Oh Shenandoah...I'm bound away

The sun is slowly sinking down here at Blandy. I made it to the computer room here; Jake on the catbird team who was here two years ago as an REU had the key. It's so nice not having a computer set up in my living space. Try it sometime. It's a real treasure, discovering what you'll do when email's not there to be checked on an obsessive basis. Ahhh.....So, one thing I did was get up at 4:40 this morning before the crack of dawn. Well, I suppose I woke up at 4:22 to my alarm, as my dad told us when we all got up for good. I bought a watch (another nice thing to not have for a while, but now I'm using it for a travel alarm) and it was set for 4:22. My folks stayed over 'till today; my dad had woken up at 4:21, heard my watch at 4:22, then at 4:23 he heard the first bird singing outside. Synchronicity must be setting in. By then, I must have turned over and started catching the next twenty minutes or so of sleep before getting up for good. About 4:55, once I'd started eating some shredded wheat, I heard a train not too far away. That'll be a good predictable way to wake up, if my watch is buried under the pillow.

The reason for all this early rising? I'll be walking out past the arboretum, through the fields, past the little pond with the purple martin houses and the wood duck momma and her baby and into a couple different habitats where grey catbirds like to nest. This morning, we went out for the first time to see what's been getting recorded, where a few nests are, and who lives out in those woods, singing to greet the sun. Eventually (not-too-distant-future) I'll be coming up with some sort of project within what's been going on so far. It's a little daunting, because I've just come back from final projects and all and now I've got to keep the creativity cap on through another season and come up with this research proposal. I suppose the endless possibilities will eventually find a way to knock on my door one by one and I'll pick a few from the bunch.

Enough with that. Back to this morning. After we did a little recording, round about 7:30 we headed back and then off to the Shenandoah National Park! I had no idea that the mountains I'd be this close to were so beautiful. Troves of wildlife, too. We went on the fox hollow discovery trail and entered a lush green woods. I was hearing all sorts of birds, some I could identify and others will be good puzzlers of the summer. I was pleased that my super glue job on my binocs has held up. They took a spill last winter as I was tracking red fox on campus, and it makes me happy to be able to repair things to full function. So, with them, I saw an american redstart, scarlet tanager, indigo bunting (2!), orchard oriole, blackpoll warbler, a drink-your-teeeaaa rufous-sided towhee. Plenty of others, too, which made for an exciting day of rarely seen birds (by me, anyhow). We rounded a bend and came across an old cemetary. Starting to unravel the history of this area has been really neat. Once homes and farms, now a second growth forest covers so much of what used to be. Flooded over by leaves and a wash of green, relics of the time before are still around, like this 4 or 5-grave cemetary surrounded by a stone wall. Somehow, one of the 'stones' in the wall caught my eye. A few were rusty-red, but this I realized was no stone at all. Just in front of me, maybe 8 feet off the trail, was a sleeping fawn. Mmmmm, it was definitely a 'good medicine' moment as Tom Brown would say in "The Tracker." When we'd lingered long enough, it knew we were there, and yet the only movement it made was blinking its eyes, which I could barely see as it's head was neatly tucked in the curve of its body. A ways down, we crossed a little trickle of a stream and I spotted some red fox, raccoon and bobcat tracks. I measured the bobcat track with my pen and the letters on it. My Paul Rezendes book-"Tracking and the art of seeing" verified that my track of about 1 1/2 inches long, with all the other bobcatt-y characteristics (off-kilter toe pads and such) was made by a bobcat. A bit further down, some fresh scat (also suspiciously bobcat-like) was just off the trail. The flies were signalling its presence--I'd never thought of flies as something we can observe to pick up on details of the lives of other creatures, kind of like bird language and how useful that can be with alarm-calling to alert others of nearby predators. I'd probably have just walked right by it, had it not been for the deafening buzz of these horse flies.

It's getting late by my new bedtime. Off to shower and see if any new roommates have arrived! So far, the two of three of us are here. My room overlooks a beautiful garden where I was sitting this evening as a hummingbird buzzzed over my head towards the columbines and other flowers nearby. It's good to be here.