Birding Appalachia Part II: Better Quit While You're Ahead

Driving back down from the Heintooga Overlook, we got enough cell-service to receive the text that Butler's Birds Jr. was still asleep for his first nap, and there was much rejoicing! There was also time, as a part of this rejoicing, to pull over and appreciate the Plott Balsam overlook. We squinted from the grandeur, and almost immediately I recognized a much more familiar song. 

The first sighting is always the hardest isn't it? It wasn't even great BLWA habitat but sure enough, with only the most minimal of effort (and getting snagged by some bikers to take their picture near the overlook sign).

Butler's Birds Jr. is an early riser, pretty much 5:30am on the dot. However, with the daylight savings change he was technically sleeping in until 7:30 or 8:00am (!!!). As such I planned on sneaking out before sunrise to hit up the trails around the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center (like the Southwest Research Station in the Chiricahuas, except much nicer and less busy) where someone had reported Golden-winged Warbler. I would get out, get a couple hours' birding, and get back in time for our schedule departure, based on his anticipated wake up from the 3 days previous.

I checked the maps and website. I made my plan. I packed extra socks. My kicks were pumped.

The access gate at mile 7 of 9 was locked. WTF!? WHY DID YOU NOT SAY ACCESS IS RESTRICTED ON YOUR WEBSITE!? I had to cover that last two miles from the station and trailhead on foot. Uggghhh. 

Time was not on my side, nor was the sun, but this portion of dirt road was actually very birdy and I logged many newer birds for the county/area, like Wood Thrush, Hooded Warbler, and Grosbeaks. The best spots were the occasional clearings along the woods, where Chestnut-sided Warblers were numerous, noisy, and nom-nom-noming away.

There were also Least Flycatchers hanging out and vocalizing on the reg. Sometimes they were prominent, and sometimes they were very shady, like nocturnal.

Keeping on a pretty quick pace, I reached the Learning Center (from which point I had a notion of the Golden-winged Bailiwick farther past) around 6:45am. It was a pastoral scene, where the Catbirds sang, the Bluebirds blued, and the Flicker foraged with the Towhee. 

 

...and then I got the phone call. Butler's Birds Jr. had NOT slept in as expected, but was awake as of 6am. Given his nap/grumpiness schedule and that we still had to cover 6 hours that day to get to our new home, this meant we needed to leave immediately, that I had to leave immediately, in order to leave immediately. There was much immediacy. And the Chestnuts played on.

Cedar Waxwing cares not for the problems of hurried parents. Cedar waxwing cares only for berries. 

Takeaways and reminders from the morning:

I love my son very very much and love being his parent. Parenthood often sucks though.

Least Flycatchers behave weirder than other Flycatchers.

I can jog 2 miles with camera and other gear in under 15 minutes, albeit down hill.

If you go huffing and puffing with heavy feet down a dirt road with lots of blind curves, you may scare a small park ranger lady into thinking she's about to be mauled by a bear.

Chestnut-sided Warblers are great.

Thank You for Smoking: Birding Appalachia Part II (Getting High)

The foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains offer much by way of diverse flora and fauna. So much greenery and water makes one feel transported to a rainforest more so than the Tennessee/Carolina border, and yet there still is something lacking. A good birder and a good American desires more, he or she desires not only the lush, but also the hard and craggy. One must climb ever upward, to the Appalachian balds and the hardy spruce/fir forests that dwell there. It's like Caspar David Friedrich's ideal picnic. In the early mornings these primordial mountains exhale deeply, linking earth and sky with an intoxicating timeless mist and blurring everything in between.

P.S. It's super tricky to bird in said mist. 

This is the sort of place one can get lost. This is the sort of place one hopes to get lost. This is the sort of place one loses oneself. This is also the place one finds some birds.

With those who were willing and able, we went on an 9 mile hike along the Charlie's Bunion portion of the Appalachian trail, moving between 4,500 and 6,100 feet, up from the deciduous forest to the ancient evergreen peaks. Sunlight was a rare thing and dryness rarer still. From the bowels of heavy growth and pervasive mist, Veeries chimed and Black-throated Green Warblers buzzed in a perpetual homage to the smoking mountains. Once above 5,500 feet, I was reacquainted with a recent lifer and what I believe to be one of the most aesthetically successful Warblers.
There was also an actual lifer in the form of this Blue-headed Vireo, but it's best not to dwell on that.

The Black-headed Blue Warblers were still defining and defending territory, and their periodic outburts also tended to stir up other birds including Canada Warblers, Golden-crowned Kinglets, and the inevitable hordes of Dark-eyed Juncos. Black-throated Blue Warbler is so damned good-looking I want to tear my face off and put it back on upside down. Yeah, you heard me.

Rather surprising to me was the abundance of amphibians, given the altitude and temperature (but less surprising given the moisture). Apparently this area, the southern Appalachians, has more Salamander diversity than anywhere else in the world, or so sayeth wikipedia. The Southern Two-lined Salamander was about two inches long and skinnier than a pencil. The Appalachian Red was about double that, and equally shy, while the mighty and better-armored Northern Dusky Salamander adults (the most common species in mountain streams) dwarfed them both.

There were times hiking along the ridge when we'd pause and look out into straight nothing. The low-stratus clouds emanating from the mountains were so thick we could not see the range on either side of our trail, but as the morning drew on eventually the smoke gave way and shapes took form.

The termination of Charlies's Bunion was supposedly named by one surveyor in honor of his accompanying buddy's gigantic toe affliction that he revealed upon resting in that area. Given the heavy vegetation it was hard to tell exactly the to-scale dimensions of said bunion, but the tree-line birds did not pay that ambiguity much mind. 

The dour weather dampened the birding overall, but Black-throated Blues would have been compensation enough. Chestnut-sided Warbler was another potential lifer for others in our group however, and I had been puzzling at their absence all morning, since in previous experience at this altitude they were the most common behind Black-throated Green. 

All worry was put to rest on our descent, perhaps when the birds were more confident their parades would not be precipitated upon. Upon hearing their calls at long last I ran down the trail to catch up with Pops, only to hear him likewise calling back that he was, "Surrounded by singing Chestnuts and in danger." Indeed. Awesome.

Unfortunately we did not have enough time for further exploration and pursuit of Blackburnian, as well as Ruffed Grouse, but the hike was gorgeous It was like that level of totally comprehensive, soul-shaking gorgeous that sticks with you weeks later and sustains you through torrid summer working conditions...

Carolina Birding: Fun in the Sun and Green Glorious Mountains

Greeting Birders, Non-birders, and B.I.nocular-curious Bros who are sneakily reading here but if caught by your roommate Bradley would claim it's only because you were googling 'Boobies" and 'Breeding Great Tits' and not because you're a closet bird nerd. 

I have done woefully little birding in the last few weeks, what with school getting back in session and Butler's Birds taking the backseat to having a job and other considerations (bird blogging is predominantly a financial burden). But migrants will be coming south soon and we're lurching to another exciting time of year. Without more Arizona material though, it's back east we go.

After the Great Texas Birding Adventure it would have been such a fizzle-out, such a quiet goodnight, to merely head back to Phoenix and enter a state of torpor for the rest of the summer. The Texas trip was tremendously birdy and successful by my less-than-expert standards, but it was also pretty exhausting, perhaps by anyone's standards. Sometimes one has to vacation from a vacation, and in that pursuit I went to spend time in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Of course, one doesn't go to Carolina and visit neither the coast nor the mountains. In fact, I was fortunate to see both. 

The gorgeous ranges to the west promised plenty of resident lifers, beautiful birds I could see, or not, on leisurely hikes through alpine meadows and semi-rainforest, quite the contrast to the time-budget, smash-and-grab (careful around Endangered Species) birding in Texas. 

: :: ack. swoon :: :

But first, a little demonstration of uncommonly seen bird behavior: sunning. North Carolina is fraught with Eastern Wood-Pewees. These are way better than Western Wood-Pewees because they vocalize loudly and humorously, while also being generally more accommodating. 

One such EAWP was getting the ol' preening gland fired up for some vitamin D-fueled, anti-parasitic hygiene. Or, according to some, this bird was playing dead as part of an elaborate reuse to lure in morbidly curious prey like House Finches, a demonstration of predatory thanatosis otherwise known to occur predominantly in species of ciclid fish...

(No finches, or even flies, came to investigate the carcass)

Can you imagine if we regulated our hygiene this way, sticking our faces into an oily gland (it'd have to be the armpit) and then a rubbin' it all over our bodies? Actually...I take it back. That sounds nice.

"Yeah! Fresh!! Deodorant is for chumps!"

One of the first spots I visited for recreational hiking was Clingman's Dome, named of course after Sir Reginald B. Clingman, who was well noted for the size of his kopf. The Dome features a 1/2 mile walk up a busy paved path that takes one to a lookout near the Carolina/Tennessee border, a pulchritudinous and panoramic view to be sure. Even better, the Dome trail intersects with a 1 mile stretch of the Great Appalachian Trail, the really big one some people take from Georgia or wherever up to Maine. Following this wilder trail I could hobble my ol' bones into the thick forest that carpets the Great Smokies. I felt like the Last of the Mohicans--except less agile and with a camera--exploring the dense woods. Of course where there's vegetation and water, and even some cooler temps, there are birds.
And darn it all, if I must come out of vacation to do scrutinize them, then so be it. The Eastern Towhee mirrors its western cousin well with its ever present pillaging and calling from the understory, a credit to whatever the hell a towhee actually is (it's a pneumonic name, for their calls?).

It's not often I get to sample flavors of non Oregon-race Dark-eyed Junco. In fact, Baskin Robbins doesn't even carry it anymore. Slate-colored is probably the most common, or at least the most widespread in North America, but it's still a change for a Phoenician. Turns out immature DEJUs look like an emo subspecies of Pine Siskin. Maybe we all are a little Emo Siskin in our immature, angsty days. Shoot, if the corners of my mouth were yellow and droopy too I'd be a party defecator (actually this guy was pretty chipper).

Where the trail was thick and overgrown the sounds seemed as muffled as the light, and this added to a very primordial feel in these old mountains. But where there were openings the light and sound reverberated (ok, light doesn't reverberate, leave me alone). The excitement of hearing a new bird call is  a recognized and yet still under-appreciated buzz. Several new calls still belonged to birds I had seen before, though not recently, but some were new entirely. One such squeaky serenade belonged to the Chestnut-sided Warbler, a much wanted and long waited Warbler species predominantly of the east. This bird's cheery song was a new one, but one with which I quickly became familiar.



The first couple of birds I picked out were distant and backlit with the overcast weather, but this warbler, even being somewhat mildly colored compared to its cousins, is still done justice with the saturated colors. Pretty but professional...this is a Warbler you can take home to your parents!

I'm trying to talk about this all cool, like it was no big thing, but truth be told I was fairly beside myself. Wood Warblers are not a group we see much of in Arizona. These colors and these songs are a rare thing indeed in the southwest. The vagrants we pick up are usually young or in bad shape, so I had long been yearning for some real, East Coast Warbler exposure. The more I stared, the more I ogled and frothed at the mouth, the more I muttered expletives and incomprehensibles, the more the intricacies  of this bird affected me. Close up Warbler require medication soon afterwards.    

It was cathartic. I was finally in the beautiful green country, the overgrown, rolling mountains with Warblers buzzing around, and I was comfortable. There was no sweat nor were there thorns, just soft and lovely nature stuff in which I had all day to wallow. I didn't realize, until that moment, how much I had really been yearning for the experience. I don't precisely recall, but I'm pretty the entirety of my being melted into a large, pulpy puddle. Fortunately, I was on a decline and the puddle must have seeped downhill. I regained consciousness near the car, and quickly made plans to get back up into the mountains the next day.