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.

Babies, Bill, Baker

At the brand-new birding festival in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia at the end of September, Bill and I hosted a birding clinic for kids. It was a hoot! It was raining lightly, but there were gobs and gobs of bluebirds and cedar waxwings and woodpeckers, and we just put the spotting scope on them and handed out binoculars and had a ball hearing the gasps and exclamations of kids getting their first good look at a bluebird or a flicker. Great Swarovski optics help. Yes, that was a product placement, but one for which I receive no compensation. I'm just sayin'.

Look at the hands on this little guy. His mom is telling him not to touch the scope, and he's doing his best. Ohhhhh....baby hands, curled up, does that do as much for you as it does for me?

Barely more than a baby, he was so intrigued by what everyone else was seeing (bluebirds) through Bill of the Birds' scope that he insisted on having a look for himself. I'm not sure he got much satisfaction, but at least he got to be a big kid for awhile. Swarovski binocs, no less, dimpled knuckles. OK. I am a baby freak.
Sooo sweet. Agggh. He brought me to my knees. Gimme one of those. Of course, I was flashing back heavily to Liam's baby days when the only name he answered to was Po Po. I have a weakness for little blonde boys. I am the kind of person who chooses the grocery line that has a baby in it, so I can mess with the baby, talking to it, trying to get a smile; talking to the mom, just digging that baby. I was always a little afraid of them until I had my own. Now I can't get enough of them. I can feel Nature preparing me for the next life passage--watching my own "red-headed, limber elf" grow up. And someday have her own. Who I will walk off with for hours at a time, rocking side to side.

I was talking about Bill before I got onto babies. I miss him. Thanks to our mutual travel schedules, we'll see each other for parts of only five days in five weeks. Days which will be spent packing and unpacking. He returned from a week away in Panama on Monday, flying into Columbus, while I left for a week away on Monday, flying out of Akron. We did not meet in the middle. Not even a shared burger at Max and Erma's. Glamorous as all get out, traveling is.

So I'm feeling like looking at pictures of my absent mate. Holding a baby, so much the better. Sigh...

Bill is very generous in helping others see birds. He's famous for it at festivals nationwide.

He even helps little brindle people see birds.
Oh, yes, Daddeh. Now I see the vulture. Thank yew.

Chet Baker, that is a bluebird.

It looked bigger in the binoculars. Well. Do you have any new toys for me?

All right. That's enough sweetness and light. If you read the mountaintop removal posts here
and here, and they moved you, I implore you to read this editorial in the New York Times. It's short. One page. Read it.

In short, because both Barack Obama and John McCain have expressed opposition to mountaintop removal mining, the Bush Administration is rushing to remove the last environmental regulation remaining that slows permit applications for mountaintop removal mining, leaving more miles of Appalachian streams open to being buried in valley fill operations.

Somebody explain to me why coal companies should be exempt from environmental impact regulations. Because they completely destroy the environment, so there's nothing left to impact? Oh, I get it.

Isn't 1,200 miles of streams buried too much already? The huge coal companies, with the regulation re-writes by Bush administration lawyers, are tearing our mountains down around us, burying and poisoning our rivers and streams, burying and poisoning the people of Appalachia. Please, please read it, and then go here to take speedy action. You'll go to a page on ilovemountains.org that will help you both to find your Federal representative and virtually instantly email your opposition to this race to destroy Appalachia before a more enlightened administration is able to take hold. It is a nation of termites, getting that coal now, getting it fast, leaving a wasteland behind.

If you like this blog, you gotta pay for it somehow. Do it. Thanks, Patty, for the heads up on this fresh, sneaky and devastating assault on our mountains, our streams, our wildlife and our people.

How it All Works

Mountaintop removal mining is a huge thing, of enormous scale and destructiveness. It's a permanent blight upon the land. There can be no mitigation for removing a mountain and filling a valley with poisonous waste. What hubris could be greater than to take a mountain down for profit and leave it gutted, blasted and baked; to leave the streams buried and the communities below poisoned and without drinkable water? To promise jobs and then yank them away when the project is finished and the mountain is destroyed? Git-r-now. Or somebody else will.

It was a great struggle for me to speak about MTR in my keynote for the New River Birding and Nature Festival, and it has been a struggle for me to wind up to speak of it here. To me, it's an obscenity, and I did not want to defile this web log--which I fight to keep a celebration of what's good and right in this world-- by speaking of it. Nor did I particularly want to rail against it in my keynote talk, which was ostensibly about the biology of migration in warblers, at a festival, no less. Aren't festivals supposed to be fun? But the insult to our forests and birds and water and people is so great, so outrageous, so devastatingly permanent, that I had to say something. It seemed so ridiculous to be leading a field trip, pointing out cerulean warblers, with this going on all around us.

                          .

photo of a furious cerulean warbler by Brandon Holden, Surfbirds.com

Cerulean warblers are going extinct, thanks to this practice, pressure on the wintering grounds, and this administration's unbelievably arrogant, self-serving, hugely protracted and wholly illegal freeze on adding any more species to the Endangered list. There are species that have been waiting 15 years to be listed. Oh. I almost forgot. The administration, with much hoopla and self-congratulation, just added the big, sexy polar bear, while denying that global warming might have anything to do with the fact that its pack ice habitat is melting out from under it. Huzzah. Who cares about little blue birds?

 So it's May, 2008, and I'm standing there, pointing this endangered sky-blue warbler out to happy festivalgoers on the slopes of a beautiful forested mountain that, this time next year, will likely be gone. I did that in two places, two mountains covered with mature mesic deciduous forest like Sugar Tree, that are slated for destruction. Do you think that bothers me? It feels like fiddling on the listing deck of the Titanic.

                           .


I want you to know that this is going on all over Appalachia. I want you to know what people are talking about when they mention mountaintop removal mining. Even the name is so sanitized, so clinical. It should be called Blasted Earth Mining, or Habitat Destruction Mining, or Community Devastation Mining. It should be called off. And I'd suggest that our president, and the president of Powellton Coal Company, and the Director of the WVDEP, while we're at it, should have to live in Ansted or Gauley Bridge, little communities beneath mountains that are being taken down, where he'd have to drink bottled water, watch his neighbors fall two by two to cancer, and listen at night to the rain pounding on the roof, and wait for a flash flood to take his little house by the poisoned creek clean away.

It is the business of the coal companies to operate where they will meet little resistance. It is part of their plan. Just like the huge chemical companies, that have all situated their plants along the Ohio River in Washington County, where I live, they're counting on us hillbillies to be too ignorant and compliant to complain. They belch their toxic, fetid waste out in the wee hours of the morning, leaving a sickly brown stain on the sky for 360 degrees around, leaving our cancer rate astronomical and growing every day, and the Ohio EPA nods and takes our calls of complaint and nods and smiles again. Thank you for your call. We're working on, (er, with) it. You may be assured we'll keep your views in mind.

That's why Washington County is the second dirtiest county in Ohio. There's been a judgement made about us, and that judgement is that we're too backward to stop them. Back to West Virginia: You aren't going to see mountaintop removal in the Catskills or the Adirondacks, and you're not going to see a filthy chemical plant belching smut into the skies along the lower Connecticut River. These things don't happen where there's money. These things happen where the corporations can wave their JOBS banner and dazzle us all with the hope of being able to pay for our gas to get to work. It's not a deal we should accept, but we do, we do.



Yes, I love nature and every single wonder she grants us, every moment of grace, every perfect petal, leaf, and feather. But the other side of a love that great is caring a whole lot about it, and that sparks a kind of fury. And so I'm telling you this. In the next posts I want to show you just a few of the things we lose when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the State of West Virginia make a few strokes of their pens, smile and nod, and let them take the mountains down.

For a spectacularly thorough discussion of mountaintop removal mining--how it could be allowed to happen, why it keeps happening, and what it does to all of us-- with links to myriad organizations dedicated to fighting MTR, please see the inaugural post of Arms Around the Planet.

Mountaintop Removal Mining

A mountain that's been mined from below still looks and acts like a mountain. A mountain that's been removed is never a mountain again.

Gentle readers, I've been absorbed lately by something that is happening in West Virginia, and all over Appalachia. Over the 2 1/2 years I've been blogging, I've tried to keep it light and entertaining. But keeping a blog is like living a life--it gets hairy sometimes, and to try to pretend otherwise, to keep the shiny happy veneer polished, feels like hypocrisy to me. I hope you'll stay with me for the next few posts.

Going to the New River Birding and Nature Festival in Fayetteville, WV, always feels like coming home to us. For one thing, the Zickefooses find their center of abundance around Buckhannon, WV. For another, Bill, Phoebe, Liam, Chet and I have built good friendships with the festival organizers over the six years we've been working at the festival, and we believe in their mission. They've raised a potload of money over the years for nature education in local schools. I can't overestimate the importance of bringing the next generations along with a better understanding and appreciation of the natural resources all around them.

Educating her children, starting an uprising from within, is going to be the only way to save West Virginia from the gigantic coal companies who are blowing her mountains up, dumping the tailings in streams, and stripping the land of its coal. For if West Virginians can't see the value of leaving their landscape intact and functioning; if a mountain is worth something to them only when it's torn down and turned inside out, then there will be nothing to stop Big Coal, the Army Corps of Engineers, and West Virginia's own "Department of Environmental Protection" from linking arms to tear the last mountain down. West Virginia's DEP routinely grants variances for coal companies wishing to remove mountaintops, looks the other way when streams are buried and valleys are filled with the toxin-loaded tailings, and even brings its own sham, placeholding lawsuits against coal companies for the sole purpose of pre-empting legitimate lawsuits bearing real complaints and evidence of horrendous environmental devastation. This beautiful state is being torn up from inside by the cancer of greed, the collusion and complicity of its own "environmental protection" department, and the more insidious disease of apathy, the feeling of powerlessness against such titanic forces.

Between 1992 and 2002, there were 380,000 acres of mountaintops destroyed in West Virginia alone--more acreage than is in her state parks. The destruction has accelerated with each passing year, until more than 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried under "fill," the new, Bush administration approved wording for what used to be called "waste." Under Bush, the Army Corps of Engineers changed the wording of the Clean Water Act in 2002, renaming surface mine waste “fill,” and allowing it to be dumped into streams and valleys. Slick move. This is a valley fill. You see the leveled area to the right; well, all the waste from that leveling is being dumped in the big mound to the left. Imagine what happens to this sheer sided, naked pile when mountain downpours occur. What happens is massive, devastating mudslides, and immediate flooding of the communities below. Selenium is a major byproduct, and severe fish deformities are showing up where they aren’t killed outright.

With that single wording change in the Clean Water Act, this administration streamlined and gutted the permit process to allow coal companies to very quickly move into a pristine area, blow up the mountaintop, extract the coal from narrow seams, and then dump all the tailings into valleys and streams directly below the flattened mountain. They bury the streams in selenium-laden mine tailings; they poison drinking water and render whole communities uninhabitable. It's the Git-R- Now mentality, brought to us by an administration that is happy to let our children worry about its environmental policies.*

*(thanks to my artist/environmentalist friend Mike DiGiorgio for that particular crystallization).

These sites have to be seen to be believed, and the coal companies make sure no one can see them from the ground, strictly guarding access from below with locked gates. But there are pilots (SouthWings) offering free flyovers for anyone truly wanting to know what's going on in West Virginia, and I'm told that flying over these moonscapes of ruined, bare earth is a devastating experience. Just looking at these pictures is bad enough. To give you some idea of the scale, the dragline (the white crane in the middle of the picture) is 22 stories high. That massive machine takes the place of hundreds of men who would otherwise be working in traditional, underground coal mines. And that machine completely destroys the mountain in taking her coal.This was Kayford Mountain, 45 minutes from Charleston, about two hours from my home.

Kentucky and Tennessee have been similarly denuded, and for even longer than West Virginia. Much of their landscape is a completely unrecognizable moonscape; it might as well have been paved. The coal companies "reclaim" the stripped, leveled mountains by hydroseeding nonnative grasses onto the baked-hard subsoil that remains. Because all the topsoil is removed, there is no seed bank by which the mesic deciduous forest can replace itself, so the notion of calling this feeble effort "reclamation" would be laughable, were it not so tragic.Let's look at a mountaintop that's been removed. We'll start with mesic deciduous forest, holding the slopes from rain and erosion, full of cerulean warblers, as well as American redstarts, Kentucky, worm-eating, black-and-white, and hooded warblers, blue-headed and red-eyed vireos, scarlet tanagers, wood thrushes and pileated woodpeckers, to name just a few. This was Sugartree Road.Sugartree Road looks like a place where you'd drive with the windows rolled down, listening to the birdsong, sifting through dozens of species as you watch for wildflowers on the forest floor.

First, the coal companies do a clearcut. They are usually in such a hurry that the valuable timber is bulldozed and buried or burned. There's money to be made here, and speed is of the essence. Sugartree Road, after clearcut. Now the mountain is ready to be blown up with dynamite to expose the coal seams. It's gutted and leveled, and the waste is dumped in the valley below.Sugartree after mining.

The rubble in the foreground has been reclaimed. In the middle is a strip that wasn't clearcut or mined. In the background is an older "reclaimed" area. Since there is no seedbank for trees or understory vegetation in the soil, the dominant vegetation is autumn olive, a bird-dispersed noxious exotic that creates a stable shrub community and prevents forest regrowth. It is scrub, and scrub it shall remain.More "reclamation" on Sugar Tree. Good job! We're done here. Coal's out, so's the forest; so are the jobs we promised. We made a bunch of money, and took it all with us. Time to move on to the next mountain.

See anything here for wood thrushes or Kentucky warblers? Or people, for that matter? Ever wonder why the cerulean warbler is headed toward extinction? Does this image help clarify it for you? It certainly helped me understand the larger picture. It's easy for us to point a finger at Colombia, and decry the deforestation that accompanies coca plantations in the highlands where cerulean warblers winter. And so easy to turn a blind eye to what we're allowing to happen on the cerulean warbler's breeding grounds.

Here's one mining project by the Powellton Coal Co., superimposed on a map of greater metropolitan Cleveland. Cleveland's a big city. One project is the size of Cleveland.
And here is a map of Fayette County, the center of warbler diversity in the East, with 23 breeding species of warblers and countless other Neotropical migrants. This is where the New River Birding and Nature Festival is held. It's got the greatest diversity of plant and animal species of any place on the planet, except for tropical rainforest.
The red areas have been removed by coal companies. These mountains are gone forever.

Would you like to do something about this? Would you like to email your Federal representatives, and ask them to put teeth back into the Clean Water Act that the Bush Administration gutted in order to allow this environmental catastrophe?

Not sure who they are? That's OK. All that matters is that you care enough. Go to ilovemountains.org where you can find out, by typing in your Zip code, to whom you should direct your polite outrage. I did it. I actually got responses, some automatic, some semi-automatic, and one that said, "You can be sure that I will keep your views in mind should this come to a vote."

I wrote back saying, "Well, thank you. That's very nice. But how do you plan to vote?" No response to that one.

Sen. Sherrod Brown is the only one of my representatives who wrote back with anything of substance. He is now my hero. He wrote:

"Environmental protection should be among our nation's highest priorities, yet all too often the current administration has acted to weaken existing rules and regulations protecting our environment. Mountaintop removal has serious consequences for our environment--from deforestation to toxic runoff in our streams and rivers. I was disappointed by the Administration's recent rule allowing for the expansion of this troubling practice. We have an obligation to protect and conserve our natural resources and I will keep your thoughts in mind as legislation pertaining to this issue progresses through Congress."

That's what I'm talking about. That's a politician who is willing not just to nod and smile at his constituents, but who is willing to say what he thinks. And he's thinking.

You can learn more and find out how to take more action by visiting the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy web site.

My deepest thanks to Deborah Griffith, writer and activist, for waking me up and providing these pictures and the mind-altering information behind them. Thanks also go to Cindy Ellis of the Highlands Conservancy for her support, and to both of them for fighting. This is not a good thing, this thing that is going on in our mountains.