Category: In the Field

I escaped the to-do list monster for two and a half days with a trip to Shenandoah National Park. I made four hikes; not too much of the flora and fauna was unusual, but a couple of the hikes themselves proved surprising.

I found resprouts of American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) in several places, none of them more than two meters tall. Eastern Comma (Polygonia comma) butterflies were the most common lep found, perhaps the most common insect found, including a scattering of them collecting minerals on a gravel verge. The most common bird I detected was probably Common Raven, which was heard quarking and flapping overhead at every site.

Following my much-loved copy of Circuit Hikes in Shenandoah National Park,¹ the loop to Byrd’s Nest #4 came in a little lower than the guidebook read: 420ft elevation change, 520ft vertical ascent.² Late purple asters are blooming in the park. I’m calling this observation Symphyotrichum phlogifolium. I found an interesting fly, ID not confirmed, and a new sharpshooter for me, Paraulacizes irrorata.

The next day, I started out with a loop around Blackrock, a hike that I also took in 2018. I added a side trip to the Blackrock Hut, which added time and altitude to the trip. I more or less knew what to expect on the last leg, but the steady straight-line climb on the Trayfoot Mountain Trail was relentless. A smol lycophyte, too tiny to get a solid ID; katydids chatting in full daylight; nice Virginia Jumpseed. An Oak Treehopper (Platycotis vittata) thought about hitching a ride with me at the parking lot.

After lunch at the Loft Mountain Wayside,³ I started up the Frazier Discovery Trail, which is marked as the Deadening Nature Trail on my map from 1988. I should have looked at the contour lines on the topo side of the map, because what I discovered is that even “nature trails” in the Park can be rocky, rugged, and vertical. This trail turned out to be the birdiest one of the trip, with a Barred Owl calling in the distance. Lots of spicebush in fruit.

For my final walk, I picked another new trail just from looking at the map. A little tired from the previous three hikes in the previous days, I promised myself that when I was ready to stop climbing, I could turn around and descend. I settled on the Meadow Spring Trail: found no meadow (succession, man) but I found a spring and the ruins of a farmhouse. I made it to the end of the trail, where it connects to the Appalachian Trail, again climbing more than I expected. While there wasn’t much in bloom on the way up, there was a patch of asters for sweat bees to nectar on at the AT junction.

This time I stayed in the main lodge building at Big Meadows. Good location, lovely view, the restaurant ran out of fruit, managing the radiator made me feel like I was in a New York apartment in the 1940s.

Hike stats (all of these taken at naturalist/old man pace):

• Byrd’s Nest #4, 2.7 miles, 2:40, 420ft altitude difference, 580ft vertical ascent
• Blackrock-Trayfoot, 2.7 miles (est), 3:00, 580ft vertical ascent
• Frazier Discovery, 1.3 miles, 1:50, 450ft altitude difference, 440ft vertical ascent
• Meadow Spring, 1.4 miles, 1:50, 510ft altitude difference and vertical ascent

¹My copy is from 2005. I really need to get an updated edition, but all my hike notes are in this one.

²Per Geo Tracker. Also indispensable, but sometimes I have trouble making sure that it’s recording.

³Too many tasty twisty fries.

It’s the off season for ducks in nest boxes at Huntley Meadows Park: a good time to write a little about the boxes themselves.

As P. and K. are demonstrating here, a typical box for us is made of nominal one-inch wood panels, about the height but not the width of a dorm refrigerator, with a slightly sloping roof, and entrance/exit hole, and a door on the side. Each box has a painted number: the numbering system is there is no system. Sometimes a box is numbered (randomly) by the carpenter who made it, sometimes a box retains its number when it’s moved to a completely different place in the park.

A box is mounted on a metal pole, usually in some depth of water. And usually we sheathe the pole in a PVC sleeve, as a predator deterrent. As a second deterrent, we’ve attached a metal cone to the PVC sleeve. As you can see from the detailed photo, there’s still a bit of a gap between the apex of the cone and the sleeve: I conjecture that black ratsnakes can slip through the gap, so we’ve recently filled in with foam crack filler.

If you’re mounting boxes on square wooden posts, you wouldn’t have this gaposis problem.

The box is attached to the pole in a couple of different ways. Typically, we drill two pairs of holes in the back of the box and pass through a pair of U-bolts, securing them with nuts on the inside. There’s not quite enough friction to hold the box in place, so it rests on the top of the PVC sleeve.

I’ve also recorded at least one box that uses carriage bolts that thread through the box and the pole.

And a box with metal straps.

The door must also be secured against predation. Whereas ratsnakes like to come in through the entrance hole, raccoons prefer finding a way to open the door. So we often close the door with a hasp and quick link, or with a hook and eye on a spring.

The inside of the box is fitted with a section of hardware cloth (wire mesh), which gives the ducklings more of a purchase when they’re ready to scramble out of the box. This element tends to be a point of failure as the box is used, so we might have to staple the mesh back in place.

A typical box lasts about five to seven years in the field before it falls apart. If a box develops a knot hole that pops open, we can keep the box going for another season or two with a bit of plywood and some (clumsy) nailing.

The view of the Blue Ridge from our bioblitz site last month.

We scuffled with lodging availability (nearby music festival), a road closure, pop-up thunderstorms, a park closed for an archery tournament, and limited opening hours for visitor centers, and still pulled off an enjoyable two days in the West Virginia highlands on a Nature Forward trip led by Mark Garland. The group visited sites in Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge’s mascot is the Cheat Mountain Salamander (Plethodon nettingi).

The driving to this part of West Virginia follows the somewhat infamous Corridor H highway, signed as U.S. 48. The stretch between Wardensville (just over the Virginia line) and Davis is four lanes divided with intersections at grade, chopping through hills and bridging rivers and valleys.

Mark showed us two new butterflies for me, both in hand: Atlantis Fritillary (Argynnis atlantis) and Meadow Fritillary (Boloria bellona). Participant B. pointed out several nifty day-flying moths, among them Eusarca confusaria, Ctenucha virginica, and Common Ringlet (Coenonympha california). I found two lycophytes new to me, Hickey’s Tree-clubmoss (Dendrolycopodium hickeyi) and Staghorn Clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum) (and). And we puzzled out the ID of a meadowhawk, at last landing on White-faced Meadowhawk (Symptetrum obtrusum).

Mark demonstrated attaching a BlūMorpho transmitter to a Monarch butterfly. Six hundredths of a gram with its own solar panel, and signals from nearby phones with Bluetooth active can be recorded. Wowee!

I hadn’t realized that the Blackwater River, flowing east to west across the region, is part of the Ohio River watershed. Traveling between the valley and my motel in Oakland, Md., I made a short side quest to visit the Fairfax Stone, marking the springs of the North Fork of the Potomac River, the Potomac of course flowing east to Chesapeake Bay.

I also passed through Thomas, W. Va., with a hippy-dippy line of shops along its riverfront. It would be cool to stop in the next time I’m in the area.