20 or 30 birders on this lovely creature is by playing a tape of its song. You play the song twice and shut the player off. If the bird is going to respond, it will respond instantly, and often sit right out on a bare limb, singing. We had our target bird by 7:18 AM and all laughed and said we wanted to go back to bed. Maybe smoke a cigarette. Ahhh. Life birds are sooo sweet, and six people in my group got to do the Life Bird wiggle.
Naturally, my best shot happened when the bird's head was turned. Buck fever strikes again.I got a life butterfly: an Appalachian azure. I didn't realize it was perched on a dead crawdad until I saw this shot on the screen. This is a lovely, silvery blue beast, way too big to be a spring azure, almost the size of a sulfur. Wow! I was befuddled, then thrilled. Wiggle, wiggle.
Got the garden planted, down to the beans and tomatoes, today. I'm wiped out. Two days hard labor in the sun, not stopping for anything. I could get used to it.